The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,120

I hadn’t heard nothing from Dirk nor Zhorzha one.

“I didn’t get you into nothing,” I said. “You got your money. I don’t know your name.” He didn’t answer, but he went on breathing heavy in my ear. “If you got any sense, you’ll hide that cash and ditch that phone, just like I’m gonna do with this one.”

“I never talked to you.”

“No, sir.”

“Okay,” he said, but he was on the line breathing til I hung up.

I put my boots and sidearm on before I went out to the shed. I didn’t know too much about cellular phones, but I took a screwdriver and a hammer to it, until I got it separated into a bunch of little electronic parts. I took the whole mess out into the woods and buried it.

By the time I was done it was near four o’clock. I stood out on the porch, listening to an owl down by the creek, thinking how the world had got bigger and shrunk up at the same time.

Didn’t reckon I was likely to get back to sleep, so I gone into the house and put the kettle on, brewed up some coffee. Then I took down my mam’s Bible and done what she always called witching. Stood it up on its spine and let it fall open where it would.

The verse I got come from the Book of Joshua: And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight before him.

The story of Jericho wasn’t nothing to set my mind at ease, and I done what I always did, gone looking for some kind of comfort out of the Psalms.

Around nine o’clock, I brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and I was drinking that and reading the Bible when Dirk pulled up in the drive. He’d left alone and he come back alone, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, with blood dried down his left arm.

“What happened to you, boy? And where’s your cousin?” I said.

“The motel. She’s coming later.”

Men dead, that’s what the Fury had said.

“You need to get that arm seen to.”

“Later. I just wanna sleep for a while.” Dirk gone into the front room and a couple minutes later, I heard Patsy Cline on the record player. That was always one of my mam’s favorites. I wondered if he remembered that, or he’d been told enough times he thought he remembered. Family stories were funny that way, how they carried on long after they stopped being facts. When I gone in the front room, he was lying on the sofa with his arm over his eyes. I left him be.

Zhorzha wasn’t too much further behind him, looking tired but not bloody. She come in carrying grocery sacks and a case of beer, like we was set to have a barbecue.

“I guess Dirk told you what happened,” she said.

“Dirk ain’t said ten words to me, but that Fury called me in the middle of the night. Said folks got killed. Truth be told, I ain’t had the stomach to turn on the news for fear of what I might see.”

She wouldn’t look at me. Spent a good ten minutes fussing around lighting the oven and putting a tinfoil pan in there. When she finally come to the table, she put a can of beer in front of me and opened up one for herself.

“I almost got Dirk killed. He got shot. Did you see?” She dug around in another of the grocery sacks and pulled out some first-aid supplies.

“Yep, he’s in there bleeding on your grandmam’s good divan, I reckon.”

“When he wakes up, I’ll clean up his arm,” she said.

“And your man?”

“I left him. His friend who went with us, he was pretty badly hurt, so Gentry stayed.”

“You think them Klansmen are gonna deal kindly with them?”

“He and Dirk took care of them.”

“Sweet Jesus, girl. You gone in there and killed them boys?”

“We didn’t plan to. We tried not to. They shot first. Anyway, I hope they shot first, because otherwise it was Dirk.”

“Well, he ain’t the brightest, but he don’t got a hair trigger, neither. That’s more Dane’s style,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I really fucked things up. Do you think they’ll come here, the people you talked to?” She took a big swallow