Seventeen
I wasn’t used to the world that I found myself in. Worse still, I wasn’t prepared for the level of danger and violence that it tended to encourage. I wasn’t ready to understand the sort of risks that we faced every day.
Those risks were the first and the biggest problem that we ran into. So I understood that by backing down, Baron looked weak. And when he told me so, I wasn’t surprised. We talked about it, instead.
I don’t know what he expected. I know that I surprised myself with the way that I could think about the violence we were about to bring down on Franklin Durham’s head. He’d shown himself as the head of the snake; all we had to do was cut it off, and the body would die.
So we talked and planned. If he had all his men around him, then he was too many. There would be some that would break for Baron from the outset, but too few. There would be more to break for Franklin, if they’d gotten to the point of open revolt.
And if there were more to break for Franklin, and the split went as deep as we both feared, then there was no way that we were going to be able to cut things off quickly. Shooting down Franklin Durham in the street would just encourage someone to take up his banner and start pushing again.
This time, they would feel justified in taking shots at Baron. So the only answer was to do it without shooting—maybe without killing him in the first place. And we had to find Durham alone. Once that happened, we could hope, maybe, that the men who would have broken Franklin’s way would see that there was no real hope in backing a lost fighter.
That was the hope, anyways. It was a simple enough plan, and yet, at the same time, it relied on a lot of trouble. It worried me more than it worried Baron. If anything he seemed like he was completely unperturbed.
First, it relied on the assumption that a bunch of killers and thieves would suddenly recall honor all of a sudden because their friend was beaten to a pulp. But Baron seemed to think that they respected a tough leader. Someone who got whipped eight ways from Sunday would lose respect, and would lose support.
Second, it relied on the assumption that Franklin was the leader. Of course, it was hard to imagine that anyone would have a man picking fights for him, if the rest of the army supported strong, dominant leadership. It was the sort of thing that a snake might do, but if you get rid of the biggest dog, then he has to move to the second-best. And you beat that one, too. So it wasn’t the biggest leap in logic, because if we were wrong then there was a fairly easy and safe response: we were safe as long as we were fairly certain we were safe.
The one that worried me the most, though, was the assumption that Baron Euler could beat Franklin in a fair straight fist-fight. Baron was a tough guy, wiry, and carried himself like someone who knew a little bit about fighting. He held a pistol like it was an extension of his arm, and he might be able to reach out and punch someone with a bullet.
He didn’t seem at all concerned about the fact that Franklin Durham was almost a head taller and near double his weight, and more of it muscle than not. It was like the whole thing didn’t even register in his mind. Like there was no reason to believe that someone very literally twice the man that he was might be able to take him in a fist fight.
But it was always a risk. The whole situation was risky, and the only way to avoid the risk was to leave and for Baron to suddenly go straight after all these years.
I let out a long, low breath and closed my eyes. There was a fourth thing that concerned me. But it wasn’t a worry. It would work, and I knew it would work. What I was concerned about wasn’t whether or not we could pull it off. It was whether or not I’d be able to look in a mirror in the morning, when we’d made it work.
I looked at Baron. He raised his eyebrows.
“You ready?”
“Right now?”
“When else? It’s late enough that nobody’ll see, and early enough you can find him.”
“It can’t wait?”
“You said it yourself. You wait too much longer, and there’s not going to be a later any more.”
I pursed my lips and tried to scrub the guilt that was already building up in me. I wasn’t that kind of woman. I’m still not. And I’ve got to admit, I’m still a little ashamed of the story. But I had to do it. So I waited a minute, let Baron out the window, and started down the stairs.
I put a little sway in my hips. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a harlot before, after all. I could fake it well enough, I thought. And maybe I did. Maybe too well. I still cringe when I think of the whole thing.
The men’s eyes laid on me the second that I walked into the room. They followed me silently as I walked over to Franklin Durham. He was sitting and drinking, a laughing smile on his lips, and he noticed me coming towards him right away.
“You coming to be with a real man,” he halfway asked, leering and showing pointed canine teeth.
“You want to talk about it outside?”
He blinked and pushed the chair back, stood up, and looked down at the boys around the table, laughing.
“Outside? To talk?”
I gave him a suggestive look and leaned my head. “We don’t have to talk if you have… something else that you wanted to do.”
I don’t know if it was my performance or the drink, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t question me for a second. He just wrapped one big, thick, hairy arm around my shoulders and guided me out the front door. I took him around the corner, into a dark alley.
To his credit, Baron didn’t sucker punch him. He gave Franklin plenty of time to see the ambush coming, and to this day, I still don’t know whether or not that was a mistake.