“Bastard!” he was yelling, “you’re out of your mind. Let me alone!”
Now she could make out two figures in the middle distance. Earl, his paunchy torso spattered and streaked with mud, was on his knees in among the soap weed and the scrub. Gyer stood over him, his hands on Earl’s head, pressing it down toward the earth.
“Admit your crime, sinner!”
“Damn you, no!”
“You came to destroy my crusade. Admit it! Admit it!”
“Go to hell!”
“Confess your complicity, or so help me I’ll break every bone in your body!”
Earl fought to be free of Gyer, but the evangelist was easily the stronger of the two men.
“Pray!” he said, pressing Earl’s face into the mud. “Pray!”
“Go fuck yourself,” Earl shouted back.
Gyer dragged Earl’s head up by the hair, his other hand raised to deliver a blow to the upturned face. But before he could strike, Laura May entered the fray, taking three or four steps through the dirt toward them, the .38 held in her quaking hands.
“Get away from him,” she demanded.
Sadie calmly noted that the woman’s aim was not all it could be. Even in clear weather she was probably no sharpshooter. But here, under stress, in such a downpour, who but the most experienced marksman could guarantee the outcome? Gyer turned and looked at Laura May. He showed not a flicker of apprehension. He’s made the same calculation I’ve just made, Sadie thought. He knows damn well the odds are against him getting harmed.
“The whore!” Gyer announced, turning his eyes heavenward. “Do you see her, Lord? See her shame, her depravity? Mark her! She is one of the court of Babylon!”
Laura May didn’t quite comprehend the details, but the general thrust of Gyer’s outburst was perfectly clear. “I’m no whore!” she yelled back, the .38 almost leaping in her hand as if eager to be fired. “Don’t you dare call me a whore!”
“Please, Laura May…” Earl said, wrestling with Gyer to get a look at the woman, “. . . get out of here. He’s lost his mind.”
She ignored the imperative.
“If you don’t let go of him she said, pointing the gun at the man in black.
“Yes?” Gyer taunted her. “What will you do, whore?”
“I’ll shoot! I will! I’ll shoot.”
OVER on the other side of the office building Virginia spotted one of the pill bottles Gyer had thrown out into the mud. She stooped to pick it up and then thought better of the idea. She didn’t need pills any more, did she? She’d spoken to a dead man. Her very touch had made Buck Durning visible to her. What a skill that was! Her visions were real, and always had been; more true than all the secondhand revelations her pitiful husband could spout. What could pills do but befuddle this newfound talent? Let them lie.
A number of guests had now donned jackets and emerged from their rooms to see what the commotion was all about.
“Has there been an accident?” a woman called to Virginia. As the words left her lips a shot sounded.
“John,” Virginia said.
Before the echoes of the shot had died she was making her way toward their source. She already pictured what she would find there: her husband laid flat on the ground; the triumphant assassin taking to his muddied heels. She picked up her pace, a prayer coming as she ran. She prayed not that the scenario she had imagined was wrong, but rather that God would forgive her for willing it to be true.
The scene she found on the other side of the building confounded all her expectations. The evangelist was not dead. He was standing, untouched. It was Earl who lay flat on the miry ground beside him. Close by stood the woman who’d come with the ice water hours earlier. She had a gun in her hand. It still smoked. Even as Virginia’s eyes settled on Laura May a figure stepped through the rain and struck the weapon from the woman’s hand. It fell to the ground. Virginia followed the descent. Laura May looked startled. She clearly didn’t understand how she’d come to drop the gun. Virginia knew, however. She could see the phantom, albeit fleetingly, and she guessed its identity. This was surely Sadie Durning, she whose defiance had christened this establishment the Slaughterhouse of Love.