I reached out and clicked off the lamp. Shafts of moonlight filtered into the loft through cracks in the plank walls of the loft, dust motes rising in the creamy glow. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, and the chilly nighttime breeze made the old barn groan and shudder.
And crack.
The sound startled me. Like the rung of a wooden ladder splintering under a heavy foot.
I sat up, and Jo Jo gasped, clutching at the blanket. Another sound, maybe the shuffling of feet. In the darkness, I couldn’t pin down the direction. I rolled to one side, grabbing the lamp, and came up in a crouch, keeping my back to the wall. I flicked on the lamp, blinked and looked around.
Nothing but shadows.
And a voice. “That’s better. Natural light just wasn’t doing it.”
I looked up. In the rafters above the loft, Kip was aiming his video camera at the two of us.
“ Out of here, Kip! Now!”
“ Okay, okay, I don’t want to lose my PG-13 rating, anyway.
He scrambled down from the rafter and climbed back down the ladder. I turned out the light again.
“ Just hold me, Jake,” Jo Jo said.
I did, and a thousand memories flooded my mind. I thought again of the day so long ago in her mother’s backyard. I thought of the good times, and the bad, and no times at all. I thought of Blinky and what he had gotten me into, and what was it Jo Jo was keeping from me, and was this the time to ask?
We lay there on our sides, her bare body warm even in the chill of the unheated barn. She coiled her legs around mine and buried her head against my chest. I could hear her heart beating.
“ Jo Jo, tell me all about it. What’s going on? Whatever it is, we can work together.”
“ All right. I owe you that. I owe you the truth. I’ve been so unfair to you. The night Hornback was killed, you went to meet my brother…”
“ Go on,” I said.
Then, the unmistakable creak of a foot on the ladder to the loft.
“ Kip, c'mon now!”
Another creak.
“ Cut your uncle a break.”
No sound at all.
“ Kip! You’re starting to bug me. I’ve got some business to finish here.”
Then a sound like a muffled voice.
I untangled myself from Jo Jo, and in the darkness, found the lamp once again, clicking it on.
Kip was there all right, but a large hand was clamped over his mouth, and he was tucked like a bedroll under a heavily veined arm that could have been sculpted from stone.
“ Fool me twice,” said Kit Carson Cimarron, “and you’re dead.”
CHAPTER 19
“ Let the boy go,” I said, getting to my feet.
Cimarron dropped Kip to the floor.
“ I tried to yell.” Kip was on the verge of tears.
“ It’s okay,” I said.
“ I tried to warn you, Uncle Jake, but the big bastard just sneaked up on me. If I’d have seen him, I’d have kicked him in the nuts.” When scared, some people clam up. Others just babble. Kip was a babbler. “I mean, he’s uglier than Mike Mazurki in Some Like It Hot, and-”
“ It’s okay, Kip. Now, get out of here.”
“…bigger than Richard Kiel with those steel teeth in The Spy Who Loved Me, and meaner than Alan Rickman in Die Hard.”
“ Now, Kip!”
Kip scrambled down the ladder. Cimarron hadn’t moved. He wore jeans and boots and no shirt, his chest and shoulders throwing a huge shadow against the far wall. Next to me, Jo Jo was clutching the blanket to her throat.
“ Josefina,” Cimarron said, “what the hell’s going on here?”
“ Simmy, he forced me,” she said, her eyes moist, her voice choking.
What!
“ He hit me, just like he used to.” Now the tears were gushing. “He tore off my clothes and just forced me.”
Who he?
“ You knew what he was like,” Cimarron said, his voice devoid of emotion. “You told me yourself. Whatever possessed you to let him get close?”
It couldn’t be me they were talking about.
“ I don’t know, Simmy. I thought he’d changed. He made promises to me. Oh, I feel so stupid, so filthy…”
So ashamed. She left that one out.
“ Wait a second!” I turned to Jo Jo. “I don’t know what game you two are playing. Maybe you get your kicks this way, but I don’t. Now, tell Wyatt Earp the truth. Tell him why I came here.”
“ Jake wanted to take me back to Miami. He wanted me to leave you and go back with him, but I wouldn’t, Simmy, and he became enraged. He hit me and called me names, and then he…”
“ This is crazy!” I shouted. “You’re both crazy. Every which way I turn, I get set up. Jo Jo, what the hell are you doing?”
“ Shut up, lawyer.” Cimarron’s expression hadn’t changed, and his voice had a touch of sorrow, of sad inevitability. “My woman goes out to the barn to polish up her saddle, and she doesn’t come back. I mosey over, and I find you. First, you steal from me. Then you trespass on my land, and now you violate my woman.”
He seemed to think about it a moment, then began speaking again, even softer, as if discussing an idea with himself. “No one could blame me. No, it would be understandable. I warned you. I told you what I would do, and you flouted me. My woman on my own property. How much can a man take?” He turned to face me head-on, his eyes drilling me. “I’m going to inflict some pain on you, partner, and when I’m done with you, there won’t be enough left for a buzzard’s midnight snack.”
He moved toward me, slowly, methodically, with a sense of purpose. No excitement, no urgency, no flooding emotions to drain energy and detract from the business at hand. With his bushy mustache and bare chest and belly bulging over long pants, he reminded me of one of those bare-knuckled fighters of a century ago.
I put my arms up in a defensive mode, remembering the last time with Cimarron. At least now, I had my clothes on. “She’s making a fool out of you, Cimarron.”
“ Now why would she do that, lawyer?”
I didn’t know.
He stayed an arm’s length away and threw two quick left jabs. They bounced off my shoulder, but not without reminders they’d been there. I feinted with a left and threw a straight right hand that he blocked with his left forearm, and it hurt me more than it did him, my supposedly healed knuckles flaring with pain.
He was a bigger, stronger man with a longer reach. Usually, that was me. I would have to maintain space-the outfighting range-then come right at him with direct frontal attacks. A tall, powerful fighter concentrates on offense and doesn’t worry about defense. He uses the reach advantage to work over the opponent from a safe distance. A shorter, smaller fighter needs to in fight, defend, and counterattack by shortening the offensive space and lengthening the defensive space.
He came at me again, and I sidestepped, glancing a left off his temple as he came by me. I fought the urge to throw a combination and waited for a chance to counterattack. I didn’t have long to wait.
He turned and came back squarely. I spun around to get more room behind me and retreated in the peacock style of kung fu. Cimarron lunged at me with a looping left, the weakest punch he had thrown, and I stepped inside and peppered him above the eye with a right and then a left hook aimed at his chin that caught him on the neck.
I jumped back again and let him advance.
“ Chicken shit,” he called out. “What’s the matter, you afraid?”
“ Go fuck a sheep.” My wit knows no bounds.
This time, he stayed out of my range, feinted a left, and shot a foot at my groin. It lacked the speed of the Mae kekomi front thrust kick, and I avoided it by taking a step backward. He nearly lost his balance, and I was tempted to step forward, but I resisted, and he caught himself, cursed, and came at me again while I circled, keeping him from pinning me against a wall.
He tried another kick, this one shorter. I was in a praying mantis defense, and I hooked his heel and spun him off his feet. He landed with a thud on the wooden plank floor, and again, I fought the urge to attack. Get tangled up wrestling on the floor with him, and I wouldn’t have a chance.