The man went for his gun—too slow, too goddamn fuckingly cocksuckingly slow.
Come at me, man! Quickly! Fill your Christing hand!
Her own hands uncrossed and moved toward her weapons with sickening swiftness. The next moment her fingers had wrapped around her Colts—I should have fixed them in the holsters with Krazy Glue, she thought—the barrels coming up smoothly. The guns kicked as bullets leapt from their muzzles, wasping through the air and hitting the young man spang in the heart and head, flinging him backward before his pistol had even cleared his hips.
Minny swiveled, no longer fighting it, giving herself over to the devil in her bloodstream. Perfect holes snapped through the windows—pip! pip!—as bullets drilled through the glass and into the men outside, slugs slamming into their bulging eyes and coring through the obliging softness, then out the backs of their skulls in a gout of sticky pink.
By then the Sharpening was already retreating. Like a sneak thief, it came and did its filthy business and left without a trace.
The young man’s body had been blown clean out the door. His boots stuck straight up in the air. Something between a sob and a scream built in Minny’s throat.
Goddamn you. I’ve had enough. Goddamn you. Let me die.
The answer came in the wind curling between the dead man’s boots.
Suffer. Suffer as you have made me suffer…
She shouldered the door open, stumbling outside. The dead man’s skull shone in the moonlight, the scalp blown apart and a bubbly purple foam emitting from the brain with a pressurized gurgle. His wide-open eyes stared at the sky, the corneas gone milky in death.
…or you may come to me, child, the voice taunted. You still know the place, don’t you? We can face each other as deal makers do. Strike a bargain.
Her marrow went cold. She felt it that way exactly: the brown bone soup crystalizing into ice inside her bones, as cold as hoarfrost in a mountain pass.
Come to me, girl. Why play at this? Let us end these silly games.
She walked in the opposite direction of that voice—which was impossible, as it came from all points of the compass. It whispered inside her head in a voice she dared not name.
3
THE GARDENER
THE MAN the townsfolk knew as Gardener walked into the Glory with a Deathstalker in a glass jar.
The man had gone by other names in other places. Some had known him as English Bill (though his name was not William) or simply the Englishman. Others had known him as the Whispering Death. Still others had known him by no name at all—his presence had been nothing but a shadow darkening their periphery before their lights were snuffed out.
But the people of Old Ditch, a decaying boomtown on the border of California and Arizona, knew him as Gardener. If townsfolk insisted on a proper name—and sometimes they did, as folks in small towns can be suspicious of nameless people—he would answer to Elton, though this was no more his name than William was. The mail that arrived at his house was often addressed to other names, too, none of them his own.
But the people of Old Ditch knew him as Gardener. The fact that he was black helped in this regard—in the South, it was not uncommon for black men to be hailed by their jobs rather than their birth names. It might be Cook or Baker or, yes, Gardener. There was rarely any cruelty to it, despite the fact that it was dehumanizing. It was simply how things were done. Everyone accepted it, more or less. Even Gardener did, now. Years ago he would not have been so obliging—in fact, he might have cut your tongue out if you refused to call him by his Christian name, or whatever name he commanded.
Gardener had earned this name in the common way. He was a gardener. When he’d arrived in Old Ditch, the Rawlston Paperworks was going great guns; the surrounding woods were harvested, pulped, rolled out in sheets of clean white hundred-bond and shipped off to the ivory towers of academia, to Wall Street, to mom-and-pop shops around the country. The women married to the Paperworks executives hired him to tend their flower beds while they fanned themselves on their whitewashed porches and said, “Good work, boy, very good”—calling him boy despite the fact that he was often their elder. He tended the grounds at the Mission Church, making sure the marigolds and snapdragons were in full bloom from spring through early summer, and the orange glories and peonies on into the fall. Come the cooler months he’d sweep the church and do odd jobs for the pastor. It was a good and quiet existence… in the daylight hours, anyway.
The Glory, a bar at the end of Old Ditch’s straggle-ass main street, was deserted when Gardener stepped into it that day. It was not long past noon, an unseemly hour to be seen inside a drinking establishment. Many of the buildings lining Old Ditch’s main thoroughfare lay empty, their doors boarded over. The Paperworks had eaten the woods and shuttered its doors before moving on to another patch of unsullied wilderness, leaving the town to rot into itself.
Gardener limped to the bar and sat down under a poster for Camel unfiltered cigarettes; it featured an overweight police officer smoking against the door of his patrol car, the sun sparkling off his aviator sunglasses. Have a REAL cigarette—have a CAMEL. Gardener could see his own reflection in the fly-spotted mirror behind the bar. His hair, which he had once worn long and straight, was clipped close to his skull and flecked with gray. His skin was ashy dark, as it had been uncommonly warm of late and he washed with carbolic soap, which dried his skin. He set the glass jar with the Deathstalker on the bar.
“Whiskey,” he said.
The tender was a God-fearing man named Clayton Suggs. He had bought the bar and its stock a year ago for a pittance—it took no time at all to discover he had been rooked, but by then, the bar’s old owner was miles clear of Old Ditch and surely laughing like a bastard. Suggs’s only hope of financial gain would be to sell the place for its wood, but there was nobody to buy it, seeing as the Paperworks had fucked off and left.
“Bit early for the hard stuff, wouldn’t you say?” said Suggs.
“I haven’t touched a drop in fifteen years. But time makes liars of us all, Mr. Suggs.” Gardener’s words held a trace of the English accent he’d carried across the Atlantic many years ago. “You need not trifle yourself over it.”
Suggs frowned. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for blacks in his establishment—beggars can’t be choosers, and if the man had folding money, he was welcome to a stool. But he knew Gardener only slightly, having seen him hunched over in yards around town, and the man had never looked entirely healthy. It wasn’t just his pronounced limp, the way he dragged that one gimpy leg behind him like a curse. His body was skeletal inside his overalls, his wrists and ankles birdlike and queerly feminine. Suggs suspected his ill health was a product of those pansy British genes. Englishmen always appeared cadaverous to Suggs. And Gardener looked particularly bloodless at the moment, as if vampire bats had been at him. More than that, he appeared… haunted. His eyes sank far into his sockets, as if they had witnessed an event of such horror that they had retreated into his skull.