Free A Hard Ride Home by Emory Vargas Page A

another, deeper hit to Emmett's gut.
    Emmett dropped to the dirt, clutching his middle.
    The sounds from inside the saloon were muffled, far away. There was a big huge moon rising over the barn. Jesse heard his own ragged, sobbed breath.
    "You can't just take anything you want!" he yelled. "You can't—"
    Roscoe caught around him from behind, nearly bowling him over as Evelyn rushed to Emmett. He tried to fight, still wanted to fight, wanted a gun in his hand, wanted to see Warren run down by a herd of wild horses or burned down in his big house.
    "Shh, shh," Roscoe was saying at his ear, hugging around him and dragging him up the stairs.
    "I can't breathe. Oh God, I can't. I can't breathe." Each wheezing sob felt like rusty nails scraping through his chest.
    "You can too, you're talking. Shh, now. Shh," Roscoe said.
    It was dark up in his room where Roscoe dragged him to the floor and Elsie hovered in front of him, spooning something awful onto his tongue.
    "Rest, poppet," she said.
    He swallowed and Roscoe kept holding him as his heart beat got slower and slower. "I can't," he said thickly, trying to keep his eyes open to see if Roscoe was listening to him. "He can't. I can't."
    Roscoe sighed and hung onto him until he couldn't open his eyes anymore.
    *~*~*
    "You alive in there, Sheriff?"
    Emmett peeked just one eye open. The floor tilted and he reached out in a hurry to stop himself from falling off the world while it spun.
    "He doesn't look to be," a woman said.
    Evelyn wavered into focus, wearing bright yellow. When she crouched outside the bars, her skirts sent a warm puff of perfumed air toward Emmett, and his stomach lurched.
    "He's breathing, more or less," Charley Green said. "I'll go brew up some coffee." His retreating footsteps sounded like bells ringing inside of Emmett's eyeballs.
    "What happened?" Emmett croaked, not recalling a fight. And if he'd been shot, he ought to be with the doctor or in a bed, not lying in filthy straw in his own jail.
    "You drank your weight in cheap whiskey and tried to rough up one of my whores, is what happened. Thankfully, Charley Green was on hand to lock you up. Consider him temporarily deputized."
    Emmett sat up slowly, creeping up the wall and covering his mouth so he didn't retch onto his boots. His stomach tightened again, and he barely had time to grab onto the rusted spittoon beside him before he vomited until his whole middle hurt and his throat felt like it was on fire. There was nothing he could say, once he remembered. He looked up at Evelyn, and she looked at him like she felt the same way. He'd seen her mad before, but nothing like this. She was pale with it, wearing her rage from her eyes to the tips of her carefully curled fingers.
    "There's a balance in this town," she said quietly. "People are going to die if you upset it."
    "I never meant—"
    "You never should have come back here, Emmett."
    Before Emmett could reply, Charley came back with the keys to the cell and unlocked it. Neither of them offered him any help getting out, so he all but crawled to the bench where Charley had set a cup of coffee and a biscuit for him.
    His bruised jaw throbbed with the beat of his pulse.
    "Is he—"
    "He's fine," Evelyn said, clipping the words the way she did when she was too upset to lie properly. "Sleeping it off, same as you. Couple of damn fools."
    Charley glanced between them. "If you'll pardon me, ma'am, I think you two are both fools. Sheriff Grady's the law in Silver Creek. If you're fearing for someone's life, you might should tell him why."
    Evelyn's jaw tightened like she wasn't too pleased at being overheard or told what to do, but her eyes squinted up thoughtfully for a few long breaths.
    Emmett's head was pounding too hard for him to make sense of anything.
    Finally, Evelyn looked at him and said, "Emmett, it's your father."
    *~*~*
    Despite what Evelyn had told him about his father, and the more he suspected, Emmett couldn't focus on the town or the law, or what