Free The Lawmen by Robert Broomall

named me that. Essex’s where his folks come from in England, or some such shit.”
    “You were a slave?”
    “No, I come to this black man’s paradise of my own free will. Of course I was a slave.”
    “And what kind of work you do now?”
    “I’m a bank president.”
    Clay just stared at him.
    “All right, I’m a day laborer. Whatever I can get.”
    “Can you shoot?”
    “Would I be here if I couldn’t?”
    Clay got the coffee and sugar from the filing cabinet. He toyed with the empty coffeepot, drumming a tuneless rhythm on its side with his fingers. “You know what you’d be getting yourself into if I hired you—which I ain’t going to do?”
    “I know.”
    “You’d most likely end up getting killed.”
    “What the hell difference would that make? I been kicked and starved and slept in shit all my life. Death’s about the only thing I ain’t tried yet.”
    “Why are you so hot to get yourself mixed up in this?” Clay asked him. “Nobody in town besides you is willing to risk his neck. Is it because that dead man—Pompey—was black?”
    “It’s because he was my friend. He took me in when I first got to this town, let me stay with him. He was a good man. Now he’s dead.” Essex’s soft voice grew more intense. “It’s because just for once I’d like to see justice done to a black man in this country.”
    Clay laughed derisively. “Justice? For niggers? That’s rich. Everything I ever had I lost because of you people—my farm, my parents.” He paused, “My brother.”
    “Well, now, I’m sorry. I guess for your sake we should have stayed slaves, and been happy to have done it. A lot of fools thought we was happy bein’ slaves, anyway. I suppose you was a rebel, huh?”
    “I was a southern patriot, and I still am, and I’m damn proud of it.”
    “Yeah, you look stupid enough to be proud about something like that.”
    Clay put down the coffeepot and started forward, then restrained himself. He had enough trouble.
    “Now what about that deputy job?” demanded Essex.
    “I told you,” Clay said, “you ain’t getting it. Who the hell ever heard of a nigger lawman—’cept for the ones the carpetbaggers installed back home?”
    “And I told you—you ain’t got no choice. And stop calling me ‘nigger.’”
    “All right. ‘Sambo,’ then.”
    “You know, it ain’t like it’s my life’s ambition to be working for some peckerwood marshal.”
    “Get out of here,” Clay ordered him.
    “Not without you give me the deputy job.”
    “Let me put it in words that even you can understand. I don’t like you. I don’t want you around.”
    “But you need me. And you’re going to hire me, ain’t you?”
    Clay ground his teeth and closed his eyes. “All right. Anything to shut you up. But as a temporary deputy only. When this is over, so’s your job.”
    Essex grinned. “ ’Course it’s temporary. We both gonna be dead tomorrow. Don’t get much more temporary than that.”
    “One more thing you better know,” Clay said. “I hate Negroes.”
    Essex’s grin hardened. “No more than I hate whites.”
     

 
    13
     
    “I’d swear you in,” Clay told Essex, “but I don’t know the words. I doubt it matters, anyway.” Searching his desk drawer, he found Johnny Evitts’s old badge and tossed it to the ex-slave. “Here.”
    Essex pinned the badge to his worn woolen shirt. “Gee, I’m just like a real white person now. What’s this deputy job pay, anyway?”
    “A dollar a day. Don’t worry, you won’t be around long enough to collect it. How are you fixed for firearms?”
    “I ain’t,” Essex replied.
    “Figures,” Clay muttered. He unlocked the gun rack and pulled down the late Jack Ryan’s Henry repeater—he preferred to keep the sawed-off shotgun for himself. He passed the repeater to Essex. “Know how to use this?”
    Essex gave him a withering look. “I told you I could shoot.”
    From the filing cabinet Clay retrieved Vance Hopkins’s pistol and