I Travel by Night by Robert R. McCammon Page B

caused him to either move around them or squeeze between. On the way past the bar someone threw their beer in his face, and someone else added a glistening yellow egg of spit to his cheek. Then Brannigan was out the batwing doors and gone, the fiddler started up again and the noise did too and Lawson put his gun away and gathered up his own money. He took a beer that was sent to him from the bar, sipped it and set it aside because it wasn’t to his taste. He needed a little cattle blood to make it palatable. He spent awhile talking to some loggers about finding Nocturne and none of them knew the place. Where to rent a boat? he asked, and was told to look for McGuire at the dock.
    Lawson left the Swamp Root and headed for the water. The darkness of the swamp beckoned him. He was walking past the stable when the image of a picture of Jesus hanging on a wall jumped into his mind. He smelled beer and caught a figure coming up from a shadow to his right, and as he whirled around with a speed no human could match the knife in Brannigan’s hand went for his neck.

Six.
     
    By the time Lawson thought of what he should do, he was doing it. His arm came up in a blur and grasped the cardsharp’s knifehand to stop the fall of the blade, and he prepared himself to throw the fool through the nearest window.
    But before he could put that thought into action, a pistol shot cracked and the knifeblade broke in front of Lawson’s face. A second shot, delivered on the powdersmoke of the first, lifted Brannigan’s hat off his head and sent it spinning. Brannigan bleated with terror, all intent to do harm forgotten. He wrenched desperately to get free of his captor, who had ducked low to avoid any more flying lead. Then Lawson let Brannigan go and the man ran for his life, in the opposite direction of the swamp. Lawson aimed a kick at his tail, but the cardsharp’s speed of terror beat the vampire’s half-hearted vengeance and so Brannigan scurried away into the night whimpering like a little lost child.
    From a crouched position, Lawson drew both pistols and surveyed the darkness. He saw the gray gunsmoke hanging in a narrow alleyway. Just that fast, the vampire gunslinger sped forward to the mouth of the alley, where he flattened himself against a wall of rough planks. Nothing moved beyond. He heard the noise of shouting. People were coming to find out what the shooting was about. Lawson eased into the alley, both revolvers ready, but his red-centered eyes detected no threat. Damnation , he thought. Somebody shooting at me or at Brannigan ? Whoever had pulled the quick-fire trigger, they were gone.
    And so too, he decided, he ought to be.
    He slipped away and became one with the dark. He holstered his guns, but kept his eyes aimed. In another few minutes he rounded a roughhewn building and found himself at the dock where the logging boats were tied up. Beyond lay the absolute darkness of the swamp, but on the dock was a cabin that showed lamplight through the windows. Lawson knocked at the door and waited.
    It opened with a billow of sour whiskey smell into Lawson’s face. A wizened old man with a scraggly white beard and white eyebrows that jumped like angry snakes peered out, a blue jug of Rose’s Whiskey gripped in his hand. He was bald, his head blotched with age spots burned in by the sun. A razor scar began at the left side of his mouth and progressed nearly to the ear. His nose had been broken more than twice. He wore a faded and ragged pair of overalls, his chest bare and showing a boil of white hair. He narrowed his dark little eyes. “Whazzit?” he asked, in a voice like the grating of stone against stone.
    “McGuire?”
    “I am. Who’re you ?”
    “Trevor Lawson, from New Orleans. You’re the dockmaster here?”
    “ Dockmaster ?” McGuire gave a nasty chortle. “I watch the boats at night. Work on ’em some if they need work. Keep the records of who goes out and where they’re goin’. That make me a