Page 98 of Ransom
I was going to get this rope off, find Ransom Lanza, and tell him I loved him while the man who built this gallows bled out at his feet.
We came down offthe ridge in the last of the light, and Bonney sat below us in its lot with the floodlights already on.
The whole place looked like a postcard somebody had drawn from memory: the marquee, the neon Billy, the fake-front buildings along the back of the arena. A new structure sat in the yard past the gift shop where the overflow parking used to be, raw pine in the floodlight, and even from a quarter mile out I knew the shape of it.
It was a gallows. Six feet of drop, by the look, and it was a real one, not the stunt rig they used inside the arena. Hell of a man, Rex, putting that kind of effort into a weekday.
Winston was on it, hands behind his back, rope around his neck, feet on the trap.
I sucked in a slow breath through my teeth. The breath caught on something high in my chest and stayed there.
Galahad nosed the back of my neck and snapped at the air.
I pushed him away. "Yeah, I know. I'm working on it." Then I turned to Fenix and said, "Hold the wash."
Fenix nodded. He turned and rode his white mare into the cut without a word. Linc went with him. They dropped down out of the floodlight glow into the dark and out of sight. The horses would be there when we came back for them. If we didn't come back, Fenix would walk them home.
That was the deal.
Coyote rode up beside me. His eyes went to the sign over the Bonney gate, Bonney Ranch in painted letters under a longhorn skull, and from there to the water tower past the gift shop with BONNEY across the tank in white.
"I'll take the tower," he said and slid down to hand me the reins. He walked off, disappearing into the scrub.
I gave the paint's reins to Mateo.
"Hold them till I'm at the back fence," I said. "Then come up on the south corner of the gift shop. Linc will work the north. You're shooting roof first. Anybody on a roof, anybody on the gallows platform, anybody you can put down before they get a shot off at the yard."
Mateo nodded. "Got it."
I looked over my shoulder at him. "You good with this?"
His jaw clenched, and he nodded once. "I'm with you, boss."
"Even after what Rafe said?"
A short silence before he let out a breath. "He'll come around. Pae Saco is your home, Ransom. He knows that. I know it. That hasn't changed."
"We'll see about that."
I rode Galahad down the cut to the back fence behind the stock pens, where I tied him off in the deep brush where the floodlight didn't reach. I put my hand on his neck, and he leaned into it like a dog.
"I'm coming back," I said, low enough only he heard it. "Don't you dare break my heart, you hear me?"
He blew out and chewed his bit.
I climbed over the fence.
The yard was the parking lot, or it had been. Someone had hauled the tables and chairs out from inside. They sat in a half-circle facing the gallows, checkered cloths on. Pitchers of water were set out on each one.
A row of folding chairs sat empty in the front. Tonight's audience was twelve men in tactical vests with carbines and a man in a white suit standing on the dirt at the foot of the gallows with a lavalier mic clipped to his collar.
Rex was waiting for me.
I came around the back of the gift shop with my pistol drawn and stopped at the edge of the floodlight.
Two on the gift shop roof. Two flanked the gallows platform on the dirt. Two stood at the doors of the main building behind. One on each side of the gate. Four spread along the perimeter of the yard between the chairs. The man with the rope sat on the platform behind Winston. Rex on the dirt. Twelve, plus Rex, plus the man on the platform.
Winston's hands were behind his back. From this angle his hands worked, small, slow, where Rex couldn't see.Good boy.The new break in his nose had gone purple already. Blood had dried under his chin, and a fresh line of it ran down from the corner of his mouth into his collar where his lip had split open.
