Yet Suggs had always sensed a strength in the man, too—dormant, but bubbling just under the surface. A wrath, Suggs suspected, even a dangerous malignancy of character that the man struggled to keep bottled up. Old Ditch was a harder place now, populated by men who’d snatch the pennies off a corpse’s eyes… but nobody ever laid a hand on Gardener. There was this gut instinct that if any man were to do so, that man might draw back a stump.
Suggs set the whiskey bottle on the bar. “I’ll put it within reach, champ, but I am for damn sure not pouring it.”
“Good man. I shall administer the dose personally. Cura te ipsum.”
“Whuh?” Suggs said.
“Physician, heal thyself.”
Gardener poured a heroic measure. Suggs made a mental note to charge him double for it. His eyes fell upon the Deathstalker. The scorpion was eight inches long and dark as midnight. Its claws clicked upon the glass jar.
Suggs said, “I can’t imagine why in hell you’d bring that in here.”
“Well.” Gardener nodded. “It is here now, as I have brought it.”
“And you’ll keep it in the damned jar, too,” Suggs said.
“Fifteen years,” Gardener said, speaking more to himself than to Suggs. “It’s a very long time to go without a drink. And my life has been much improved for it.”
“Let me take the bottle away, then. Let that improvement continue.”
Gardener gave Suggs a look. The spit dried up in Suggs’s mouth—something in his spirit fled from the dark holes that sat at the center of the black man’s eyes.
“I’d be obliged were you to find it in your heart to leave it, Mr. Suggs. It will be a balm to my wounded spirit.”
Gardener took a sip of whiskey. He winced.
“Tell me, Mr. Suggs. Perchance, did you use this swill to strip the old paint off your car?”
“Don’t have a car anymore,” Suggs said woodenly. “Bank took it.”
Gardener unscrewed the jar’s lid. He set the jar on its side. The scorpion crept over the rim and hesitated two inches from Gardener’s hand, which lay palm-down on the bar.
“What the hell’s got into you?” said Suggs.
“Have you ever seen the face of the devil?” Gardener asked quietly.
Quite suddenly, Suggs felt a strong urge to urinate. He no longer wanted to be in this place with this man.
“It is my judgment that people believe they have seen the devil.” Gardener drummed his fingers on the bar. The Deathstalker reared back, poised to strike. “They have seen the devil in the faces of wicked men, and at the sight of murdered women and children. But they have no inkling of the real devil and the horrors he can bring.”
Gardener’s voice had gone breathless and dreamy. His fingers tap-tapped…
The scorpion darted forward and jabbed its stinger in the back of his hand. If Gardener’s features twitched, Suggs did not notice it. The Deathstalker’s body flexed as it pumped in poison. Gardener picked up the whiskey glass with his other hand and drained it at a go.
“Mr. Suggs, the quality of your whiskey is poor, and so truly, I cannot tell you what is worse. Drinking this”—he held up the empty glass—“or enduring this.” He tapped the glass on the scorpion’s exoskeleton. It made a sound like champagne glasses clinking during a toast.
Gardener sloshed more whiskey into his glass, pouring with his free hand. The scorpion gripped his other hand in its pincers. It was beginning to draw blood.
“You have been envenomed,” Suggs said hoarsely.
Gardener closed his eyes. He raised the glass to his lips. The gutrot washed down his throat with a fiery itch. The scorpion’s stinger was embedded in his skin. The creature struggled to pull itself free but could not—Gardener’s flesh was swollen tight, trapping it.
A miscalculation evident in men just as it is in beasts, he reflected. The urge to kill can be so great that a creature overextends itself, and in so doing threatens its own life.
Gardener had served the citizenry of Old Ditch faithfully for many years. He had served it in clandestine ways, too. Four years ago, a pair of petty drifters and brothers named Horace and Eldred Bilks had raped a prostitute at the old Fairfax motel. They had been hell-raising around town a few days by then. Evidently the girl had made some offhand remark about Eldred Bilks’s harelip, about which he was sensitive. The younger and more sadistic of the two brothers, Eldred had lashed the woman to the hitch of his pickup and dragged her five hundred yards down a gravel road, busting her elbows and one kneecap. She was twenty-two and considered a looker before the incident.
Gardener had been planting pansies at a house a block or so from the Fairfax when the screams broke out. A few minutes later came the screech of tires as the brothers laid tracks. Next, an ambulance screamed past. What Gardener didn’t see, and knew he would not see, was a police car. Not anytime soon. The sheriff, a sniveling wretch named Gorse Ellson, had no taste for the kind of violence those brothers could bring. It’s just some whore, Ellson would tell himself. No use getting hurt over it.
Knowing this, Gardener fell to grim musings. The woman worshipped regularly at the Mission Church. Her soul was clean, if not her body.
Gardener walked to his small home and lifted a loose floorboard under his bed. Underneath were three pistols: two German Mausers in a beechwood box, plus a smaller Paterson model. He had arrived in Old Ditch with these and little else years ago. The sole tether to his old life. He would take them out to clean and oil them every year, only to rest them back beneath the boards. But that day he holstered one of the Mausers and hung the Paterson on a length of wire descending from his left armpit. He pulled on his felt coat and set off.
He did not own a car. But he was adept at hot-wiring them—a trick learned in the sad old, bad old days. He found an unlocked Dodge Dart behind the coin laundromat. Easy as pie, as the Yanks say.
That evening he found the Bilks brothers along the creek ten miles outside Old Ditch. Their car was parked at the end of a rutted wash under the sweeping limbs of an oak tree. Gardener waited until nightfall before creeping up on them. By the light of a harvest moon he could make out a body curled by a guttering fire. He tensed, reaching for his pistol—
He caught a noise in his blind spot—the clicking sound a rider makes to urge a stubborn horse forward. Gardener turned to spy Eldred Bilks sitting in the crotch of a tree with a revolver trained on his chest.
“Lookee, lookee,” he said. “If it isn’t Hopalong Nigger.”
Gardener cursed himself; as a younger man he would not have been so easily ambushed. The second brother awoke and joined his sibling. Their eyes shone with bright avidity, two cruel boys who had come across a crippled bird.
“I seen you around town,” said Horace, the more observant of the two. “Mowing lawns for nickels, huh?”
“I do that, yes,” Gardener said in his smooth British lilt, which took the brothers by surprise. “But I do not come to you under that guise.”
“What the hell—what guys?” said Eldred.
“Hush,” Horace told his brother. His gaze was sharper now. “What guise do we entertain you under, pray tell?”
“I come as a death angel, Horace Bilks. Yes,” he went on, seeing their startled looks, “I know your names. But they will be unattached to you soon enough. I’ve come to kill you, Horace. You and Eldred both.”
The Bilks brothers laughed… until something in Gardener’s eyes rendered their mirth stillborn. They thought they had been dealing with a middle-aged gimp. But it was dawning that they were in the presence of something else—something that had learned to hide its true face.