The room seemed suddenly to lack air.
Mona sat in a corner, knees up to her breasts, hand to her mouth, terrified eyes on Bubber. Then another shuddering crash of thunder and she put her face in her hands and wailed.
Whatever happened here, Russell was upstairs.
I bolted from the room and around to the stairway just as Nurse Rose came swooping down to the landing, face wrenched in terror—and she ran headlong into a beefy Ranger coming from the parlor.
“Whoa, Nellie!” he said, catching her by the shoulders, but she twisted from his grasp and fled around the corner.
As he turned toward me I drew the .380 and swung it backhand and caught him with the barrel just over the ear. His head slung sideways and his big hat tumbled from his redhaired head and he did a couple of shaky sidesteps and his knees buckled and he went down in a heap.
I took the steps two at a time to the landing and ran down the hall to the last door on the right. The heat much greater now, the smell of smoke stronger.
I yanked open the door and it banged against the wall—and all in an instant saw a man whirl around from looming over Russell, saw the cords standing on Russell’s neck and his mouth open wide in rasping screams almost inaudible in the din from outside, saw that the man’s hand at Russell’s bloody crotch was no hand at all but a bright metal contraption. Saw John Bones grinning fiercely…and the yellow spark of his pistol.
I caromed off the doorjamb and staggered breathless along the wall and heard another gunshot and the room tilted and the floor hit me in the face.
Pain boiling in my gut, wrenching at my knee. The .380 four feet away. Gustafson prone and glass-eyed at the foot of the bed.
Hard gruntings. John Bones arching backward, his neck clenched in Russell’s forearm, his gunhand in Russell’s grip, the pincers somehow wedged behind him.
Crawling to the .380, feeling my belly smearing. The air hazed pink, the floor steaming.
John Bones’ revolver thunks the floor at his booted feet.
Russell screaming—the pincers seized on his forearm, broken bones jutting.
John Bones wresting himself around, clamping the pincers to Russell’s throat. Blood jumps and Russell spasms and falls still.
The .380 in my hand. Cocking.
John Bones crouching, hand closing on his gun.
The .380 kicks and he flings back against the wall and sits hard, legs splaying, gun arm dropping limp under a bloody shoulder, pistol unhanded. His eyes bright on me, pincers on his lap, opening and closing.
Boots stomping hard to the door.
My pistol on John Bones’ great white grin.
Somebody shrieking, “Drop it or die!”
I shoot.
She finds the back door jimmied, every drawer emptied on the floor, every closet rummaged, every mattress upended. The place ransacked by someone practiced. The envelope gone from behind the toilet tank. The best hiding place for it, they’d said, but what some thieves know, so do others. She takes lunch in a local diner where all the talk is of Blackpatch. The fire reported to be still burning on this following noon. Sixty-three dead and counting. Not a building left standing. Gonna have to call it Blacker patch, some wiseguy snickers, and gets more hard looks than laughs. She waits three days before admitting to herself what she has known from the moment he got out of the car. Then fuels the Chrysler and heads east, in the direction of New Orleans. She has a total of two dollars and forty cents, which meager stake might have been worrisome but for her discovery of a fully loaded .44 under the car seat. It is all she will need, she knows, to make her way in this world.
About the Author
JAMES CARLOS BLAKE has written seven books of fiction, including In the Rogue Blood (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Red Grass River (winner of the Chautauqua South Book Award), Borderlands (winner of the Southwest Book Award), and the critically acclaimed Wildwood Boys. He is also the author of The Pistoleer and The Friends of Pancho Villa. He resides in southeast Arizona.
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PRAISE FOR
A World of THIEVES
“Blake writes with a command of the language and a deft ear for dialogue that few novelists possess…. A World of Thieves is classic Blake, mixing violence with passion, the hardnose with the sensitive. No one out there does this better.”
—Tom Walker, book editor, Denver Post
“Blake is one of the more talented practitioners of tough-guy fiction…. A World of Thieves is a powerful book [with] compellingly drawn characters.”
—Tom Pilkington, Dallas Morning News
“In a splendid ode to hard-drinking Jazz Age desperadoes, James Carlos Blake jimmies open Cormac McCarthy’s safe and runs off with the twanging strings McCarthy brings to the American sentence…. Blake remains a poet of the damned who writes like anangel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A hard-driving, entertaining novel full of outsized characters and as much humor as brutality.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Writing doesn’t get much better than this. Unforced, honest…. A novel that delivers. Fabulous and unforgettable.”
—New York Review of Fiction
“A deliciously visual story…. Blake seems to revel in biting off bigchunks of American history and letting the blood dribble between his teeth.”
—Austin Chronicle