The Transgressors Read Free

Lord’s hands.
    The trouble was that he had virtually had to protest. The deputy had forced him to by his manner of accosting him.
    So, “How about it?” he said. “Why single me out on this permit deal?”
    “Well, I’ll tell you about that,” Lord told him. “We aim t’ be see-lective, y’know? Don’t like to bother no one unless we have to, which I figger we do, in your case. Figger we got to be plumb careful with any of you Highlands big shots.”
    McBride reddened. He himself had heard that there was gangster money in the company, but that had nothing to do with him. He was an honest man doing a hard job, and the implication that he was anything else was unbearable.
    “Look, Lord,” he said hoarsely. “I know you’ve got a grudge against me, and maybe I can’t blame you. You think that Highlands swindled you and I helped ’em do it. But you’re all wrong, man! I’m no lawyer. I just do what I’m told, and—”
    “Uh-huh. An’ that could mean trouble with a fella that’s workin’ for crooks. So you get rid of that pistol right now, Mis-ter McBride. You do that or take you out a permit right now.”
    McBride couldn’t do either, of course. Not immediately, as the deputy demanded. Not without a face-saving respite of at least a few minutes. To do so would make his job well-nigh impossible. Oil-field workers were a rough-tough lot. How could he exert authority over them—make them toe the line, as he had to—if he knuckled under to this small-town clown?
    “I’ll get around to it a little later,” he mumbled desperately. “Just as soon as I go back to the bank, and—”
    “Huh-uh. Now, Mis-ter McBride,” said Lord, and he laid a firmly restraining hand on the field boss’s arm.
    It was strictly the deputy’s game, but McBride had gone too far to throw in. Now, he could only play the last card in what was probably the world’s coldest deck.
    He flung off Lord’s hand and attempted to push past him, inadvertently shoving him into a storefront.
    It was practically the last move that McBride made of his own volition.
    Lord slugged him in the stomach, so hard that the organ almost pressed against his spine. Then, as he doubled, gasping, vomiting the breakfast he had so lately eaten, Lord straightened him with an uppercut. A rabbit punch redoubled him. And then there was a numbing blow to the heart, and another gut-flattening blow to the stomach…
    But he couldn’t keep up with them. No more could he defend himself against them. He seemed to be fighting not one man but a dozen. And he could no longer think of face-saving, of honor, but only of escape.
    Why, he’s going to kill me, he thought wildly. I meant him no harm. I’ve given willful hurt to no man. I was just doing my job, just following orders, and for that he’s going to kill me. Beat me to death in front of a hundred people.
    Somehow more terrible than the certainty that he was about to die was the knowledge that Lord would probably not suffer for it: the murder would go unpunished. He, McBride, would be cited as in the wrong, and he, Lord, would go scot-free, an officer who had only done his duty, though perhaps too energetically.
    McBride staggered into the street, flopped sprawling in the stinging dust. Fear-maddened, fleeing the lengthening shadow of death, he scrambled to his feet again. He couldn’t see; he was long past the point of coherent thinking. Dimly, he heard laughter, hoots of derision, but he could not read the racket properly. He could not grasp that Lord had withdrawn from the fight minutes ago, and that his leaden arms were flailing at nothing but the air.
    He hated them too much to understand—the people of this isolated law-unto-itself world that was Lord’s world. This, he was sure, was the way they would act; laughing at a dying man, laughing as a man was beaten to death. And nothing would be done about it. Nothing unless…
    Donna! Donna, his young wife, the girl who was both daughter and wife to him.