Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter Page A

Farm, where all power seemed concentrated. He would get to the bottom of this or know why.
    Once he’d taken off his shoes and his hat and at last his tie, and folded his jacket into a little package that would do for a pillow, it didn’t take long for him to fall asleep. For all its scratchiness, the straw was warm and dry. His roommates cooed quietly on their nests, and even the rooster seemed at last to accept him; it realized he was no threat when it came to fertilizing the hens.
    He slept easily; he was, after all, near exhaustion. The dreams he had were dead literal, without that kind of logic-free surrealism that fills most sleepers’ minds. In Sam’s dreams, the world made the same sense it made in reality; the same laws, from gravity to probate, still obtained; reason trumped emotion and the steady, inexorable fairness of the system proved out in the end, as it always did. Sometimes he wished he had a livelier subconscious, but there was nothing that could be done with such a defect.
    He was not dreaming when they woke him. He was in dark, black nothingness; the light in his eyes had the quality of pain and confusion. He sat up, bolt awake, aware of shapes, the smell of horses, the sense of movement all ’round him.
    Three flashlights had him nailed.
    “Say, what on earth is—” he began to bluster, but before he could get it out, somebody hit him with a wooden billy club across the shoulder. The pain was fearsome, and he bent double, his spirit initially shattered by it. His hand flew to the welt.
    “Jesus!” he screamed.
    “Git him, boys.”
    “Goddamn, don’t let him squirm away.”
    “Luther, if he fights, whop him agin!”
    “You want another goddamn taste, Mister? By God, I will skull you next goddamn time.”
    They were on him. He felt himself pinned, turned, then cuffed.
    “That’s it. Bring him out now.”
    He was dragged out. There were three deputies, husky boys, used to using muscle against flesh, who shoved him along, their lights beaming in his face, blinding him. The cuffs enraged him. He had never been handcuffed in his life.
    “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing! I am an attorney-at-law, for God’s sake, you have no right at all to—”
    Another blow lit up his other arm and he stumbled to the earth in the agony of it.
    “That ought to shut him up,” said the man on horseback, who was in command. “Load him in the meat wagon and let’s go.”

5
     
    I T smelled of pines. The odor actually was not unpleasant; it was brisk, somehow clean, and pine needles, like tufts of feathers, light brown and fluffy, lay everywhere.
    But it was still a prison.
    Sam’s arms were both swollen, and when he clumsily peeled away the clothes he wore, he saw two purplish-yellow bruises inscribed diagonally across each biceps, as if laid there by an expert. One was not harder than the other. In fact, they were mirror images. No bones were broken, no skin cut, just the rotted oblong tracing exactly the impact of the billy club upon his upper arms, each delivered with the same force, at the same angle, to the same debilitating effect. Sam’s arms were numb, and his hands too un-feeling to grab a thing. He could make but the crudest of movements. When he had to pee in the bucket in the corner, undoing his trouser buttons was a nightmare, but he would not let these men do it for him, if they would, which was questionable.
    He knew he had been beaten by an expert. Someone who had beaten men before, had thought critically about it, had done much thorough research, and knew where to hit, how to hit, how hard to hit, and what marks the blows would leave, which, after a week or so, would be nothing at all. Without photographic evidence, it would only be his word against a deputy’s in some benighted Mississippi courtroom, in front of some hick judge who thought Arkansas was next to New York, New York, the home of communism.
    His head ached. His temper surged, fighting through the pain.
    It