He went straight to Aaron Tillman, stood over the shackled man sprawled on the deck.
“Morning, Mr. Tillman.”
“You sonofabitch. You’ve been waiting a long time for this, haven’t you?” Aaron snapped.
“You notice I called you ‘Mr. Tillman,’ Mr. Tillman?” Ekert smiled, tilted the bottle up, took a long swig that made his Adam’s apple bobble. “You know what your brother was nice enough to let me do?”
Aaron just glared at him.
“He said I could do anything to you I wanted. Anything at all.”
The pointed-toe kick of the cowboy boot did maximum damage, caught a rib and cracked it. Aaron screamed and began to twist back and forth in great and immediate pain.
“All the times I had to clean up your puke; all the times I had to haul you out of saloons before somebody killed you because you were such a prick when you were drunk; all the times I had to put you on my shoulder and carry you out of whorehouses because you’d passed out—and you never said thanks. Not even once, Mr. Tillman. You realize that? All those years and you couldn’t even bring yourself to say thank you even one time. You said I was scum. Remember all the times you called me that? Called me scum and trail trash? You even spit in my face one time. That’s the one that got me. That’s the one I can’t forget, Mr. Tillman. Spitting on me.”
Aaron groaned, cursed, groaned again.
Fargo knew that there was no pain quite like the needle-sharp, insistent ache of a cracked rib. And he’d heard the bone crack loud and clear.
“I don’t get to stay on the island with you, Mr. Tillman. But I thought I’d give you the same kind of treatment you gave me all these years.”
Fargo knew what was coming; he figured Aaron did, too. But for the moment Fargo listened to all the resentment and hatred in Ekert’s voice. He hated Ekert, wanted to kill him. But he had to give the man his dignity—something Aaron in his drunken arrogance had taken from him a long time ago. The weak brothers of strong, powerful men are pretty hard to take under the best of circumstances. He sensed that Aaron had probably been a champion bully.
The second kick was even swifter than the first. And just as devastating. A tad higher up. Another terrible cracking sound. Rib number two.
“You work Daisy over the same way before you killed her?” Fargo said.
Another swig of the bottle. Another grin on the grizzled face. “Now, Mr. Fargo, I sure wouldn’t go around hurtin’ women this way. Not unless I was paid to do it. And Noah, he paid me to kill her quick and clean. He always tells me how he wants things done. Sometimes he lets me have a little fun, sometimes he don’t. Daisy died quick, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just hope you killed the Mex quick, too. He was a pretty good partner. Now I got to find me a new one.”
Short-leaf pines lined the shore. A long, narrow dock extended like a finger into the water. Dogs greeted the approaching boat with violent barks. Killer dogs, no doubt. A short man in a khaki shirt and jeans appeared, toting a shotgun. He waved. Ekert waved back.
A touching scene, Fargo thought. Two killers greeting each other. He wondered again if he’d done the sensible thing, putting himself in such a situation.
Then he decided to hell with it. All this mental jawing was worthless. He was here; it was too late to turn back, and now he needed to spend his time figuring out how to tear the island apart and bring down Noah Tillman in the process. And, oh yes: get his hands on Ekert and beat the sumbitch to death.
The khaki-shirted man walked to the pier, grabbed the rope that was thrown him and helped bring the large craft in true.
Ekert leaned down to Aaron and spat in his face. “I’ve been waitin’ a long, long time for that, Mr. Tillman. I sure have.”
A minute later, Ekert stood on the dock with the other man. They were soon off-loading provisions. And then they were off-loading two shackled prisoners, Skye Fargo and Aaron Tillman by name.
Just after eight o’clock, Tom Tillman left the sheriff’s office and walked two blocks down to the newspaper office. He did a lot of smiling, even a bit of handshaking, a part of his job as the local enforcer of laws. To a lot of folks hereabout, a lawman was the closest thing they had to a celebrity. There was the mayor, but he didn’t carry a gun and didn’t go after bad men. And there was a parson and a priest but they didn’t carry guns, either, and the only bad men they saw were the kind who filled the pews on Sunday and pretended to be holy, the hypocrites.
The street was packed with revelers. There had to be—or seemed to be, anyway—several hundred thousand tykes from ages three to eleven running, jumping, shouting, screaming, laughing, crying, giggling, hopping, crawling, and whining everywhere he turned. In some ways, he was blessed that the missing persons matter had taken all of his attention. Dangerous as it might prove to be, it was still better than trying to deal with little ones who couldn’t find their mommies, drunks who liked to hit people, and traveling thespians who tried to sneak innocent girls into their tents to introduce them to the sweaty miracles of sex.
Liz was alone, sitting at her neatly organized rolltop desk. Two stacks of envelopes sat in front of her. One stack was three times as tall as the other.
She looked up, smiling, when she saw Tom. “Care to guess which one is bills and which one is income?”
“It’s a good thing you’ve got the constitution of a bobcat. You’re in one tough business.”
She put out her arm. Tom took her hand. She said, “Well, at least I don’t get shot at in my business.”
“You write another one of those editorials saying everybody in the North and the South should calm down and talk reasonably—somebody might shoot you then.”
They both knew he was only half-joking. She’d written one such editorial, urging both sides in the increasingly bitter debate over slavery to try to be more civil. The night the editorial appeared, her front window was smashed. Two nights later, somebody set the back of her building on fire. Luckily, a passerby saw the blaze when it was still controllable. It had been put out with minimum damage.
“You’re over here mighty early,” she said.
They were both careful to avoid any talk of romance, hurt feelings, or sneaking off to see each other. Tom’s bearing this morning allowed for none of it. He was able to signal his intentions just by his disposition. Now, he was all business.
“I wanted to find out if Richard ever learned anything about Skeleton Key,” he said.
She nodded. “Enough to know that’s where our answer must be.”
“Exactly. Noah’s my stepfather and I still don’t know anything about it. He claims it’s private because he keeps his best breeding stock there. But the times I’ve been by it in a canoe, all I ever see is a man standing at a dock with a shotgun.”
“What I hear about is those dogs. They’ve got a legend of their own.”
“The fisherman?”
She nodded. “I hope it’s just a story.”
Anytime you make anything off-limits to the public, you inspire all kinds of tales. Anything secret must be evil. Everybody who’d come within a quarter mile of Skeleton Key had heard the dogs. No doubt that they were merciless killers.
It didn’t take long for all sorts of stories to be passed on. The best had to do with voodoo, a boatload of Haitian slaves being transported to Skeleton Key to do some kind of undisclosed work. As the story had it, the slaves naturally enough got tired of being slaves and decided to turn the dogs loose on the masters. To do this, the slaves hoobie-joobied the dogs with some kind of devil hex and the dogs dined on the masters while the slaves slipped away.