Free Doom Weapon by Ed Gorman Page A

Grieves was going. All he could see was Grieves walking slowly across a widepatch of buffalo grass. The patch was empty except for an unsaddled horse that was enjoying the taste of the grass.
    There was nothing for Grieves to blow up there.
    And then, thank God for the half-light so he couldn’t see it clearly, Dobbs watched in disbelief as Grieves readied the grenade and then lobbed it right at the horse.
    Dobbs had never seen such carnage before. And he would never forget it. No amount of willpower, no amount of whiskey, no amount of saloon whores could ever put the sight out of his mind. The horse’s head was ripped from the body and flew several bloody, brain-spilling feet into the air. And from the hole where head was separated from body gushed an unthinkable rain of blood as the horse collapsed to the grass.
    “Did you see that, Dobbs? Did you see that?”
    The evil child, delighted.
    Dobbs swung around backward and vomited as he had never vomited before.

Chapter 11
    L iz Thayer, who I’d been told ran the newspaper, was about five two and ninety pounds at the most. Blond hair pulled back and tied into a bouncy tail. Big brown eyes that would have been sweet if they didn’t look anxious. Faint wrinkles at her mouth and eyes. They looked good and true on her. White blouse, a man’s ancient brown cardigan sweater, and a pair of brown butternuts that showed off her very elegant little behind.
    When I walked in she was standing on a stool and thumbtacking flyers to a cork board. The flyers appeared to be samples of the quality of printing you could get there. Few newspapers survived without being a job printer as well.
    She looked down at me.
    “Be right with you.”
    “No hurry.”
    “You’re the federal man?” She said this while stretching and talking around a mouthful of thumbtacks.
    “Aren’t you afraid you’ll swallow those?”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “Well, you didn’t answer mine.”
    “Well, as all the six-year-olds say, I asked you first.”
    “Yes, I’m the federal man. How many tacks do you have in your teeth?”
    “They’re not tacks, they’re long nails about three times as long as tacks.”
    “They look like tacks.”
    “That’s because they have bigger heads. And I only have two of them between my teeth.” At which point she held up a new poster, picked a nail from between her teeth without relinquishing the hammer, and nailed the poster into place. She did the final one in half the time. Then she turned and jumped down from the stool.
    She walked over to the counter, set the hammer down, dug in the left pocket of her butternuts, pulled out a small handful of nails, and laid them down next to the hammerhead.
    “Coffee?”
    “You people drink a lot of coffee.”
    “You may not have noticed but it’s pretty cold here sometimes. But I should warn you, my granddad says, and I quote, ‘Liz makes coffee that tastes like goat piss.’”
    I laughed. “You two like each other?”
    She went behind the counter and poured herself some coffee. “Depends on the month, day, hour, and minute. It’s a constantly shifting relationship.”
    “I’ve had a couple of those.”
    “I have, too. Unfortunately, I was married in one of them. He was wise enough to walk away from it. I mooned for a long time. Are you familiar with mooning, Mr. Ford?”
    “Much more than I care to be.”
    “Good. At least we understand each other about the important things.”
    She came over and leaned on her side of the counter. The longer you looked, the more you liked. Behind her Icould see the Standard Washington Hand Press and the type forms, the key elements in the laborious business of printing. In the East I’d seen a linotype machine, the wave of the future they’d said, where setting the type was done in hot metal and set in long strings of words. This cut the biggest chore of printing—setting type by hand—in half. Out here, with few able to afford it, the linotype was the stuff of