He had cut off my path to the open door, and now I hobbled toward a window, but this was one he had boarded up after the hailstorm. Two steel support posts supported the loft here, and I squeezed between them to block the oncoming whip. Cimarron still tried, though, snapping the leather against the steel posts with the sound of ricocheting gunshots.
After three or four tries, he dropped the whip and just came after me. I backed farther along the wall, studded with dowels hung with bridles, reins, and blinders. Still facing Cimarron, I moved backward, my hand feeling along the wall, until my fingers wrapped round the cold metal of a bit and bridle.
He was on me then, reaching for me with open palm, trying to grab me around the neck. As he did, I swung the bridle, and the bit cracked his front teeth and sunk between his jaws. I kept pushing and he gagged, his tongue stuck under the bit. I had his head bent back, and still I pushed, cutting the sides of his mouth, his tongue and gums, forcing his mouth open, farther still.
Then he bit down.
He clamped the metal bit between his jaws and stopped my movement. Both my hands were on the bridle, and both his hands were free. He boxed my ears with a thunderous double punch. I sank to my knees, my head ringing, and he kicked me in the solar plexus. I pitched forward, heaving, and he grabbed my hair and knocked me over backward. I stumbled back two steps, tripped over a two-by-four railing and tumbled into a corncrib. I was on all fours, gagging, staving off the urge to vomit, trying to catch my breath.
Cimarron stood watching me, his eyes blazing with hate. His tongue flicked the corners of his mouth, where blood trickled down his chin. I tried to get to my feet, but the corncobs rolled under my feet and I fell. When I looked up, Cimarron was pointing something at me. At first, I thought it was a gun.
I blinked twice.
“ Don’t move, lawyer, or I’ll nail you to the barn wall. I’ll crucify you, and no court in the land would convict me. Even the Lord would understand.”
I was trying to get up again.
“ I mean it, lawyer.”
“ Jo Jo,” I called out. “Where are you? Tell him the truth. Tell him how you got me out here. Tell him that you told me he beat and raped you.”
I heard the floorboards creaking overhead and caught sight of her coming down the ladder. In a moment she was beside Cimarron, clutching the blanket at her throat, looking small and vulnerable. “He raped me, Simmy, and then attacked you. And you’re right, no one would blame you. You’ll never even be charged. I know. It’s what I do for a living. You were protecting a loved one and defending yourself. It’s justifiable homicide.”
“ She’s lying,” I said, my voice weak and unconvincing. “She’s lying about everything.”
I was half crouching, half standing, like some prehistoric ape-man, ancestor to us all. He aimed the stud gun at my chest, then carefully lowered it toward my groin, then lowered it an inch more.
“ You’re bluffing,” I said. “It won’t fire that way. The barrel has to press against the target…”
Whomp. A carbon steel nail ricocheted off an ear of corn beneath my feet.
“…unless you modified it,” I said.
Cimarron slipped another nail into the barrel, raised the gun, aimed at the center of my forehead, then turned his wrist a fraction of an inch.
I felt the whistle of the nail by my ear and heard it whomp into the wall. Again, he slipped a nail into the barrel. Whomp, into a cross-hatched beam just above my head.
When I looked back at him, he was aiming at my midsection. Click.
“ Damn. Josefina, there’s a full clip over by the sawhorse.”
Cimarron stood ten feet away. I could launch myself out of the corncrib, lower a shoulder and send him flying. I could fake and juke and zig and zag and get the hell out of there. Sure, and I could fly to the moon, but at the moment, I couldn’t lift one leg. Exhaustion and fear had paralyzed me.
I saw Jo Jo hand Cimarron something, heard the sound of metal sliding against metal. He was pointing the stud gun at me again. “A fellow could grow tired pulling this trigger all day. Gives you respect for roofers and carpenters. I’ve got some pretty strong wrists, and already I’m getting tuckered out. Maybe I should just end the game.”
He aimed at my heart, lowered to my groin, moved down to my knee, then back to the heart. “Bang,” he said, then laughed as I winced.
He quickly moved the gun to a point high over my head.
Whomp. Another nail into the barrel. Whomp. Again, a high shot. Just what the hell was he doing?
I heard a tearing sound and looked up in time to be hit in the face with a dozen ears of field corn, kernels hard as pebbles, cobs heavy as nightsticks. And then another dozen, and then a deluge. Down they poured through a mesh screen at the bottom of the silo torn open by the nails.
I tried to scoot on hands and knees, but I slipped again, and the com continued to fall. I raised my arms above my head, but I was knocked off-balance and buried, facedown, as still it poured over me.
Air.
I couldn’t breathe.
I tried to inhale, but the weight of an elephant pressed down on my back. I wriggled to one side and took in a breath.
Dust.
I coughed and sputtered and struggled to gulp in air.
From somewhere I heard his muffled voice. “Lawyer eats all my corn, the animals will starve this winter.”
I squirmed some more, managed to take one breath, then was conscious of movement. Mine. I was being pulled backward by my ankles. Then I was hoisted up and over the crib railing and tossed to the floor. I was flat on my back, and in a moment, Cimarron was on top of me, sitting on my chest pinning my arms down at the wrists. He didn’t weigh any more than the Appaloosa. Then he released one of my wrists and slapped my face with an open palm, and then the back of his hand, his huge knuckles hitting me hard across the bridge of my nose.
He dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handful of nails, placing them in his mouth. He loaded one into the gun, reached around my head and pulled at the top of my sweatshirt. I felt the cold metal of the gun barrel against my neck.
Whomp. A nail tore through my sweatshirt and into the floor.
“ Maybe the lawyer needs a haircut.” He loaded a nail, placed the barrel at the top of my skull, then slid it over the skull. Whomp. A nail skimmed my head and sunk into the floor, giving me a new part in my hair. He slid off me and placed the gun just below my crotch. Another nail in the barrel, another shot into the floor, close enough to make various parts of me retreat northward.
The rest was a blur. A nail that just missed my kneecap, another alongside my foot. One alongside each temple, the noise deafening. Finally, a last shot between my splayed fingers. Then he dropped the gun into the straw.
“ Josefina,” he called out. “I’m gittin’ tired of this. The fireplace is lit in the house. Take one of those branding irons in there and heat it up good. I’m going to show this fellow what we do with rapists out here.”
Her voice was a whisper. “Simmy, why not just finish it?”
He was sitting on my chest again, and I felt him turn to face her.
“ I don’t know about that.”
I stretched my right arm out as far as it would go. Beneath my hand, I felt something metallic.
“ I want him to suffer for what he did to you, but I’m not going to kill him. Scar him, maim him, put the fear into him so he never bothers you again, but I’ve never killed a man, and I won’t start now.”
“ If he lives and starts talking, it’ll just complicate things,” she said. “Keep it clean and simple.”
My hand had worked itself around the metallic piece, which was hot to the touch. I hadn’t used one since Hurricane Betsy lifted the shingles and tar paper off Granny’s roof with 140-mile-per-hour winds when I was still a kid. I was going to use it now. I didn’t know if the clip had a bullet left or if there was a nail in the barrel, but I had very little to lose in finding out.