Hanging Judge Read online

  “About that,” Mildred said. “Not exactly.”

  Sharleez was so intrigued, or maybe shocked, that she snapped right out of her crying jag.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you sure, though, Krysty?” Mildred asked, suddenly concerned. “You’re still weak. Still healing.”

  “Well, I have healed,” Krysty said. “Some. The rest has done us both a lot of good. And anyway, what am I saving myself for?

  “Wait!” Sharleez said in alarm. “Don’t throw your lives away over me! You just met me.” She laughed. It had a savage edge to it—near crazy. “Listen to me talking like a simp. We’re all doomed.”

  “Things just aren’t that simple,” Mildred said.

  “And nobody’s talking about sacrificing themselves,” Krysty added. “Though there are costs involved.”

  “What about the boys, though?” Mildred asked.

  Krysty laughed. “We can’t just hang around helplessly waiting to be rescued, like screaming female hostages in some old Hollywood vid. Ryan and the rest will do what they can, when they can. They’ve got their own problems.”

  She grinned suddenly at Mildred.

  “Anyway, it’s not like this is the first time we’ve released ourselves on our own recognizance, is it? Anyway, much as I hate to admit it, I’m getting double bored.”

  “Me, too,” Mildred said.

  “So, it’s decided?”

  Mildred thought for a moment.

  “Yeah. You heal fast. If you feel fit to fight, let’s do it.”

  “Do what?” Sharleez said, almost imploringly.

  Krysty looked at her. “I need to ask you to do something,” she said, “that I really hate to ask.”

  “What?” Sharleez asked. “I’ll do anything.”

  “Trust us.”

  * * *

  “HEY, EVER’BODY! HEAR the latest news?”

  Heads turned in the late-afternoon gloom inside the Last Resort’s bar as the voice came booming in the door. Jak had just sat down at the bar proper.

  It was Bobb, the ville drunk, a red-faced perpetually cheerful mess of a man, about the same height and general build as Meg but with lots more by way of gut spilling over his belt buckle. He had strands of hair so soaked in accumulated grease and grime their color was impossible to tell dangling from beneath an almost equally befouled trucker’s cap.

  Somehow he was always the first to know the latest gossip, whether from inside Esperance or from the Wild and surrounding Deathlands. Jak knew that despite his massive indifference to the subjects—along with most other human interactions—because whenever Bobb found out something juicy, he immediately trucked down to the Last Resort to tell everybody about it in his foghorn voice.

  “You’re going to tell us regardless, I expect,” said Meg dourly, without looking up from where she was wiping down the bar with a rag. “So at least park your carcass and pay for a brew first.”

  He trundled in and sat a few stools down from Jak. He gave the albino a companionable smirk and nod. Whatever else you could say about him, he was a friendly drunk. And if he knew Jak was an albino instead of a mutie, it clearly made no difference to him either way.

  Bobb’s arrival meant there were now two patrons seated at the actual bar, although the gaudy had its usual late-afternoon crowd already, fifteen or twenty customers seated at the tables or benches along the walls. That included a trio of obvious coldhearts fresh in out of the Deathlands.

  Jak kept those three always within the edges of his peripheral vision. Unlike the jovial local boozehound, they did seem to have some problems with Jak to judge by the hard looks they kept shooting his way.

  There had been a lot of traffic coming in from the Deathlands to the north the last day or so, he’d overheard Elián telling Anthony. They mostly looked like hardcases.

  The giant Osage bouncer, Bo, unspeaking and unsmiling as always, straightened from behind the bar with a bottle of brown fluid the hand-scrawled label called “whiski” in one ham hand. He was lending a hand tending bar, with the evening rush coming on. His still relatively clean apron made his scalp lock, the broad red stripe above his forehead and the matching red wedges painted beneath his piercing black eyes, look all the more unnerving.

  “Of course,” Bobb said, favoring the crowd with a big, broad smile, “I could tell my highly pressing and important news a lot more freely if I wet my whistle first.”

  Someone in the crowd had to have signaled they’d take the hint and buy for him, because Meg laid down her rag and started drawing a mug from a wood cask on a shelf. Jak didn’t see. He was dividing his attention between the coldhearts and Bobb. Jak was not the sort to assume that, just because the drunkard looked completely harmless, he actually was.

  Something about the man or his manner had Jak’s nerves all standing on end, for sure.

  Bo sensed it too. He stood like a statue, glaring out over the gaudy crowd with unfocused eyes. He made no move to offer the bottle to Jak, who had other things on his mind right now, anyway.

  Bobb drained half the mug at a gulp.

  “Ahh,” he said, wiping foam from his beard, which was in about the same state as the hair hanging from beneath his cap. Or maybe worse, by way of food stains. “That hit the spot. So where was I? Oh, right. The big news.

  “Well, I can tell you this. It’s big. Remember those coldhearts who busted one of their gang off the Second Chance gallows mebbe a week ago, right from under Santee’s pointy nose?”

  That brought a general rumble of assent that made Jak’s blood run cold and his skin creep even more than it had started to. He wondered how many here knew he was the one who escaped the gallows, as he tried desperately to keep his face and body language from showing how exactly he felt like a jack-lit deer, right now.

  But nobody seemed to be paying Jak any attention. Their focus was Bobb.

  “Well, the word has come down the pike that Cutter Dan and his men have the fugitives trapped. Right up against the base of the Red Wall. They been standing off the marshals so far, but he’s put the word out that a big bonus would be paid for recruits reporting directly to him. And he’s started hiring mercies off the Deathlands too.”

  The crowd went still. Dead still.

  No stiller than Jak. It was as if the blood running through his veins, already chilled by Bobb’s opening words, had all pooled into his stomach and then congealed in a big, nauseating, icy clot.

  “He’s started to get ’em, too. Smart word says it’s only a matter of a day or too before Cutter Dan goes in to smoke ’em out regardless. So anybody interested in earnin’ a little extra jack best hustle their butts west down under the Wall, sign up while there’s still openings.”

  He drained the rest of his mug and thumped it down on the bar with a sigh of satisfaction.

  “Not as if they’s anybody here’d piss on them Second Chance pukes if they was on fire, o’ course.”

  That brought a chorus of surprisingly muted assent from the crowd. All except for the three coldhearts. As one they stood up and without a word headed for the exit.

  “Don’t hurry back, Dyson,” Meg called. “You go sign up to play bullyboy for that blood drinker Santee, you won’t be welcome here any more.”

  Their leader, a tall, shaved-headed man dressed in black leather, with the butt of a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun sticking up behind his left shoulder, stopped at the swing doors and turned back, a sneer on his long, scarred face.

  “When we come back here as marshals,” he said, “which we will, you won’t have a choice about letting us in.”

  “Leave,” Meg said firmly. “While you can still walk to do it.”

  He and his companions did. The rest of the bar uttered a collective sigh of relief and turned back to their drinking with even more s
erious interest than before.

  “Still want this?”

  It took a moment for the words, which sounded like an iron cannonball rolling around in a rain barrel, to penetrate the roaring silence that seemed to surround Jak.

  Bo was looking at him. Though the tanned-leather features were as impassive as ever beneath their paint, he was obviously pained. If anything, he liked talking even less than Jak did.

  It came to Jak he’d been doing a power of it, the last few days. That seemed distant now, and receding fast.

  He nodded convulsively. Bo twisted off the top and shoved the bottle across the bar to him.

  Jak grabbed it with both hands like a drowning man thrown a driftwood log. He started to raise it to his lips.

  Then he stopped. He held the bottle up before his eyes and just looked at it for a long moment. His heartbeat boomed in his ears like a giant tribal drum.

  Slowly he upended the bottle and watched as the amber contents gurgled out and down onto the sawdust-covered floor.

  The whole bar erupted in outraged babble. “Why, nuke your eyeballs, Whitey,” a voice cried—whose he neither knew nor cared. “That’s a crime against good whiskey!”

  “Easy,” Meg said, in a voice like her own heavy hand slapped down hard against her bar. “He paid for that whiskey. It’s his privilege what to do with it.”

  Looking neither left nor right, Jak hopped down from the stool and stalked toward the hall where his rented room lay.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was right around midnight, Mildred judged, when Krysty stirred on her pallet and sat up.

  “Right,” she said, stretching like a cat. “It’s time.”

  Mildred sat up on her own straw mattress. She’d been pretending to sleep since the jailers had collected their dinner trays a couple of hours before. She was too keyed up to really sleep.

  Sharleez sat against one wall with her knees drawn up. She was staring at Krysty like an old alley cat spying an eight-legged mutie rat the size of a Shetland pony. Mildred had seen those. Not a pretty sight.

  But what seemed to be alarming the young Second Chance firebrand was the way Krysty’s long red locks writhed around her shoulders like scarlet serpents. Krysty had really been asleep, if Mildred was any judge, but now that she was awake and ready to roll, she was feeling a few nerves of her own.

  Mildred couldn’t blame her any more than she could blame Sharleez, who had obviously just decided to assume her new cellmates were complete loonies and probably needed to be watched closely. But then, Mildred knew what Krysty was capable of.

  And what it would cost her.

  The redhead stood, rolled her hips and windmilled her arms to get the last kinks out. The straw-stuffed mattresses weren’t that luxurious. Then she stalked to the cell door as noiselessly as a big cat and looked out the grille.

  “No one in view,” she said softly, turning back. “You ready, Mildred?”

  The physician stood and stretched, too, bracing her hands on her hips and leaning her upper body back. She winced at the cracks and pops she heard. They sounded like a brisk little firefight a block away; she was half surprised it didn’t bring the jailer right down on their necks.

  But then, they probably got used to ignoring a wide variety of loud and unsettling noises.

  “Yeah,” she said, drawing out the word. “I’m sick of this joint. They forgot to leave a mint on my pillow when they turned the sheet down. Again.”

  Then she grinned. She’d thought Sharleez’s dark eyes couldn’t get any wider.

  Turned out she was wrong.

  The local woman stood. She looked apprehensive, then she shrugged. “You want me to attract the guard’s attention or anything?”

  Krysty shook her head. She seemed somehow businesslike and distracted, as if her attention was firmly focused but on something far away, which Mildred, at least, couldn’t see.

  “No need,” she said, more briskly than usual. “Just stand there in that corner. Yes, by the front wall. Away from the door.”

  Sharleez looked puzzled, but obeyed. “And?” she asked.

  “Stay there,” Krysty said, “until we tell you to move.”

  Meanwhile Mildred had picked up her mattress and stood holding it in both hands just to the side of the door, as if preparing to step through.

  “Remember what Krysty told you earlier,” she said to Sharleez, “that she hated saying?”

  “Uh, ‘trust me’?”

  “Yeah. Well, I hate saying it, too. So consider it in full effect until further notice.”

  Sharleez made a helpless little waggle of her hands and rolled her eyes.

  Mildred nodded to Krysty. The redhead put her face up by the barred window in the stout cell door.

  “Who’s out there?” she asked. “Who’s on guard?”

  Mildred thought she heard a half-stifled noise of surprise, then an even less-stifled yawn.

  “Who’s that?” It was Evrard’s voice.

  Krysty smiled.

  “It’s one of you bitches in the Very Important Prisoner cell, isn’t it?”

  Krysty smiled wider.

  “It sure is. Me. Krysty. The red-haired one. You’re the tall, intriguing, handsome one with the dark hair, aren’t you?”

  Sharleez opened her mouth and made vomit-inducing gestures with her forefinger. Mildred wagged her own finger at the young woman and tried to look stern. Also not to crack up.

  She realized that was, in part, a nervous reaction.

  Nervous about what, girlfriend? she chided herself. We’ve done this sort of thing a dozen times.

  But she knew that something could go wrong. Something could always go wrong.

  “That’s me,” the sec man said, sounding as if he had taken a break to puff up his chest.

  “Well, come over here,” Krysty purred. “I got something to show you.”

  “What for?”

  “I reckon if I treat you nice, mebbe you’ll treat me nice.”

  “What good’s that gonna do? You’re still under sentence of death.”

  That surprised Mildred. She would have thought the black-haired marshal and his issues with women would have been well past the point of thinking with the big head.

  Reminds me never to underestimate anybody, she told herself. Even jerks like Evrard.

  “Well,” Krysty said, drawing out the syllable. “Prisoners have been known to escape before.”

  “Not from—” He stopped.

  Krysty was showing all her teeth now, but her expression no longer looked much like a smile.

  “Sure, honey,” he said. Mildred could hear his steps approaching the door. “If you treat me good enough, we might be able to work out something.”

  Krysty closed her eyes. She tipped her head slightly back and began to quietly chant a prayer to the Earth Mother. Nostrils flaring she drew a deep breath.

  Her rib cage seemed to expand. The sec man’s face appeared, framed in the little window. His black eyes opened wide as he saw the way Krysty’s inhalation had pushed her generous breasts even more prominently to the fore.

  “That’s a good start,” he said. “Show me what you got.”

  “Sure,” Krysty said in an oddly deep tone. She reached up both hands, grabbed the bottom of the little window and heaved.

  With a splintering crash, the whole door popped inward out of its frame.

  Mildred crouched, ready to spring forward and toss the mattress over Evrard’s head. But there was no need. The door buckled vertically right down the middle. The two halves were still stuck partially together, and Krysty thrust them back through the opening to slam the sec man in the face and drop him to the floor on his buttocks.

  Krysty stepped through, pulling the broken halves the
rest of the way apart and tossing them aside. Mildred followed right on her heels.

  The marshal’s nose was broken. His blood was shockingly bright against his blue-white skin, even in the low lamplight of the jail corridor. He was fumbling to get a handblaster out of his holster.

  Krysty put both hands on top of his head and picked him up off the concrete floor as if he were a doll. He tried to scream. His face went red as she put on pressure. All he was able to do was emit a desperate squeal through his nose.

  He kicked frantically, but without the focus to do more than bruise the redhead’s shins. His hand came up with a Beretta M9, the military model. Mildred recognized that; she had learned a lot about various handblasters from J.B., though she had known a lot before she had met him.

  She also knew that to do about this one. Dropping the mattress, she stepped forward, grabbed the pale, hairy wrist with one hand and the blaster muzzle with the other. Before he could manage to click off the annoyingly-placed safety, she torqued the weapon sharply toward her.

  When a person did that, he or she could perform the move in such a way as to give the blaster-holder the option of just letting go and sparing himself having his finger broken by the trigger guard. Mildred listened to the bone snap with grim satisfaction.

  A big brass ring of keys hung from Evrard’s belt by a D-shaped carabiner with a straight gate. She snapped it free, then hurriedly plucked two reload mags from carriers on the belt.

  She stepped back. Well back.

  Evrard was flailing both hands helplessly at the arms like iron bars that held him by his head. His busted forefinger flapped ridiculously. His kicks were getting weaker, as if he couldn’t breathe. He’d quit the thin keening sound and was making weird little grunts.

  Then the muscles stood out on Krysty’s forearms. The veins popped out. The sec man’s face went white, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets.

  His head burst like a watermelon dropped off a roof onto a sidewalk. With similarly messy explosion. Mildred was glad her intuition had led her to step back as far as she had.

  “Sharleez,” she called, softly and tautly, as the body fell to floor with the final firings of random neurons. “Come outside now.”