Читать книгу A Knife in the Heart - William W. Johnstone - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

His own scream woke him up.

Fallon tried to catch his breath, feeling suddenly freezing, and realized sweat drenched his night robe. While trying desperately to catch his breath, he noticed his right arm was up, crooked, and his clenched fist trembled. He held a pair of scissors. Fallon stared as early morning light seeped through the curtains of the parlor of his home. He waited until he stopped shaking, could breathe normally, and stared at the scissors.

Sobs came somewhere down the foyer beyond the formal parlor.

A woman’s voice soon whispered, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. Papa just had another bad dream.”

He lowered his hand, swung his bare feet over the chaise. Feet on the rug, he managed to swallow and gently laid the scissors down on the side table. How he had managed to find them was beyond him, but thank God, he prayed, he was sleeping in the parlor.

Sleeping in the parlor. One more time. Instead of in the bedroom with his wife.

Fallon planted his elbows on his thighs, buried his face in his hands, and waited until he stopped shaking, bits and pieces of the nightmare returning to him, but only in fragments. He didn’t need to remember every single detail. It was the same damned nightmare he always had. A few things might change: the location, the number of inmates, how men were trying to kill him, or execute him. Sometimes he knew the men, the crazed killer named Monk from Yuma; the leader of the riot from Joliet; the Mole from Jefferson City; even John Wesley Hardin from Huntsville. Mostly though, they were cretins and monsters and blurs of men, often without faces, but always trying to kill him. In the worst of the dreams, they were about to succeed before he woke up. On the good nights, he woke up quickly before his own shouts awakened his family . . . one more time.

This, he knew, was no way to live. Not so much for his sake, but for Christina and the five-year-old girl, Rachel Renee.

He managed to stand, ran his fingers through his soaking hair, looked at the chaise, and tossed a blanket on it, hoping the wool would soak up the sweat. The chaise had belonged to Christina’s grandmother. He would hate to ruin it, like the leather-covered sofa he had slept on one night that he had ripped apart with a paper opener he happened to find in his sleep.

As long as he didn’t start sleepwalking. God, wouldn’t that be awful.

He moved out of the parlor and into the hallway, stopped in the indoor bathroom to dry his face, comb his hair, drink a cup of water, and maybe make himself look halfway presentable, with luck mostly human, and then to the girl’s bedroom. It was empty, her covers thrown off the little bed. Which is what usually happened.

Fallon took a few more steps before pushing open the door at the end of the hallway.

Christina Whitney Fallon sat in the four-poster bed, hugging Rachel Renee tightly, kissing the top of her dark hair. Dark hair like Fallon’s, not the soft blond of his wife’s.

Both stared at him in silence.

“Good morning,” Fallon said, realized the absurdity of such a greeting, and sighed. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right, Papa.” Rachel Renee’s voice trembled.

“Are you all right?” Christina asked. Her voice was noncommittal, professional, like she was interviewing a witness or a suspect from her days just a few years back as an operative for the American Detective Agency in Chicago.

“Bad dream.” He shrugged. “The usual.”

“Were there monsters?” Rachel Renee asked.

By then, he had managed to cross the room and sat at the end of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Daisies and licorice.”

Rachel Renee laughed, and that made Fallon breathe a little easier, if not quite relax. He even thought he saw a twinkle in Christina’s eyes.

“Daisies and licorice aren’t monsters, Papa,” the girl said with bemusement. “Those are nice things. My favorite flower. And my favorite breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” Christina now laughed.

The day might be all right, Fallon thought.

The precious little girl, one of the two loves of Fallon’s life these past few years, crawled from her mother and leaned against Fallon, still in the robe.

She quickly pulled away. “Oh, Papa, you stink.”

Fallon tried to laugh.

“And you’re all sweaty.”

“That’s what boys and men do, baby,” Christina said.

“They’re gross.”

“Yes,” her mother agreed. “Very much so.”

“But I love you anyway, Papa.” She came back and tried to hug him. Fallon put his arm around her.

“What was the nightmare really about?” Rachel Renee asked.

Fallon looked across the room. It was a nice room, extravagant by Fallon’s standards, in a rented home—what Fallon would have considered a mansion back when he was a kid in Gads Hill, Missouri—in the upscale section of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fallon would have opted for something a little less pretentious, but the governor insisted, as did the state senators—Fallon could remember when Wyoming was just a U.S. territory. Everyone argued that the United States marshal for Wyoming needed to live in a fine house. Especially since he had a beautiful wife, and, for the past five-plus years, a lovely little daughter.

Politics.

All politics.

That’s what Fallon’s life had become. Politics during the day. Nightmares for the night.

A hell of a life.

“Papa?” Rachel Renee pleaded.

Fallon hugged her tightly. “Oh, I’m not too sure. Dragons, I think. Maybe a unicorn.”

“Are unicorns mean?”

“This one was.”

“I know dragons are evil. They spit fire.”

“Yeah, the two in my bad dream spit out a lot of fire.”

“Where there any Indians?”

Fallon looked down at her. “Indians aren’t mean like dragons and bad unicorns, or smelly boys and sweating old men.”

“Janie Ferguson says Indians are real bad.”

“Janie Ferguson is wrong.” He tousled her hair.

“You know, back when I was just a regular old deputy marshal, back in Fort Smith, Arkansas, I worked with a lot of Indians. Lawmen. Peace officers like me. Scouts. They were always good folk. Really good folk. So I don’t think I met any real bad Indians.”

“Honest?”

Not really. Fallon had arrested Indians, too, but not as many as the white men who tormented the Indian Nations across the western district of Arkansas. But those times had changed, and after what happened at Wounded Knee so many years ago, Fallon had decided that he’d bring up his daughter to understand that you could find good and bad in all kinds of people, no matter their skin, no matter their beliefs.

Although Fallon had a hard time thinking that for himself. Most of the men he had dealt with were rotten to the core.

As a deputy marshal, and then as an operative for the American Detective Agency—the latter a job he had been forced into—Fallon had worked with dregs. And some of the worst of the lot were men who supposedly represented law and order, like the president of the American Detective Agency, a soulless pitiful man named Sean MacGregor.

Often Fallon blamed MacGregor for these nightmares, for keeping Harry Fallon from being able to spend a night sleeping next to his wife—without having this fear that a nightmare would seize him and he’d wake up and realize that he had killed her by accident.

No way for a man to live. No way for a daughter to grow up.

On the other hand, Fallon might be having these dreams anyway, even if Sean MacGregor had not forced Fallon to go undercover into three of the worst prisons in America: Yuma in Arizona Territory, Jefferson City in Missouri, Huntsville and its prison farms in Texas.

Because long before that, Harry Fallon had spent ten years in Joliet, Illinois—for a crime he had not committed.

“You hungry?” Fallon asked his daughter.

“I’m always hungry,” Rachel Renee said.

“What time is it?”

“Five-thirty,” Christina answered. She started to rise. “I’ll get some . . .”

“No.” Fallon pushed himself up. “You two snuggle or at least get a few minutes more of sleep. I’m wide awake. Let me make some breakfast.”

Christina smiled, and the baby girl crawled back to her mother, hugged her, and Fallon pulled up the sheets and blankets over them. He kissed Rachel Renee’s forehead and looked into the hard eyes of his wife.

He kissed her forehead, too, pulled back, and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

Christina just nodded.

And Fallon walked out of the bedroom and closed the door.

One more time.

If this kept up, he realized, he wouldn’t have a wife or a child with him.

He could blame that on the American Detective Agency, the prison system in the United States, and the men who had framed him and tried to ruin his life.

Tried? Hell, his life was still ruined, even five years after being pardoned. After being told he was free, with an appointment as U.S. marshal for the district of Wyoming.

Fallon knew what most prisoners knew. Once you had spent time behind the iron, you never could be completely free again.