Free Powder Keg by Ed Gorman Page A

lamp. She held the door open as I came in and we both let our eyes adjust to the gloom.
    Because the place was so small, it was easy to see what had happened in a single glance.
    Chuck lay face down on the floor. One of the rocking chairs had been knocked over and several magazines had been scattered from on top of a small pine stand.
    Jen was already kneeling next to him.
    “He’s alive.” Then: “Chuck, it’s Jen. We’re going to help you sit up. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    His only response was a muffled moan. I got on the other side of him. We lifted him as gently as we could to his feet. His knees gave out with the slightest pressure on them. I got my arm under his and around his back. Jen did the same. We half-dragged him to the daybed.
    We laid him on his back. She brought a jar of water and a white cloth over. We started looking for the spot on his head where he’d been hit. Easy enough to find, really. He’d been struck with something edged and hard—probably the handle of a handgun—just behind the ear. In his condition, it was easy enough to knock him out.
    Jen soaked the rag and started to clean the wound. His eyes were still closed. He moaned every few seconds. Once, I was pretty sure he started to speak words. But the words were never finished. He went back to moaning.
    I walked around the place. I could see melted snow tracked in by somebody’s boots. The visitor had been there quite recently.
    On the small table next to the two stacked orange crates he used as cupboards for his canned goods, Isaw a paper where somebody—likely Chuck—had started to sketch out two maps.
    I held them up for inspection. They were basically the same drawing but he had so many lines and erasures on the pages that it was hard to tell exactly what the map showed. No words identified the various points.
    “What happened, Chuck?”
    When I turned around to look at him, he was sitting up. Jen was still daubing at his wound.
    “They just come in. Didn’t knock or nothing. Come in and one of ’em grabbed me around the neck and got at me so he could strangle me. They didn’t even say nothin’. They waited until I was choking before they even spoke to me.” He started coughing. It went on for some time. She patted him on the back the way she would a baby. He kept staring at me. When he quit coughing, he said, “That’s what I needed. A .44 like our friend has. I woulda cut ’em both down.”
    “Who were they, Chuck?”
    He tried to talk but the coughing had cut in.
    “Pepper and Connelly. They said they followed you here and wanted me to tell them what you and me talked about.” More coughing. “Damned lungs. I don’t think they quite healed up from the last time I had pneumonia. I just treated it myself. Maybe I shoulda gone to my doc.”
    “Your head still hurt, Chuck?”
    “Yeah, but I’ll get over it.”
    He looked at Jen. “You’re a saint, Jen, you know that?”
    “I’m not sure Mr. Ford there believes that.”
    “Aw, what’s he know?”
    Jen put her hands on his arms and began the slow process of laying him back down.
    “Guess my head does still hurt a good piece.”
    “Of course it does. Now you just relax and lie still there.”
    “I had the map all set out for you when they came in. Did you see it over there on the little table?”
    “It was gone. How long were you out, you think?” I asked.
    “I was in and out, Noah. I’d try and get up and then I’d just fall back to sleep. I was real shaky. I thought I was gonna die. It was like a nightmare. My heart would be racin’ and then my head would be poundin’ and I’d hear the wind—”
    Jen glanced at me and shook her head. No more questions for Chuck. And she was right. The assault had scared him. He was responding more to his fear of death than he was his actual pain. An old man, alone, a couple thugs like Connelly and Pepper knocking him out—death probably hadn’t been far away and the terror of it still lingered in