Power in the Blood (99 page)

“I have no idea what you mean, ma’am,” he purred, “nor any notion on what your little girl said about me.”

“Why do you carry a knife there?”

“For protection, ma’am, just as you carry a pistol. A woman can never be too careful, the world being as it is.”

“He’s a man, Mama,” moaned Omie. “Don’t believe him.…”

“I don’t,” said Zoe, and saw the face before her harden subtly. She was afraid of the androgynous creature with the wicked blade strapped against his thigh, afraid of the cold darkness behind his eyes. He had come to murder them both, as Omie said, and Zoe could not think what to do with him now that she had him at gunpoint. She could not simply shoot him, although that was probably the safest option.

“I had no idea Leo hated me so,” she told him.

“Leo?” said Tatum, lifting an eyebrow.

“My husband, Leo Brannan. I suppose you’ll deny he sent you. How can you do such work? What kind of ghoul are you?”

Tatum shrugged with casual nonchalance. The pistol had begun to weigh heavily in the woman’s grip, and she lacked another hand to support it; soon it would begin to waver, and he would be able to pounce, providing the girl had not recovered by then. She was still slumped against a porch pillar, breathing heavily, paying little attention to him. He had only to take the pistol from the woman, and his first target would be the girl, before she hypnotized him again; without her daughter, the woman would be easy meat. He would kill her slowly, painfully, as compensation for having bungled the job at first.

“Well? Did he send you? I won’t be intimidated by him. I won’t!”

Tatum let her talk; the more time passed, the heavier the pistol would become. He was intrigued to hear the name of Leo Brannan; he had been told nothing but to look around Durango for a one-armed woman called Zoe Dugan. Locating the target had been easier than anticipated; batting his eyes at the postmaster had charmed the fool into offering an address and a letter besides. He hadn’t bothered to open it yet, but he would, after he had taken care of the work he was paid to perform. The letter might even be worth an extra few hundred dollars to Price; Tatum could always threaten to take it to Mr. Jones instead, if Price demurred. Tatum sensed there was some kind of uneasy competition between the men, and that was why Price asked him to perform work on the side, extracting as a condition his promise never to breathe a word of his free-lance activities to Jones. Yes, Leo Brannan’s name could well be the perfect tool for blackmail, and the letter as well. Tatum knew he was regaining his sense of control, taken from him without warning by the girl. It was coming back now, calming him; he had always had the ability to think clearly when he knew he was in control of a situation. The gun barrel pointed at him was beginning to droop, but he kept his eyes from it, not wishing to draw the attention of Zoe Dugan to her faulty aim.

“Mama, there’s a letter.… He put it in his purse.”

Tatum was taken by surprise again. He hadn’t mentioned the letter to the girl. The postmaster must have mentioned it to the mother, but how could the girl have known, and be reminding her about it? He felt irritation over the inexplicable begin to agitate him again.

“In his purse, Mama. It’s important, he thinks.”

“I don’t have any letter.”

“You most certainly do,” said Zoe. “It belongs to me, so kindly hand it over.”

“Oh, yes, the letter they gave me at the post office. Yes, ma’am, I certainly do have that letter with me. I forgot about it, what with one thing and another.…” He gave a little laugh intended to disarm the woman as he began opening the purse. Tatum wished he had a derringer hidden inside, but he did not, so confident was he of his ability with the stiletto. “I have it here somewhere … ah, yes.”

He pulled out the crumpled envelope and offered it to her, hoping she was sufficiently dazed by events to dither over how best to accept it, since her only hand was occupied by a gun. One small hesitation, a look of indecision in the eyes, and Tatum would know the time had come to pounce.

“Drop it,” ordered Zoe.

“Ma’am?”

“I have only the one arm, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, excuse me.”

Tatum allowed the envelope to fall between them onto the porch boards. If she stooped to pick it up, if she so much as looked down at it, he would have her.

“Move sideways.”

“Pardon me?” asked Tatum, disappointed by Zoe’s cleverness. He should have been warned of that, as well as the girl’s hypnotic ability. He would shoot the girl in both eyes, so as not to give her another chance at pinning him down with nothing more than her gaze.

“Move away from the letter, or I’ll have to shoot you.”

Tatum shuffled sideways, moving clumsily to convey the idea that he was somehow hampered by the unaccustomed dress; in fact he felt less encumbered in women’s clothing than in men’s, and often wore dresses when alone, just to hear and feel them swish through the air when he twirled and kicked and twirled again before the many mirrors in his bedroom.

“Turn around and face the wall.”

“Ma’am, I’ve tried to explain to you that I was given the letter to deliver, and that’s why I’m here.…”

“Stop lying! I am not a fool! Now turn around, you … you monster!”

Tatum sighed and turned himself awkwardly around. The woman was taking fewer chances than most would have taken; he would need to resort to stealth. He could hear the girl stand up again and come closer to her mother. That was bad; he wanted her at several arms’ lengths from him when the moment came to strike. She was picking up the letter now, although the woman hadn’t told her to, almost as if she could read thoughts.

“It’s addressed to you, Mama, by general delivery.”

“Put it in your pocket, then go and pack our bags. Are you well enough to do that by yourself?”

“Yes. What will we do with the man?”

“I don’t know. It may depend on him. Go on now, and don’t bother to fold things neatly, just fling them in the bags and bring everything outside.”

Tatum caught a glimpse of the girl as she went through the front door. That was good; he knew he could get the drop on the woman much more easily while they were alone. She was shifting position, moving a little further from him. Bad.

“Lift your dress and remove the knife.”

“Ma’am, it’s my only protection.…”

“Stop this nonsense! You’re a man, a … a killer for hire! I despise you. Take it out very slowly, and drop it at your feet.”

Tatum lifted his dress and extracted the stiletto from its sheath. The weapon was his pride; he much preferred it to noisy guns. He had read of the Borgia assassins, Italy’s dagger men of stealth and cunning, and chosen to emulate their skills, rather than those of his own society’s dime-novel pistoleros.

“Drop your knife.”

Tatum sneered to himself. The woman didn’t know the difference between a knife and a stiletto. He wished he had his brace of throwing knives strapped along his ribs; he could have spun and sunk one into her throat before she had a chance to gun him down; but he had left them all behind, like a fool, thinking a woman less of a challenge than a man. He had learned a lesson on this assignment, and would never again underestimate any one of his targets. The stiletto clattered to the boards between his dainty button boots, and Zoe was startled to see that the blade, unlike that of an ordinary dagger, had three sides.

“Move away from it.”

Tatum did as he was told. He had just remembered another weapon, not one he had trained himself to use, but one that would serve him well in an emergency.

“What is your name?” Zoe asked him.

“Julia, ma’am.”

“Stop that! I wish to know your name, and how much my husband has paid you to do this!”

“No one has paid me to do anything, ma’am,” said Tatum. He had employed his female voice throughout, except when the girl had him held against the wall, when it had been difficult to talk at all. He didn’t know why he continued playing a role that clearly had been seen through; probably because to abandon it would have been an indication of defeat, he decided.

“Tell him that I will not be cowed. Tell him I will have what’s mine, regardless.”

Tatum was encouraged by these words. If he was expected to tell Leo Brannan something, it meant he was not about to be killed, and a woman who had no intention of killing the man she held at gunpoint was already halfway to reversing their positions. She was not so clever after all, he concluded.

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I hear you, only I don’t understand any of this, I really don’t, ma’am.”

“And tell him to send someone of intelligence to negotiate in good faith, not some operetta buffoon.”

Tatum knew then that his usual delights would have to be augmented for this woman. She had insulted him openly, and would pay with a slower death than any he had heretofore orchestrated. The slowest death he had conducted at the behest of Mr. Jones had been a rancher in northern New Mexico who refused to join his spread to that belonging to his neighbor, presumably an associate of Mr. Jones. Tatum never concerned himself with the details of why a murder had to be committed, and often did not adhere to the sparse instructions given to him before such an undertaking. He had been encouraged of late to indulge his fancy for protracted death, especially in that region, by the convenient presence of Slade, the Colorado Cannibal. Tatum knew his torture of the rancher had been considered the work of that elusive man-beast, and had been glad of it, even if Mr. Jones was not fooled and had censured him for embellishing an otherwise straightforward murder.

“Ma’am, I just don’t know what any of this means. You won’t hurt me, will you?”

Zoe made a sound of frustration and disgust, another good sign. The party whose head was cool was the party who generally survived any kind of showdown, in Tatum’s experience. His own head felt as cool as it did when he snorted cocaine into his nasal passages. Tatum had given up liquor when he discovered the white dust; nothing compared to its glacial thundering in his veins. Cocaine took him to distant mountaintops, where he breathed the chill atmosphere of ultimate aloneness and satisfaction. He often snorted the dust, and obliged his partners to share the experience before making brutal love to them. Nothing so enhanced his self-aware performances as stud-bugger
extraordinaire.
The heavenly powder was both opiate and stimulant, and Tatum accorded it the reverence other men gave to money.

Omie reappeared on the porch. “Everything, Mama? The big trunk too?”

“No, leave that. Just the small bags. Hurry!”

Omie went back inside the house. Tatum thought about how best to employ his alternative weapon. Zoe Dugan was still too far away.

“I won’t be so easy to find next time. You tell him that.”

“Tell who, ma’am?”

“Don’t talk to me in that idiotic fashion! Talk like the man that you are!” Zoe took several breaths to calm herself. “Tell him he has disappointed me. I thought him above such practices. Tell him he has become a lesser man than the one I knew. The one I thought I knew. Can you remember that?”

“I don’t know what to say, ma’am. I believe I’m too confused to remember anything.…”

“Stop it!”

He was stoking her agitation with professional aplomb. Another few degrees of anger and she would be incapable of good judgment and split-second reaction. Tatum was backing his prey into the corner Zoe had elected to occupy, a kind of slaughtering pen his intended victims always built around themselves without being aware that they did so. Tatum was fascinated by the responses of people to imminent danger; so very few of them actually believed they would come to harm. He could not understand why they made this assumption, but was glad their minds worked so contrarily, since it gave him the advantage every time. Tatum saw death everywhere, and was always prepared for it, day or night, like a creature of the jungle. Even as he killed them, his targets expressed disbelief in their eyes, and he scorned them for their naive weakness, their pathetic belief in physical immortality. They deserved to die solely on account of that, in his opinion.

Time was passing. He had to turn around and kill the woman while her daughter with the dangerous eyes was inside. Tatum asked, “May I remove my hat and wig?” He used his male voice.

“You may. I should like to see how you look.”

Tatum lifted both arms and unpinned the hat from the wig, then dropped both behind him, knowing Zoe’s eyes would follow whatever moved. During her few seconds of distraction, he palmed the hatpin.

“There,” he said. “I’ll have to turn if you want to see my face, ma’am.”

“Then do so, very slowly.”

Tatum shuffled himself around to face Zoe.

“What is your name?”

“David Mulrooney.”

“Have you done this many times before?”

“Never. I have considerable debt. Your husband offered me the work for ten thousand dollars. He didn’t say you were his wife. He said your name was Dugan. If I had known … He said you were blackmailing him, but gave me no details. He said you were … excuse me, ma’am, but he said you were an ex-whore who gave nothing but trouble to the world. I suppose that was to make everything more acceptable to me. I failed, of course, and now that I have, I’m glad. You aren’t what he described at all, I can see. Ma’am, I don’t know what grudge your husband may hold against you, but I want no part in erasing it. I’ve been deceived by him, as I imagine you have been. I humbly beg your pardon.”

His tone was haltingly sincere. Zoe began to wonder if she had been wrong to treat him with such caution.

“They told me to bring a gun,” he said, “but I couldn’t shoot someone. I bought the other thing instead, like a fool who doesn’t know what’s best. What kind of killer arms himself with a pigsticker, ma’am, I ask you? It was all doomed to fail, even if your little girl hadn’t been so clever as to see through this … this
ridiculous
disguise. I feel so humiliated.… Ma’am, I urge you to hide yourself away from him, because as soon as he learns how badly I’ve bungled the task, he’ll dispatch someone who knows what he’s doing, someone who won’t be so clumsy as myself.”