Day of Independence (18 page)

Abe Hacker was too excited to sleep.

The clock in the hallway struck two, then tenaciously ticked away the seconds of the new day.

The fat man rolled like a soft slug and struggled out of bed onto his feet. His great, white belly hanging in front of him like a flour sack, he shrugged into his robe and took the chair beside the window.

Hacker gazed out at the moon-dappled darkness and smiled to himself, his face smug.

Today... yes, it was really today! Huzzah!... Last Chance and all it stood for would be history.

Then the Big Bend river country, say thirty-five linear miles of fertile floodplain, would be the basis for his son's vast cotton plantation. The gin would be where the school now stood and the big, four-pillar plantation house would be built nearby.

Hacker saw himself smoking a cigar of a morning, standing on the porch beside his tall, stalwart son. Together they'd gaze out on cotton fields stretching as far as the eye could see, white and smooth as a December snowfall.

He nodded to himself.

It was good for a man to have a dream, especially one he makes come true.

Nora lay in bed asleep, her hair spread across the pillow like a fan.

Hacker glanced at the woman and grimaced.

He didn't want her there. He wanted his teenaged bride in his bed, wide-eyed awake, waiting, and preferably pregnant.

A little thrill of anticipated pleasure ran through Hacker as he directed his attention to the window again. Ah, well, the girl and all that went with her would come soon enough.

“What the hell?”

Hacker's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Men moved in the street, rubes carrying shovels, walking back from the river.

The fat man cursed under his breath. What mischief was this? Surely the idiots weren't digging in for a fight?

Questions without answers irritated Hacker. If there was something going on he must know about it, then, with Mickey gone, he could pay some local hick to carry the word to Sancho Perez.

Hacker stuck his feet in his slippers then patted the breast pocket of his robe and made sure the derringer was still there.

If anyone questioned him, he would say he couldn't sleep and was out for a breath of fresh air.

The rubes were a suspicious bunch and wouldn't tell him anything. He'd have to find out for himself.

 

 

By the time Abe Hacker made his way out of the hotel, the street was shadowed and empty and streamers of mist crept ghostlike between the shuttered buildings. A large flying insect thudded into the window to his right, dropped to the timber floor of the porch, and spun in circles, buzzing.

Hacker tapped the derringer again, then stepped into the street, his small, porcine eyes searching into the distance.

Nothing moved and there was no sound.

The air smelled of damp earth and the orange and grapefruit trees down by the river, their odors released by the heat of the day.

His doctors had warned Hacker that night air was bad for the heart and lungs, but the men he'd seen were coming from the direction of the Rio Grande and he must go there.

Hacker was halfway across the street when a high, shrill voice stopped him in his tracks.

“Hey you, stay right where you are.”

A ragged, red-haired boy stepped toward him from an alley opposite, then demanded, “Why aren't you in bed?”

The urchin walked closer and his freckled face wrinkled into a pugnacious frown.

“You weren't down by the river,” Andy Kilcoyn said. His face cleared and he grinned and pointed. “I know. It's because you're too fat.”

“And who are you, boy?” Hacker said, his voice like silk.

“Texas Ranger Andy Kilcoyn, that's who.” He pointed to the star on the front of his shirt. “So watch your step, mister.”

“Is that so?” Hacker said. “And a fine Ranger you are, keeping such a strict night watch.”

“Why are you out in the dark when you should be in bed?” the boy said.

“I could ask the same question of you.”

“I'm on duty. Ranger Cannan needs me by his side first thing in the morning and I mean to be on time.”

“Ah, dutiful indeed,” Hacker smiled. “Admirable dedication, my boy.”

He looked around him. Only the mist moved and the town was as silent as a cobwebbed tomb.

“Well, off to bed with you, mister,” Andy said. He wished he had a big, bone-handled Colt in his pants like Ranger Cannan.

“I'm afraid I can't,” Hacker said.

“Why not?”

“I couldn't sleep so I took a walk to get some fresh air,” Hacker said. “But I'm a very sick man and I need your help getting back to my hotel.” He smiled. “Would you be so kind?”

“I should think a Ranger would,” Andy said. “Here, mister, just you lean on my shoulder and you'll be fine.”

Hacker put his hand on a thin shoulder that spoke of too many missed meals and felt mightily pleased with himself. He'd question the boy and save a walk to the river, which could only be bad for his heart. And perhaps the boy could be persuaded to carry a message to Perez.

The space between the Cattleman's Hotel and the adjoining store was too narrow to be called an alley, but it was dark, misty—ideal for Hacker's purpose.

With surprising speed and strength for a man of his massive bulk, he grabbed the back of the boy's neck and pushed him into the narrow passageway.

He slammed Andy so hard against the wall of the store the boy let out a gasp of pain and surprise.

“Listen to me, you little worm,” he growled. “I want some questions answered.”

Hacker's fat forearm rammed into the side of Andy's head, forcing the right side of the boy's face into the rough timber wall of the store.

“What was going on by the river?” he said. “And what is the plan?”

“I don't know,” Andy gasped.

The pressure of the fat man's forearm made it hard for him to talk, and blood trickled from his abraded mouth and oozed down the wall.

“Cannan. It's Cannan, isn't it? What does he plan to do?”

“A... Texas... Ranger... never... tells...”

“Tell me, you little dung heap. Tell me the plan.”

“Go to hell,” the boy whispered.

Insane with anger, Hacker pulled Andy toward him by the front of his shirt and backhanded him across the face. It was a vicious, brutal blow with a half-clenched first by a man of immense strength and it smashed the boy's right cheekbone and eye socket.

Andy's shock and the unbearable, smashing pain from the blow manifested itself in a terrible scream torn from his throat.

Horrified by the boy's sudden and massive eruption of blood and panicked that someone might hear him shriek, Hacker grabbed the boy's head and pulled his face hard into his belly.

“Shh... shh...” Hacker whispered. “There now... there now...”

Andy Kilcoyn, the newest acting, unpaid Ranger in Texas, smothered to death in Abe Hacker's sweating fat.

 

 

Hacker felt the boy go limp as all the light and life that had been in him fled like the shutting off of a gas lamp.

He let Andy drop, staggered back until he bumped against the hotel wall, then stared in gape-mouthed horror at his bloodstained hands.

Veins popped out on Hacker's forehead and breath wheezed in and out of his chest in short, shallow gasps. He felt as though he'd stepped out of himself, an onlooker uncertain of what to do.

He had not meant to kill the boy.

It had been an accident.

He didn't know his own strength.

The boy should have answered his questions, told him what he wanted.

It wasn't his fault.

Nobody would blame him. How could anyone be expected to know that the damned kid was so fragile? Besides, the boy was a useless ragamuffin, a nobody who would have fallen to the guns of Perez's men anyhow. It was a justifiable homicide.

Hacker's cartwheeling brain stopped its mad turning and jolted to a halt on a single thought: Get rid of the body.

He stumbled through the gloom, a thin shroud of mist parting around him, and made his way to the end of the passage.

Behind the store, thrown carelessly in a jumbled heap, lay a pile of empty packing cases, including, Hacker noticed, a large tea chest stamped with the word CEYLON.

The fat man stepped back to the dead boy and dragged the body to the tea chest, panting from the effort.

Small and undernourished, the child fit into the chest quite well.

Hacker then kicked the box over on its side and covered it with packing cases.

No one would find the corpse until the cases were removed... and that could be never.

Hacker leaned against the wall of the hotel and let his breathing return to normal. He told himself that the boy's death had been unfortunate, but by and large, he was quite happy.

Very happy, in fact.

He was as pleased as punch that his heart had stood up so well to all the fuss and bother.

Huzzah! And again, Huzzah!

Not even a twinge of pain, not so much as a tingle in his left arm. It all boded well for his upcoming nuptials and political future.

As to what happened by the river, let it go to hell. Sancho Perez would deal with it.

Hacker shouldered himself off the timber wall.

This was not the time to push his luck.

Abe Hacker let himself back into the hotel.

His hands covered with the dead boy's blood, he had to use a corner of his robe to wipe a red stain off the shiny brass door handle. He went directly to his room, glad that no one had decided to make a nocturnal trip to the outhouse.

Nora sat up in bed and when Hacker stepped inside she looked at him in horror, then tossed the sheet aside and jumped to her feet.

“Abe, were you shot?”

“No. It's nothing,” Hacker said.

He poured water from the pitcher into the basin.

“You're covered in blood,” Nora said. Her face was very pale.

“I told you it's nothing,” Hacker said. “Damn you, go back to sleep.”

The water in the bowl turned red.

Nora took a step back. “My God, Abe, what have you done?”

Hacker turned his head to the woman. In the low lamplight his eyes were wild, his fleshy face masked by demonic shadows.

“I killed somebody,” he said.

Nora shrank from him. “Who, Abe?” She stared at the bloodstained front of his robe. “Who did you kill?”

“Does it matter?”

The woman said nothing but her wide eyes signaled her alarm.

“It was a boy. A troublemaker. Just a ragged guttersnipe.”

“A child?” Nora said.

“I didn't mean to kill him. It just happened. He wasn't strong.”

Nora was appalled, horror and disbelief vivid in her eyes.

“You murdered a child?”

“He was nothing. A bug I squashed underfoot. Can't you understand that?”

For a few moments Nora stood petrified, her mouth open but empty of words.

Finally she said, “You're a monster, Abe. You're... evil.”

His hands dripping rust-colored water, Hacker advanced on the terrified woman.

“You'll keep your trap shut or the same thing will happen to you.” He pulled the derringer from his pocket. “I warn you, Nora. Don't try my patience.”

But Nora Anderson had been raised hard, and her early adult life had been spent in the cribs where every day was a struggle for survival. She had sand, and Hacker gravely underestimated her. “You're a child murderer, Abe, and if I stay silent about it I'd be just as guilty and evil as you are,” Nora said.

“Don't make a move toward the door or I'll kill you, Nora,” Hacker said.

His eyes, lost in folds of fat, glittered.

“Abe, there's something I should have told you a long time ago,” Nora said. She grabbed her robe. “Go to hell!”

The woman made a rush for the door, but Hacker, like many grossly obese men, could be as light on his feet as a ballet dancer.

He grabbed Nora just as she turned the handle and dragged her away from the door. As the woman cried out, Hacker, cursing, violently threw her across the room.

Nora stumbled and as she fell her head crashed into the top of the brass bed frame. She sprawled onto the floor, stunned, but tried to rise.

Hacker was on her like a cougar on a whitetail doe. His meaty hands circled Nora's neck and his thick thumbs dug deep.

 

 

The reality of killing up close and personal left Abe Hacker horrified.

He had ordered men killed before, but those were assassinations and death kept its distance. But the killing of the boy and now Nora was a new experience for him, apart from Jess Gable, who had been a dead man already.

The murders lay heavy on him, not because of a guilty conscience, but because the blood was on his hands.

Damn it all, he was a businessman, not an assassin.

Hacker paid lesser men to perform that chore, men like Mickey Pauleen.

He toed Nora's body. The woman lay still and was not pretty in death. Her face had contorted grotesquely in her final agony and her eyes were open, accusing.

Hacker looked away, shut that image from his mind.

He laid the derringer on the bedside table and took off his stained robe. Outside a coyote, hunting close, passed Hacker's window like a gray ghost, a bloody, kicking thing hanging from its jaws. Farther away a woman cried out in her sleep, then the tranquil tick of the hallway clock testified that all was well.

Abe Hacker forced himself to think.

Two killings in one evening and yet another body to hide and through no fault of his own.

Recently it seemed that the whole damned world was against him.

Naked, he threw himself down on his chair by the window, scowling.

Think... think... think...

All would be well by late tomorrow afternoon. That much was certain.

Yes! He'd wrap Nora's body in his robe and stuff her under the bed. Plenty of room there!

Now Hacker's mind reached longer into the future.

He'd leave Last Chance when the town was burning and the slaughter of the rubes was well under way. He and Mickey would harness the pair of mules to the wagon that had originally brought them here and head upriver. Once they found a settlement a quick wire would set his friends in Washington scrambling to get him back home to his bride and his future.

The wagon parked behind the livery had not yet been supplied with food and water, but Mickey could enlist a couple of Sancho's men and take care of that. Hacker sat back and beamed.

There, that wasn't so difficult.

He rose to his feet and dragged Nora into the middle of the floor by her feet. He picked up his robe and began to wrap the body in it.

Damn, she was heavy! Nora had put on weight, no doubt because he'd treated her so well these last few years. Finally, with an effort that left him exhausted, Hacker managed to shove Nora's body under the high brass bed.

Her elegant left hand remained exposed, and he pushed it under with his foot.

Worn out from his exertions, Hacker rolled onto the bed and lay on his back. His massive belly made him look like a man trapped under a beer barrel.

He shifted his weight and the bed creaked.

Now he did it more purposefully, rolling back and forth.

Now the creak became a screeching squeal of protesting brass and steel.

Hacker rolled faster... faster...

“You like that, Nora?” he said. “You like my lullaby?” Hacker laughed.

He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks and wet the pillow.