“Mean little redneck peckerwood,” Mildred spit. “Wish I’d got my blaster with me now.”
“Wish we’d got a single blaster between us,” J.B. replied. “One’d be a start.”
Ryan sat down and picked up Krysty’s limp hand. “Talk’s cheap, friends, and action costs. And time is passing us by. We got the rest of the dark hours. Then it’s done.”
Doc coughed in his sleep.
THE CONVERSATION kept following the same circle. There was no hope of Krysty being well enough to make a nocturnal run for it, so they all had to stay. But Doc was irrevocably doomed if he was still in Hopeville at noon tomorrow. Mildred had awakened him around nine, feeding him some oatmeal gruel that she’d gone and begged from one of the older women. She chafed his cold hands and legs, making him stand and move around, despite all of his protestations, keeping him walking around and around.
“By the Three Kennedys, madam!” he moaned. “To so torture a wretched, dying old man. You must certainly be kin to Tomas de Torquemada, accursed head of the hateful, hated Spanish Inquisition. Give me peace.”
Josiah Steele had returned the ebony cane to the sick man that evening, not realizing that it concealed a lethal blade of Toledo steel. Now Doc used the swordstick, leaning heavily on the silver lion’s-head handle as he built up his strength, the ferrule clicking on the floorboards.
Ryan bit his lip. Though the old man was much better than earlier, he still had the uncontrollable cough, and he was desperately frail.
“Doc?”
“Dear boy?”
“Let’s go through the plan one more time.”
Chapter Thirty
Ryan opened the door a crack, peering out into the first dim glow of the false dawn. A huddle of sec men stood by the dying embers of the main camp fire, while half a dozen others were patrolling the perimeter of the ville. A thin coil of gray white smoke rose lazily up between the branches of the enormous pines that lined Hopeville.
“Shit’s going to be hitting the fan any minute now,” he said. “Best all get up and ready.”
Dean yawned and sat up. Like the others, he’d remained fully dressed. “How’s Krysty, Dad?”
“No change. Slept quiet.”
She hadn’t yet recovered consciousness, though Mildred had kept checking her vital signs, finding both respiration and pulse were improving.
J.B. checked his wrist chron. “Doc’s been gone for just on eight hours. Should be time enough for him to hole up someplace. Fingers crossed.”
Three times during the night, Owsley had peeked in, checking that everyone was still there. Doc’s bed was farthest from the door, and they’d made up a realistic mount of blankets. Each time the sec man had left, convinced they were all there.
Mildred was busily washing her hands and face in a large blue-and-white china bowl, using a large tablet of dark brown soap. “Cold,” she said. “Went to take a leak—must have been around three—and there was a biting frost. It’s not going to help Doc with his cough and all.”
“Cough could be the least of his problems,” Ryan said. “Uh-oh. Here comes Wolfe and his sec men, taking their early-morning check.”
Mildred held up her fingers, crossed. “Good luck, Doc,” she said.
THE TRUSTY BLUE swallow’s-eye kerchief had been lifesavingly useful.
Doc’s mind was never one hundred percent sharp. Mildred, Ryan and J.B. had all tried to explain to him what was happening, what had happened and what was going to happen. But he’d ended up more confused than when they started talking at him.
There was to be a testing. He’d clued in to that. But he still didn’t quite understand what it would have involved and why his presence in the ville would be seriously bad news.
And Krysty was ill. She’d had some kind of a fight and she had won it. Doc understood that much. But it had made her very sick so she couldn’t travel.
What he had to do was get out of the ville without being seen or heard, make his way through the cloudy darkness and try to keep back along the trail to hide in the burned-out eatery, where the rest of them would join him when they could.