“Best get shelter,” he said to himself.
Glancing around through the gloomy drizzle, he could see that some of the side streets of the little ville seemed to be untouched by fire.
Movement caught his eye, and he saw what looked like a dozen or more tiny mice scurrying across from one building to another, their little legs powering through the spray.
Ahead of him he could make out a row of wooden shacks, some of them already tumbled, built against a steep slope that held some stunted pines. He thought he could see the remnants of an ancient mine a little higher up the hillside, but it was getting too dark to be sure.
Ryan picked his way through the muddy puddles, trying to decide which of the cottages looked the most solid. Four or five of them seemed to have been inhabited, with unbroken glass in windows, curtains and decent front doors. One had a few scrubby rosebushes tangled around a white picket fence, and a hand-painted nameplate on the gate. Pong-de-rosa, it was called.
Ryan took a last look around the dead township, checking that he wasn’t being watched, then walked up the narrow path and pushed at the front door. After a momentary resistance, it gave, and he stepped into a dark hall.
There wasn’t the usual dead, flat smell of a long-empty building and he hesitated. Food had been cooked within the last day or so, and he could smell lamp oil.
The woman’s voice from the shadows wasn’t all that much of a shock.
“You got three seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t blast your cock clean out your ass.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A note of raw panic ran through the woman’s voice like a hacksaw through a sheet of plate glass.
She was crouched in the doorway of what Ryan guessed was likely the kitchen. The voice came from low down. Just as she spoke, his keen hearing had caught the click of a shotgun hammer being thumbed back. So it probably wasn’t any kind of a bluff.
“Could use ten seconds, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Three’s not enough.”
“Three’s plenty if you’re the murdering bastard that I take you for. Speak out, quick. I can see you silhouetted against the front door real good. Not going to miss with my 12-gauge, old Betsy here.”
“Sure you’re not. Name’s Ryan Cawdor. Come from out in the Shens. On my way to Fairplay to meet up with my wife and some friends. Came across a party that had been attacked on the trail. Said it was a gang of norms and stickies. Seen plenty of their work. They fire the ville?”
“Course they did, stupe! Hadn’t been for the heaviest damned rain I’ve known in fifty years of living in Alma that put out the flames.”
“Most folks get away?”
“Yeah.” The tension eased just a little from her voice. Now that his eye was becoming accustomed to the semidarkness, Ryan could see her, kneeling on the floor, about fifteen feet in front of him.
“They been gone long? The killers?”
“Half a day. I’m not sure I believe your story, mister. You took a gamble coming in here.”
“Didn’t know anyone was left in the ville.”
“Still a gamble. You a gamblin’ man?”
“Best I know is not to hit seventeen when you bet against the dealer,” he replied.
There was no response, though he could see the woman had shuffled a little, as if she were uncomfortable.
Outside, he could hear the rain sweeping against the door, slicing into the narrow hall. He stood still, not wanting to make any move that might leave him on his back, staring at the ceiling, with a bellyful of buckshot.
“You still there, lady?” he asked.
“Yeah. I can’t see why you’d have come back on your own if you were one of those devils. They only go around in gangs.”
“Comes down to you believing me and letting me in. Or you don’t believe me and you gut shoot me and that’s the end of the line. Up to you. But it’s cold and wet waiting here.”
The woman stood, sighing, helping herself with a hand on the frame of the door. “Damned arthritis creeps up in rainy weather,” she said. “Best close the door, mister. What did you say your name was?”