“You reckon? Could go and do it again. Stand a mite closer to the shittin’ razor.”
“Let it lie,” Ryan said. “Time we was hitting the road into town.”
THEY STOPPED the first night at a dismal rooming house set back off the trail along an unmarked side road. Ryan would have easily walked past it if Paddy hadn’t grabbed at his arm. “Up here,” he said.
It looked as if it had once been the biggest of a complex of vacation cottages, perched on the side of a small lake. Ryan guessed the water might once have been crystal clear, filled with leaping rainbow trout. Now a thick layer of green algae covered it like a winter blanket, and there was little sign of any lifeexcept for a sullen, coiling movement near the center that looked like a large reptile of some kind.
The rooming house was run by a couple of deaf-mutes, in their middle twenties. The wife took the greasy handful of coins that Paddy laboriously counted out from a tattered wallet and indicated room 5, at the top of the stairs.
There were two narrow beds there, each with an undersheet and three threadbare blankets. The chamber itself was fairly clean, with scrubbed pine flooring.
The window looked across the contaminated lake, and there were two pictures on the walls. One was a pallid watercolor of a small church set against the background of what Ryan recognized as the Tetons. The other picture was much older, in dark oils, showing a Spanish duenna riding a high-spirited stallion in front of a Moorish mansion. The caption said it was the Dona Maria Elena Cantrell riding Firestart in front of the ranch of her father.
“Mighty pretty slut,” Paddy said, seeing Ryan admiring the painting.
“Not sure that slut’s the right word for someone like that, Paddy. Little more classy.”
The old man shrugged. “You say so. See them three shitters at the table down the stairs?”
“Sure.” Ryan hadn’t just seen them. He’d weighed them up and checked out what weapons they were carrying. Sheer habit. He put them down as hired hands, the kind that wouldn’t argue too much about what kind of work they got paid for.
“Playing cards.”
Ryan nodded. The journey had tired him more than he’d expected, and the bed looked amazingly inviting.
The old man grinned, showing the mix of rotten and missing teeth, like peering into a long-lost graveyard. “Figure go and show the hick fuckers how to play some serious poker.”
“Take it easy, Paddy,” Ryan warned. “Three of them and one of you. Didn’t look like good losers to me.”
The old man cackled and slapped him on the shoulder. Reaching inside his shirt, he showed Ryan a slim-bladed cutthroat razor. “Slice them shitters thin and raw if they fuck with me,” he said boastfully. “Young blood spills easy, Ryan. Anyways, I get trouble, I’ll call and you can come runnin’.”
Ryan nodded. “Sure. Just take it careful.”
The door closed behind the eager Paddy Maxwell, and Ryan lowered himself onto the bed, sighing at the sensation of ease, resting his head on his hands, closing his eye.
Sleeping.
HE WASN’T TOTALLY SURE what had awakened him. It seemed as though there’d been a shout or a disturbance from somewhere else in the rooming house, down the stairs in the room beneath him. But now there was only late-afternoon stillness.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, ready to get up, when he caught the sound of feet moving slowly along the corridor toward him.
One man, alone.
“Paddy!” he called, but there was no answer. Ryan felt the familiar prickling at his nape. There was something wrong, but he couldn’t quite turn his mind to what it was. There hadn’t been any shooting. He was certain of that.
The steps were much closer, slurring and scuffing, as if it were too much trouble for the man to walk properly.
Ryan stood, glancing sideways out the window, seeing from the light and the shadows that he’d been sleeping for something between half and three-quarters of an hour.
The doorknob started to turn slowly, rattling as if the person were having trouble gripping it properly.