“You come see me tonight and I’ll fix you up something special,” she said. “You gonna hold onto that picture for Jem?”
McParlan stood the photograph on the edge of the table so it would be the first thing anyone saw when they walked in the door. “Maybe if they see this, they’ll remember what a real lawman looked like.”
Janet said good day and let herself out the door. McParlan watched her go down the street and smiled despite himself when she turned around and looked back, checking to see if he was still standing there. Elijah Harpe’s voice ruined the moment. “Hey, Marshal?”
“What?”
“Can I see that picture?”
“Why?”
“I just want to.”
“No.”
“How old’s the little girl?” Harpe said. “Is she young? Is she pretty?”
McParlan ignored Harpe’s thick snorts of laughter as he kicked his feet up on the Sheriff’s desk and laid his head back. “I get a contented feeling when I think about you spending the rest of your miserable life on a penal colony, boy. I really do.”
The heater in the basement made an unstoppable clanking noise that sounded like a freight train running through Anna’s office basement. Anna had taken the contraption apart a dozen times. She changed the filters and tightened every bolt, but it still rattled enough to shake the operating room floorboards overhead.
She picked up a heavy wrench and smacked the units thick metal side. She proceeded to curse it out when she was interrupted by a polite cough coming from the stairwell. Harlan Wells said, “Miss Anna, you all right down here?”
She wiped a grease-smeared hand across her forehead and nodded. Harlan’s boy, Adam, was hunched over behind him, watching her. Anna dropped the wrench on the workbench and said, “I’m fine, it’s just that this dang heater hasn’t worked right since Doctor Halladay was here. I’m ready to rip it out and just buy a new one.”
“Listen, you’ve been real kind to us since we got here. Let my boy Adam take a look. He’s got some kind of special gift for fixing things. Do you mind?”
Anna looked at the young man, who seemed too obsessed with the movements of his fingers to comprehend keeping his mouth closed to stop drooling all over the place, let alone fix her heater. “I’m just going to get rid of it anyway, Mr. Wells. Let him have as much fun as he wants with it.”
Harlan patted Adam on the arm and said, “Go ahead, son. Fix that thing for Miss Anna.”
Adam looked back at his father with no obvious signs of recognition.
“Adam,” Harlan repeated, pointing at the heater and coaxing Adam to look at it. “Go over there and fix Miss Anna’s heater. It’s making an awful racket.” Harlan mimicked the heater’s BONG-BONG-BONG sound, and Adam said, “BONG-BONG-BONG.”
Harlan stuck his fingers in his ears and made an ugly face. “Make that sound stop. There you go. Good boy.”
Adam approached the heater and looked it over. He ran his fingers over the coiled wires and touched the pressure gauges attached to them; he laid his ear against its wide metal belly and listened.
The boy sifted through the tools on the work bench and started to disassemble the bolts connecting the water lines. The clanging stopped. Adam continued working and Harlan said, “He might look simple, but he ain’t.”
Marshal McParlan’s muffled voice hollered Anna’s name from outside and down the street. “Damn,” Anna said. “I was supposed to go watch the prisoner for a spell. I’ll be back, Mr. Wells.”
“I can go,” Harlan said. “Adam will be fine here. I promise he won’t blow up your office. You go get freshened up. Jem should be back by nightfall, and you’ll want to wash that grease off your face and make yourself all pretty.”
Anna put her hands on her hips. “Just what does that mean?”
“It means I’m an old fart who’s been around long enough to know what it means when a woman can’t take two steps without bumping into something and spends a long time looking through the security gate. She’s waiting for her man to come home.” Harlan tipped his hat and smiled at her before turning to go up the steps.
There was dust on the road outside of the office, kicked up by passing carriages, and Harlan covered his face with his neckerchief before he crossed. Jimmy McParlan was leaning on the handrail, watching the older man limp out of the way of an oncoming carriage. “How’s that forehead, Mr. Wells?”
Harlan lifted his cap to show the Marshal the line of stitches that ran under his hairline like railroad tracks and said, “At first, I was afraid it was gonna ruin my modeling career, but Miss Anna told me scars are sexy.”
McParlan laughed and opened the door for Harlan. “This sum-bitch hasn’t moved in two days except to eat and use the toilet. I need to go scout this town’s layout and see if we can’t set up some sniper nests, or choke points, or something we can use to our advantage. We got us a fight coming, and if Jem don’t come back, we’re dead men.”
“Well, you go do what you need to and I’ll make sure Mr. Harpe stays put,” Harlan said.
“If he talks to you, ignore him. If he begs and pleads with you, ignore him. If he wants you to come close to listen to him, ignore him. I’ve seen prisoners throw a handful of their own filth at guards just for laughs. You follow me?”
“I do. I won’t go anywhere near him.”
“And most especially, if he does anything that remotely looks like he is trying to escape, pick up that pistol on the desk and shoot him. Can you do that?”
Harlan looked at the old pistol laying on the desk. “I will do my best.”
“Okay. Good.” McParlan took a deep breath and made sure he had Harlan’s full attention, “I hesitate to say this because it probably won’t happen, but maybe it’s one of those things that can still happen unless you say it might happen. At which point it won’t. Kind of like a reverse-jinx.”
“If you say so, Marshal.”
“If any hostiles show up to try and take this fool before I get back, you need to understand one thing. They might try to convince you that if you give them Elijah they will go away peacefully. That is a damn lie. They will do unspeakable things to every man, woman and child in this town just to send a message. If they show up, you take that pistol and kill as many as you can, but kill that son of a bitch first.”
Harlan watched the Marshal ease down the steps toward the road and looked back at the gun. He’d never fired one before. Harlan picked it up and stuck it in his belt, and when he turned around, he saw Elijah Harpe sitting up in his bunk, staring at him. Elijah smirked and laid back down on the bench, folding his hands under his head before closing his eyes to go back to sleep.
McParlan stuck his fingers in his ears and waited for the high-pitched whining to cease. He walked past the mining site’s entrance toward the column of massive machines all gathered around a massive crater. They were larger than buildings and shot white hot laser beams into the quarry in bursts that shook the ground and blew gusts of rock dust into the air. The Marshal tapped one of the workers on the shoulder and asked to speak to someone in charge and was directed toward a young man holding a clipboard.
McParlan walked over to him and touched the badge on his dusty coat, “Marshal James McParlan of the PNDA. Who’re you?”
“Bartholomew Masters, but you can call me Bart.” When he stuck out his hand to shake McParlan’s, his fingers were tattooed black and tipped with cracked fingernails that would never heal. His skin was colored grey from so many years spent down in the mines.