She rushed forward holding out the can of kerosene. He unscrewed the cap off the spout, found his whiskey bottle, poured it almost full. She stood by, watching in wonder. He said, “You better get to picking up those dishes or they’ll wonder why you’re so long.”
“Right,” she said.
Longarm finished with the kerosene, screwed the cap back on the spout, and then carefully hid his whiskey bottle now full of kerosene back behind the bed. Now came the part that was the most important.
He went up to Sarah, first glancing down the hallway to make sure no one was near. He said, “Honey, you’ve got to do something and you’ve got to bring it off. There’s no two ways about it.”
She looked up at him, frightened. She asked, “What?”
“You’ve got to get one of the three pistoleros to come back with you and they have to be wearing a gun.”
She said, “How do I do that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe tell them I tried to take the key away from you, or maybe that I ran into the hall. Tell them you’re afraid of me, tell them anything. Tell them that I want to see them, that I’ve got some information for them. Tell them anything, but get one of them to come with you.”
She swallowed. “Can you tell me what’s going to happen?”
“You saw that whiskey bottle?”
She nodded. He said, “If things go right, that whiskey bottle is going to get us a pistol, a revolver, a gun, a way out of here.”
She looked uncertain. “How is that going to happen?”
“I want you to do exactly what I tell you,” he said. “Don’t worry about what’s going to happen. If you know what’s going to happen, you’ll worry and you’ll give it away. You’ll be too nervous, so I won’t tell you.”
Her voice broke a little as she said, “All right.”
He said, “When you come in with my supper, come straight to the table. I will be on the other side of the bed. Let out a shriek, yell, drop the tray, and throw yourself to the floor as far away from the door as you can. Try to edge yourself under the bed.”
She looked at him in wonder. “Why would I want to do that?”
“You can’t ask me any questions. Just do it.”
Her eyes searched his face. “Well, if you say so, but what if more than one of them comes?”
“Try to just get one, but if more than one of them comes, I’ll have to handle it as it is. Just do what I tell you. You come in first, drop your tray at the table, dive under the bed. That’s all. And you yell, scream as loud as you can. Make as much commotion as you can.”
She let out a long shuddering sigh. She said, “Custis, I’m not used to this sort of thing. I’m not brave like you are. I’m not sure I can do it.”
He reached out and softly stroked her hair. He said, “Honey, it’s not that I’m brave. I’m desperate and I think you are, too. Now, you can do this. Don’t you worry. You only have to do that small part. If you get one of those pistoleros to that door, I’ll take over from there.”
She smiled bravely and said, “Yes, I’ll do my best. I don’t know what I’ll say, but I’ll get one of them here.”
He leaned down and kissed her. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back, hard. Then he let her go and she picked up the tray and walked to the door. She looked back at him, wistfully.
He said, “It won’t be long.”
She said with a faint smile, “I was sort of looking forward to tonight.”
“Tonight ain’t necessarily out. It just might be somewhere else.”
She pulled the door to behind her and locked it. He sat down on the bed. Now came the hardest part of all. The wait to see if she could successfully return with one of the pistoleros. If she couldn’t, then all of his planning would have been in vain.
It was about time to put the final touches on his bomb, if it could be called that. He got the whiskey bottle out and held it up. It was above the neck of the bottle with kerosene and the powder lay about half an inch thick at the bottom, though some of it was floating around near the top. He took the candle she had brought him and got his penknife out. The idea was to get the fuse inserted into the bottle and then plug it with a solid piece of wax and then drip more wax on that to seal it tight. He cut a piece about an inch long off the bottom of the candle with his pocketknife. He tried it in the mouth of the bottle, but it was too big. He carefully wittled it down, making it taper toward the end he was going to shove into the bottle. After several tries, he had it so the piece of wax would slide down snugly into the mouth of the bottle. After that, he took his knife and very carefully cut a small channel along the length of the candle cork. That was to accommodate the fuse. Being careful not to lose any of the ground-up match heads, he stuck the fuse down until it just touched the kerosene and began to wick up some of the flammable liquid. Then he took the candle stopper, positioning the little vee he’d cut into the wax over the fuse and shoved it down hard. If his plans went as they should, the wax should allow the fuse fire to pass through, igniting the kerosene, which would ignite the powder and explode the whole bottle. Slugs and brass casings and glass would fly every which way and there would be a lot of smoke, noise, and confusion.
That was if it worked.
He struck a match and lit the rest of the candle where the wick was sticking out. Holding it carefully away so as not to set the bomb off too soon, he began to drip the melted wax around the fuse hole and all around the sides where the candle stopper met with the glass of the bottle. He did it slowly and carefully, and when he was through he was certain that the bomb, at least, was airtight, which was necessary to create an explosion. He held it up to the light and looked at it carefully. It looked lethal enough with the eight lead slugs and the eight brass casings and the kerosene and the powder, but he hadn’t the slightest idea in the world if it would work. Maybe it would be nothing but a loud fizzle, but even if it just smoked a little, it might give him the chance, the brief instant he needed, to get his hands on a gun.
There was nothing more he could do. He walked over to the door and placed the bomb against the wall about a foot from the doorway entrance. The fuse hung down about two feet and, because the paper was stiff, it did not touch the floor but just drooped over slightly. The idea was that he was going to light the fuse and hope that it burned fast enough to catch whichever pistolero came in and explode before the man could see the danger. The problem was that he had no idea how fast the fuse was going to burn. It should burn very quickly. Of course, if it burned too quickly, it wouldn’t allow him to get to safety on the other side of the bed or Sarah to get to safety underneath the bed. But he would simply have to guess. He didn’t have another fuse to test and wasn’t likely to get one. It was the kind of experiment that would have to work on the first try.
Now time hung heavy on his hands. He paced about the room, looked at himself in the mirror, thought about shaving, discarded the idea, put his hat on, looked in the mirror again, had a drink, and finally sat down on the bed with one of the two-week-old newspapers to see what had been happening in San Antonio.
It got to be four o’clock by his watch and then five, and finally, six. All he could think about was how intricate, how delicate, how very improbable his plan was. It depended on too many things that were out of his control. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He thought that maybe the best thing to do would be to rush whoever was at the door—throw a picture at him or whatever. Anything but this infernal weapon that he had created in an empty whiskey bottle.
But then it was probably all for naught anyway. Most likely Sarah wouldn’t succeed in getting one of the pistoleros to come back with her. If she complained he was trying to get the keys away from her, they would probably just laugh. It wouldn’t make any difference to them if he got out of his particular cell. He wouldn’t make it through the hall door anyway.