Decker stood. “Willa, you feel well enough to interrogate Doctor Whitton?”
“I sure can.” She pushed herself off the table, weak but determined, and joined him in the back room as he shut the door behind them.
Decker yanked him to the middle of the room and Whitton’s head snapped to the side. The chair wobbled to a halt.
What good are threats to a man that carved himself to pieces fora hundred years?
Drool leaked from the corners of his slackened mouth as Decker pulled the gag away. “Shall we begin, Doctor?”
Decker’s old friend took the reins, and he gladly gave them.
Not a word fell from Whitton, even after the floor splintered under his boot from Willa’s shot, dark blood mingling with crust from his leg wound. Time escaped them, the sun long gone.
As the day wore on, numbness took them all. Decker’s head fogged, only kept sane by Willa.
The doctor was more blood than man when they stopped.
Willa swore and jammed her heel on his leaking, destroyed foot, grinding down until bone crunched. He didn’t twitch, head hanging. “Bastard isn’t going to be of any help. God can hear his confession, if he’ll listen,” she growled. Bloody boot prints left a trail into the main room of the saloon.
Decker joined the center table with the rest of them. Sighing, he scrubbed his hands over his face and through his beard.
Sister Inez glanced up, a nearly-finished wooden rosary coiled in front of her. A small leather tassel replaced the cross at the end. “Have you any luck?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say luck like Cricket’s.” Safine looked over the tips of her boots propped on the table, a book balanced across her knees. “Pretty fucking shit, right, Decker?”
Please, not now. Let us go back to how it was. How we were.
Decker couldn’t stomach his refusal of Laurie—their mutual agreement—andher constant twisting of the knife, driven so deep in him he thought he’d never be able to dislodge it.
“Shit,” he finally said. “He won’t talk.”
“And I’m all out,” Willa muttered.
Sister Inez stabbed one of the wooden rosary beads in front of her with a long, thick needle and knotted it into place. Wordlessly, she unthreaded the waxed cord. Buttons rasped as she rolled her sleeves up to her elbows.
Willa cocked her head.
A slight smile tugged at Sister Inez’s lips. When she threw open the storeroom door and swooped in, her habit snapping behind her, she had the look of a vulture descending to feast on carrion.
Safine’s boots fell to the floor with a solid thump.
How long could she punish him? How long until she looked at him like a friend instead of a stranger, met with a barbed tongue and anger?
“We’ll figure it out, Safi. We won’t lose anyone else.”
She didn’t look at him. Just stared at the closed door to the back room before she poured Willa a black coffee and settled next to her, idly rolling a jar of the thick, brown liquid from Whitton’s between white-knuckle hands. Her lip rouge was faded, bitten away through the hours.
She hadn’t let her nerves eat into her composure for years; now she was raw, bleeding, like the man behind the door. Decker ached to repair his mistakes, to plead with her like he was in the Garden at the foot of God. Unsaid words and avoided looks stretched him thin until he was bursting at the seams.
Decker couldn’t bear the eye of the storm any longer, and he retreated upstairs, taking the hall to his room in quick strides.
Laurie's eyes were nearly as bloodshot as Whitton’s when he looked up from crumpled stacks of paper and pencil nubs scattered across Decker’s bed like piles of ammunition.
His shoulders slumped at Decker’s expression.
Decker soaked his face and neck with the stale water from his wash basin and breathed through the droplets, wishing they could wash away the mounting fear of life never returning to how it was.
“We haven’t—” Decker said, faltering before he scrubbed the towel over his face and returned it to the hook in his wall. “Safine and I haven’t—fought. Willa and I both thought if we could capture Whitton and make him answer for what he’s done, if we could stop all this, maybe it would help. Revenge can’t bring back Cricket, but maybe it will bring back Safine,” he said.
