Page 5 of Small Town Beast 2: Saverin’s Duet (Sins of the South)

Hiram jabbed the gun towards her but she stepped backwards, towards Absalom.

“Sit down,” Absalom told her quietly. “Behind me, right there.”

She sat down on the bed.

Absalom’s wife finally picked up. A voice like nails on a chalkboard snarled through the phone, “What the fuck do you want, Hiram?”

“Sister. I got a question for you.”

“I don’t have your damned meth, like I told you a dozen fuckin’ times already.”

“Dinah, are you pregnant?”

The silence was only broken by a strange noise from Lorraine. Absalom knew they were cooked. I’ll have to shoot her first , he thought wildly. They’ll torture her here all night. I don’t believe this shit. Lorrie… I was so close. So fuckin’ close to everything…

But after a long silence, Dinah finally spoke. “Who told you that?”

“I just heard it on the grapevine,” said Hiram, his hog-small eyes narrowing. “So it’s true?”

“Was it that doctor bitch?” Dinah shrilled.

“I ain’t saying.”

“I’ll fuckin’ kill her! That schemin’ slut– she said she wouldn’t tell! She promised! I’ll kill that fuckin’ slut!” The gravel-pit voice of Dinah Green Tree rose to a shriek before she sputtered, “Don’t tell Absalom– he doesn’t know.”

“I won’t say a word,” said Hiram, his eyes locked on Absalom’s stone face. “You know I never liked that son of a bitch. Now what’s it saying about the meth?”

“It’s at Ma’s house under the TV. You promise you won’t tell Absalom?”

“Cross my heart,” sneered Hiram, and hung up the phone on his sister.

Lorrie sagged against the bed and put her head in her hands.

She might be pregnant but it sure as fuck ain’t mine, Absalom thought furiously. Not only had the Snatch Hills forced him into a marriage, they had never meant to honor it in the first place.

“Looks like you were right,” Hiram admitted, pacing the room now. “But what I can’t understand is how you figured it out if she ain’t say nothing to you, Green Tree.”

“I’m a man of detail,” came the dry reply.

“Well I’ll be damned. Dinah’s got a baby coming. The Green Trees and Snatch Hills united.” Hiram laughed and the tension broke all at once.

Absalom just couldn’t believe that Lorrie’s insane fabrication might have actually saved their bacon.

He could only now play off the whole thing like a big misunderstanding among gentlemen.

Revenge would come later. He smiled wryly and shrugged his shoulders at Hiram and his men.

“I’m only a man with a man’s urges. This girl ain’t nothing to me but a lay. ”

“Is that right?” Hiram smiled. “Reckon you can let us take a turn with her, then.”

Absalom’s jaw clenched.

“She’s a fit filly, alright,” said one of the goons.

“Stacked,” agreed another.

“We can all fuck her,” said the fourth, a rat-faced man with the sunken cheeks and twitchy bearing of a man from the Back Hills. He wiped shiny lips on the back of his hand. “We can fuck her right now, can’t we? Don’t have to wait. Spitroast the cunt.”

Hiram hawked another clot of tobacco juice on the floor. “Not this time. We got work to do. Maybe next time, eh darlin’?” His eyes said the same to Absalom, with a very different meaning. “I’ll see you at midnight, brother . Like we discussed.”

Coldly Absalom nodded.

“War tomorrow,” mused Hiram, holstering his KelTec. “We all got to stick together against the McCalls. High time we lesser clans took control of the Harvest. We’re all the same, right? Green Trees, Snatch Hills…All the same blood.”

“That’s right,” said Absalom.

“All the breeding with niggers will have to stop,” said Hiram. “Reckon we’ll pass a law on it. Everybody that ain’t with it can clear the fuck out of our mountain. You ken what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Feeling Lorrie’s eyes on his back Absalom said roughly, “I ken it.”

“I’m sure glad to hear that, brother . I mind the fact that we put you up as leader because you were Duke’s son.” Hiram stroked his beard, pointedly adding, “But Duke had lots of sons, as I recall.”

“That’s right,” piped up Ratface.

You’re replaceable, motherfucker, in other words.

“Until next time, then,” Absalom said, going to his desk.

It was a simple sleight of hand for him to open the bottom drawer and finesse the weapon into his belt.

The Beretta complicated the movement, but at that moment a bumblebee flung itself against the window and made a helpful distraction.

Absalom shut the drawer. “The plan stays the same,” he said. “Tomorrow Roman dies.”

As the men went back through the door, Absalom glanced at Lorrie, still cowering in terror on the bed. He made a gesture. She frowned, so he made it again. Cautiously she covered her eyes.

“Hey,” Absalom called to Ratface. The man turned.

“What?”

Absalom jerked his head towards Lorrie and smiled, crossing the room in a couple loose strides. Lowering his voice he asked, “You still want to fuck her?”

“Yeah,” the man said, perking up. “What’s it saying, friend?”

“Come talk to me for a minute.”

The man grinned. “Pretty girl like that…She ain’t gonna fight much, is she?”

“Naw,” said Absalom. “She’s sweet as they come.”

“I like it more when they do,” Ratface admitted, shaking out his shoulders, cracking his neck. “They’re nice and tight like that.” He called to the Snatch Hills, “I’ll be a minute up here, boys.”

“Whatever,” said Hiram, halfway down the hall already. The others seemed more keen on drink than rape. Ratface alone remained when the door swung shut on its broken hinges.

Lorrie scrambled to her feet. “Abi, what the hell are you doing?”

“Sit down,” Absalom commanded.

Ratface’s eyes lingered on Lorrie, her spellbinding beauty working on him like it did on every man that laid eyes on her.

Some men treasured beauty. Others found joy in stamping it into the mud.

It was time for Lorrie to appreciate the difference.

Knobby hands with dirty fingernails fumbled at a flaking leather belt.

“Can she suck it first?” Ratface said, turning to face the frightened young woman.

“I want her mouth. Them lips. How much you want for her cunt?”

“Let me think about it,” said Absalom, taking a step back. With enough momentum, it wasn’t much to bring the hatchet down squarely into the joint of the man’s right shoulder.

Lorrie screamed. Ratface screamed louder. Absalom disarmed Ratface as he tried to draw with his left hand. Too easy now. Blood was everywhere. The world seemed to be tilting on its side. Breathing hard, Absalom pressed the advantage of his size and brought the hatchet down again. Ratface fainted.

Absalom took a bottle of water from Lorrie’s bag and flung it over the man’s face, reviving him.

Ratface moaned, “Don’t kill me!”

Too late. Bright red arterial blood spurted from the arm Absalom had almost severed.

He would bleed to death eventually. Lorrie was weeping, her face buried in the bed.

Absalom squatted on the floor to the man’s level.

“I don’t recognize your face,” he said. “So you must be one Hiram picked up from the road. I don’t think he’d care if you died right here and now.

He understands somebody’s got to answer for his fuck-up just now.

Absalom’s got to save face with the boys, don’t he? As their leader.”

“I got kin from the Back Hills. You’re dead,” the man spat.

“Fuck your kin.”

“You bastard— Fuck you!”

Absalom held out the man’s gun to Lorrie. “You can do the honors.”

“You’re crazy,” Lorrie gasped, backing up against the wall in sick horror. “I’m not shooting anybody. Get it away from me!”

“No woman’s gonna be my end!” The man tried to crawl to his knees.

Absalom carefully applied his boot to the man’s shoulder and stopped that nonsense cold.

The man’s screams were muffled by…something.

Lorraine’s? No. It was a distant noise from somewhere in the back door of his mind. What was it? Anyway, the man fainted.

“You wanted to rape my girl?” he said, grinding his boot down. “You wanted her to suck your dirty fuckin’ dick? How about now?”

“Abi, stop it,” Lorraine sobbed, scrambling to the end of the bed to grab his belt. She’d seen this side of him once…He’d tried to never show it to her again. “No! Don’t do this,” she begged.

He had words for her too. “This motherfucker would have raped you,” he said. “This is exactly why I didn’t want you up here. This is Florin. You ain’t ready for this life, Lorrie. Not by a mile.”

“This is wrong!” Lorrie sobbed. “Abi, it’s a sin! Oh, God! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.”

Sorry for what ? Then he remembered. “You sorry for Mike?”

“Yes! Yes, I’m sorry!” She wrapped her arms around his waist. “Don’t kill him, Absalom. Don’t be that man.”

“Lorraine,” he said, shaking his head at the soft heart that would beg for the life of a man who had tried to violate her.

“If this son of a bitch held you down on this bed like he wanted to, and you got hold of his gun, would you lay there cryin’, or shoot him dead?

One way or another, he ain’t leaving this room.

You do it fast with the gun, or I butcher him slow with this.

” He hefted the bloody axe. “Your choice, darlin’. ”

“They’ll come up here and kill you for this,” Lorrie argued desperately. “You already hurt him bad. Walk away and leave him.”

She still didn’t get it. “Hiram put a gun to my head. He put a gun to my girl’s head. That needs a response– right now, in this moment,” he patiently explained.

“Choose peace, Abi! Choose God!”

He stepped back, forcing Lorrie to take her hands off his belt or fall on the floor.

“Next time they’ll get you alone,” he said grimly.

“There might be more of them when they do that. They’ll drag it out.

They’ll fuck you to death. And I won’t be there to stop them– they’ll make sure of it.

I know that, ‘cause they done it before. You understand me now? You understand why I didn’t want you up here in Florin?

Tender hearts don’t have a place in my world. ”

“Just shoot me, damn you,” the man moaned. “I can’t take this horn-tossing.”

“Lorrie?”

“No!”

Absalom nodded. “Go wait outside, then.”

Lorrie gripped his arm, eyes huge. “You really gonna kill him with that axe?”

“I would kill anybody that ever hurt you.”

“You hurt me,” Lorrie said, grabbing her things. “You hurt me so much, you don’t even know. I will never forgive you.”

The man’s blood had soaked the pages of her Bible. She picked up the Book, then suddenly dropped it like a hot coal. The door slammed after her.

“Wait in the hall, Lorrie,” Absalom called.

“Go to hell!” came the muffled reply.

Downstairs the tempo was lively: stamping, tramping music that shook the building from studs to rafters.

Ratface lay panting on the floorboards, helplessly watching the pool of his own blood grow wider.

Maybe it would drip through the floorboards.

People would come upstairs looking. Planning to be gone before then, Absalom ripped the sheet off the bed and mopped up some of the blood using his boots.

The bright red color boded ill. In minutes the man would bleed to death.

His eyes never moved from the axe in Absalom’s hand. He’d turned the color of chalk.

“Cold son of a bitch,” he said, laughing quietly. “Hiram doesn’t know what the fuck he’s dealin’ with, does he?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I ain’t going nowhere.” Ratface eyed the axe. “I’d ask for mercy. Use the gun.”

Absalom allowed the man to struggle upright and lean against the bed. A clean death is more than you deserve. But he didn’t want Lorrie to think him a monster. Her opinion of him mattered more than Absalom would ever let on.

He would have loved to take the motherfucker apart one piece at a time.

If Ratface had had his way, he’d be forcing his dirty cock inside Lorraine right now.

Hurting her. Giving her some filthy disease.

Lorrie, his angel. Blood had now soaked through the rough suede of Absalom’s own boots.

They would be a devil to clean, and stink if he didn’t.

Some things never washed out, though. No matter how hard you tried. Absalom stuck the hatchet through his belt. “Can I trust the Snatch Hills?”

“What the hell do you think?” sneered Ratface.

“I reckon they want me to do their dirty work killing Roman tomorrow, and then they’ll deliver me a cold bullet once I sniff out his gold.”

“Ain’t you sharp. There’s more. So much more.” Ratface groaned in pain. “To think I’m dying over a woman.”

“Maybe they’ve got whores in hell.”

“Fuck you. I’ll tell you something else, boy. Something rotten they’ve got cooking for you. Blow your mind.”

Absalom watched him dispassionately, not bothering to guess what filth was coming next. No evil in this world surprised him. He’d seen enough to know the wickedness of men ran deep as the eternal pit. Truth and kindness were the real rare gems.

“Hiram never told you that he was Duke McCall’s bastard, too,” Ratface wheezed.

Absalom said, “ What ?”

“That’s right, boy. You and Hiram? Y’all have the same daddy. Ain’t that sweet…And Hiram’s sister, Dinah– your wife?”

They’re twins. Bile rose up Absalom’s throat. That motherfucker…

“That’s right. Those funny Snatch Hills had you marry your own sister.”

“Who else knows?” Absalom asked quietly.

“All the Snatch Hills, but Hiram got ‘em to keep it stitched up. I heard ‘em talking, that’s how I come to know.”

So that’s it. Thank God he had never touched her.

His sister. They made him marry his own sister in exchange for their guns, and probably laughed about it over their tincan fires as they plotted when and how to eventually cut his throat.

The Snatch Hills were a rotten bunch, but Hiram had a calculated malice to him that was different from the rest. Absalom saw the scheme: Hiram would bide his time, waiting for the right moment to humiliate him in the eyes of the whole mountain before striking him down.

“Did Dinah know?” he asked.

“Of course,” chuckled Ratface weakly. “But she’ll do anything Hiram tells her. Half of it ain’t a sin, right? God! You knocked up your own sister. Shit, I almost did with mine, before they sent me to jail.”

“I never touched the bitch,” spat Absalom. “And you and I ain’t nothing alike. Time’s up.” He primed the KelTec, loath to waste his own bullets. “Last words?”

“You’re a dead man, Green Tree,” Ratface uttered. “They’ll never let you be King. And your little colored slut…she’ll get what’s coming, just like you.”

“I meant like a prayer or something.”

The colorless eyes dimmed. “Heaven ain’t where I’m bound.”

The KelTec jammed. Predictable. Absalom tossed it aside and reached for his Beretta.