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"All your idea. You and that dumb bitch from headquarters," an accuser continued.
"Cuff him good-he's slippery," someone with a deep voice advised from the darkness. He was too far away be delivering punches and kicks.
Or maybe his vision was going and it just seemed as though the voice was coming from a great distance. There were painful stars dancing in his vision like a faerie circus. Valentine felt kicks that might have just as well been blows from baseball bats, so hard were the assailants' boots.
"You've made enemies, Valentine. Now it's time to settle up."
The rain stung; it must be washing blood into his eyes.
"We don't like criminals walking our streets, bold as black."
They took turns punching him in the face and stomach.
"Grog lover!"
"Renegade."
"Murderer!" The last was a crackling shriek.
They added a few more epithets about his mother and the long line of dubious species that might have served as father. Valentine's mad brain noted that they sounded like men too young to have ever known her.
"You bring any of those redlegs into our good clean land, they'll get the same. Be sure of that."
"Hell, they'll get hung."
"Like you're gonna be-huck-huck-huck!"
"C'mon-let's string this fugitive from justice up."
They dragged Valentine by the rope around his neck. He strained, but the handcuffs on his wrists at his back held firm.
The old street in Jonesboro had attractive oaks and elms shading the pedestrians from summer heat. Their thick, spreading boughs made a convenient gibbet above the sidewalk and lane.
The noose hauled Valentine to his feet by his neck. His skin flamed.
Valentine knotted the muscles in his neck, fought instinct, kicking as he strangled. The rope wasn't so bad; it was the blood in his eyes that stung.
Vaguely, he sensed that something was thumping against his chest. An object had been hung around his neck about the size and weight of a hardcover book.
One of them wound up, threw, and bounced a chunk of broken pavement off his face.
"Murderer!"
"Justice is a dish best served cold," that deep voice said again.
They piled into the little putt-putt and a swaying, aged jeep that roared out of the alley behind the red-lit house. With that, they departed into the rain. Valentine, spinning from the rope end as he kicked, bizarrely noted that they left at a safe speed that couldn't have topped fifteen miles an hour, thanks to the odd little three-wheeler.
Valentine, increasingly foggy with his vision red and the sound of the rainfall suddenly as distant as faint waterfall, looked up at the rope hanging over the branch.
For all their viciousness with boot tips and flung asphalt, they didn't know squat about hanging a man. And he'd purposely kicked with knees bent, to give them the illusion that he was farther off the ground than he actually was.
He changed the direction of his swing, always aiming toward the trunk of the tree. The rope, which his assailants had just thrown over the thick limb, moved closer to the trunk. He bought another precious six inches. Six inches closer to the trunk, six less inches for the rope to extend to the horizontal branch, six inches closer to the ground. With one more swing, he extended his legs as far as they'd go, reaching with his tiptoes, and touched wet earth.
The auld sod of Arkansas had never felt more lovely.
Valentine caught his breath, balancing precariously on tiptoe, and found the energy to give himself more slack. He got the rope between his teeth and began to chew. Here the wet didn't aid him.
His blood-smeared teeth thinned the rope. He gathered slack from his side and pulled. He extracted himself from the well-tied noose and slumped against the tree. There was a wooden placard hung around his neck, but he was too tired to read it.
