He was fast.
Grey was faster.
He caught the man’s wrist before the blade could do more than dent the woman’s skin, then he stepped back and sideways, pulling the arm with him. Grey had received some schooling in the manly arts, but he’d learned more from gutter fights and trench wars. He knew what hurt and how to make it hurt. He jerked the man’s arm straight and punched him full-fisted just above the elbow. A bent elbow, Grey knew, was as strong as a knotted tree limb. A straight elbow was as fragile as a breadstick if you knew where to hit. He did.
There was a sharp snap and the elbow suddenly bent the wrong way.
The knife fell from twitching fingers and the man let loose a howl that would have broken glass if there was any around.
The woman, clearly not content with the man having a broken arm, spun toward him, kneed him in the crotch, drove a thumb into the socket of his throat, boxed his ears and broke his nose with a very professional short punch.
He went down.
And she spat on him as he fell.
Grey liked that. He grinned.
A fragment of a second later the grin was knocked off his face by a hard punch that caught him on the point of the jaw and spun him halfway around. He staggered back, continued the turn and then stepped inside the follow-up punch. It was the man Picky had crashed into. Not tall, but far bulkier than Grey had first thought. Arms and shoulders like a circus gorilla. He swung big lefts and rights that would have darkened the world if a second one had landed fair.
Grey brought his elbows up and used his own fists to protect his ears. As he plowed forward he let the man ruin his own arms by punching elbows and shoulders; then as he got close enough he leaned in and hit the man in the face and throat, left-right, left-right, and followed it all with an overhand right that put the man down on his face.
Then Grey stepped back and drew his pistol. He thumbed the hammer to half cock and the sound was as sharp and eloquent as if he’d fired the weapon.
“Stop!” cried a voice. “For the love of Jesus and the saints, please stop this!”
Grey turned to see the bearded monk, his cheek torn and bleeding from the pistol-whipping, his nose askew, eyes filled with the tears of pain, standing between him and the thugs. He stood with palms out, pleading with him. With everyone.
The moment froze into a bloody tableau.
The group of men lay or knelt or leaned in postures of exhausted defeat, their clothes dusty, faces streaked with bright blood. Looks Away climbed to his feet on the far side of the well, and the man he’d been fighting with crawled away from him with blood dripping from his nose and slack lips. The woman stood panting, fists balled, blond curls blowing free from her pins, blue eyes blazing with cold fury.
“Please…,” begged the monk. “I beg you.”
Grey glanced at Looks Away, who gave him a small nod. The woman looked too furious to speak, but even she gave him a nod. And in that moment Grey’s heart froze in his chest.
The woman.
Dear God, he thought. She was a stranger to him, and yet there was something so intensely and deeply familiar about her and a name came to his lips.
“Annabelle,” he murmured.
The woman frowned. “My name is Jenny Pearl.”
Grey swallowed hard. It was like forcing down a chunk of broken glass.
Not her, he told himself. Annabelle’s gone and this is another world, another life, another woman.
The face was different, the body was different, but those eyes.
He wanted to turn and run out of the moment.
There was a smudge of bloody dirt on Jenny Pearl’s left cheek. And that hit him almost as hard. There had been blood on Annabelle’s cheek when he buried her.
God.
“Please,” repeated the monk, intruding into his thoughts and bringing him back from that long-ago grave on a forgotten hillside in Virginia.
Grey took a breath, then nodded, eased the hammer down, and let the gun hang at his side.
“Okay, Padre,” he said. “Okay.”
The monk exhaled a big lungful of air and nodded. “Thank you, my son. God bless and thank you.”
On the ground, one of the men groaned and staggered painfully to his feet. He stood swaying like a drunkard. With a snarl of feral hatred he peeled back the lapel of his coat to show the vest he wore beneath.
Pinned to the vest was a round disk of metal embossed with a star. The words “Sheriff’s Deputy” were etched into the silver badge.
Grey said, “Oh… shit.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Drop your weapons and raise your hands,” snarled the deputy as he laid his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “All of you sons of bitches are under arrest.”
Grey stiffened. His gun was still at his side. “On what charge?”
“Assaulting an officer,” barked the deputy. “How’s that for a start?”
“Not good enough,” said Grey. “Way I saw it six grown men were assaulting a man of the cloth and a helpless woman.”
“I’m not helpless,” snapped Jenny and again those eyes flashed at him, full of life and challenge.
Full of life.
Of life.
“Point taken. Assaulting a woman,” Grey amended, trying to study that lovely face while keeping an eye on the deputy. “Even if that wasn’t illegal in itself, six to one is hardly what I’d call fair.”
The deputy sneered. “We were in the process of making a legal arrest.”
Jenny spat at him. It didn’t reach his face, but the effort was impressive. Grey smiled. She was a very pretty woman. Slim, but with an abundance of everything he liked above and below. A face like an angel and, clearly, the temper of Satan himself. Nice. And it was relief to see those qualities, because even though Annabelle had been willful and passionate, she was a gentle flower and not this desert rose. Plus Jenny could clearly handle herself. If it had only been two men, she might have wiped the street with both of them. Grey liked her at once.
“Arrest?” he asked. “Care to tell me what the crime was?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
Grey kept the pistol down at his side, but he thumbed the hammer back to full cock. “I guess I’m making it my business.”
The deputy eyed him, clearly weighing his options. The man had his hand on his gun, and maybe he was a quickdraw artist — they seemed to be springing up all over the place these days — but on the other hand, Grey already had his gun out. And Grey knew that to anyone with wits he did not look like a man unfamiliar with gunplay.
“Please,” urged the monk. “We can be civil about this.”
“Civil?” said the woman. “How can anyone be civil with wild dogs?”
“You watch your mouth, Jenny Pearl,” warned the deputy, his fingers beginning to close around the sandalwood grips of his gun. The other deputies were getting to their feet, dazed and stupid with pain. But there was anger and bloodlust in their eyes.
Thomas Looks Away drew his pistol in a smooth, fluid motion and pointed the barrel at the side of the deputy’s head. “Jed Perkins, I believe you were born stupid and you’ve lost ground since.”
Deputy Perkins froze.
A shadow passed above them and out of the corner of his eye he saw the same ugly bird he’d spied earlier. With a whipsnap of its leathery wings, the creature came to rest on the top of the well’s crossbar. It cocked its head again, turning a dark eye on the drama here on the street. The monk touched the wooden cross that he wore on a cord around his neck.