The Bully of Order by Brian Hart

Author:Brian Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Duncan: Welcome to the Hall

Two men rounded the corner, dragging something, so I hopped down the bank to hide.

It was Tartan that spotted me. He whistled, and Bellhouse was suddenly at his shoulder. I stood up and waved hello. I hadn’t really been hiding at all.

“Get up this fucking hill and be counted,” Bellhouse said.

Tartan stood at the road’s edge, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees. Behind him was what looked to be a man’s corpse strapped to a door that had been ripped from its jamb, hinges dangling. “Cold for swimmin and yer under-outfitted for fishin. The fuck you doin?” Tartan said.

“Nothin. Walkin.”

Bellhouse slid a stub of a cigar out of his hatband and lit it. His teeth clamped to it like a golden vise. “Boyerton’s walking too. He’s in your footsteps, and you don’t even know it.”

Tartan caught me looking at the body. “You know a man named Gutowski?”

“No.”

“Then quit starin.”

“What if I were Chacartegui?” I said. “What if it were him instead of me off the hill by the bridge?”

Bellhouse blew the ash from his cigar. “Listen to the little darling.” He turned and pissed from the bridge. Two pistols bulged under his coat, and in the small of his back, if the stories were true, there was an ornate, three-pocketed leather holster used to carry a pair of pliers and two knives, one short and one long. He used the pliers to pull teeth.

“I gave you a dollar coin once,” Tartan said.

“I still have it.” Of course I didn’t, but lying seemed appropriate, more so than having handed the coin over to Oliver Boyerton for taking his eye.

Bellhouse buttoned up and came toward me and crowded me and sniffed at me like a bipedal dog, then gave me a slap and took my shotgun away. “Do you want an adventure?” His slight German accent edged through his words.

I’d felt the same emotion pass over me when Matius was whipping me and I quit struggling and just let him have it, let him take what he wanted.

Tartan sat down on the corpse and rested there awkwardly, exhaled, then stretched his jaw. “You ask me, let him go icicle. Farewell, Ophelia.”

“I didn’t ask you. He’ll come with us.”

“We got other business, Hank. Leave him and let’s get to it.”

“No, I got a notion here,” Bellhouse said to the sky. “We’ll plant Gutowski, then take the boy out for a show. Boyerton’ll have him within the week, anyhow. We’ll let him have some excitement and thrilling adventures to send him off. A good for the bad, you see?” Bellhouse scowled in Tartan’s direction.

“We’ll pay for this act of kindness same as if it were viciousness.”

“Like it matters to you, sweet or bitter,” Bellhouse said. “String him a line so he can help us with the drag.”

Tartan smashed a hole in the door panel with his boot heel and wrapped a length of chain around the frame and handed it to me. Bellhouse slid my shotgun under the tarp with the corpse.

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