Rough Justice Read Free

Shot one of the torches”—Hubbard had to smile as he explained—“and set one bastard’s hood on fire.”
    â€œLanguage!”
    â€œBe serious,” he said, losing the smile.
    â€œWho’d help us out against that mob, in Corpus Christi?” she demanded.
    â€œThey don’t speak for everyone. You know that, well as I—”
    â€œWhat’s that?” she interrupted him.
    A rapping at their back door, soft but clearly audible.
    â€œBack in the tub!” he ordered.
    â€œTom—”
    â€œDo like I tell you!”
    Josey ducked into the bathroom. Hubbard checked the street again, saw no one lurking there, and started moving toward the back door, shotgun ready in his hands. It struck him as peculiar, that the mob or members of it would come creeping back and knock politely on his door after the skirmish sent them fleeing. Still, he knew they weren’t all idiots. Some of them might try stealth, where a direct attack had failed.
    Halfway between the bedroom and the back door, Hubbard paused. What if the knocking was a trick to draw him from the street-side window, while the mob or part of it came back? They wouldn’t have to rush the house, just sneak back long enough to pitch a torch or a kerosene lamp through one of the windows. Hubbard couldn’t fight fire with a shotgun, and once he fled the house with Josey, they would be exposed to gunmen waiting in the dark.
    He almost doubled back to watch the street, then realized that someone with a mind to burn the house could set a fire as easily behind it as in front. He mouthed a silent curse, then detoured to the tiny bathroom and spoke into its shadows.
    â€œBe ready to run if I tell you,” he said, then retreated, not waiting for Josey to answer.
    It was imagination, he supposed, that made him hear her whisper back, “I love you, Thomas
.
”
    Only half as much as I love you,
he thought.
    Hubbard would die defending her, and gladly, but heknew it wouldn’t help if she was trapped inside the house by flames or gunfire, with him dead.
    Moving toward the back door, Hubbard placed each step precisely on floorboards, cringing when they groaned beneath his weight. The little noises he’d grown used to in the weeks they’d occupied the rented house all worked against him now, marking his every movement for whoever waited in the night, outside.
    Go slow and take it easy.
    Hubbard knew it wasn’t the police. Most of them thought no better of him than the men who’d come to lynch him, and if they’d arrived belatedly, they would be kicking in his front door, probably arresting him and Josey for the crime of self-defense. He thought about the man he’d wounded in the butt and knew that if he died, Hubbard might well be charged with murder.
    Hang me one way or another, will you? Then I may as well die fighting.
    He was almost at the back door when the knocking was repeated. Slightly louder now, or was that just because he’d moved in closer? Hubbard stayed as far to one side of the doorway as the narrow hall permitted, knowing that a fusillade of gunfire blasting through the door could cut him down before he had a chance to use the Sharps.
    What now?
    The knock came for a third time, urgently, and someone whispered through the door panel, calling his name. A man’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.
    Should he answer, or just blast the prowler straight to hell?
    â€œWho is it?” Hubbard asked, throat dry and croaking.
    â€œI’m a friend,” the disembodied voice replied.
    And what else would it say?
I’m here to kill you?
    â€œState your name,” Hubbard demanded, knowing that the answer might well be a lie.
    â€œGideon Ryder.”
    â€œNever heard of you.”
    â€œBe disappointed if you had,” the stranger said.
    The Sharps was trembling in his hands like a divining rod with water underfoot. “What do you