by Andy Monk
“What…” he demanded, “…is that?”
“Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“Of course I’ve seen one before!” He hissed, scrambling to his feet.
“It’s a .45,” Molly said proudly, “…not that I really know what that means…”
“Put your damn skirts down!”
“Nobody is going to see,” she said, pouting slightly as she tossed her head to one side.
Amos gripped the bars of the cell and stared at the revolver Molly had strapped to the inside of her thigh. He also noticed, despite himself, the bare white flesh above her stockings and the fact her underwear was made of silk. Probably.
“What do you expect me to do with that?” he asked, finally.
“The gun or my-”
“The gun Molly! What do you expect me to do with the gun? Shoot our way out!”
“Well, luckily I’ve been thinking about that. I have a plan!”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I thought I could pretend to be ill, you could shout for help and when one of the dickhounds come down, I’ll be draped over the bed – or maybe the floor, that might be best – holding my stomach and groaning. If they eat the same shit they gave us they’ll buy that, and when they start opening the cell you produce the gun, get the keys and, hey presto, we’re free!”
“Hey presto?”
“Yeah, it’s something magicians say. Maybe your mother would have used it?”
“She wasn’t a magician…”
“Anyway, what do you think?”
“It’s a lousy plan.”
“Really?” Molly looked surprised.
“How do we get out of town, assuming we can even get out of these cells?”
“We get some horses.”
“You’ve got horses and provisions ready then?”
“Well, no… I thought we’d steal some.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long… we’ll tie the deputies up and gag them. We’ll have plenty of time.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as being hung, I would have thought.”
“They’re not going to hang me; though breaking out of here and stealing horses would be enough to get us both strung up.”
Molly raised an unconvinced eyebrow.
“Now, please put your skirts down. It’s… distracting.”
“Sure…” Molly sighed “…just let me get this thing off. It’s starting to chaff…” She hoisted her skirt and petticoat up further and started to fumble with the strapping she’d used to bind the gun to her thigh.
“Just… leave it where it is…” Amos turned away and slumped back down on his cot.
“There. Done.” Molly waved the gun in his direction as she let her skirts fall back.
“Just make sure they don’t see it when you’re released… or shoot me with it in the meantime.”
Molly slipped the gun under her pillow, “I’m not a complete idiot…”
“Got any more bright ideas?”
“I only had the one bright idea; I knew the alibi thing wasn’t going to work. I just wanted Shenan to lock me up so I could give you the gun.”
“And if he hadn’t locked you up?”
“Well, I knew if I annoyed him enough he’d put me in a cell for the night…” Molly explained in a matter of fact voice, “…and I can be really annoying when I try.”
Amos didn’t say anything.
The Widow
The wafer-thin mattress, the gun stashed beneath the emaciated straw pillow and Amos’ snoring all conspired to keep her awake.
Snoring, for fuck’s sake.
Tom had snored, particularly if he’d been drinking; prodigious, rasping snorts of air. How many nights had she lain awake listening to that awful din? About as many nights as she’d dug her elbow into his side to try and wake him up, not that that had often worked, Tom had always been a ridiculously deep sleeper. Wouldn’t work with Amos either, given he was out of elbow range.
Still, she did have a gun if things got really unbearable.
She wasn’t sure what to make of Amos’ refusal to entertain her plan for busting them out of jail. Admittedly it was a little sketchy in parts, but the basic premise (that it was preferable to being strung up) seemed pretty solid to her. Instead, Amos was content to stretch out and go to sleep with little apparent care or concern for his current predicament.
He certainly wasn’t behaving like a guilty man, an idiot maybe, but not a guilty one.
Molly rolled onto her side and stared at her shadow on the roughly plastered wall, as much for a change of view than in hope of stumbling upon a comfortable position.
Guilt was not really an issue of course; this was all being done to stop Amos poking about into Tom’s death. If the Mayor wanted him dead then he’d be swinging out on the town square gallows regardless of guilt and she worried that Amos hadn’t quite grasped that simple fact.
Besides, the thought of taking her chances trying to escape jail (and Hawker’s Drift itself), was far more appealing than the alternatives currently available to her. If the worse came to the worse, catching a stray bullet would be a quicker and less painful death than working upstairs in Jack’s or marrying Guy Furnedge.
She rolled over onto her back again and listened to Amos’ wet snores. Tom’s had been louder and even more irritating.
Her husband had spent more than a few nights in jail, usually for brawling or some other consequence of over-drinking. Had he snored in jail too? Probably, the combination of booze and the pig-headed dumbfuckery that had got Tom tossed into a cell in the first place would have combined just as effectively to help him snore off his cares regardless.
She’d had to bail him out of a few jail cells in their time together, but she’d never shared the experience with him. Still, as Granma Hildy had always said, you should try everything in life once… apart from incest and naked dancing.
Granma Hildy had been, unsurprisingly, a brainless old loon well known for drinking herself into foul-mouthed tirades against anyone in earshot before passing out face down in her own puke.
Molly, however, had always had a soft spot for her; she’d learnt some of her best cussing at Granma Hildy’s bony knee.
The ceiling was proving no more panoramic than the wall, while the slats beneath the thin mattress dug into her either way, so she rolled over again to face the cell bars, where the wan lamplight illuminated a black suited figure watching her.
She sat up with a start.
“Why, Mrs McCrea,” the Mayor said with a nod, “what a pleasant surprise to find you here!”
Molly hadn’t heard the door above open or the stairs creak. She hadn’t been actually listening for anything, but she couldn’t see how he’d gotten down into the basement that contained the jail cells without her hearing; then again, he was a sneaky one-eyed cattle botherer.
“I was being a nuisance, apparently,” Molly replied, the metal frame of the bed squeaked as she swung her legs over and stood up in as dignified a manner as she could muster.
“Oh, there’s no need to get up for my sake.”
“I wasn’t,” she said quietly, coming to stand before the Mayor as much as she wanted to run away from him.
The Mayor glanced at the still softly snoring figure of Amos, “Oh I see. How sweet… I suppose he has had a rather tiring day.”
“What do you want?”
“Just checking in on the prisoner, making sure no one has been too enthusiastic; entirely understandable considering the wretched nature of the crime, but I like things to be done right in my town.”
“How conscientious of you.”
“Conscientious? I’m impressed, that is not a word I would usually associate with you; your language tends to be far earthier.”
“Fuckin’ conscientious, if you prefer.”
“Much more in character.”
They stood
regarding each other in silence, the Mayor, with his eye constantly flitting from point to point as if he were facing a room packed to the brim with wonders rather than a featureless cell, Molly clutching her hands before her to stop them shaking and wondering just what she should say next. She’d never been good with small talk.
“Why did you have my husband killed?”
The Mayor’s eye came to a stop, “What on earth makes you think that?”
“Because you’re too high and fuckin’ mighty to do the job yourself.”
“I had nothing to do with your husband’s death.”
She remembered the dead animals and burnt rifle Amos had found, but didn’t think it would help their cause much to mention them to the Mayor. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure why she’d even brought it up; the Mayor wasn’t likely to confess and offer to lock himself into the unoccupied cell.
“I can smell it on you,” she tried to sound dark, mysterious and threatening, though she suspected she just came across as being ridiculous, and, possibly, a little bit mad.
The Mayor chuckled, seemingly thinking the same.
“Tom’s death was an unfortunate accident, nothing more.”
His tone was assured, bordering on smug bastard in fact, and the way he smiled suggested they both knew it wasn’t true, but that he was doing her a favour by being polite enough to lie to her face.
“What exactly did my husband do for you?”
“You mean apart from drinking my whiskey and screwing my whores?”
His quietly spoken words slapped her face and she immediately hated herself for letting him get to her. She tried hard not to show it.
“Fuck off, you lying maggot!”
“Tom was useful to me, his death saddened me greatly, but life, so they say, goes on. I’m sure you will be very useful to me too.”
“I’m not going to work in that whorehouse.”
“Are you going to start swearing at me again? I wouldn’t have thought there was a big enough audience for you here,” he said, turning his head towards Amos as he spoke. The Mayor moved along the corridor to stand outside his cell.
One of the, numerous, things that upset Molly about the Mayor was his ability to appear entirely unruffled by her, no matter how inventive her cussing was. She thought about the gun hidden beneath the pillow. That would get his attention. It would also get her hung, sadly.
“So peaceful,” the Mayor commented, looking back at Molly, “so hard to believe he’d do such a terrible thing.”
“That’s because he didn’t.”
The Mayor offered a little shrug before ambling back to Molly’s cell, his hands stuffed into his pockets.
“Are you really so sure?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t be the first woman who denied the wrongs of a man she loves…”
Molly’s head jerked up, “I don’t love him!”
“Of course not, after all, you know your heart so well don’t you Molly?”
His eye was boring down upon her and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it saw a lot more than it should do. Still, she didn’t love Amos, she knew that much.
“Yeah, I know my heart well enough.”
The Mayor leaned in towards the bars and whispered, “Then why did you marry a man you didn’t love?”
Molly took a step back, “How… that’s…”
“Tom and I were quite close; I was rather fond of him in fact. We talked at length about… things…”
Tom never talked much about anything. Not with her, not with anyone. Not stuff that mattered anyway. He was just trying to get under her skin. Tom wouldn’t have talked to him about that, fuck, Tom wouldn’t even have known about the way she actually felt about him.
Would he?
“The human heart…” the Mayor tapped his chest “…one of my little hobbies. Quite fascinating.”
“You’re so full of shit I don’t how you eat your biscuits.”
The Mayor laughed, “I can see what men see in you, sometimes anyway…”
“I’m a real prize.”
“Well, everything is in order here, everything’s just… tickety in fact!” He grinned a slow knowing little grin, before moving off.
Molly narrowed her eyes, “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you need to decide which horse you’re gonna ride… a man who loves you or a man who’s going to swing from the end of a rope. Sleep well Mrs McCrea.”
Molly watched him disappear up the stairs. It was only when she laid back down on the bed that she realised Amos wasn’t snoring anymore.
*
Molly had little sense of time in the cell, other than it dripped by as slow as molasses from a spoon on a frosty day. There was no skylight and no way to judge when morning broke. She managed to sleep a little, but it was the fitful, restless kind that left her more exhausted than staying awake. She might have slept for a few hours or ten minutes. It was hard to tell.
One of the Deputies, a bespectacled clerkish one called Royce, eventually brought them a breakfast of bread and milk. She’d thought prison meals of dry bread were just something from story books, but if they were then Royce appeared to have read them too.
She’d glanced dismissively at Royce as he slid the unappetising crust under the cell door on a battered metal tray, and tried to think of something withering to say in return, but her cussing gland must have been drained by its previous night’s work.
Instead, she showed her distain by leaving the tray on the floor and rolling derisively onto her side to stare at the wall. Only looking over after Royce had slid a second tray into Amos’ cell and retreated back upstairs in silence.
Amos was already chomping on the bread.
“You want that?” He nodded towards her sorry excuse for breakfast as he sat cross-legged on the floor.
“I’m waiting for the pickles.”
“Huh?”
“You have it – I’ve lost my taste for stale bread.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Molly stared at him before slumping back onto the bed. Her stomach was rumbling slightly, but she wasn’t going to dignify matters by eating the pitiful crust on offer.
“Could you pass it over?” Amos asked a few minutes later.
Molly sighed for effect, pulled herself to her feet and pushed the bread and mug through the intervening bars; she resisted the urge to throw the tray at him too.
“Sure you don’t want me to hide the gun in that?”
“I don’t need to shoot our way out.”
She shrugged, “I suppose you could always bludgeon your way out with that crust if you have to.”
Amos found time for a quick smile between gulps of milk.
“You still haven’t told me how you’re going to get out of this – unless you actually want to get hung of course.”
Amos chewed on a crust and refused to meet her eye.
“Oh, fuck!”
“No, of course I don’t.” It didn’t sound a particularly assertive denial to Molly.
“Then?”
“Trust me.”
“Why should I?”
“You’re trusting me to get you out of this town aren’t you?”
“And that does kinda depend on you not getting strung up.”
“Or filled with lead during a jailbreak.”
Molly retreated and plonked herself back down on the bed.
“Does Furnedge love you?” Amos asked once he’d polished off the second crust.
“I suppose he must. Or at least thinks he does. He asked me to marry him…” Molly stretched her legs out into mid-air and wiggled her toes “…kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“The price for paying off my debts. Apparently he’ll be quite rich once he inherits his wife’s money.”
“It wasn’t his before?”
Molly pursed her lips “Dunno, think she came from some fancy family back east. She never told me the details.”
“What
was she like?”
“A bitter, foul-mouthed drunk… we got on quite well really.
“Surprising…”
Molly poked out her tongue.
“You send him away with a flea in his ear?” Amos asked after a long pause.
“Thought it better to keep my options open. You never know…”
“Probably safer than running away with me.” Amos said in a small voice.
She looked up; he was running a finger along the edge of the tray that now only held two empty mugs and a scattering of stale bread crumbs, a slight frown of concentration creasing his brow, like a small boy playing some made up game in his head.
“I’ll take my chances… if we can get you out of here.”
“I’ll get out of here soon enough – now put that gun back where it came from. The Sheriff will be down in a bit.”
“You know that huh?”
“He’ll decide I’ve sweated enough soon.”
Molly did as he asked, she wasn’t sure whether to smile or roll her eyes when she noticed him look pointedly in the opposite direction when she started to hitch up her skirts.
Once the gun was safely taped up and out of sight for all but the most inquisitive of eyes, she eased herself back down onto the bed.
“Well-”
They both looked up as the door to the basement was opened and booted feet made their way down towards them.
Sheriff Shenan came in followed by Blane and another deputy called Cully, whose hard distant eyes and scarred face unnerved her almost as much as Blane. The Sheriff cast her the most cursory of glances as he passed her, his stride a rolling half-waddle. He came to a halt outside of Amos’ cell, Blane and Cully stationed themselves against the back wall, neither man’s right hand strayed far from their holstered revolvers.
“I’ve spoken to the Godbold girl,” Shanan announced as he slipped his thumbs into his belt.
“She still saying I did it?”
“Oh yes,” Shenan replied with a slow jowl twitching nod, “she was very clear about what you did to her. Fair made my stomach turn I have to say,” he glanced in Molly’s direction, “but I’ll spare us all the details for now.”
“Tell me,” Amos said quietly.
“Pardon?” Shenan’s attention snapped back to Amos, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor.