James Burke - Heartwood

"This is gonna be quite a rodeo," he said.

"Johnny! Tillman's got the kids on the phone! Get the fuck up here!" a third man hissed down the staircase.

Johnny Krause mounted the steps three at a time. I prised the tongue of the lock back against the spring and scraped the door back on the cement and stepped inside the cellar.

Temple twisted her head and stared at me. Upstairs I could hear Krause talking into a phone.

"That's right. Captain McDonough's the name… No, Ms. Carrol will probably be all right, but somebody has to watch her father. Bring Ms. Ramirez with you. I need to ask her about this car of hers that's out back," he said.

I set down the ball peen hammer on the chair and began sawing through the electrical cord that was wrapped around Temple's wrists. Above me the heavy shoes of the intruders creaked on the planks in the floor. Temple's eyes were inches from mine, bulging in the sockets, charged with alarm, then I realized she was not looking at me but at something over my shoulder.

A behemoth of a man in dark blue overalls stood at the head of the landing, his back to us, his huge buttocks stretching across the doorway. Then he turned to go down the stairs.

I picked up the hammer from the chair and stepped behind the furnace. The insulation on the cord around Temple's wrists was frayed, the bronze wire exposed.

Each plank in the stairs groaned under the massive weight of the man in overalls. His head was auraed with a wild mane of black hair, his neck festooned with gold chains. He was eating a cheese sandwich and his thick fingers sank deeply into the bread and left black marks on it.

He stood in front of Temple, chewing, his eyes roving over her face.

"Hi, girlie," he said.

I swung the hammer into the back of his head and saw the skin split like gray leather inside his hair. He doubled over, his sandwich bread clotting in his throat. An unformed cry hung on his lips, as though he had stepped on a sharp stone.

Then he straightened up and looked at me, his face creasing with both bewilderment and rage. A bright stream of blood dripped from his hair.

I hit him again, this time above the ear. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he struck the cement with his knees, falling sideways into the shadows. My hands were shaking when I sawed through the electrical cord on Temple's wrists.

She pulled the tape off her mouth, her breath trembling as she drew air into her lungs. I put my arm in hers and pointed toward the cellar door.

We walked out of the cone of electric light by the furnace, back into the shadows, the door yawning open in front of us, the freedom of the night only seconds away.

Then I heard someone in the driveway, his feet pausing, the gravel scraping under the soles of his shoes. A flashlight beam bounced inside the storm doors I had opened, welling out in a pool on the cement steps that were stenciled with my boot prints.

The man in the driveway eased a foot down on the first step, then removed it and tried to angle the light into the cellar without getting any closer to the door.

I turned the unconscious man on his back and felt his pockets, then inside the bib of his overalls. My hand closed around the butt of a Ruger. 22 automatic.

I moved quickly past Temple through the side door and was suddenly standing below the man with the flashlight. Hanging from his right hand was a chrome-plated. 45 automatic. His mouth dropped open.

I aimed the Ruger at his throat and clicked off the safety, although I had no way of knowing if a round was in the chamber.

"Throw it away, bud! Do it now!" I said.

He froze, his hand squeezed tightly on the grips of the. 45. He had a small, round, tight face and enormous blue tattoos that covered the insides of his arms.

"You can live! Throw it away and run!" I said.

I saw the moment gather in his eyes, the big question that he had always asked himself-Was he really a coward, as he had always secretly feared? Was he willing to risk it all and glide out over the Abyss, with nothing to sustain him except the residue of the last injection he had put in his veins?

He swallowed, the pistol rising upward as though it were a balloon detached from his hand. Then suddenly he gagged in his throat, his face seemed to dissolve, and he flung the. 45 into the flower bed and ran toward the road.

I let out my breath and wiped the moisture from my eyes on my shirtsleeve.

Temple came out of the cellar behind me. The inside of the house was quiet, except for the exhaust of the air conditioner and the sounds of the television set. The pecan tree in the backyard puffed with wind, its leaves rising like birds against the moon. I pressed my hand between Temple's shoulder blades and tried to move her toward the road, then felt her stiffen.

" No… My father," she said silently with her lips.

But Johnny Krause preempted any more decisions that we may have been forced to make. He came off the back porch, letting the screen slam behind him.

"Where's Tillman at, Skeet?" he said into the darkness.

We stared into each other's face.

He fired with his. 25 automatic, the sparks flying into the darkness. The rounds made a dry, popping sound, like Chinese firecrackers. At least two of them hit the windshield of the Avalon and one ricocheted off the curved front of Beau's trailer.

At almost the same time, I raised the Ruger with both hands, my arms stretched out in front of me, and squeezed the trigger. The first round slapped into wood somewhere inside the welding shed, but when I let off the second round I saw his left arm jump as though it had been stung by a wasp.

Then he bolted through the backyard, over a fence and an irrigation ditch, and was running hard through a field toward the river.

"You all right, Temple?" I said.

"My father's tied up in the bedroom. I have to go," she said.

"Are you all right?"

The whites of her eyes were pink with broken veins. Her face contained a level of anger and injury and violation I had never seen in it before, like water-stained paper held against a hot light. She went into the house and did not answer my question.

I cleared the jammed shell from the Ruger and backed Beau out of his trailer and lifted a coil of polyrope off a hook on the wall. I swung up on the saddle and hung the polyrope on the pommel and leaned forward in the stirrups. Beau crossed the yard and irrigation ditch in seconds, then I popped him once in the rump and felt his whole body surge under me.

Beau was beautiful when I let him run. His muscles rippled like water, his stride never faltering. The thudding of his hooves in the field, the rhythmic exhalation of his breath, his absolute confidence in our mutual purpose, were like sympathetic creations of sound and power and movement outside of time. Lightning trembled inside storm clouds that stretched like a black lid on a kettle from one horizon to the other. But electricity or wind or mud and blowing newspaper or desiccated poppy husks rattling in a field never affected Beau, as they did most horses. Instead, he seemed to draw courage from danger, and his loyalty to me never wavered.

Up ahead I could see Johnny Krause running, his face twisted back toward us.

Beau and I went across a ditch and up a slope toward a bend in the river where three cottonwoods grew on the bluff. I widened the loop in the end of the polyrope, doubling back part of the rope in my right hand, and whipped it in a circle over my head.

Johnny Krause turned and fired once with his automatic, but Beau never flinched. I flung the loop at Krause's head and saw it take on his neck and the top of one shoulder. I leaned back in the saddle and wound the rope around the pommel and felt the loop bind around Krause's throat. Then I turned Beau and brought my boot heels into his ribs.