“You arrogant flyboy! You think you can return here a hero? After what you pulled last night!”
“I think if you try even one single thing, I will bring this whole town down on your scurvy head.”
“You try it, son.”
Hitch shrugged out from under Campbell’s grip. He turned and he walked away. Campbell’d never stand for that, especially not now. But let him make the first move. Better that way this time. The whole town would see their sheriff, and the whole town could draw their own conclusions about him.
Hitch made it two steps before Campbell’s paw slammed down, this time right on his wounded shoulder.
Pain sliced through his vision. He staggered sideways and fell to his hands and knees. He tried once to get up, then caught himself on his good hand and shook his head woozily.
Around the corners of his blurred vision, he could see the crowd shifting. Their attention moved from the fire, toward him. Some of them muttered protests.
“Stay down,” Campbell said.
Hitch raised himself onto his knees and faced the crowd. “He’s going to arrest me. But before he does, you all need to know this man’s got no business being your sheriff. He’s been crooked for years!”
They started murmuring amongst themselves.
“Don’t go there,” Campbell growled, low and deep. “You can’t win.” He grabbed Hitch’s good arm and twisted it up behind his back.
New pain exploded in his arm socket, and he groaned.
“That’s enough!” a woman shouted.
The crowd closed in around them, some of them just curious, some of them repeating the dissent.
“How do you know this?” a man yelled at Hitch.
He raised his chin. “I know this because I’ve let him make me a part of it.”
Jael clasped her hands and shook her head.
Hitch kept on going. “I’ve smuggled stolen goods and bootleg liquor for him, and when we downed Schturming the other day, I turned control of it over to him. I shouldn’t have. But I did it because he’s threatened my family time and again.”
Brows started to lower. Mouths started to frown. At least they weren’t dismissing him out of hand.
Campbell hauled him to his feet. “Not true, and you all know it. This here boy ain’t the hero you want to make him out.” But his hand on Hitch’s wrist was starting to sweat a little.
The crowd’s murmurs grew into an outright hubbub. A ripple moved up through the people, and they parted to let three men through: Griff, Matthew, and J.W.
Griff’s nose was swollen, and dark bruises welled under each eye. He looked tousled and exhausted, but at least he wasn’t in jail. Judging from the shotguns propped on the Berringers’ hips and the smug determination on their faces, they had to be the reason.
Griff gripped a revolver as he crossed the distance. “What my brother says is true. William Campbell, you are under arrest for malfeasance.”
“Call it skullduggery and be done,” J.W. said.
Campbell’s jowls quivered. “Escaping after a lawful arrest, you think that’s going to get you anywhere, Deputy?” He glowered at the Berringers. “Or your friends?”
“You can say what you want.” Griff walked up to Campbell, handcuffs in hand. “We both know where this is going to end.”
“You make any kind of case that I’m guilty, then your brother has to be complicit. You don’t want that.” With surprising speed, he snatched Griff’s revolver away from him. His voice went deadly calm. “You don’t run this town, boys. I do. And that isn’t changin’.”
Behind them, a second explosion erupted.
Hitch ducked. Specks of hot debris spattered against his back, and he twisted a look over his shoulder.
Campbell’s green sedan had flipped all the way over and flattened the picket fence. The fire must have gotten to it. Campbell’s big house and Campbell’s big car—all in one fell swoop. Not bad for a day’s work. But it wouldn’t mean a thing if they couldn’t get Campbell himself.
Hitch gathered his weight on the balls of his feet, ready to hurl himself against Campbell—and probably break his other arm in the process.
Like the rest of them, Campbell had jerked around at the sound of the explosion. Already, he was turning back. His eyes found Griff. The revolver rose.
From behind Campbell, a board from his own house smacked him right in the back of the head. A look of utter surprise dropped his mouth. Then his eyes rolled up, and he thudded to his knees. He stayed upright for one second longer, then toppled sideways into the mud.
Behind him, Jael held the board cocked over one shoulder, ready for another go. Right in front of all the town’s ladies, she spat at Campbell’s body. “Eto pravosudie.” Then she raised her fierce gaze to Hitch. The set of her mouth looked extremely satisfied.
Hitch’s breath fizzled from his body, and he gave her a grateful nod.
Griff turned to the crowd. “C’mon, let’s have four men to carry him to a car!” He turned his head, not quite looking at Hitch. “Campbell’s right. I’m going to have to put you under arrest too. If I ask you to come along, will you do it?”
The adrenaline filtered out of Hitch. Everything started to hurt. He cradled his bad arm against his stomach. “Yeah, I’ll come.”
Jael frowned. “What is this? Wait—” She clenched the board harder.
Hitch touched her arm. “It’s all right. Take care of Walter. Make sure he gets back to Nan.”
She knit her eyebrows hard. “Hitch—”
He found he could smile, in spite of everything—or maybe because of everything. “It’s all right, kiddo.”
He turned to follow Griff.
Townspeople rushed on every side. The thirty-member volunteer fire department had arrived. People with buckets started to form lines, all the way down the street to Campbell’s home. Maybe they’d even put out the fire before it could spread to any other houses.
He squinted upward. The clouds were drawing up higher into the sky. Here and there, a rim of gold edged a crack, and, on the brink of the horizon, the warm, red line of the summer sunrise reached out for him.
Fifty
AFTER TWO WEEKS cooped up in that dad-blasted cell, waiting on a hearing, the sun felt mighty good. Hitch stepped out of the courthouse into the late August heat. Under a sky of perfect blue, the waning morning stretched as far as he could see, golden and dusty. Two weeks was plenty of time for Nebraska soil to suck up even a cataclysmic storm’s moisture.
He paused on the steps to roll his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. Then he slung his jacket over his stitched-up shoulder. It was still stiff, but the doc said it’d mend fine in another couple of weeks.
He looked down the street on one side, then the other. Automobiles rumbled and honked along. Farmers in overalls and straw hats strolled the sidewalks, alongside women with their handbags over their arms and their shopping lists in hand.
Everything looked back to normaclass="underline" back to boring farm-town life. And it all looked about as beautiful as anything he’d ever seen. It was good to be home. If he had said that when he’d first flown in here, nearly a month ago, he might have been lying. But right now, it was the gospel truth.
Of course, a little part of that might be the fact he was free to walk out here into the sun, rather than stay locked up in jail for the good Lord knew how long. His insides jittered at the thought of it, and he started down the steps.
Campbell was still stuck in there, eating jail food, railing about burying everybody in sight, and waiting for a trial that was sure to put him away for a good long while. Folks Hitch hadn’t even known about were coming out of the woodwork, wanting to testify against him for everything from doctoring finances to extortion to criminal connections with his bootlegging buddies in Cheyenne and beyond.