Micah was asleep when the window exploded, but the second it happened, he knew what it was. “Fay, stay down!” he shouted. He ripped their top blanket away and threw it across the shattered glass that covered the floor. He rolled from the bed onto the blanket and grabbed the shotgun that leaned against the wall. He crawled over the blanket to the window and peered through.
The moon was gone, and it was too dark to even see the grove of cottonwoods by the river. Somewhere a dog barked, and Micah thought he heard a horse whinny, but nothing more.
There was a pounding on the bedroom door, and Chester called, “Micah, are you and Fay all right in there?”
“Yes, get back. Have everyone stay down. And watch the front.” He turned to Fay, who was huddled in the corner of the room with the bed sheet wrapped around her. “Fay, throw me my pants.” He knew it was irrational, but he didn’t want to get into a gunfight without his pants. She tossed them to him, and he pulled them on.
“Can you see anything?” she whispered.
A thousand thoughts were rushing through Micah’s mind, but Fay’s whispering brought them all to a stop. There had been a shot fired, glass shattered, dogs barking, he and Chester shouting back and forth, and after all of that, Fay was whispering.
He would laugh if he weren’t so damned scared. “No, nothing,” he said. For five minutes he stared into the darkness, but he couldn’t see or hear a thing. “Whoever it was is gone.”
“Whoever it was?” said Fay, standing. “We know who it was.”
Micah didn’t respond, but she was right. Sonny Pratt had been outside the house tonight, and he had put a bullet through a bedroom window to let them know he was there.
Micah moved to the edge of the bed and sat down. He pulled on his boots and shirt. “Careful of the glass, Fay,” he said as he crossed the room to the far wall. The bullet had blown out the window and torn into the wall. Micah opened the door and stepped through. Sure enough, there was an exit hole on this side of the wall.
“Is everybody okay in here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Chester said. “A little shaky, but all right.” They were clustered together in the center of the room.
“A little shaky?” Jackson asked. “Very shaky is what I am.” He pointed to the floor next to the pallet where he had been sleeping. Micah crossed to the spot where he pointed. When the bullet exited the wall, it had done so in a downward trajectory, hitting the pinewood floor less than six inches from where Jackson’s head had been. Micah pulled out his pocket knife and dug the slug from the plank. The bullet was distorted, but it looked to Micah to be a forty-four.
“It was Sonny,” Polly said.
“He must not have liked your performance in court today,” said Chester. “You showed him you meant business.”
“Sonny doesn’t give a damn whether you’re convicted or not,” said Micah. “But he doesn’t want Polly to testify. This was his way of letting her know that one more time. So far his name hasn’t come up in the trial. He wants to keep it that way.”
“By God, he can’t get away with firing a gun into a house full of sleeping people,” Jackson said. His voice was still a little quivery.
“Oh, please, Jackson,” said Cedra. “He’s already gotten away with it. He gets away with everything. Isn’t that why we’re all hiding in this house together, because Sonny Pratt can do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it?”
“It could never be proven that Sonny Pratt was the one who fired this shot,” said Micah, “but there is some law in this town. There’s supposed to be, anyway. And this time that son of a bitch Collins is at least going to question Pratt about it.” Micah tore his coat from the hall tree. As he pulled it on, he said, “Chester, there’s some wood in the shed behind the house. Cover that God-damned window in there before everyone freezes to death.”
Brad Collins rented a small house on North Second Street, one block over and a couple of blocks south of Lottie’s. Nora, his wife, had run off with a traveling salesman of pots and pans two years earlier, and Collins had lived alone in the house ever since.
Micah climbed Collins’s front porch and pounded on the door. “Open up in there, Collins.”
There was no response, and Micah pounded again. After a bit, there was the sound of curses, and Micah saw the flare of a match through the thin curtains as a lamp was lit. Collins pulled open the door. His hair was mussed and his eyes still looked a little out of focus. He wore pants and the top of his longjohns, but he was barefoot.
“Who is it?” he asked, holding the lamp up and rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand.
Micah stepped into the room, pushing Collins aside as he did.
“What the hell do you want, McConners? It’s the middle of the damned night.”
Micah held the piece of lead up to Collins’s light. “Ten minutes ago,” he said, “this was fired through the bedroom window of Lottie Charbunneau’s house.”
Collins took it from him. He held both the lamp and the piece of lead as far from his eyes as the length of his arms would allow. “Anybody hurt?” he asked.
“No,” said Micah, “by some miracle no one was.”
Collins handed the lead back and placed the lamp on the table in front of the window. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked, rubbing his head.
“A little after five.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No, it was too dark. But it had to’ve come from the freight yards behind the house.”
“Probably some drunk cowboy.”
“It was no drunk cowboy,” said Micah.
“Now how the hell would you know that, McConners?”
“It was Sonny Pratt.”
“What? Are you out of your mind?”
“You’ve been turning your back on Sonny’s behavior ever since you’ve been in office. Now I’m telling you I have reason to believe he fired a gun into a house with six people in it.”
“You got anything showing it’s Sonny?” Collins asked.
“He’s made threats to Polly to prevent her from testifying tomorrow.”
“Well, now,” said the sheriff, puffing his chest up, “this is the first I’ve ever heard about any threats being made.”
“Polly and Cedra didn’t want to inform the law. But I’ve had enough of it, and I’m here telling you now.”
“I can’t go out to the Pratt place and start making accusations with no more to go on than that.”
Micah stared at the man. “Let me get this straight,” he finally said, “a gunshot was fired into a house with six people in it. One of the victims gives you the name of a person who’s made threats against another of the victims to keep her from testifying in district court, and you won’t even go out and question the person making the threats? Is that what I’m hearing?” Micah’s anger was rising fast. “That’s the way I’m reading the situation here, Collins. How close is that to accurate?”
Collins stuck a thick finger in Micah’s face. “You listen to me, you pup. If you think you can come back into this town with the ink still wet on your license to play lawyer and start telling folks how to do their job, you are wrong.” He jabbed Micah’s shoulder. “Now you get out of here before you wish you had.”
“Oh, for Christ sake, Collins, what’s this? Are you getting tough with me?”
“You better watch yourself, boy. You’re not in the courtroom now. You and me start scrapping, it won’t be with words.” He jabbed his big finger into Micah’s shoulder again, this time hard enough to push him back a step.
“You know, I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” Micah said. He could feel a smile bloom but it felt too wide and too stiff.
“So you don’t like that, huh? Let me tell you something, if you didn’t like that, you’re really going to hate this.” He pulled his hand back for another jab, and when he did Micah’s left fist lashed out, catching Collins on the right eye, making him stagger and turning his head to his left. Micah followed up with a right cross that also landed on Collins’s right eye. This time the sheriff went down flat on his back, smacking his head with a clunk on the wooden floor. Collins was stunned, but still conscious.
Micah stood above him looking down. “Collins,” he said with disgust, “you are about as worthless as any man I’ve ever run across.” He tossed the bullet onto Collins’s chest. It hit and bounced to the floor, rotated in one tight circle, and came to a stop. “I don’t guess I ever expected anything from you, anyhow.” He started for the door. “By the way,” he said, turning back to face the sheriff, “you were wrong about me hating it.” He watched as Collins lifted a hand to his eye. A little groan skittered through the man’s clenched teeth. “Knocking you to the floor was the most fun I’ve had in years.”
He stepped out into the cold late-December air. Although Micah had not accomplished a thing by his visit to the sheriff, as he walked back to Lottie’s, he felt one hell of a lot better.