The Reckoning (29 page)

She straightened herself, glanced back at Danziger and Albert Lee, a brief look full of warning, faced the people again. “Well then, now we come to the Reckoning.”

She paused, let the moment stand.

There was a whispering ripple and then the crowd grew quiet. Waiting and attentive.

“The Reckoning…is not a gift we place into a man's hands. We are not the keepers of the Reckoning. We do not own it. It is not ours to give, nor ours to withhold. No priest trades in it, no judge commands it, no lawgiver defines it. It is a part of the living world, as much as the moon and the stars and the rivers. The Reckoning is forbidden to no one and open to all, but without it there can be no peace in this life, nor ever in the hearts of living men or dead.”

There was a murmur of assent and the crowd stirred uneasily.

“It is now time for Abel Teague to come forward and face the Reckoning,” she said in a carrying tone that was stern and full of judgment.

“Mr. Teague has been given six months here at the plantation to consider the days of his long life and how he has chosen to live among his fellow men and women. The hour has come for him to stand and tell us what he has come to know about himself, and what he might now have the grace to regret, and how he might see his ways differ from what they were. If this is honestly and willingly done, he will find that he is eased and unburdened. He will free himself. If it is not, if he refuses, he remains bound in chains of his own making, and he will be returned to his confinement to consider his ways for another season. Those who wish to witness Abel Teague's attendance are welcome to stay. Those who prefer not to should leave now.”

The people shifted and stirred, a restless alteration, and many of them began to move away through the wheat toward the fence line.

In the end three men and one woman stayed, all of them with something hard showing through their sunburned faces, resolution in their stance and the set of their bodies.

Glynis raised a hand, waved in the direction of the four men standing apart. “Will he come willingly?”

All four men shook their heads.

Glynis sighed, looked back again at Danziger, and then spoke to the men again. “Then you must compel him.”

They looked at each other, and one man answered, his voice strained and tense. “Ma'am. We are sorry. He will not come.”

Glynis looked at Danziger and Albert Lee. “Then you two men must go and bring him.”

Danziger smiled, started to move.

She stopped him with her hand. “Be careful. He looks old, but he is quick and strong and cunning. And the crows? You heard them? There may be guardians near. Be watchful.”

They walked across the wheat field, a distance of fifty or sixty yards. On the way Albert Lee offered Danziger a sip from his flask, and Danziger accepted, savored it, handed it back.

As they got closer, they saw what looked like an open pit in the earth, a trench wide and deep, only a few yards from the edge of the forest, running along a section of the river-rock wall that was under construction. The four men were standing around it, staring down at something in the trench. Danziger and Albert Lee came up to the edge, Danziger covering the trench with his BAR. Albert Lee had his revolver out.

There was an old man sitting in the trench, a powerful old man, but weathered with age, as gray and seamed as barn boards. He had his back up against a bank of dirt and willow roots. He was broad and strong-looking, with a blue-skinned face made up of harsh planes and sagging flesh, the haggard sunken-cheeked face of a man who has spent his life doing exactly as he damn well pleased. He had a crater-shaped scar in his right cheekbone, and his right eye was blood-rimmed and bulging.

He slouched there in what looked to Danziger like a muddy formal suit, a dirty shirt that had once been white, thick black boots covered in muck. As their shadows fell across him he looked up, squinting into the sunlight, seeing them only as black figures against the sky.

He showed his teeth, big and yellow as piano keys, blood-red gums, thin lips, and flat-dead eyes like the eyes of a shark. “Who are these sorry-looking bumpkins?” he said in a grating voice, his accent Deep South, Louisiana or Alabama. His sleeves were filthy, and his knees too, as if he had been kneeling in the muck, digging the trench with his bare hands. His fingernails were cracked and bloody.

“He was trying to dig under,” said the man with the shovel.

“I
had
dug under,” growled the old man in the trench. “I was almost through. I asked you who you were,” he snapped, looking up at Danziger and Albert Lee. He squinted more closely at Albert Lee.

“I know
you
. You were the darky from last spring. In the duel. You loaned me your pistol.”

“I did. I loaned you this very one I have in my hand. Should have shot you myself,” said Albert Lee in a hard flat voice.

The man in the pit grinned up at him. “But you didn't have the sand. Not then and not now. You darkies never do. It just ain't in you. Born to tote and carry and then go under the harrow with the rest of the manure. And who're you?”

This to Danziger. “Never mind who I am,” he said, centering the BAR on the man's dirty shirt. “Get up or die in a ditch. I don't give a personal damn either way.”

The man leered up at him. “But
she
cares, cowpoke. This is all
her
show. And you
can't
kill me, you ignorant lout. Not with that ugly damn thing, anyway.”

Danziger appeared to think this through. “Well, I can probably shoot you into a lot of bits and pieces,” he said with a big carnivorous smile. “How'd you like to get scattered all over this ditch in chunks small enough for the rats to eat? You'd still be
alive
, according to you, every greasy twitching bit, but the rats would have you down in their guts, and there you'd stay forever.”

The old man's face changed. Danziger had reached him. He was shaken by Danziger's ferocity, and by the truth inside his threat, and it showed. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Charlie Danziger. Remember it.”

The man put his head back against the dirt, sighed, and got slowly to his feet, making an irony of his obedience, staring at the men around the edge of the pit, coming back to Danziger. Hate came off him in waves. He stank of dead meat and sewage, not on him, but
in
him, like he was made of it.

“And my name is Abel Teague, Mr. Danziger. I will not ask you to remember it. You will have no choice.”

He showed his teeth, looked past the men at Glynis Ruelle, standing by the hay wagon. “Mr. Danziger, let me share a confidence with you, one gentleman to another. Someday I'll buy a new straight razor,” he said, his voice sliding into a reptilian hiss, “and I will gut that poxy cunt over there like a fallow deer.”

Danziger clubbed him with the butt of the BAR and he went reeling backward onto the rim of the trench, blood spraying out of his mouth. He wiped his jaw, grinned through the blood. Two of his front teeth had been smashed in. The man shook his head, suddenly cheerful, smiling through blood.

“What time you figure it is?” he asked in a conversational tone.

Albert Lee had his watch out. “Three seventeen.”

This seemed to please him. He stood up again, reeled a bit, put his head back, looked up into the sky, spread his arms wide. Crows were wheeling along the top of the tree line, a huge flock. Danziger heard Glynis shouting, calling his name.

Teague grinned up at them. “Mr. Danziger, all you wildwood boys, please welcome my dear companions.”

Three hard shots cracked out of the pine forest. The man with the shovel pivoted like a dancer, blood flying out of his shattered skull. A second man went down, falling into the trench, his pitchfork clattering on stones. Albert Lee was crouching, firing, steady and slow, aiming into the shadows of the pine forest.

Danziger raised the BAR, squeezed the trigger, the weapon thudding, the sound of it thunderous, the muzzle flare lighting up the tree line, his body taking the recoil. He could see figures in there, pale white figures, manlike, but not quite right. They had weapons, and they were
many
.

Danziger cut them down one by one, calm and methodical shooting—acquire the target, steady on it, squeeze the trigger, move on to the next—one after the other, firing semiauto, like taking out a row of clay pipes, four, five, six of the guardians, pale figures jerking under the impact of the slugs, coming apart, falling away into the shadows under the pines.

More shots came back and Danziger felt a round tug at his shoulder, another at his cheek…he kept firing—killed three more—and then the rifle stopped and he was reaching for another box mag, ejected the empty one, stuffed it in his pocket, slammed the new one home.

A ragged volley of mixed fire came out of the woods—handguns, shotguns, maybe a rifle. He heard a solid thwack and then saw Albert Lee falling backward into the wheat.

He racked the bolt and it locked. He punched the magazine home, lifted the BAR—aiming at a pale gray flicker in the shadowy woods—felt movement at his side, half turned, and Abel Teague was
right there
, swinging that shovel like a lumberjack taking down a tree. Danziger flinched, felt the heavy blow glancing off the side of his head, wild blue lights exploded in his vision, he knew he was falling, going down, going down
hard
—

Nick could hear Kate's voice and in some part of his mind he knew he was lying in a hospital room and that he felt pretty damn bloody awful, but he was also standing in an upstairs window in an old farmhouse, from the light it was close to sundown, and he was watching a crowd of people some distance away, a loose column of men and women, following an old green hay wagon.

The wagon was being pulled by a horse, a big chestnut horse with a long golden mane, a Clyde or a Belgian. The horse looked familiar, but Nick couldn't figure out why. Then he remembered.

It was the same horse that he had seen galloping along Patton's Hard in the moonlight six months ago.
Jupiter
came to him, but he had no idea what it meant. Maybe it was the horse's name.

Nick knew he was dreaming, but he was awake enough—and perhaps cop enough—to take an interest in the
quality
of the dream. It had been his experience that some dreams cheated on the special effects stuff, at least in areas that weren't all that important to the dream, but he had to admit this one was pretty damn convincing.

The details were exactly right, down to the raspy feel of the worn-down window ledge under his hands, and the heat rising up from the wood, and that rickety old barn across the lane, and the generator muttering, and the pine forest far away, a low black line that squared off and contained what looked to be a field of wheat.

Nick recognized the wheat field. He had seen it once, although upside down, projected through a small hole in a window shutter onto a basement wall in Delia Cotton's mansion, Temple Hill. Like a room-sized pinhole camera. Just as in the image on the basement wall, there was a sledge of some kind far off by the edge of the pine forest, piled high with small white spheres.

Rocks?

Or skulls?

He looked closely and decided they were rocks, river rocks, rounded by water, and they were being used to build some kind of barrier fence along the edge of the pine forest. It was all completely familiar to him. Nick wondered if there was a word for the reverse of
déjà vu.

Jamais vu,
he decided, admiring the dream with an outsider's detachment. The dream was a perfect rendition of a country farm from back in the days of the Great Depression. It even had a faint sepia-tinted coloring.

The people and the horse and the hay wagon were a long way off, maybe a quarter mile, but he got the idea, looking at them, that he was seeing some kind of procession.

As they got closer he could see the people were wearing clothes from the thirties, cotton dresses for the women and bib overalls for a lot of the men. Farmworkers and their wives.

Looked like them, anyway.

When they came through the cattle gate and turned into the farmhouse lane Nick could see that there was someone laid out on the wagon bed, cushioned by a pile of straw, a long spare figure in a black suit. Nick leaned out the window, trying to make out the details; since it was a dream he tried to conjure up some binoculars but had no luck.

“Nick, honey, please…”

Kate's voice. She was
close
.

He turned around, half expecting to see her standing in the farmhouse room, smiling at him.

“Nick…can you hear me?”

The procession was closer now, almost up to the laneway gate. Soon he could make out individual faces and one stood out, a middle-aged woman with long black hair, lovely even at this distance, a curved and sensual body, wearing a pale green dress, carrying a parcel wrapped in an Indian-pattern blanket…He knew her, of course, because he had seen her once before, in a way that had burned itself into his cortex. She was Glynis Ruelle. He scanned the group for Clara…

“Nick, honey, if you can hear me…”

As dreams do, this one flickered and faded, although Nick tried hard to file away the details.

He opened his eyes.

Kate was standing there, looking down at him, her face lit by the bedside monitors. She was pale and trying hard to smile, although fear was right under her skin, bringing out her fine-boned skull, her deep-set green eyes.

“I can hear you,” he said in a dry croak.

Kate turned away, came back with a plastic glass half full of water. It had one of those bendable straws in it.

He started to sit up, but a sizzling bolt of white-hot pain lanced through his ribs. He kept as much of that off his face as he could. Kate tried to stop him, but he made it all the way to nearly upright, at one hell of a cost, but he hated being on his back. People in hospitals always died on their backs.

Kate held the straw up to his lips, but he took the glass from her gently, with a bruised smile. When the round had smacked into him he'd hit the tarmac on his right side and his cheek was a black-and-blue tattoo. He sipped the water.

It was better than blessed. It was exquisite.

“Thank you, babe,” he said, in a slightly more human voice. Kate was standing by his bed and looking at him as if he were the Risen Christ.

“Jeez, Kate,” he said. “Stop looking at me like that. I'm not dead yet.”

His thirst eased, he blinked away the remaining wisps of the dream—something about a farm…Glynis Ruelle…Clara Mercer.

He looked around the ICU unit.

He was in the middle of a bank of monitors and IV feeds. He had something dripping into his arm, a kind of clip device clamped around his index finger, and there was a large rectangular package sitting on the chair behind Kate.

And he
hurt
.

His entire chest felt as if he'd been kicked by a horse. Several horses. Big horses. Big horses with grudges. And he had stitches underneath some kind of wraparound body bandage. He could feel them like fishhooks in his flesh. He took a deep breath and regretted that immediately.

Past the chair was a large glass wall, and beyond the wall was a group of people: Mavis Crossfire, Beth and Eufaula, Tig Sutter, Boonie Hackendorff. They were gathered around a doctor and listening to what he was saying so intently that Nick could almost feel it through the glass.

“Okay,” he said, leaning back into the pillow. “What's this? A wake?”

Kate glanced at the window. “That's Dr. Ginsberg. He's the one who sewed you up. He's explaining…you.”

“I'm glad somebody can.”

Kate smiled, not persuasively. “Your heart rate was all over the place. They've spent hours trying to control it.”

“And?”

“They think they've got it managed. For now.”

“Good. Then I think I'll go for a walk.”

“You will
not
!” said Kate.

“It's from Monty Python,” he said. “That Holy Grail movie. Damn, I
do
feel like hell.”

“Joan called me on the cell. She said you had woken up and were talking.”

“Yeah. That's good, isn't it?”

“When I left you were…very sick.”

He studied her, fighting through the pain. “I'm sorry, babe. I'm sorry I scared you.”

She smiled at him. “You scared us all.”

He looked at the monitors and then at the plastic sensor clipped to his finger, and he followed that lead back to the Vital Signs display.

“I know I got shot. They told me so in the ambulance. But it didn't punch through. I remember that too. Hurt like hell, but…if I'm not all shot up, why the machinery?”

“Your heart. I told you. The bullet sent a shock wave through your chest and it made your heart rate go all…funny. There may be tissue damage. Your enzymes are all out of whack, whatever that means. How do you feel right now?”

“My heart, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“How does it look, on that?”

Kate studied it for a time. Nick realized she had probably become an expert on ICU procedures over the last…how long? It also occurred to him that in the last six months he had ended up in the hospital at least twice, once when a prison van he was riding in hit a deer and rolled over, and now because he had gotten himself shot.

Maybe I should have stayed in Special Ops,
he was thinking.
It would have been safer than Niceville. This town is trying to kill me.

“It's…steady,” she said. “Finally.”

She went all shaky and had to sit down in the chair. She shifted the package to the floor, leaned back, shook her head at him.

“I've…I thought you were going to die.” She started to cry, serious racking sobs.

Nick tried to reach for her.

Bad idea.

The room went bright and the pain in his side went zigzagging all through his body.

The duty nurse was there, all brisk and bustle, smelling of Old Spice.

Nick figured they taught that bustling thing at nursing school, along with the
glove
thing.

“You're in pain,” she said, which Nick felt was stating the Stunningly Fucking Obvious.

“You think?” he said, in a grating whisper. He had his eyes on Kate, who was trying to pull herself together. The only thing she hated more than crying was being seen while crying.

The nurse reached up, fiddled with an IV, handed him a gray plastic remote.

“This controls the morphine pump,” she said, smiling at him. “Don't overdo it. You die now and I lose the pool.”

“What's the prize?”

“It's split by outcomes. Your not dying has wiped out most of the night-shift players. But I'm still in. You live, but you're a drooling gomer, I only get fifty dollars. If you regain all your bodily functions, I get a hundred.”

“How will you be able to tell? You volunteering?”

“No. Not that I wouldn't enjoy that. But I think we'll just ask your wife.”

She backed away and stood by the curtain, hovering. Beyond her the people were gone, shooed away by a floor nurse. Nick looked down at the parcel on the floor. Kate followed his look. “What's in the package?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” said Kate.

Nick peered down at it. “Oh, come on. The mirror? Really?”

Kate straightened up a bit, set her face. “I thought you were going to die.”

“So you were going to send me to Glynis Ruelle?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking of the strange talk she had had with Glynis just a while ago. “I was.”

And she was so dead serious that Nick couldn't even smile. It hit him that she was in worse shape than he was. “You know what?” he said.

“What?” she said with an edge.

“I could use a kiss.”

She smiled.

“Where?”

“Let's start with the lips. Then we'll see.”

She stood up, came in, leaned down. “Maybe I should pull the curtains?”

“Maybe you should get me the hell out of here. Then you can kiss me anywhere you like.”

The staff didn't like it, not one tiny bit—neither did Kate—but they finally agreed to move him from the ICU into a standard room.

Kate managed to make it a private room. He took his morphine pump with him. He figured he was going to have to buy one that he could carry around with him on the job. He was never going to be without one again.
Morphine: It's not just for sissies anymore.

Kate got him settled down into the bed. They were still monitoring his heart rate, and he had the morphine pump, but the morphine pump reduced the chest pain to a minor irritation surrounded by a rosy glow. This in spite of the fact that he was wrapped up in bandages from under his arms to his hipbones and basically felt like a grilled bratwurst. With stitches.

Kate was at the window curtains, pulling them back. He was shocked to see it was almost sundown.

“What day is it?”

“It's Sunday evening.”

“I've been out for twenty-four hours?”

“They had you sedated. They were pretty worried about you.”

“So were you, apparently.”

“I don't want to talk about the mirror.”

“I can understand that. Where is it?”

“I locked it in the car. Are you feeling okay to talk?”

“Yeah. Starting with how's Reed? How's Mavis? And Lemon and Frank?”

Kate sat down on the chair, pulled it over close. Nick watched her face. Out in the hall nurses were gliding by and the PA system was asking for housekeeping in Room 307, with an edge of hysterical urgency. Nick said a silent prayer of thanks that he wasn't downstream from Room 307.

“Okay,” said Kate, facing up to it, “Reed wasn't hurt. He's doing a PISTOL Shooting Report right now. Mavis is up and around. She has a cast on her ankle. Lemon's over in the Haggard Wing, with nerve damage in his arm. He's going to be needing a lot of rehab. And…”

Her face had gone pale again, and she looked as terrible as a woman that beautiful could look.

Nick had an idea what was coming.

“Frank…honey…about Frank…”

“Kate, what is it?”

She looked at her hands, took in some air. “Okay. Lemon got Frank to the ER, and they gave him blood, stopped the arterial bleeding, got him stabilized. He was in the Annex ICU until three this morning. They figured he was okay to move to a standard room—all the ICUs in town are full and they needed the bed…”

Her voice trailed off and she looked as miserable as he had ever seen her look.

He waited.

“He was conscious…but he was agitated. Upset. He was looking for something, couldn't find it. Getting angry. They wanted to sedate him, but he refused it. He was thrashing around, aggressive. So they held him down and…”

“Tranked him?”

“Yes. When he was out, they put an orderly in the room with him. There was a shift change, the orderly was asked to help move a patient. Frank was still out…”

She lifted her head and looked at him. “When they came back, the bed was empty. The drawers had been rifled, the closet too, some of his clothes were gone. They looked for him everywhere.”

Nick was feeling sick. He didn't know what was coming but he knew it was going to be bad.