Winter Duty (8 page)

Or maybe his vision was going and it just seemed as though the voice was coming from a great distance. There were painful stars dancing in his vision like a faerie circus. Valentine felt kicks that might have just as well been blows from baseball bats, so hard were the assailants’ boots.

“You’ve made enemies, Valentine. Now it’s time to settle up.”

The rain stung; it must be washing blood into his eyes.

“We don’t like criminals walking our streets, bold as black.”

They took turns punching him in the face and stomach.

“Grog lover!”

“Renegade.”

“Murderer!” The last was a crackling shriek.

They added a few more epithets about his mother and the long line of dubious species that might have served as father. Valentine’s mad brain noted that they sounded like men too young to have ever known her.

“You bring any of those redlegs into our good clean land, they’ll get the same. Be sure of that.”

“Hell, they’ll get hung.”

“Like you’re gonna be—
huck-huck-huck
!”

“C’mon—let’s string this fugitive from justice up.”

They dragged Valentine by the rope around his neck. He strained, but the handcuffs on his wrists at his back held firm.

The old street in Jonesboro had attractive oaks and elms shading the pedestrians from summer heat. Their thick, spreading boughs made a convenient gibbet above the sidewalk and lane.

The noose hauled Valentine to his feet by his neck. His skin flamed.

Valentine knotted the muscles in his neck, fought instinct, kicking as he strangled. The rope wasn’t so bad; it was the blood in his eyes that stung.

Vaguely, he sensed that something was thumping against his chest. An object had been hung around his neck about the size and weight of a hardcover book.

One of them wound up, threw, and bounced a chunk of broken pavement off his face.

“Murderer!”

“Justice is a dish best served cold,” that deep voice said again.

They piled into the little putt-putt and a swaying, aged jeep that roared out of the alley behind the red-lit house. With that, they departed into the rain. Valentine, spinning from the rope end as he kicked, bizarrely noted that they left at a safe speed that couldn’t have topped fifteen miles an hour, thanks to the odd little three-wheeler.

Valentine, increasingly foggy with his vision red and the sound of the rainfall suddenly as distant as faint waterfall, looked up at the rope hanging over the branch.

For all their viciousness with boot tips and flung asphalt, they didn’t know squat about hanging a man. And he’d purposely kicked with knees bent, to give them the illusion that he was farther off the ground than he actually was.

He changed the direction of his swing, always aiming toward the trunk of the tree. The rope, which his assailants had just thrown over the thick limb, moved closer to the trunk. He bought another precious six inches. Six inches closer to the trunk, six less inches for the rope to extend to the horizontal branch, six inches closer to the ground. With one more swing, he extended his legs as far as they’d go, reaching with his tiptoes, and touched wet earth.

The auld sod of Arkansas had never felt more lovely.

Valentine caught his breath, balancing precariously on tiptoe, and found the energy to give himself more slack. He got the rope between his teeth and began to chew. Here the wet didn’t aid him.

His blood-smeared teeth thinned the rope. He gathered slack from his side and pulled. He extracted himself from the well-tied noose and slumped against the tree. There was a wooden placard hung around his neck, but he was too tired to read it.

Even with the rope—standard Southern Command camp stuff, useful for everything from securing a horse to tying cargo onto the hood of a vehicle—removed from his neck, Valentine could still feel the burn of it. He swept his hand through the gutter, picked up some cold wet leaves, and pressed them to the rope burn.

They might come back to check on his body. He lurched to his feet and staggered in the direction of the door of the bordello.

He missed the porch stairs, rotated against the rail until he tripped over them, and went up to the door on hands and knees. Blood dripped and dotted the dry wood under the porch roof.

His head thumped into the doorjamb.

“He’s made it,” someone from within called.

He didn’t have to knock again; the door opened for him. He had a brief flash of hair and lace and satin before he gave way, collapsing on a coconut-coir mat and some kind of fringed runner covering shining hardwood floors.

“He’s bleeding on the rug. Get some seltzer.”

“
Lord, he’s not going to die on us, is he?” a Texas accent gasped.

“Uhhhh,” Valentine managed, which he hoped she’d interpret as a “no.”

“What if they come back to check on him?”

“They told us not to come out. Didn’t say anything about us not letting him in,” another woman put in. “He made it in under his own power.”

“They still might do violence, if’n we help him. Toss him in the alley.”

“Hush up and quit worrying while we got a man bleeding,” an authoritative female voice said. “I’ve never refused a gentleman hospitality in my life and I’m too old to change now. You all can blame me if they do come back. Don’t think varmints like that have the guts, though, or they would have watched till he was cold. Alice-Ann, iodine and bandages.”

Valentine blinked the blood out of his eyes. The women were of a variety of ages and skin hues and tints of hair, mostly blond or red. He counted six, including what looked and sounded like the madam—or maybe she just catered to the certain tastes in experienced flesh. A gaunt old man moved around, pulling down extra shades and closing decorative shutters with a trembling arm. The doorman? He didn’t look like he could bounce a Boy Scout from the establishment.

“Before you throw me out, could you please get these handcuffs off? If you don’t have a key, I’ll show you how to do it with a nail.” The speech exhausted him more than the trip to the door. He put his head down to catch his breath and managed to roll over on his pack.

“Are you kidding?” a fleshy older woman said, showing a brilliant set of perfectly aligned teeth. “In this place? Standard equipment, hunneh.”

They helped him up and took him back to the kitchen and performed first aid at the sink. Valentine embraced the sting of the iodine. It proved he was alive.

When he had stopped the flow of blood from face and lip, he looked around the homey kitchen. Baskets of onions and potatoes lined the floor, rows of preserved vegetables filled racks in the kitchen, and bulbs of garlic and twisted gingerroot hung from the ceiling, fall’s bounty ready for winter.

The madam introduced herself as Ladyfair, though whether this was a first name, a last name, a stage name, or a title, she didn’t say.

“There’s a little washroom just off the back door, next to the laundry room and past the hanging unmentionables,” the madam said as Valentine rubbed his free wrist. “You just make use of it. There’s a flexible shower hose. Just the thing for a fast cleanup.”

Valentine, feeling a little more human, realized he stank. An unpleasant presence was making itself felt in his underwear.

It’s not just an expression. They really kicked the shit out of me,
Valentine thought.

When he came out, a towel around his waist, he glanced into the front parlor and noticed that the porch light had been turned off. A thick head of hair looked through the heavy curtains from the edge of a window.

Valentine rubbed his sore neck. The attempted hanging wasn’t so bad; the pain was from the hard jerks from the rope during the fight. He wondered if he had whiplash.

They presented him an old pair of generously cut khaki trousers and some serviceable briefs. “We have a little of just about everything hanging in the basement,” Ladyfair said. “You’d think we were a community theater. We do everything but produce Shakespeare.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t. The Bard had his bawdy side.”

“You just come back now when you’re up to it. You seem like a better quality than that rabble, and a smart business is always looking to improve the clientele. Seeing as that disgrace took place right on my front lawn, I’ll offer you a freebie when you’re feeling more recovered.”

“I appreciate you taking me into your house.”

“Oh, it’s not my house. We’re a limited liability partnership, young man. Quite a few make that mistake, though. I suppose I’m the old lead mare of the house, though I’m still very much involved on the cash generation side of things. There are some that have learned to appreciate a woman without teeth.”

She winked.

Bordello co-ops. What will they thing of next
? Valentine thought.

“Then I’m grateful to the whole partnership. Novel idea.”

“Not really. I’m surprised. Your necktie party insisted you were a fan of professional gentlemen’s entertainment. Said you used to visit a place called the Blue Dome. They said it was only fitting that you get hung up on the doorstep of a whorehouse, so to speak.”

Valentine shrugged. “I don’t suppose you could give me their names,” Valentine said.

“You’ll remember we haven’t even asked yours.”

“David will do,” Valentine said.

“Well, David, if you want names, nobody gives a real name here. You should really hurry on. Mr. C, our banker and lawyer, is removing the rope from the tree, but if they come back . . .”

“Were they Southern Command?”

“They were in civilian attire but had fabric belts with those clever little buckles our heroes in uniform wear. One of them was drinking and kept talking about General Martinez and about how things are going to change for the better once he gets in, so I suspect at least some of them were.”

A prettyish young “entertainer” came into the kitchen with the placard that had been hung about his neck. “You want this as evidence?” she asked with a strong Texas accent.

It was an ordinary wood bar tray, much ringed and weathered though carefully cleaned, with black letters burned into it:

 

Whoever had done it hadn’t bothered to pencil out the letters before setting to work with the wood burner. “Back to the UFR” was rather crowded together.

“David Valentine,” Ladyfair said. “It sounds rather dashing and romantic, as though you should be riding around in a cloak, holding up carriages with a pistol and donating the booty to the peasantry.”

Valentine probed his teeth, checking for loose gum line or a broken crown.

“I am fond of novels when idling in bed or tub.”

Valentine wanted to keep the sign just for the interesting spelling of “condemned.” Might make an interesting memento on his office door. Maybe they’d summed up his life better than whoever would write his eventual obituary—if he died where people noticed such things. Condamned.

“I’ve troubled you enough,” Valentine said. “I suppose you’ve lost a night’s business because of this. If you’ll let me know what the clothes and bandages cost, I’ll come by tomorrow to repay you what I can.”

“Nonsense. Here’s a card. If you do find those rowdies, give us a jingle. We’ll give them a little law and order when we testify in court. Dumb sons of bitches didn’t wear those masks when they were in our parlor waiting on you. I’d like to be able to point them out in court.”

“Cheap too,” the young Texan said. “Kept complaining about not being able to run a tab for their whiskey.”

Valentine inspected his reflection in a little mirror next to the kitchen doorjamb. He’d probably have some horizontal scarring on the right side of his face to balance out the long vertical bullet furrow long since faded on his left. The asphalt had been sharp.

Well, he didn’t have much keeping him in the United Free Republics anyway. Besides, he had mail to get back to Kentucky.

He might as well abandon the guise of a militia corporal; it wasn’t doing him any good. He’d return to Kentucky in the leathers of the Bulletproof clan.

CHAPTER THREE

The bar is decorated with grainy pictures of boat crews as well as old
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit models and
Playboy
centerfolds, immortal icons of wet-haired desire. Wooden models of famous Southern Command river craft—mostly pleasure or sport or fishing boats and tugs converted to carry machine guns and old rapid-fire twenty-and thirty-millimeter “bush guns”—rest on a little brass-railed shelf above the bar. The traditional mirror behind the bar is more a mosaic of shards now, having been broken in so many brawls and patched together with colored glass it now resembles a peacock splattered against a wide chrome bumper.