Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

He was being kicked now. All his fear had become a bright ball of fire, and now it was diminishing in its brightness, the light was going gray, going out. His face was wet. He had blood in his eyes.

He understood what was happening. Babe had yelled at him and swatted his head when he played a familiar handful of notes on the piano. And then Babe had broken his hands. But when the music had ended, the pain ended, too. And now he began to hum the notes that had played all the while Cass was dying.

This infuriated his assailant and the blows were heavier and faster, more vicious.

A strange intimacy, this.

And now Ira reached out to his attacker with the rest of the music. He had learned the entire song, and he crooned it now, his voice becoming horn and flute in an accompaniment to pain, a musical score for violence.

And when his song ended, and he lay quiet, not moving anymore, the violence stopped, just as Babe had stopped. Ira had learned his lesson well.

Even with his eyes shut, Riker recognized the trappings of the Owltown bar where he had spent some time as a guest of the New Church, boozing with the faithful. He could feel the rough wood under his hands and his face. The night before last, he had listened to the same bad music on the jukebox. Now the song was slightly muffled, and he knew there was a door between his prone body and the outer room. The stale smells of beer and sweat were not muted at all. He kept his eyes closed while he counted the voices in the air – three men.

“Wake up, Sunshine.” This greeting was punctuated by the nudge of a boot in his rib cage.

Riker opened his eyes and focussed on the only window and a patch of dusky sky. He had been unconscious for at least five hours. This enforced rest was not such a bad trade for the small ache on the side of his head.

Two men sat at a small square table. Ray Laurie was standing over his body and cracking the seal on a bottle. “Mr. Riker needs a drink – a lot of drinks.” He filled a shot glass with whiskey from the bottle as he spoke to the man with the rifle. And now Riker noticed his own.38 automatic in the hand of the second man. “Now don’t let him nurse his shots. This shouldn’t take all night.”

Ray leaned down and handed the glass to Riker. “Just drink it.”

“Sure, why not?” Riker pulled himself up to a sitting position and drank from the glass. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” And he meant that.

He looked around at his companions and smiled. “You know, this was always my big dream, being forced to drink good whiskey at gunpoint.”

They all smiled back – no hard feelings here, no animosity whatever. He recognized the two men at the table. He had spent some time drinking with them on his last excursion to Owltown.

Ray Laurie was lining up the bottles on the table. “Just keep pouring till the job is done. ‘Night, Riker.”

When the door had closed on Ray, one of the remaining guards lifted the rifle barrel slightly. “Drink up, friend.”

“That’s a lot of liquor.” Riker admired the labels, all beyond his means. What was served out front was watered-down swill, and he guessed these homeboys had never seen the undiluted article in this bar. The collection of bottles on the table must be Malcolm’s private stock. “I don’t think anybody’d notice that I wasn’t drinking alone.”

The two men looked at one another, and then at the virgin bottles. “Go ahead,” said Riker, pretending not to see the rifle barrel as he climbed into a chair at the table. “Would I rat on you guys?”

He slugged back the rest of the whiskey and threw the empty glass across the room. Suddenly a rifle and a gun were pointing his way, aiming at his head. Overlooking this blatant rudeness, Riker grabbed up the open bottle. “Let’s get down to some serious drinking, boys.” He put the bottle to his lips and tilted it back. Then he passed it to the man on his right, the one who was holding on to his.38.

The man accepted the bottle from force of habit, but now he looked to his friend across the table for further instruction.

The man with the rifle shrugged and said, “What the hell.” And then it became a warmer, friendlier group drunk.

As the bottle was passed around the table, Riker wondered if these men knew they were dealing with a full-blown alcoholic, a professional drinker. He assessed the two men as lesser artists. After they had demolished two bottles, Riker began to slur his words, and he dribbled liquor from the corners of his mouth. He considered falling out of his chair, but dismissed the idea as overacting.

Mallory’s shoulder was stiff and sore as she raised herself to lift the shade of the bedside window. The sun had gone down and all the plants she could see were the mute green of the twilight hour.

She had lost a day, a whole damn day. How could that be?

The yellow cat was sitting at the edge of the bed, hissing. Mallory was slow to grab her pillow, giving away her intentions. The cat emitted a low growl. She tossed her pillow at the animal, missing it by a good two feet.

Not possible! How could she have missed such an easy target?

And now the cat came stealing back, perhaps sensing weakness in a slow reaction time, a foggy brain at work, and best of all, a bad aim.

Mallory threw back the covers with the certain knowledge that she had been drugged and that her next target would be Augusta.

She had pulled her jeans over the nightshirt before the cat crawled out from under the mangled sheets.

She found Augusta in the kitchen, stacking plates and bowls in the dishwasher. Charles sat at the table, poring over a sketchbook, his empty plate pushed to one side.

“Well, hello,” he said.

But Mallory only had eyes for Augusta. She glared at the old woman, the herb queen, her personal enemy of the hour. She had already forgotten how much she hated the cat.

“Well, my, don’t you look rested,” said Augusta, well armored against glares of all kinds.

The message in Mallory’s eyes was unmistakable. I’ll get you for that.

Unimpressed, Augusta turned back to the more pressing business of stirring a large pot on the stove. “Now you go sit down and I’ll heat up your dinner.”

Mallory was thinking it might be a comfort to break something – or someone. She looked at Charles, but he had done nothing to make her angry. She pulled up a chair at the table. “Where’s Riker?”

“Holding down the fort at the sheriff’s office,” said Charles. “The sheriff and the deputy are taking Jimmy Simms to New Orleans.”

“That’s smart,” she said. “But what are you doing here? Why is Riker by himself?”

Charles shrugged. “He told me to leave. I think he wanted to get caught up on his sleep. He thought I might be more useful here.”

“Doing what?”

Charles had no answer for that, but she could guess that this was a baby-sitting detail. And she knew Riker was not sleeping. If he had been planning to close his eyes even for an hour, he would have kept Charles around to wake him in case of trouble.

Augusta put a bowl of aromatic rice and meat on the table in front of her. Mallory looked down at it with deep suspicion.

“Did you want me to taste it first?” Augusta laughed, as she sat down to join them. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the table and grinned very wide, the better to frustrate the younger woman.

Mallory ignored her and looked out the window. Not dark enough yet to give her cover. “I want the car keys.”

“The car isn’t here,” said Charles. “Riker told me to park it outside of Betty’s and leave by her back door. Thought it would be best if no one followed me back here.”

That didn’t sound like Riker. He was too laid back to be that neurotic about security. “So there was a leak?”