The Black Widow (9 page)

And this boy wasn’t even on the side of
the angels. The Stanwyck family was evil, and it was boys like this
one who stood between Jed Herne and his justified revenge. So what
was a little more suffering among so much?

‘
I’ll
tell you! Please. Why don’t you just
ask me some questions, and I’ll tell you?’

An
d he’d talked. Betrayed every one of
his friends and the people who paid his hire. Herne shook his head
in silent contempt at the lack of guts. Within a couple of hours
they knew most everything they wanted to know.

Just how many men there were left? Seven.
How many other servants? Just the butler, Jackson, and the
housekeeper, Mrs. Bellamy. Where were the guns kept? Where did the
guards sleep? Where were the rooms of the Stanwycks? When did they
eat?

But there was one question that Mel shook
his head on and refused to answer. Coburn didn’t press it,
preferring to slide around it, and try other questions. Finally,
though, there wasn’t anything else left.

‘
Apart from that main
gate, there has to be another way into the place. Where is it, and
are you going to take us there? That’s the last one, Mel. You done
real good so far, and we’ve not had to hurt you scarcely at all, so
come on with this one.’

The boy shook his head. The time had
given him some time to regain his composure. ‘I can’t I told you
everything else. But if I tell you about the other way in, and they
find out... Then they’ll give me either to that creepy one Luke,
with his white clothes and his fuckin’ needles, or to his
brother.’

Despite the sweat that ran down his
naked chest, the boy shuddered.

‘
What’s wrong with Mark
Stanwyck?’ asked Herne.

Glancing across at Becky who was trying to
sew up a tear in a skirt, the boy whispered: ‘He’s a pervert... you
know? He likes doin’ it up your... Only he hurts you while he does
it. And in your mouth. When he...’

‘
All right. We get the
picture.’

Yes, we see,’ said Coburn, shaking his
head in distaste. ‘But you got to realize, Mel, that if you don’t
tell us, then they won’t be able to harm you. ’Cos we’ll kill you.
Course, we’ll hurt you horrible first.’

‘
If you tell us, then maybe
we’ll let you go after all this is over. And if you tell us right,
then we’ll get in there and kill them and you needn’t worry no
more. Now how about it Mel?’

The boy’s eyes flicked from man to man,
the firelight bouncing off their faces, hardening them. And he
shook his head.

‘
I
can’t. Truly. Please let me
go.’

‘
Jed?’

All
three men turned to look at the girl,
speaking for almost the first time since they’d arrived with their
prisoner.

‘
What is it, honey?’

‘
Can’t you let him go,
Jed? He’s answered all your questions. Hasn’t he?’

Whitey turned to her, the red of the fire
reflected deep in the hollow caves of his eyes, making it seem as
if flames glowed within his skull. ‘Becky. Young Mel here’s told us
a lot that helps. But none of that’s worth a flying … flying damn,
less he tells us how to actually get in the house. And for that we
figure we need him to take us in. So you just hush up and leave us
be. It won’t be long, and if you don’t like it, then go take a
breath or two of that fresh air.’

Her lips went thin with anger and hurt,
and Herne saw, half in the shadows, how much like his dead wife the
girl was.

‘
Becky. Remember what the boy
told us. These two are the last. And in some ways they’re the
worst. I recall what Louise told me about these twins before she …
before she died. The one who wears white, he couldn’t do it, and he
threatened to cut her eyes out if she told. And this other. Mark.
He was one of them to do it the... to do awful, blasphemous things,
to her. She was your friend and my wife, Becky. We got to do what’s
needful to avenge her.’ After that, she said nothing.

It hadn’t taken long. But it had been
messy, and noisy, despite the knotted rope gag jammed in the boy’s
open mouth.

Because the needle-point of Jed’s bayonet
was a little sharper than his own knife, Coburn borrowed it to help
‘persuade’ Tarrant that it would be better if he helped
them.

There wasn’t all that much
blood.

But so much pain that Herne had to lie
across the boy’s body to hold him still under the probing of the
steel. It was at that point that Becky rushed outside to be
sick.

‘
That’
s enough, Whitey. Look at his eyes.
He’ll talk now. Won’t you, Mel?’

The young gunman nodded, his face a white
mask of agony, blood trickling from his gagged mouth where he’d
bitten through his tongue. His eyes were rimmed with blood from the
delicate touch of the knife, and breath bubbled through the slit
nostrils.

Before handing back the bayonet,
Coburn cut away the gag, and wiped the blade on the boy’s own
trousers. Helped him to sit up, putting his arm gently round his
shoulders.

‘
You did well, boy. None of them
in that house could have done better. Ain’t no shame in knowing
when to give in, isn’t that right, Jed?’

Herne
nodded his agreement, feeling the
thin bitterness of bile rising in his throat at the violence and
coldness of this sort of torture. Whitey had always been better at
it than him. Even though he didn’t take any pleasure from it, like
Bill Yates, Becky’s father, had.

He was just glad it was over, and
wondered whether he ought to go out to the girl, then deciding
she’d probably be better for a while on her own. Looking out into
the night, he could see that the snow had eased, with just an
occasional flake catching the light of the fire as it drifted past
the mouth of the shelter.

‘
You should have killed me,’
said the boy, his voice flat and dead.

‘
Come on, Mel.’

There’s a door. At the bottom of the
far tower wing. Nearest to the path you brought me down. Nobody
knows about that. The path.’

‘
This door?’ prompted Herne,
leaning forwards intently.

‘
It’s just for us. The
guards. It’s got its own sentry on twenty-four hours a day. Man
with a scatter-gun behind it. Barred window that slides open for
him to see through to who’s outside.’

‘
And? This is interesting,
boy, but it’s not getting us inside there.’

‘
Mrs. Stanwyck is very tight on
discipline. Always makes rules that we have to knock and wait and
the guard inside has to identify the men outside and slide back the
grill so he can see them. Only then will he let them in. Oh, and
he’s supposed to carry a lantern at dark so there’s no
mistake.’

‘
Sounds tight to me,’
muttered Coburn to Jed.

‘
It would be, only most of us
have been there for several months, and it comes to be a whole load
of wasted time to keep going through that.’

‘
So?’

‘
So we have a special
knock.’

‘
And the man inside just
reaches up and opens the bolts and doesn’t even stop looking at his
set of French postcards. Is that the way of things?’

Tarrant nodded. ‘Yes. Maybe after what
happened this afternoon, things might get tighter.’

‘
And again, they might not.
What’s the knock?’

The boy looked down at his feet,
ignoring the question. Spitting out a trail of blood and saliva in
the fire where it hung sizzling on the end of a branch.

‘
I’ll make it easy, boy,’
said Coburn. ‘I’ll make like you didn’t quite hear me, and I’ll
keep real nice and I’ll ask you again. If’n you mishear me that
time, then I’ll have to trouble Jed for his sticker again. Now.
What is ... ?’

‘
Three close together.
Then a pause. Then two more. That’s all.’

Coburn grinned, elated by the news.
‘Good! Good boy, Mel. So we’ll move tomorrow, Jed.
Right?’

‘
Wait on. There’s two ways of
thinkin’ on this, Whitey. One says they’ll be more careful now and
then relax over the next few days. Other way, they won’t expect us
to come back straight away. Which do you favor?’

Coburn scratched his nose. Put his head on
one side, screwing up his eyes. ‘There’s things for and there’s
things against. What do you reckon, Jed? You were always a mite
better than me at the thinkin’ game.’

Becky came back in the shelter, her
face almost as pale as the albino’s. Averting her eyes from the
blood-speckled face and body of the boy. She ignored Jed and sat
down as far away from him as the cramped shelter would permit,
picking up her sewing again.

It was hard to figure out what might
be best. The weather surely wasn’t going to get any better over the
next few days. That meant more snow all round. But it shouldn’t
make the path up through the woods any harder for them. The men
inside wouldn’t know about that hidden trail, and they’d see the
deepening snow as a way of keeping them safe. So, they’d start to
relax.

It was that thought that
decided
Herne. He cracked a small twig across his knee and threw it
on the fire. ‘We’ll wait. Wait for a week. By then they’ll reckon
that we’ve gone and that’ll be the time. They can’t get out, but in
a week we’ll be able to get in.’

Coburn nodded. The girl stopped her
work and looked up at him. ‘That mean we all stay here for a week?
In this place? All of us?’

She stressed the word ‘all’, staring
deliberately at the bound figure of the young gunman. Coburn caught
the inference and glanced sideways at Herne, shaking his head
negatively. Jed felt the same. To try and keep Tarrant a prisoner
for seven days was too great a risk. Left to his own decision, he’d
just as soon have taken the boy outside and shot him behind a
tree.

‘
All of us, Jed? Or are you
going to kill him after stabbing him like that?’

‘
There wasn’t any other way to
do it, Becky. He knew something we wanted to know.’

‘
Now you know it. What
about him?’

Coburn opened his mouth as though he was
going to speak, then changed his mind and shut it again. Tarrant
looked up, his emotions locked away in shock, hardly seeming to
realize that they were discussing his life.

‘
All
right.’ Herne made the decision, even
though it was one he didn’t really like. ‘We’ll keep him. But he
stays tied and if he tries anything, I’ll kill him.’

‘
It’s only for a week,’
Becky said, flashing him a smile of thanks.

But it wasn’t.

It was three days.

Three days of continuous snow, the wind
gusting up towards gale force, driving drifts of deep white against
the base of the trees, piling snow along branches until they
snapped under the weight.

Mel Tarrant sat quiet and patient,
only speaking when he was spoken to, huddled up inside a blanket
that Becky had sewn into a poncho. He was fed by the girl, and the
men took it in turns to go with him and watch him with a drawn
pistol when he wanted to answer a call of nature.

Whitey and Jed spent a large amount of
time either locked in deep reminiscences or planning the attack on
Mount Abora. Trying to cover every detail of what might happen and
what they’d do if it did. But there came a point when further
planning became absurd, and they stopped working out all the angles
on the third day, when they just didn’t have any angles left to
work on.

Inevitably, they had all come to accept
the presence of the captured boy, and he played his part perfectly,
appearing cowed and humble. Grateful for the gift of his life.
Ironically, it was the suspicious Whitey Coburn who gave him the
half-chance he’d been waiting for.

Late on the afternoon of the third day,
with the blizzard easing down to a more modest fall, the albino was
smoking and Tarrant asked him for a draw. Coburn leaned right
across him to put the roll-up in the boy’s mouth, and found the
muzzle of his own pistol digging into his ribs. The gunman had
slipped it from the holster, gripping it in his bound hands, using
the folds of the blanket as a cover.

‘
Make a move and I blast you
through the belly, you white-face bastard. Move back, slow and
easy, and keep your hands open and your mouth shut.’

Herne
and Becky were both out collecting
wood during the lull in the gales, and would be back at any
moment.

‘
Just sit there good and
quiet, and wait. Then I’ll be moving on.’

‘
We would have let you go, you
stupid son of a bitch! Now we’ll have to kill you.’

Tarrant smiled, the barrel of the gun
tilting to point directly at Coburn’s face from six feet away. ‘Any
killing round here, Whitey, and it’ll be me that does
it.’

‘
Kill me and who unties you? I’m
your card, boy, so let’s not be even more fuckin’ foolish. It’s
something of a standoff, boy, so let’s play it that
way.’

Tarrant snarled at Coburn. ‘Don’t call me
“boy”, old man!’