Читать книгу Stand Up and Die - William W. Johnstone - Страница 16

CHAPTER TEN

“You gutless puke.” Sean Keegan cursed the undertaker. “How much does the county pay you to bury a convicted murderer and owlhoot?”

Undertaker A. Percival Helton wiped his bald head and said in his irritatingly squeamish voice, “That’s not the point, sir.” He was a short man, pale like most undertakers were, but pudgy unlike most of the men who did business with the dead. Maybe that’s because undertaking still proved to be a booming business in the remote frontier of West Texas, and a man could get fat if he ate nothing but chicken fried steaks and greasy enchiladas.

“It damned well is the point,” Keegan said, and he pointed up at the dead man still swinging from the gallows. “He’s dead, and he needs burying, and from the records I found in the county sheriff’s office, you signed a contract to bury Tom Benteen, also known as Tom Lovely, alias Lovely Tom. Well, that’s him up yonder, you weasel, and I don’t like folks walking by and looking up at him like he was the Lord Jesus on the cross. He ain’t. He’s a rotten, murdering devil whose soul be burning in hell, and I want him cut down and buried. Now. With the rope still around his neck and his face planted down, so he can see exactly where he’s going.”

“That contract,” A. Percival Helton whined, “Has been invalidated. It wasn’t a legal hanging.”

Keegan spit on the grass. “He was to be hanged today. Sentenced legally, upheld by the governor of the Great State of Texas, and he was hanged. Just because the hangman got killed—”

“And there you have it.” The high-voiced, rotten snake had found something he could sink his teeth into. “The Benteens shot the bloody hell out of Purgatory City, and I am far, far too busy preparing the dearly departed for their funerals. Citizens of our county and our glorious town. They deserve burying, and, as the only undertaker in Purgatory City since Willard Carradine coughed himself to death from consumption and Alfred Davidson decided that El Paso was more to his liking, I think my duty rests with tending to the needs of those fine people.” And just to cut Sean Keegan to the quick, the whining miserable excuse for a man added, “Surely, Titus Bedwell, gallant soldier and God-fearing servant to our state and our county and our country, deserves my attention much more than a pathetic killer, whoremonger, bank robber, arsonist, and horse thief like Lovely Tom Benteen. Or, sir, do you disagree?”