Showdown (32 page)

Black eyed Johnny, still amused. He stepped toward the podium. Johnny stepped back. The man reached into his trench coat, calmly removed a book, and laid it on the pulpit as if it were a Bible.

But this was no Bible. It was a leather-bound book that reminded Johnny of the books that Samuel had described. A book from the monastery, the ones Billy was writing in.

Black rubbed his hands together slowly and lifted his eyes to the people. He seemed to be considering his next move. Johnny knew his. It was time to leave.

But he was momentarily fascinated by Black's disorientation. The news about Thomas had thrown Black for a loop. The man had a weak side after—

Black lifted his arm high and brought it down on the pulpit with a tremendous
crack
. The podium split in two. Black stood, trembling from head to foot. His right hand began to bleed.

“We will only be so tolerant of deceit!” Black said. “Continue down this road and you will end up like Billy.”

A few scattered
amens
sounded to Johnny like the whispers of aimless ghosts.

Johnny ran for the door. He leapt off the platform, ran straight down the aisle over the carpet still smoldering from the lightning strike, smacked through the swinging doors, and staggered out into the howling wind. He doubled over there. Swirling dust filled his throat, and he coughed.

Exactly what had Black meant there at the end? Billy? He really didn't want to try to figure that out.

He believed that what Samuel told him was true, and he'd done what Samuel had asked. And that was that.

He believed. The rest did not.

Johnny headed into the wind to find a safe haven until morning.

CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

PARADISE

Sunday morning

STANLEY YORDON sped down Highway 50 before sunrise Sunday morning filled with a sense of terrible unease. Not because he feared returning to Paradise—on the contrary, because he had
not
come back sooner. Four days ago the idea of staying in Denver for an extra day seemed inviting, a well-deserved break and, more importantly, some time away.

Time healed wounds, they said. He'd decided to give Paradise a little time. Time to come to their collective senses. Time for Marsuvees Black to move on.

But he tried repeatedly to raise someone in Paradise last night, and no one answered. For all he knew, they were all down at the church swaying to the tunes of Marsuvees Black.

Unable to sleep, he left Denver at two in the morning. It was now five a.m. The drive had given him the time to flesh out the sermon he intended to preach. No mercy this time. Not an ounce. Just the right mixture of authority and compassion, the thundering voice of reprimand, the gentle words of empathy. And in the end they would have to listen.

The air was still and quiet when he drove through Delta. It was blowing hard and hazy twenty miles later when he passed the sign that read
Paradise
3 Miles
.

Someone had erected a barricade across the turnoff to Paradise. A large orange sign leaned against it.

Road Damage. Road Closed Ahead.

Yordon came to a stop. Road damage?

An image of Black drawing that ridiculous two in the air flashed through his mind. He gunned the motor, steered around the barricade, and headed up the road.

No sign of road damage.

The sun was trying to rise, but weather smothered the mountains. Dark clouds socked in Paradise valley like a cork between the mountains. Mountain storms were notorious for coming up fast and furious. But this . . .

He frowned and drove on, cautiously. Thin wisps of sand whirled across the road through his beams. Quite a wind.

His thoughts returned to his meeting with Bishop Fraiser in Denver. The bishop was smiling at him, telling him he'd better start believing what he was teaching if he wanted to hold on to his congregation. And if there were any hidden sins in his heart, he'd best bring them into the light.

“What you do mean?” he asked, wary.

“Secrets, Stanley.”

“We all have our secrets.”

“Yes, we do. And some secrets are meant to be secrets, while others will eat away at your heart like a cancer. I've seen whole churches crumble over a single indiscretion that was swept under the rug. But the rug can only cover so much, Stanley.”

He left the meeting assuring himself that the bishop had spoken in broad, general terms. He'd swept a hundred small indiscretions under the rug in his time, but nothing worthy of the glint in the bishop's eyes when he said “secrets.” There was Sally, of course. There was a possibility that some fool said something out of turn about Sally. But that had been fourteen years ago.

Welcome to Paradise, Population
. . .

The sign was missing. Wind?

Yordon turned the corner into Paradise and immediately pumped the brake. Blowing dust blasted by, nearly obscuring the small valley. Now
this
was a dust storm. That must be why they'd closed the road. Stanley couldn't recall a wind so heavily concentrated in the valley like this.

He dropped his eyes to the road's yellow lines to guide him in the early-morning light. The road leveled out and ran straight through the town without a bend. By the time Yordon passed the first outlying house, his orientation began to fail him. Following the yellow line made him dizzy.

The theater loomed on his right. He followed its outline. Looked different somehow. He couldn't see worth a darn, but he—

The car slammed into something. A joint-wrenching crash, shattering glass. His head snapped forward and hit the steering wheel. The fact that he'd been creeping along at under ten miles an hour saved him from
any serious injury.

Yordon cursed, something he could only do alone in his car. He shoved his door open, climbed out, and staggered around to the hood. The Starlight sign lay smashed on the blacktop. His bumper had hit one of the support poles, buckling the chrome under the car. The pole must have ripped a hose from the radiator, because it whistled with the wind.

Yordon stared unbelieving at the ruined landmark. His eyes followed the poles back to where they had been chopped.

He swore again.

Past the poles, the theater's front wall had been stripped of its siding, slashed to ribbons. As far as he could see, which wasn't terribly far, the buildings had taken a beating. Telephone poles, shattered doors, branches, and an assortment of broken-beyond-recognition appliances littered the place.

He saw the silhouette of the church like a ghost in the wind and wondered about its condition. He turned toward it, squinting through the whipping sand. Leaves blasted by—brown fall leaves in the middle of summer. Yordon began to run.

“Hello?”

No use in this wind. The streets were vacant, but that wasn't surprising considering the storm.

It's more than a storm, Stanley
. He fought a surge of panic.

A selfish little thought crossed his mind—conditions like these would undoubtedly keep a few farmers from attending the morning service. But a much bigger voice chased that possibility.
Not a soul, Stanley! Not a single
soul will come to hear your pathetic sermon!

For all he knew, they were all dead.

No, not possible.

To his right the black sky framed Claude's store—a store that should have a large blue sign along the length of the building three feet above the door.

One side of the large sign banged against the wall in the wind. Stubborn fragments of broken glass jutted from wooden window frames like frozen claws. The door was gone.

Yordon felt gooseflesh ripple up his arms. This was not the work of wind. Who could have done this? The telephone pole next to Claude's convenience store lay across the sidewalk. He stepped over it.

Smither's Saloon was even worse off. The collapsed steps left a three-foot rise to the gaping door frame. The town's only bench had been reduced to matchsticks along the gravel walk.

Surely they wouldn't have trashed the church. Yordon was about to plunge ahead when he saw yellow light flicker in the bar's window.

Someone was inside at this hour?

He ran to the saloon, jumped onto the trashed landing, and shoved the dangling door aside. He stepped in and scanned the interior of Smither's Saloon.

A small fire at the center of the room spewed white smoke to the ceiling and for a moment Yordon thought the saloon was ablaze, but then he saw it was a campfire of sorts, fed by broken table legs that formed a teepee over the flames. The bar lay chopped to kindling; the broken glass of a hundred bottles covered the floor. Only one table remained standing. And around the table sat three chairs, sagging under the weight of three figures, sitting like ghosts by the fire.

Yordon stepped over the rubble. Two men and a boy—resembling Claude Bowers, Chris Ingles, and Claude's boy, Peter, respectively—all leaned on the table, clutching bottles of booze, looking at him through drooping eyes. A toppled can of beer fed a pool of liquid that glistened in the flames.

They saw him and then returned their focus on the spilt malt. Dirt matted their hair; ash streaked their faces; something had torn their clothing to shreds. Chris Ingles wore a sling on his right arm.

“Hi, Stanley,” Chris said without looking at him.

At first Yordon couldn't find the voice to respond.
Hi, Stanley?
What was he supposed to say?
Oh, hi, Chris. Having a bad day are we? I see you have a
nice fire going. Do you mind if I join you?

What Chris needed was a good palm to the cheek. A thundering crash upside his right ear.
Wake up, boy! What do you think you're doing?

But Claude was the leader here. Yordon could see it in his face, below all that crud. “Claude, what are you doing?”

The big Swede turned his head and stared at him. The flames' reflection danced in his glassy eyes. “Hi, Stan.”

He looked back at the table. Peter glanced his way for a second, took a swig from the bottle in his hand, and turned back to the reflection of flames in the spilt beer.

Yordon walked up to the table and gave it a good shove. “What's wrong with you guys? Wake up, for crying out loud! You're going to burn this place down!”

The amber liquid spilled over their laps as the table tipped. Claude's eyes snapped wide, as if an electrode had just hit the muscle controlling his eyelids, and Yordon immediately knew that he might be in a spot of trouble.

Claude stared at the table, aghast. He stood abruptly, sending his chair flying across the room.

Yordon stepped back.

The others came to their feet as well, gawking in disbelief at the table. “Wha . . . what happened?” Chris stammered.

The stupidity of the question shoved Yordon into an offensive gear.
The
best defense is sometimes a good offense. Sometimes, like when your opponent
is a drooling fool wondering why his hands are on his arms.

“What have you done to the town? Look at this place, you've trashed it!”

All three of their stares turned to him. “We didn't do this,” Peter said.

“Then who did?”

“Black did it,” Peter said. “
He
told us to do it.”

Black? How was that possible? How could anyone turn men so quickly?

“He's just a traveling salesman,” Yordon said. “He couldn't do this.”

“He's a salesman and he's selling a lot.” Claude grinned. “You think we care about your lousy church? You should go look at it now. I don't think you're gonna be preaching too much there anymore.”

Claude's son snickered.

He could see it in his mind's eye—the pews hacked up like these tables, the carpet peeled back in long maroon strips, the cross blazing on the wall like at one of those KKK meetings.

Yordon launched himself at the three figures, and he knew with his first step that he was about to experience a great deal of pain.

Yordon never actually reached them. Claude's fist reached his forehead first, like a sledgehammer.

Wham!

He collapsed, belly down on the table, his arms draping limply over the edges. Pain swelled through his head.

“He's on our table,” Chris said from a great distance.

“What should we do with him?”

“Let's get rid of him,” Claude said.

They pulled him from the table and hauled him like a sack of onions. They heaved him into a hole
.
He crumpled to the floor. A door slammed. A latch was locked
.

They've thrown you into a grave.

His brain crawled through the haze.

You belong in a grave, buried with the rest of your indiscretions. Your secrets.

Yordon opened his eyes. A cool, damp breeze ran across his face. The smell of fresh dirt filled his nostrils, the kind of dirt found six feet under. But the space around him wasn't the two-by-seven of a casket, it was more like ten-by-ten. A sliver of light penetrated some boards above him.

They had dropped him in the saloon's root cellar.

He laid his head on the earthen floor and closed his
eyes against a throbbing headache.
Dear God, what have I done?

CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

THE MONASTERY

Sunday morning

BILLY OPENED the ink jar, dabbed the quill into the liquid, and sent his mind to Paradise. Except for the torch that popped and licked at the ancient walls, only his breathing sounded in the chamber. The quill hovered a centimeter above the blank page. Perspiration beaded his forehead and he brought his left wrist across his brow.

The idea of his sweat falling to the page seemed profane, which in turn struck him as ridiculous, considering where he was. He'd written a thousand stories above, where he was taught to write, encouraged to write. But down here, the writing was different. In fact, it was the writing that drew him now more than the worms. The monk was right, the writing attracted them all.