5

He was dreaming … or was it—?… the faces of demons, leering down at him … pain like the torture of the damned … screaming … human eyes gazing upward, white and opaque as milk-glass … a cavern, where nightmare shapes shifted all around him, things he couldn’t even put a name to, flickering and fading like flame-shadows on the stone wall … on a cabin wall …

… the wall, the ceiling, torn away … deafening noise and blinding light … a cabin, a cavern … the woman from his picture, her face filled with fear as she cried out, and he tried with all his strength—

But whatever he was trying to do or stop was lost, along with her face … as the whole world turned upside down, inside out … as it all changed. Light blinded him, blue light brighter than the sky, and the last thing he heard was her voice, screaming in terror …

*   *   *

THE MAN THE law called Jake Lonergan jolted awake, with screams still echoing inside his head. He squinted in the sudden brightness … only lamplight, not sunlight, this time.

Not blue light … He rubbed his eyes and groaned, rolling over. His face and hair were wet with something that didn’t feel like water or smell like blood. Something slimy.

As things came into focus he made out a face looking down at him: Percy Dolarhyde’s face. Percy spat on him, again.

That dung-eating maggot—Jake bolted upright, with murder in his eyes.

Percy dodged backward out of his reach, laughing at him from behind bars … the same kind of bars, Jake realized, that caged them both now. He wiped the spit off his face, swearing under his breath. As the rest of his senses began to come back, he remembered what had happened in the saloon to make him wake up here, and why his head hurt so much.… He touched the lump on the back of it, beside his ear; felt his hair matted with dried blood.

Ella. That woman, she’d knocked him out just as he’d.… Damn her, that bitch, that witch—

Jake wished he hadn’t sat up so fast; his head left him feeling queasy from the change of position. Blinking more of reality into focus, he recognized the inside of a jailhouse.

Nobody official was in the sheriff’s office right now; there was no one here at all but him and Percy.

“You’re gonna burn, boy,” Percy Dolarhyde said. His voice peeled Jake’s nerves like a skinning knife. Percy was pressed up against the bars again, still wearing the same ugly sneer from Jake’s memory. Jake had to look away from it, or be sick to his stomach.

But turning his head couldn’t shut out Percy’s voice, the diarrhea of taunting threats. “My daddy’s comin’ for me. He learned how to kill a man slow from the Apaches. I’m gonna watch you suffer a long, long—”

Without looking back at him, not even bothering to get up from the bunk, Jake stuck his arm through into the next cell, grabbed Percy, and slammed his damnfool skull into the iron bars, knocking him out cold.

Hell was other people.… Jake lay down on his bunk again, relieved to finally have peace and quiet so he could nurse his aching head. His body hurt almost as much, and he remembered his wounded side … remembered Preacher Meacham stitching it up … remembered everything back to the moment he’d come to, early this morning. Before that, nothing. Still. Like he’d dropped out of the sky, he’d said to the preacher.

He remembered what Meacham had said to him in reply: “… another such story … fella by the name of Lucifer.”

He stared at the bars of his cell. His name might as well be Lucifer, from the reception he’d gotten in this town. The sheriff claimed he was Jake Lonergan … and Jake Lonergan was a wanted man: wanted dead or alive. That meant the territorial government had put out a bounty on him—and up in Santa Fe they didn’t pay bounties on dead men unless the law had declared they were of no use either way, to anybody but the Devil.

Jake Lonergan, in the law’s opinion, was the kind of man who deserved to be shot down like a dog. Or, if taken alive, hung from a scaffold to choke away his final moments of life in agony and humiliation.

He sat up again, slowly this time. He crossed the cell with equal care and hung onto the bars, peering out into the sheriff’s office. He spotted the wanted poster lying on Taggart’s desk. With his body pressed up against the bars, he could only read the largest print from where he stood. But that was enough:

JAKE LONERGAN

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

$1,000 REWARD

If you wanted a man dead, you put out a poster like that on him. If you wanted him dead a lot sooner, you offered a big reward. But a $1,000 reward…? The territories were dirt poor; they didn’t have the resources to spend that much on one man, no matter what kind of murdering lowlife bastard he was. Whatever Jake Lonergan had done, he must’ve woken up the wrong passenger when he did it … one with a whole lot of money and influence.

If he was really Jake Lonergan, with a thousand dollar bounty on his head, why the hell was he still alive?

Jake Lonergan. Jake Lonergan. “Jake Lonergan—” He repeated the name out loud, saying it over and over, but it stirred nothing inside him.

Not his name, not his past … not his crimes. He didn’t feel like a cold-blooded killer. But then, how could he explain what he’d done to the three men who’d tried to bushwhack him this morning … to the sheriff’s men … to Percy.

He glanced over at Percy, sprawled on the floor in the next cell. Well, maybe that had just been doing the world a favor for a few hours.

This entire day seemed like one long nightmare, only with some of it worse than the rest … the part with the screaming, the undead faces, the pain … the bright-darkness, and sounds like nobody on earth had ever heard or made.…

But waking up from that had only left him trapped here: Was this Hell? He didn’t know much about Hell, or Purgatory, any more than he really understood absolution.

Absolution was just a place. But somehow it had come to seem like Hell on Earth. “Come into the light,” the preacher had said; but he’d only meant to fix the wound in Jake’s side.

Jake went back to the bunk and lay down again, shutting his eyes, blocking everything out. Even if he never opened them again, the darkness was the only hiding place he had, at least for now.

*   *   *

OUT ON THE Dolarhyde spread, the cowhands had taken Mr. Dolarhyde down to the river, to see for himself the mystery of the dead cattle. Torches lit the darkness of the same field where, not long before, a blazing cottonwood tree would have given them all the light they needed.

Woodrow Dolarhyde stood on the edge between light and darkness, staring down at the remains of a steer. His perpetual frown deepened, etching the bitter lines of his face into an even bleaker, more unforgiving mask.

If he hadn’t known that was a cow before, he wouldn’t have known what it was, now.… He kicked the carcass with his boot.

The men who’d ridden out here with him stole glances at him again; they were as skittish and wary as their horses right now, but not entirely for the same reasons. The horses were only animals; their senses told them things about this place no human could detect, told them to be afraid.

The men knew enough to be afraid of the unknown, too, but it was fear of the known—of him—that made them the most fretful now: his ruthless anger, his pitiless vengeance … his absolute control over everything and everyone that so much as touched his life. That was how he preferred things; that was how he intended to run things and keep things, forever—

He became aware again of the man’s voice still whimpering and pleading, at the center of the torchlight: Roy Murphy, the only man left out of three, that some of his other men had found when they’d ridden out to check on things.

Just around dusk, he’d been told, the men had seen and heard unbelievable lights and sounds coming from clear out here by the river … things none of them could adequately describe. To hear them tell it, the strange phenomena had scared them shitless, even at that distance.

It hadn’t scared them as much as he did, obviously, or they wouldn’t have gone out to check on what’d happened.

When he’d ridden out himself to see what in hell the problem was, the men who’d been waiting there had still found only Roy Murphy, lying in the grass, reeking of alcohol—and half a dozen dead steers.

“Please!” Murphy’s voice rose, intruding on Dolarhyde’s thoughts again. “I didn’t kill your cattle, Colonel Dolarhyde! You gotta believe—”

Dolarhyde raised his finger: the gesture was barely visible in the torchlight, but silence still fell at his signal. Dolarhyde was accustomed to prompt obedience—as well as to men who disappointed him.

What he was unaccustomed to was anything that made him doubt his own eyes and ears, or question his fixed view of the world. Right now, although he’d never admit it, he was confounded by the dead animals on the ground around him, and amazed almost to the point of amusement by the audacity of the lie that Roy Murphy had been swearing was true.

He moved closer to the place where two of his most reliable men, Greavey and Parker, had tied Murphy between two horses—his arms fastened to one horse’s saddle, his legs to the other. The horses stood obediently, waiting, for now … but not for long.

Dolarhyde came close enough to look down into Roy Murphy’s wide, frightened eyes, letting the man have a good look into his own. “You only been riding for my brand what, ’bout two weeks?” he said. “You don’t maybe know who you’re dealing with, Roy. Nobody calls me ‘Colonel.’ Ones that did are mostly dead.”

He paused, letting that sink in, satisfied when Roy’s eyes got even wider and more desperate. “Now: You, Ed, Little Mickey was s’posed to be picking up strays.… How many you get?”

Roy strained just to form words. “… b-bout twenty-four, boss.…”

Dolarhyde’s expression didn’t change. “You say you weren’t drinkin’ … I can smell it on you. Don’t you respect my rules, mister? What kinda man blows up other people’s cows, and tells a bullshit story.… Couldn’t do no better than that? Where’s the other eighteen animals, Roy?” Roy shook his head. “It’s like I said, there was a bright light.…”

“So there was these big ‘lights,’ you fall in the river; when you come up…” Dolarhyde’s face twisted with disgust. “Two of my oldest hands was just ‘disappeared.’ And there’s these, these exploded…” His voice trailed off as he looked again at the carcasses of the cattle lying all around him.

“There wasn’t no storm tonight, no lightning. You don’t respect me, do you. Otherwise you wouldn’t lie to me … would you?” Dolarhyde drew a Bowie knife from his belt, letting the blade gleam in the torchlight, beautiful and deadly. “Funny thing about respect. When it’s gone, it’s all over; everything gets sideways.… I can’t have that. Know what I’m saying, Roy?”

Murphy didn’t even try to answer. But at the sight of the knife, piss stained his pants, and dripped onto the ground.

Dolarhyde’s cold, scornful smile vanished abruptly as he turned away at the sound of riders approaching. He stood waiting, the knife still in his hand, as the men who had gone into town came riding out to find him. He searched their faces, looking for two in particular. He saw only one of them: Nat Colorado. His frown deepened again as he realized something serious must’ve happened for Nat to come looking for him clear out here.

Nat reined in in front of him and dismounted.

“Where’s Percy?” Dolarhyde demanded.

Nat’s glance went from his knife to his face. It was Dolarhyde’s face that added a touch of fear to the respect in Nat’s voice, as he said, “Taggart locked him up, boss.”

Dolarhyde stiffened. “Why?” he rasped. “For what—? What the hell’d he do now?”

Nat forced the words out of a throat that didn’t want to say them. “Shot a deputy.”

“Goddammit!” Dolarhyde’s fist tightened around the knife hilt.

The horses around them moved restlessly at the sound of his anger. The two that were tied to Roy Murphy, already stretching his entire body with every small movement, moved some more.

“He didn’t kill him,” Nat added, as if that might bring Dolarhyde some sort of comfort, or cool his outrage.

“Who’s Taggart think he is?” Dolarhyde’s voice was enough to make Nat thank God that he wasn’t Taggart. “He wouldn’t have a job if … this is my town!”

Roy Murphy cried out in pain, as the two riderless horses stretched him almost enough to dislocate a limb, but Dolarhyde still ignored him. Confronting Nat, he said, “Now I gotta go in there, reason with him … cause of your failure to take care of my son. Didn’t I tell you to watch my son—?”

Dolarhyde turned away abruptly with the knife in his hand, and in one stroke slashed through the rope tethering Murphy’s feet.

Murphy’s lower body slumped to the ground, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank y—”

Dolarhyde slapped the rump of the horse Murphy was still tied to. It bolted away into the night, dragging a screaming Roy Murphy with it.

Dolarhyde put away the knife as he closed on Nat again. Nat glanced up at him, barely. Dolarhyde’s fists were still knotted with anger; Nat’s expression said he figured it was his turn.… Braced against the blow he expected was coming, Nat stared at the ground.

Dolarhyde studied his foreman, who stood gazing at the ground covered in dead cow parts as if he was afraid Dolarhyde had done that, and that he might be next.

Dolarhyde’s fists unclenched. He looked at Nat a moment longer. He shook his head. At last he turned on his heel and shouted, “Everyone saddle up!”

“Boss,” Nat said, “we ought to bring some extra hands.”

Dolarhyde stopped, turned back to look at him. “What for?” he said.

Nat took a deep breath. “You ain’t gonna believe it … but I think Jake Lonergan’s in town.”

Dolarhyde’s eyes narrowed, as if every other thing on his mind had suddenly ceased to exist. “What—?” he whispered.

*   *   *

“JAKE LONERGAN?”

Jake sat on the floor of his cell, his back resting against the back wall, staring into a void. He glanced up as the sheriff and his men finally re-entered the office, but it took his mind a long moment to realize someone had actually called his name—if that was his name.… He sat blinking, as Taggart stopped by his cell.

Jake still felt dazed, like his head hadn’t recovered yet from Ella’s blow … or he’d had too much whiskey on an empty stomach. Or maybe it was just everything. All it meant was that he was still sitting in a jail cell, trapped in what now passed for reality.

Sheriff Taggart turned the key in his cell door; for a moment, Jake’s hope shot up.

It dropped into his boots again as he registered the way the armed deputies were flanking Taggart. Some of them appeared to be new recruits, but two men glared at him over their guns; they both looked like they had broken noses. Lyle’s head was bandaged under his hat.

The sheriff looked into the next cell, where Percy Dolarhyde still lay unconscious on the floor. He looked back. “What happened to him?”

Jake glanced at Percy, back at Taggart again. “Couldn’t say.”

Lyle unlocked Percy’s cell; he and another deputy dragged Percy out into the office, heading for the door. Taggart was holding a pair of manacles as he approached Jake. “Am I gonna need these?”

Jake glanced at the other deputies and their weapons; they kept their guns trained on him, but they were keeping their distance this time.

“No,” he said, looking back at the sheriff again. He’d done enough damage for one day … and he didn’t particularly want to end it riddled with bullet holes.

But either the sheriff had been watching his eyes move, or the question had been rhetorical, because Taggart came forward and put the irons on him anyway. He had a hard time with the left one, finding a place for it by the metal bracelet. He glanced at Jake with an odd look, and another look at the bracelet, before he backed away.

“What’re the charges?” Jake finally remembered to ask.

Taggart picked up the wanted poster from his desk and began to read them off: “Arson, assault, mayhem, hijacking—says you robbed the bullion coach last month, with a gang of outlaws including Pat Dolan and Bull McCade, which makes you accessory to every law they broke.…”

“That it?” Jake said, almost relieved … almost amused. A thousand dollars on his head, just for that? The sheriff held the poster out so he could take a look. He glanced at the face on it: it looked like a prison picture, badly reprinted. Was that him? He realized he didn’t even remember what he looked like, anymore … He read just above the picture, “SCOURGE A‘ THE TERRITORIES.” Yeah, right. His mouth curled up at the edges.

“Murder,” the sheriff added. “Whore outta Cottonwood Grove, next county over—name of Alice Wills.”

Jake’s smirk fell away, leaving his face stunned. No.… That was impossible; it couldn’t be true. He wouldn’t hurt—

Taggart took down Jake’s hat from a hook on the wall, and removed the tintype of the woman from inside it. He held up the picture. The loving, gentle eyes found Jake’s—or he found them, automatically, as she smiled, seemingly only for him.

“This her?” Taggart asked.

Jake gazed at the picture, feeling only confusion, a nameless grief, an inexplicable resentment at the question. “You say I killed this woman?”

Taggart shrugged. “You tell me.”

Jake looked down, his eyes desolate. How was he supposed to do that? He didn’t know whether he was a cold-blooded killer or not. He had no idea what he was really like, or capable of. He thought of the face on the wanted poster, a face with stark, angular planes, and the eyes of a man he wouldn’t want to cross. The eyes of a man who’d kill you for saying the wrong thing, or maybe for no reason at all. If he would actually kill a woman like that …

He only knew that if he had to live his life this way much longer, he didn’t give a damn if they hanged him—guilty or not—because he couldn’t take much more of this.

The sheriff put the picture back inside the hat and tossed the hat to Jake. Jake caught it with cuffed hands. Looking up at Taggart, he said, “Why would I carry around a picture of a woman I murdered?”

Taggart only gave him a look that said anything Jake Lonergan, Scourge of the Territories, might do—even sparing his life—was beyond his comprehension. “That’s for Santa Fe to sort out.”

He opened the cell door, and gestured to Jake. “Now I’m puttin’ you in that coach,” he said. “I will treat you with respect, but make no mistake—if you try and escape, I will put a bullet in you.”

Jake put on his hat and walked out of the cell. At gunpoint Taggart pushed him toward the front door, and through it into the shadowy lamplit night.

A coach stood outside the jail—an armored prison wagon with oak lattices barring the windows. Deputies lined the short path between the door of the jailhouse and the coach, their guns still trained on him.

A crowd of murmuring onlookers was gathered behind the deputies, staring at him. Christ, didn’t these people have anything better to do? He supposed they didn’t, in a place like this.

If he tried to make a break for it now, he’d never get through that crowd without someone getting hurt. It would probably end up being him; but now he really didn’t feel like he wanted to hurt any more strangers on his way out of town.

Even before he got to the door of the prison wagon he heard Percy Dolarhyde, awake at last and already mouthing off. Resigned, he climbed into the coach just as Percy tried to stick his head out the open door, yelling at Taggart about how it was an accident, they got no right sendin’ him to the federal marshal—

Jake shoved the little shit back into his seat so he could get past. Percy broke off his rant to call him a few choice names.

Jake observed the bruises that had streaked Percy’s face with the colors of sunset, wherever his head had collided with the bars of his cell. Jake barely managed to keep the smile of satisfaction off his own face. A few bruises were probably the worst thing Percy would end up with, if half the threats he was blurting about his old man were true. On the other hand, Percy’s face just might be the last amusing thing Jake Lonergan ever got to see.…

Jake sat down on the opposite bench and looked out the window on the far side of the coach. He didn’t expect to find a friendly, or familiar face in the crowd that had spilled out into the street; didn’t even know why part of him was searching for one. But then he caught a glimpse of Preacher Meacham, framed by the bars of the oak lattice. As their eyes met, Meacham’s face filled with sympathy, and regret. His was the only one, but Jake appreciated it, for as long as it lasted.

He thought he saw Ella moving through the crowd near Meacham; he recognized the dog that had followed him all day still at her side, like it’d come to say goodbye. He looked back again as the sheriff said, “Gimme your wrist.” Jake held out his hands. The sheriff unlocked the manacle on his left hand, freeing it—grabbed Percy’s arm, and locked the iron around his wrist.

Sonofabitch—Jake thought.

He saw a tight grin come out of hiding under Taggart’s mustache. “Best way to make a man stay put—chain him to his enemy.”

Taggart showed the grin to Percy as he said, “You lovebirds have a nice trip, now.” When he slammed the coach door he was actually smiling; the relief on his face made him look ten years younger. Jake heard the heavy lock being fastened.

“Are you tryin’ to get me killed—?” Percy whined out the window.

*   *   *

OUTSIDE THE PRISON wagon Jake heard Taggart again, sounding abruptly exasperated, but not at him or Percy.

“What are you doin’?” Taggart said to somebody. “Go on home, go to bed.”

A boy’s voice answered: Taggart’s grandson—Jake could just see him outside the window, hanging on his grandfather’s arm.

“Please don’t go.”

Taggart shook the boy off, gently but firmly. “Have to, Emmett. It’s my job.”

“I don’t like it here,” Emmett’s voice rose as he got more upset.

Jake watched Taggart’s face, seeing sorrow, strain, regret, and love move across it. Taggart said, like he’d repeated it a hundred times before, “Your pa’s gettin’ things in order. When he does, he’ll send for you.”

“Been over a year…” Emmett said, his voice starting to get tremulous now.

A flicker of something crossed Taggart’s face that told Jake the man was telling lies he was having trouble keeping up. He watched Taggart force a smile as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he will. And this is where your mama’s buried—you know I can’t leave my little girl. Now what would she say if she knew I let you stay up so late?” He began to turn the boy around, urging him back to wherever he should’ve been.

Jake was suddenly glad he hadn’t had to kill the man; even if it meant he’d wound up in this fix.

He sighed and tried to settle into his seat, too bone-weary and disoriented to do anything but let the coach’s wall hold him up. It was a long ride to Santa Fe. He could worry about the end of it later.… Right now his whole body ached—not just pain, but hunger gnawed at him too. Damn, he never even got to eat that pasole—He realized how little the pain or hunger had really bothered him, until now; like they were things he was used to enduring, to the point of ignoring them, for as long as he had to.

His right arm jerked up short as he leaned back. Percy sat sullenly at the far end of the other bench, pulling the chain taut, keeping him from sitting comfortably. Jake yanked on the manacles, and Percy fell off his seat.

That little pissant wasn’t going to make what might be his last ride miserable, simply by existing. Jake gave Percy a long, meaningful stare, and then leaned back again, making himself as comfortable as he could; forcing Percy to adjust, if he wanted to stay conscious.

“Ah, shit.…” Percy muttered. He got back up onto the bench and didn’t try anything more.

Jake folded his arms and looked toward the street-side window. He started, as he found the last person he’d expected, or wanted, to see there—Ella, the woman from the saloon, staring in at him.

… the hell? He frowned. What was she, a bounty hunter—? He started to turn his face away.

But that desperate, driven look was in her eyes again; the look that had seemed to see right through him earlier.… Unwillingly he turned back, not able to ignore her even now, even though he wanted to.

“Listen, I’m sorry—” she said, her fingers tightening over the window lattice until they whitened. He glanced at her face, “But I had no choice. I couldn’t let you leave.”

Jake grimaced, holding up his chained hand. “Well, I’m leaving now.”

Jake heard Deputy Lyle shout, “Taggart!” in sudden warning.

Taggart looked away at something, and his face turned as hard as stone. “Get inside now,” he said to Emmett. The townsfolk who’d surrounded the prison wagon began to vanish too, clearing out the street.

As their voices faded, Jake heard the sound of riders, coming in fast. Percy sat up across from him, suddenly alert and expectant, and Jake’s eyes hardened.

“I need you,” Ella said. Looking back at her, he saw the truth in her eyes, but no more clue as to why.

“You got something to say, say it,” he snapped at Ella, as he heard Taggart calling orders up to the wagon’s driver.

“I need to know where you came from.”

His eyes widened, just for a second. Then he muttered, “So do I—” and looked away.

“Step aside, miss,” Taggart said, through the far window, and it was a sharp order, not a request. The deputies nearest Ella moved in to force her back from the coach onto the boardwalk.

Percy sniggered, grinning at him. “Oh it’s on now.…”

Jake peered out the street-side window again, trying to see what had turned the whiny little shit back into a gloating monster, just as riders surrounded the coach, most of them carrying torches. Two men rode up close on either side, peering in.

Jake recognized one of them—the man the sheriff had called “Nat” while facing him down, when Nat had tried to intimidate him into letting Percy go. Jake didn’t recognize the other man, until Percy yelled, “I knew you’d come for me, Pa!”

Dolarhyde.