He had made love to her every night since Santa Fe, purposely making it easy for Cory; but it had taken the clod almost a week to discover them in a parking lot, Ivy’s skirt up around her hips, underpants hanging off one ankle. Cory had gone a little mad, and Griff had dashed away, barely getting his pants zipped before Cory could get back with his revolver.
He had entered the caves and made his progress simple for Cory to follow. And there, well within the mouth of the cave, he had grabbed up the crossbow he had secreted for just this situation.
Now Cory was precisely where Griff and Ivy had wanted him. With his back bullseyed for a dead shot. Yet the scheme jangled out of focus for Griff. If Ivy had wanted Cory out of the way, there were simpler ways of doing it.
Drain the brake fluid out of his car.
Hire a torpedo to gun him in his sleep.
Simply shoot him herself and just say he was away on a hunting trip. They traveled enough for her to get away without suspicion.
Or simply divorce him.
He hesitated at the trigger. There was something far uglier here than simply murder. Griff bit his lip.
And there was a scream from Cory, well past Griff in the inky darkness of the cavern. The scream came again, and Griff rolled out from under the ledge, got to his knees and stared off into the nothingness. He could not see the man, but now there came the soft snuffling baby-sounds of a man in constant pain. Then silence.
Griff pulled the flashlight from his hip pocket and let it shine down the channel. The dripping perspiration of the limestone walls was all that met his light until he moved forward, around a slight bend in the channel, and saw that the ledge under which he had rolled had angled upward again, and almost met a similar ledge on the opposite side of the channel, thus forming an upper and lower channel, cut nearly in two by the ledges. Cory had clambered up on the ledges and had been crawling along till the channel opened out once more. He had slipped and fallen halfway through. His feet dangled off the floor of the cave, and his arms were pinned in the thin space between the ledges. The razor-edges of moist limestone were literally cutting him in half.
Griff stared at the unconscious man for a long moment, then turned and crawled back down the channel, leaving him in darkness. It was simpler than perforating his body with a hunting arrow.
Ivy was waiting inside the mouth of the cave, where the side-tunnels all met.
“Where is he?” she asked, breathless, her eyes glowing with something malignant.
“He’s trapped down there. Between two ledges. No chance of his ever getting out. We can wait a week and come back. If the ledges haven’t cut him in half, he’ll be dead of starvation.”
Ivy smiled a terrible smile, and brought the XP-100 out from behind her back. It was a huge Buck Rogers kind of weapon with the ungainly telescopic sight on it. “Thank you, Mr. Griffen,” she said, and fired. Griff threw himself sidewise just as the incredible report of the pistol-rifle shattered the stillness of the cave. The .221 Fireball cartridge zinged past his ear and clattered off one wall then another then another as it ricocheted down into the main channel.
He rolled and got to one knee and pulled the trigger of the crossbow. The bolt whizzed past her, missing her stomach by bare inches. She chuckled then, a soft deadly sound in the cave. He was up against the wall, with his back to a small ledge, but nowhere to run. She reloaded the weapon and slammed the bolt home. Griff felt the terrible pain of fear in his stomach and the taste of antimony in his mouth.
As she sighted him down, an impossible shot to miss, Griff heard the growing-thunder of movement in the cave. The rasp of fur and the rattle of hooves against rock, and as he looked down the bore of the handgun a pack of javelina burst out of a side-corridor where they had been hiding. Ivy screamed once as the gunshot-stampeded boars plunged toward her. There must have been sixty of them, none over fifty pounds but bristling with wire-fur and deadly tusks as they rushed her. She got off one shot, right into the pack, felling a four-foot prime boar, before they ran her down.
Griff leaped up onto the ledge as they rushed past, and the ivory clicking of their tusks was a fearful song in the filtered sunlight of the shadowy cavern.
The javelina went right over her. They cut her legs out from under her with the hideous ripping of flesh and muscle and cartilage that meant meat literally stripped off the bones. She fell, and they went on, thundering over her, snapping pieces out of her body, off her face, as they insanely plunged into the afternoon.
When the sound of their passage had gone, Griffen let himself down from the ledge and moved to look at what was left of her. One breast had been bared and scored by fangs, but was still intact. It was all that was intact.
He leaned against the side wall of the cave and fought to keep his stomach down.
Finally, the thought of what she had intended came to rest in his mind, and he tried to be phlegmatic about it. Then he turned and went back down the channel to find Cory. A man can’t be too vengeful when his wife has been torn to shreds by killer pigs and the wife’s paramour has just saved you from a fate worse than death. A man tends to be grateful in those circumstances. There might even be a tidy reward.
It would have to be the least Cory could do for a nice guy like Griff.
Eight: Pride in the Profession
There were many who called the lynching of Eustace Powder a blot on the previously-unbesmirched reputation of Princetown, but for Matthew Carty, it was the handing-down of a latter-day Ten Commandments.
The alleged crime for which the dusty Negro was swung high is of no consequence at this time; suffice to say he was innocent, if not in thought, at least in deed, indeed; but all things pass, and the momentary upheavals that result in the neck-stretching of one unimportant dark man are of no importance in the shadow of later, more electric events.
For it was the excitement, the crowd-respect directed at the man who knotted the rope and threw it over the elm’s thick branch, that struck eight-year-old Matt Carty with such lasting force. The humid, expectant rustle of the summer day, the pavement warm beneath his bare, dirty feet, the women watching flame-eyed. It was all such a rich experience, he could not put it from him.
There was even an unexpected touch of homespun humor. The black, black man’s last request, jocularly offered by one of the local rakehells, was to have a pair of dice, to hold in his hand when they swung him aloft. “Those who live by the bones gonna die by the bones!” replied the last-request-man, and fishing in his own jeans, he came up with a fine set of red plastic dice; as neat a set of see-through galloping dominoes as ever was. And giving them to Eustace Powder, the local happy-smith patted the Negro on the cheek. “Roll a natural, boogie.” He grinned, and the black man clenched them in his fist tightly as they yanked him aloft.
The face of the gap-toothed Eustace Powder, his mouthings of horror and expectation. The gurgle and retching and final gasp as he swung clear of the ground. He seemed to thrash and twitch interminably. It was one of the two high points of Matt Carty’s life, even if Powder did drop one of them.
In the light of that one incident, his existence was systematically directed, till the day he died, many years later.
For Matt Carty liked the idea of being a hangman.
There was a certain pride a man could take in such a profession. So he took pride, and he took the profession. It suited him, and he suited it. A wedding of the right job with the proper tool.