As it turns out, Orrin Lafferty's found himself two more accomplices since his warrant was issued, along with a covered wagon loaded with the ill-gotten proceeds of a streak of bank robberies in Kentucky. Hildy is decidedly unsettled at the sight of eight or so malefactors passing through the valley below.
"That many more for us," Schultz says lightly, though he's not without concern. There isn't the time to do the job properly, not with the law breathing down their necks. Nor does it sit well with him to hang back and let Django and Hildy do most of the shooting. He settles himself on the outcrop overlooking the valley, one hand on his rifle, the other wrapped around the spyglass.
Be careful, he almost says, or good luck, but superstition gets the better of him, and for once, he says nothing at all as they climb down the rocks, scrabbling for handholds and tree branches.
It's not mid-morning but the sun is already baking the rocks, settling over him like a stifling wool blanket and beading droplets of sweat on his neck and forehead. He takes off his jacket, spreading it over the bare branches of a tree above his head. It gives him little shade, and his shirt and vest are already soaked through.
He doesn't pray, hasn't since that spring night in Düsseldorf when he'd realized that if there was a God, He didn't care much for the likes of Schultz, but he wishes he had at least more to go on than the stone of dread in his stomach. Django is dwarfed where he crouches in the shadow of a peak, no more than a few feet between him and the sheer edge of the cliff below. Hildy is even smaller, barely a speck without the spyglass, and with it, a leaf held aloft before a swarm of angry hornets.
The caravan halts before her. They're too far away for him to hear the exchange, but he can imagine it; Hildy breathless and ragged, dressed in clothes better suited for a man, grubby, but there's only so far dust and dirt can tarnish a beauty such as she possesses. She's noticed; Lafferty, riding at the head of the convoy, circles as he tips his hat appreciatively. Schultz imagines whistles, taunts from the man. Perhaps she flirts back, more accustomed to surviving by her wits and her body than by her gun. Tilting the spyglass a little to his left, he can see the muscles in Django's arms tense, his finger inching into the trigger.
Schultz tells himself that he can wait. They both can.
She's light on her feet, running an appreciative hand across his horse's flank, twirls in an almost-dance, and Lafferty leers out so that he's practically nose-to-nose with her, and that's when the derringer pops out from inside the loose sleeve of Hildy's blouse and Lafferty's head jerks up backwards, blood spurting from his shattered eye socket.
Everything is chaos.
Hildy drops and rolls under the wagon, away from the guns that immediately turn on her and the frenzied limbs of Lafferty's riderless horse. Django takes down three of the men before any think to look up; having given his position away, he clamors down the mountain pass, firing his pistol as he goes, the return fire from Lafferty's gang gouging out chunks of rock and blasting holes in the wagon's canvas hood.
Schultz picks off the remaining men methodically, shielding Hildy and Django in a rain of bullets, his rifle spewing fire and scorching hot shell casings. The rebound kicks into his side, but he grits his teeth against the pain until none of the outlaws are moving, until Hildy crawls out from under the wagon and she and Django throw their arms around each other, blood branching in rivulets through the caked dust on their skin.
The ache, watching them together, has nothing to do with his wounds. He has no right to intrude on this; were it not for the warrant, he could slip away now and leave them to their bliss.
Still. He never claimed to be a saint. He takes his jacket from the tree and folds it neatly over one arm, slings the rifle over his shoulder and slowly, laboriously, makes his descent down to the valley below.
Schultz returns to their campsite a few hours later with the spoils of war: the wagon, shot-up but emptied of corpses, one of the packhorses, several bottles of whisky, bags of oats and sundry provisions, and an IOU from the marshal promising the $6000 bounty on Lafferty and his gang within the week. He loathes the idea of staying in one place for so long, but arguing the point might well have drawn more attention than not. Not to mention that even a crooked lawman might be unlikely to try to cheat a bounty hunter who, despite age and obvious infirmity, managed to bring down a gang of notorious outlaws without so much as a speck of blood on his impeccable suit.
The heat is unrelenting, the overhang of the canvas offering no respite from the sun's sweltering blaze and the buzz of flies over the dried bloodstains inside the wagon. Likely as not, the heat wave will deter most other travelers; it's not, he thinks, weather to murder in. All but the most dogged or desperate bounty hunters will be tempted, as he is, to find some quiet shaded place and wait out August's last onslaught.
They've camped by a stream, and he sees Django first, chest-deep in the middle of the water with the soggy remains of Calvin Candie's fine suit yards away from him, drying out on the rocks. Hildy's on the shore, unbuttoning her blood-stiffened blouse; as she turns towards him, it slips down one smooth brown shoulder. She glances down, gathering the fabric in one fist, not quite swift enough to preserve her modesty.
Schultz does her the courtesy of turning away, pretending to find the new packhorse tremendously interesting, and so he doesn't see that she's approached him.
"It go fine in town?"
He nods, still avoiding looking at her directly. From the periphery of his vision, he notices Django watching them both. "We'll have to wait some time for the money, but that's not unusual for a such a sizeable reward." There's the whisky in the back of the wagon, and that might serve as a distraction. She takes a drink from the bottle, one-handed, the other still clutching her blouse closed, and he watches the long line of her throat as she swallows.
"The water's nice," she says when she hands it back to him, and he drinks in nervous sips. Hard liquor has never been his preference, but he'll take any diversion he can get. With one hand free, she takes him by the wrist and walks him to the shore.
"Fräulein," he says, stiff and formal and her giggle is the sound of wind chimes.
"Doc," she drawls. "It's hotter 'n hell." Half-faced away from him, she releases her grip on her blouse, and it slides loose, past her shoulder blades, past the roadmap of scars carved into her back. "'Sides, Django and I both seen you in your altogether, an' you already seen the worst part of me."
It's as much of an invitation as he's ever going to get, and the whisky makes him braver. He peels off his vest and shirt in short order. She's in the water, thrashing her bloodied clothes in the stream, by the time he's unbuttoned his trousers and folded his things in a neat pile on the rocks. Feeling tremendously exposed, he wades in after her, the bottle clutched like a talisman in one hand. She laughs again and swims out to Django. Whispers something in his ear in the private language of husband and wife, then they both look up at him as if on cue, and she stretches out her hand and motions him closer.
Schultz stands in the stream, the current lapping at his bare skin, digging his toes into pebble and silt. Stunned, all but paralyzed at the prospect that he's permitted this. That they are all alive, beneath the blistering sun, and free. The water is cool and soothing against his scars, carrying the weight of his tired body as he slogs his way out towards them.
Django drains the rest of the whisky bottle and casts it at the shore. Turns to Schultz, and with a devilish smirk, says, "Took you long enough."
He kisses Hildy deeply, his mouth devouring hers, one arm circled around the small of her back. His other arm loops around Schultz, tugs him closer until he can feel the warmth of Django's side, the swell of Hildy's breasts tight against his chest. Django kisses him, his breath hot, lips bitter with whisky, and Hildy sucks and bites at his neck.
"This what you want?" Hildy asks, though he's not sure whether she's asking him or Django. "Both of us?"
No one answers, so they can still blame the whisky, the terror and relief of the gunfight, the searing heat. There are, Schultz thinks as he's caught up between the two sinewy, exquisite bodies, less elegant solutions than this one.
"We should talk about this," he mutters, because he's never quite learned when it's best to shut the hell up.
"Think there's better things to do than talk," Hildy says, splashing water at him. He rubs at the droplets sluicing down his face and splashes both of them back. Django smiles, not sardonic and guarded as he'd been down in Mississippi, but one of those rare, mercurial smiles he'd give in his first nights of untested freedom, when they'd built snowmen in the mountains and Schultz had told him half-remembered stories by the fire.
And then they're both holding him, and each other, and he's submerged in their embrace, long limbs twining together so that he's not sure where one begins and the other ends, whose hand traces the curve of his spine, whose fingers tease at his cock. As off-balance as he is, he tries to reciprocate, planting soft kisses across Hildy's collarbone, skirting his fingertips across the ridged skin of Django's back.
"You been so good to us," Django rumbles in his ear. "Don't even worry 'bout nothin'. We got ya."
He's struck with the sudden terror that it's an exchange to both of them, freedom for intimacy, payback for his near-fatal quirk of conscience. His life since coming to America has been a string of transactions; the closest thing he has to a friend someone he, however briefly, bought and owned. And then the man had gone and somehow opened his heart, not with the certainty of a key turning in a lock but with the violence of a sharp knife rending flesh.
He can't ask this to mean more than it is, drunken, clumsy fumbling between three colliding bodies, bent into each other the way the scraggly trees at the highest mountain peaks come to grow around stone. And still, he falls into them, held upright by the push and pull of the current, and lets them take him apart.
After, they lie together on the shore, Schultz cradled, his eyelids drooping shut, in Django's arms while Hildy, propped up on one elbow, twirls a long strand of his hair between her fingers.
"Prolly ain't right," Django says.
"Baby," Hildy reminds him, "we kill folks for a living. If we goin' to hell, it ain't cause of this."
"You trouble, girl."
"Says the man with a $3000 price on his head."
"We could move to Utah," Schultz says drowsily, "I've heard the Mormons practice comparable debauchery."
"There many bad folks there?" Hildy asks, just as Django's about to ask what debauchery means. Schultz shrugs. "But we good together. We good?"
"We are."
They blaze a crimson trail across Tennessee and Arkansas.
The stories start in the cotton fields and log cabins, passed on like maps to the North in nighttime whispers. There's a grey man on a black horse, and with him a tall black cowboy with an R burned onto his face. But it's the woman they speak of most—for it's the women who tell the stories—the fierce angel of death arisen to smite the rapists, the murderers and torturers and overseers. Of course someone scoffs—whoever heard of a black killing a white, let alone a black woman killing dozens of white men?—but the story survives the way hope does, a tiny flame poured out of the Drinking Gourd and kindled in the heart of every woman who toils beneath the whip.
And while five other bounty hunters are searching for a frightened slave, a dumb brute of a creature fleeing for the free states, Handsome Jack Stone listens to the mutterings and rumors and nonsense and stabs his Bowie knife, over and over again, into a crumpled map. While five other bounty hunters scour the wilderness, he visits sheriffs' offices and asks after the handbills that are no longer posted on the wall.
Thus the ghost becomes a man, a crippled German who seems far too frail to be responsible for the pile of corpses left in his wake. Dressed in grey, yes. Alone, at least when he comes to collect, but the hills and forests keep their own secrets. Interested, it seems, in this Django Freeman, enough to always take the warrant with him.
At night, Stone runs his finger up and down his pockmarked map, and watches his road take shape.
