James Burke - Light of the World

Then he felt her stiffen under him and knew that something was terribly wrong. When he pushed himself up on his arms, her face was sweaty and white and disjointed with fear and surprise, her eyes fastened on someone standing directly behind him.

He looked over his shoulder and saw not one but three men silhouetted against the sky, all wearing gloves and plastic masks that were a bright metallic gray and gave the impression of a weeping specter with a downturned mouth and cheeks pooled with shadow. One of the men was holding a police baton, a lanyard looped around his wrist. He stepped forward as though on cue and swung it across Wyatt’s ear, putting his shoulder into it, snapping it like a baseball batter connecting with a fat pitch.

Wyatt suspected his eyes rolled but couldn’t be sure. The trees and mountains and sky suddenly reduced themselves to a pinpoint of light inside a sea of blackness, then the pinpoint disappeared, too. Wyatt fell sideways into the grass, naked except for his unsnapped cowboy shirt, a trickle of blood sliding down his neck.

When he woke, the shadow of his truck was in the same place where it had been when he was hit with the baton, but Bertha Phelps was gone. His hands were tied behind him with rope, and his wallet and its contents were scattered on the ground. He got on his knees and worked the rope under the bumper, then rose to a squat and strained against the rope to the point where he thought his molars would break. He took a breath and tried again, this time tearing the skin off his knuckles. Suddenly, he was free and standing erect, his head throbbing, his hands bleeding. He pulled on his underwear and Wranglers and searched for his Tony Lama boots and the six-inch bone-handled Solingen clasp knife he carried. They were not there. Neither was the money in his wallet.

Who were they? Some guys fresh out of the can, maybe wiped out on crystal? These days the jails were full of guys with no class, all rut and penis and shit for brains. Where was Bertha?

The wind changed and he heard her voice up the slope, deep in the trees, and he had no doubt what the three men were doing to her.

He opened the back of the camper shell. His 1892 lever-action Winchester lay on the floor, but the shells for it were at his house. He reached into a duffel bag where he kept his camping gear and removed an army-surplus entrenching tool. The blade was locked into the straight-out position of a shovel, the edges of the blade filed clean and sharp. His gaze swept across the hillside, then he ran to the left of where the men had probably entered the trees with Bertha, the hatched scar tissue on his back as white as snow.

The floor of the forest was soft with damp grass and seepage from a spring in the hillside. To his right, inside a widely spaced stand of ponderosa lit by a solitary band of sunlight, two men were holding Bertha on her back while the third man attempted to mount her. When she tried to cry out, one man scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and poured it into her mouth.

They were still wearing their masks and apparently had not heard him coming. When they heard his bare feet running across the forest floor, they twisted their heads toward him in unison, frozen in time, like men who’d thought they possessed total control of the environment only to discover they had just locked themselves in a box with the most dangerous man they had ever met.

Wyatt’s upper body was streaming sweat and stenciled with nests of veins when he struck the first blow, catching the man on top of Bertha across the back, slicing through his shirt, slinging blood through the air. He wielded the e-tool like a medieval battle-ax and didn’t aim his blows or plan his attack. The power of his swing and the level of energy and rage that went into each blow was devastating and similar in effect to a jackhammer deconstructing a plywood house. Oddly, there was little sound inside the grove of columnlike pines, other than the muffled grunts his adversaries made behind their masks whenever he hit them.

Bertha got to her feet, stumbling off balance down the hill, her backside covered with dirt and twigs and leaves and pine needles. Wyatt kicked a man in the groin and split his scalp when he doubled over, and was sure he broke a third man’s ribs when he stomped him on the ground.

There was blood on the trunks of the trees. Wyatt was revolving in a circle, hitting his assailants as many times as he could, inflicting as much bone damage as possible before their superiority in numbers took its toll. One man fell out of the fight and scrambled away on his hands and knees, then rose to his feet and began running, his mask off, his long blond hair tumbling from a bandana that had come loose on his head. That was the moment when Wyatt made a critical mistake. He took time to try to see the running man’s face and instead saw a hand with a rock in it swing from the corner of his vision. His eyebrow split against the bone, and he tumbled down the side of a ravine into a creek bed.

The man who had struck the blow followed Wyatt in his slide down to the water’s edge. He wore a painter’s cap pulled down tightly on his scalp and a long-sleeved black shirt and tan strap overalls. The hair on his chest resembled gold wires. Wyatt was standing in the creek, his feet freezing. He had another problem. Just before he went over the side of the ravine, he felt his ankle fold under him, like a thick tuber bent back on itself.

The man in the painter’s hat opened Wyatt’s six-inch clasp knife and held it out from his body, blade up. “I’m gonna cut off your sack, Jack,” he said, his voice echoing inside his mask.

Wyatt had dropped the e-tool at the top of the ravine. He picked up part of a cottonwood limb from the rocks. It felt soggy and cold and foolish in his hands, the leaves dripping into the stream.

Long ago, on the yard, Wyatt had learned that real badasses didn’t talk. Nor did they shave their heads and wear tats from the wrist to the armpit. Nor did they mob up with the Aryan Brotherhood. Genuine badasses curled 150 pounds, picked up five hundred on their shoulders, and did fifty push-ups while another guy sat on their backs. Their bodies radiated lethality the way hog shit radiated stink. As an old con in Huntsville once told him, silence was your greatest strength. It forced your enemies into the theater of the mind, where their fears ate them alive.

“Then we’re gonna finish our date with your gash,” the man in overalls said.

Wyatt didn’t move. He could hear the water coursing around his feet and ankles and the cuffs of his jeans, the canopy swaying high above the ravine.

“Looks like you might have broke your ankle,” the man in tan overalls said.

Had he heard the voice behind that mask before? He couldn’t be sure. It was distorted, as though rising from the bottom of a stone well. Why wasn’t the man carrying a piece?

“Maybe we’ll call it a draw,” the man said. “Maybe you learned your lesson.”

Lesson about what? Wyatt thought.

“You got nothing to say?”

He blinked inside the mask. He’s lost his guts. He’s fixing to step backward.

“Count your blessings, Tex,” the man said. “We’re going to allow you to walk out of here. The broad got off easy, too. If you ask me, she majored in ugly.”

When the man in strap overalls stepped backward, Wyatt whipped the cottonwood limb down on his forearm, knocking the knife from his hand onto the rocks. He swung again and missed, his ankle folding under him, a sickening pain traveling upward into his genitals and stomach. He threw himself forward and grabbed the man’s legs and tried to pull him down but lost his purchase in the stream and was barely able to hang on to the man’s right wrist.