“The Corning ladies? Come to think of it, yes, I had a drink with the sisters. Now I’m having breakfast with you. Don’t be jealous, Dan.” I remained perfectly still and as poised as one can be with sweat in his eyes, a hard-on in progress, and consumed by rolling waves of blue-black pain. My own beast was growling and slamming its Stone Age muzzle against the bars. It wanted blood to quench its terror, wanted loose. “What do you have against old ladies. They didn’t mention you.”
“Our business interests lie at cross-purposes. I don’t relish no competition. Wait. Wait a minute… Did you see the child?” Blackwood asked this in a hushed tone, and his face smoothed into a false calmness, probably a mirror of my own. Oh, we were trying very hard not to slaughter one another. He cocked his head and whispered, “John, did you see the child?”
That surely spooked me, and the teary light in his eyes spooked me too, but not half so much as the recollection of the cries in the dim room at the Corning bungalow. “No. I didn’t.”
He watched me for a while, watched me until even Dick and Bly began to rouse from their reveries to straighten and cast puzzled looks between us. Blackwood kept flexing his hand, clenching and tearing at an invisible throat, perhaps. “All right. That’s hunkum-bunkum.” His smile returned. “The crones don’t have no children.”
I wiped my palms to dry the sweat and lighted a cigarette and smoked it to cover my expression. After a few moments I said, “Does Paxton know I’m here?”
“Yes. Of course. The forest has eyes, the swamp ears. Why you’ve come to give him the buzz is the mystery.”
“Hell with that. Some say he’s at the root of trouble with my kin. Then there’s the goons he sent my way. I didn’t start this. Going to end it, though.”
“Mighty enterprising, aren’t you? A real dyed in the wool bad man.”
“What is this pact? I wager it involves plenty of cabbage.”
“An alliance, bad man. He and I versus the damnable crones and that rotgut they try to pass off as whiskey. Little Lord Paxton is moneyed up real good. He inherited well. In any event, he keeps palms greased at the Governor’s mansion and in turn, I watch his back. Been that way for a while. It’s not perfect; I don’t cotton to bowing and scraping. Man does what man must.”
“Who funds the sisters?”
“Some say they buried a fortune in mason jars. Gold ingots from the Old World. Maybe, after they’re gone, me and the lads will go treasure hunting on their land.”
So, I’d well and truly fallen from fry pan to fire. Paxton wanted me dead, or captured, thus far the jury remained out on that detail, and here I’d skipped into the grasp of his chief enforcer. “Hell, I made it easy for you lugs, eh? Walked right into the box.” I nodded and decided that this was the end of the line and prepared to draw my pistol and go pay Saint Peter my respects with an empty clip. “Don’t think I’ll go quietly. We Copes die real hard.”
“Hold on a second,” Bly said, sobering in a hurry. I didn’t think the Bly clan had a similar tradition.
Blackwood patted him on the head. “No need for heroics, gents. We’ve broken bread, haven’t we? You can hop on Shank’s Mare and head for the tall timber anytime you like. Nobody here’s gonna try to stop you. On the other paw, I was kind of hoping you might stick around the Hollow, see this affair through.”
I sat there and gaped, thunderstruck. “We can walk out of here.” My senses strained, alert for the snare that must lurk within his affable offer. “What do you want, Dan?”
“Me and the boys recently were proposed a deal by…Well, that’s none of your concern. A certain party has entered the picture, is enough to say. We been offered terms that trump our arrangement with Paxton. Trump it in spades. Problem is, I’ve sworn an oath to do him no harm, so that ties my hands.”
“That’s where I come in.”
“You’ve said a mouthful, and no need to say more. We’ll let it ride, see how far it takes us.”
“And if I want to cash in and take my leave?”
He shrugged and left me to dangle in the wind. I started to ask another question, and thought better of it and sat quietly, my mind off to the races. Dan’s smile got even wider. “Candy will squire you back to the Sycamore. There’s a garden party and dinner. All the pretty folk will be there tying one on. Dress accordingly, eh?”
* * *
Candy returned us to the hotel where my entourage collapsed, semi-clothed and pawing one another, into a couple of piles on the beds. Dawn leaked through the curtains and I was queerly energized despite heavy drinking and nagging wounds, so I visited the nearby café as the first customer. I drank bad coffee in a corner booth as locals staggered in and ordered plates of hash and eggs and muttered and glowered at one another; beasts awakened too soon from hibernation. I fished in my pocket and retrieved the cocoon Carling had given me and lay it on the edge of the saucer. It resembled a slug withered by salt and dried in the hot sun. I wondered if my father, a solid, yet philosophically ambiguous, Catholic, ever carried a good luck charm. What else was a crucifix or a rosary?
“You know you’re playing the fool.” I said this aloud, barely a mutter, just enough to clear the air between my passions and my higher faculties. Possibly I thought giving voice to the suspicion would formalize matters, break the spell and justify turning the boat around and sailing home, or making tracks for sunny Mexico and a few days encamping on a beach with a bottle of whiskey and a couple of señoritas who didn’t habla inglés. At that moment a goose waddled over my grave and the light reflecting from the waitress’s coffee pot bent strangely and the back of my neck went cold. I looked down the aisle through the doorway glass and spotted a couple of the Blackwood Boys loitering in the bushes of a vacant lot across the way. One was the big fiddler, the other wore overalls and a coonskin cap. The fiddler rested his weight on the handle of what at first I took for a shovel. When he raised the object and laid it across his shoulder I recognized it as a sword, one of those Scottish claymores.
A party and in my finest suit and tie it would be. Goddamn, if they were going to be this way about it I’d go see the barber after breakfast and have a haircut and a shave.
* * *
It was as Blackwood promised. We drove over to the mansion in a Cadillac I rented from the night clerk at the hotel. Even if the guys hadn’t scoped the joint out previously, we would’ve easily found our way by following a small parade of fancy vehicles bound for the estate. Bly rolled through the hoary, moss-encrusted gates and the mansion loomed like a castle on the horizon. He eased around the side and parked in the back. We came through the servants’ entrance. Dick and Bly packing shotguns, me with the Thompson slung under my arm. Men in livery were frantically arranging matters for the weekly estate hoedown and the ugly mugs with the guns made themselves scarce.
Conrad Paxton was on the veranda. He didn’t seem at all surprised when I barged in and introduced myself. He smiled a thin, deadly smile and waved to an empty seat. “Et tu Daniel?” he said to himself, and chuckled. “Please, have a drink. Reynolds,” he snapped his fingers at a bland older man wearing a dated suit, “fetch, would you? And, John, please, tell your comrades to take a walk. Time for the men to chat.”
Dick and Bly waited. I gave the sign and they put the iron away under their trench coats and scrammed. A minute or two later, they reappeared on the lawn amid the hubbub and stood where they could watch us. Everybody ignored them.
I leaned the Thompson against the railing and sat across from my host. We regarded each other for a while as more guests arrived and the party got underway.