Chapter 3

I didn't immediately go out to do what the nice rich lady and her lackey told me to. They gave me some reasonably clean, although painfully bland guns, a nice new hunting knife, some clothes that probably came off a dead man or out of the trash, and a horse ready to die if a stiff wind hit him wrong. I had ways of getting things, most of them being stealing, conning, or violence. I simply needed to look for a place to apply my skills and so I rode east.

So struck was I by the clean air on my face, a horse beneath me, and rolling open land without a prison wall or piss-stench cell blocking my way that I made it nearly to Roanoke before I took stock of my surroundings. A little stone farmhouse, tucked way back in the trees, had a light in a shuttered window but no smoke flowing from the chimney. I turned my skin and bones nag toward it and approached slow and quiet to unravel the mystery of inhabitation without comfort.

The side pen where chickens were kept held a fresh splash of blood and fluttering white feathers. On the other side I found a hastily, and not too deeply dug grave for more than a few folks.

I eased my way back around the front of the house, drew my pistol, and crept up like a shadow on an overcast day. The door burst in after a hard kick and I got the drop on the ugliest man I've ever cast eyes over. The outsides of his brows sloped hard down over eyes that would make more sense on an ancient hound with liver troubles. The rest of his face was a chewed ham hock hanging from a fence post. His chest was exposed, displaying sloppy tattoo work, grime, and matted hair. The tiny house reeked of body odor, trapped wood smoke, and the tang of gun oil. A sawed off, double barrel shotgun sat on the table in front of the man beside an oil lamp, a hair too far away to do him a lick of good with my pistol lined up right on the sweaty space between his sunken eyes.

"You're a damn ghost, girl," he growled in a low bass voice. "Well, are you going to kill me or do I have time for a smoke and a word?"

"The mass grave," I said.

"Stuck chimney flue," the man said. "Family asphyxiated and I gave them what burial I was able."

"So smoke." I eased the hammer back on my pistol, gave it a firm twirl and slid it back into the holster slung low on my hip. "And talk if that's what you want."

He rolled and lit a cigarette with deft fingers the size and shape of spring sausages left in the smokehouse too long. He took a drag and blew it out, his hands never inching toward the shotgun and his eyes never leaving mine.

"There are some men, three of them, hold up in the ruins of the big house, south of that dump, Van Horn," he said. "They stole a boat. The rowing kind if you know how. And I want it."

"You want me to steal your boat back?"

"Never said it was mine. I said I wanted it. That going to be a problem?"

I shrugged and shook my head.

"Good, good, that's the right attitude for this world," he said, gesturing at me with his cigarette, the cherry glowing faint red in the gloom of the cabin. "Row it up to Van Horn. There's a dock with a few buildings on it. I'll be waiting at the end."

"I'm not a charity."

"Ten dollars and the four little nuggets in my pocket are worth more than any boat, even this one."

I nodded and turned to leave. That was a lie. You don't pay someone more than a thing is worth to fetch it, but it was true enough on the face. Ten dollars and some gold scraps could buy five rowboats. The ugly man didn't strike me as the sentimental type, so it couldn't be a fond memory or a valued heirloom. Since none of it was my concern, I headed out to my horse with the setting sun at my back.

I found the mansion a little after dusk, right where the ugly man said it'd be. The sound of a dog whimpering and the smell of burned fur and flesh drew me close to the decrepit manor until I found the source. Some poor cur dog had been tied to a post and signed and kicked for the evening's entertainment. When I slid my new knife from its fresh leather sheath and freed the poor beast from its tether, it gave me one confused look before vanishing into the night. Good luck and Godspeed to fellow ne're-do-well. Keep your freedom if you can.

I saw the boat tied up when I slipped around the side of the house. I could probably abscond with it soft and quiet, letting the current of the huge river take me silently down and then rowing back far enough out that nobody in the manor could see or hear me. But I didn't do that. Didn't even give the plan serious consideration. I was hungry and I was angry.

Sneaking into the house wasn't easy. The doors creaked, the floorboards groaned, and the whole structure settled uneasily whenever I laid a boot down. I'd have been in a fight for certain if the men I was after hadn't drunk themselves into a stupor in the basement. Two were in chairs, hunched over a table near the fireplace, a collection of empty liquor bottles creating a barrier between them. The third was half flopped on an old sofa, his legs too long to fit with one dangling over the arm and the other off to the side.

Any farm girl of even the meanest skill can butcher a hog or a sheep. The most adept among us could make it so they never saw the knife and were gone from their body before the blood hit the mud. This was the end I offered the two drunken assholes at the table: quick, quiet, clean, not even enough violence to wake them before dying.

The third man on the sofa, the one I expected passed for the honcho of the trio, mostly because he had the biggest moustache and least vomit on his clothes. Him I woke up, he felt the knife and knew what it was to have a blade twisting in your innards while someone holds your mouth closed. The ugly man didn't say anything about killing the thieves, if they even were thieves. Might have been their boat all along, making me the thief rather than the repossesser. Didn't matter. They didn't die for the ten dollars, the gold, or on the ugly man's say so. Men that would do a thing like that to a dog would do worse given the chance and almost certainly had. The world would be well rid of them and I wouldn't have anyone to watch over my shoulder for.

The thing is, I hate people. Never came across two in a row that were worth the foulness on the bottom of a pig's hooves. The mangiest dog, surliest cat, or most temperamental, headstrong horse you can find is worth more than any twelve men you or anyone else can assemble. That dog gnawing on an old bone, flea-bitten, and filthy did more for the world than the three corpses I left in that basement and nobody would ever convince me otherwise.

I rowed the boat up the river until I could smell Van Horn and see the weak lights of torches, pitiful campfires, and a few guttering candles in windows. Rot, death, decay, and despair washed off that crumbling pile of timber, bricks, and rusted metal with every breeze that had the misfortune of passing over it. The water was a slick of dumped oil, raw sewage, and dead fish that nearly gagged me when I rounded the defunct lighthouse that stood empty, dark, and meaningless on the pile of rocks it was meant to warn of. I hastily found the dock the ugly man mentioned and rowed swiftly to it to tie off on a rotted support post near a moldering ladder.

The ugly man was at the top when I crested the end of the splintering pier. He handed me the promised ten dollar bill and handful of twisted little gold bits and scrambled down the ladder at a speed I thought imprudent for a man of his size and a ladder of such questionable integrity. He rooted around the seats of the boat until he found a little lockbox mounted beneath the rowing bench then climbed back up. He handed me the box to hold while he lifted a massive rock he must have brought with him from beside the end building and dropped it over the edge to punch a hole the size of his head in the boat. The little rowboat sank quickly into the murky, black water. The frayed tie-off rope unraveling from where the ugly man must have weakened it.

I handed him back the box that was the real goal.

"The man inside this building will buy anything you got off the thieves who took the boat," the ugly man said. "If you stole from them or robbed the graves you sent them to, don't concern yourself over it. They would have done worse to you given half the chance and gone out of their way to do me in if they knew I sent you. Survival, ghost girl, that's all that matters. Come find me again when you need more work for whatever reason."

And like that, the ugly man was gone, shuffling swiftly down the dock into the night and vanishing amongst the Van Horn residents that wouldn't know or care what business he'd conducted in their town.

I strode into the cluttered shop at the end of the dock that the ugly man had indicated. I had a little money, although the three assholes I'd killed didn't have anything of value on them to sell and only a handful of coins rattling around between them, but who knew what ten dollars and some gold might buy in a place like Van Horn?

Amid the crates, dusty crab traps, and stacks of pelts stood a gourd-headed man in a thick sweater beside a banjo displayed on the wall. He smiled, or at least I think he did since his brown moustache covered most of the face.

"Good evenin' to you, lassy!" he exclaimed in a thick brogue that felt like a warm reminder of home. "Joe said I should be expectin' you."

The ugly man had a boring name. That was a little disappointing, although I couldn't say much for myself considering I'd be happy if people thought I was Sara. I nodded and walked up to the counter the Scotsman stood behind.

"What do you need? It's all for sale, exceptin' the banjo on the wall there," the Scotsman said.

"Do you have a gun that won't cause embarrassment in front of the ladies?" I asked.

"I have just the thing," he exclaimed, "and Joe said to give you the first thing you asked for on the house." He reached under the counter and slid a beautiful, silver plated, pearl handled, heavily engraved double-action revolver across to me. "A man who knew guns, but not how to use them or cheat at cards used to own it, if ye catch my meanin.'"

"I do at that." I took the offered gun, felt the perfect balance of it, and did a few flairs with it before replacing the plain revolver Horley took from a prison guard to arm me.