Winter Duty by E. E. Knight Page B

of town. Most of the houses here were vacant, stripped skeletons with glass and wiring removed, metal taken right down to the door hinges. The one remaining had either been under constant occupancy or been restored—Valentine couldn’t tell which in the dark. It had a pair of friendly red-tinted lights illuminating the porch. Candles flickered from behind drawn curtains.
    Seemed a popular place: A party of four was just leaving—
    Valentine felt a sharp tug and his windpipe closed up. He realized a rope had been looped around his throat, and he was jerked out of the seat backward.
    A quick look at looming figures framed frostily against the red porch light of the house. They had on ghoulish rubber Halloween masks. Then the ground hit him, hard.
    The tallest and heaviest kicked him hard in the stomach, and Valentine bent like a closing bear trap around his neck. He opened his mouth to bite, but someone hauled at the rope around his neck, pulling his head away hard.
    “David Valentine. You murderous, traitorous bastard. Been looking forward to this meeting,” one of the masked men said.
    “You hauled my little brother all the way across Kentucky to get him killed,” another kicker put in.
    Something struck him hard on the kidneys with a crack. “Few more officers like you and the Kur won’t need no army.”
    Valentine roared back an obscenity and tried to get his hands up to fight the rope pulling his neck, but two of the attackers closed, each taking an arm above and below the elbow.
    “All your idea. You and that dumb bitch from headquarters,” an accuser continued.
    “Cuff him good—he’s slippery,” someone with a deep voice advised from the darkness. He was too far away be delivering punches and kicks.
    Or maybe his vision was going and it just seemed as though the voice was coming from a great distance. There were painful stars dancing in his vision like a faerie circus. Valentine felt kicks that might have just as well been blows from baseball bats, so hard were the assailants’ boots.
    “You’ve made enemies, Valentine. Now it’s time to settle up.”
    The rain stung; it must be washing blood into his eyes.
    “We don’t like criminals walking our streets, bold as black.”
    They took turns punching him in the face and stomach.
    “Grog lover!”
    “Renegade.”
    “Murderer!” The last was a crackling shriek.
    They added a few more epithets about his mother and the long line of dubious species that might have served as father. Valentine’s mad brain noted that they sounded like men too young to have ever known her.
    “You bring any of those redlegs into our good clean land, they’ll get the same. Be sure of that.”
    “Hell, they’ll get hung.”
    “Like you’re gonna be— huck-huck-huck !”
    “C’mon—let’s string this fugitive from justice up.”
    They dragged Valentine by the rope around his neck. He strained, but the handcuffs on his wrists at his back held firm.
    The old street in Jonesboro had attractive oaks and elms shading the pedestrians from summer heat. Their thick, spreading boughs made a convenient gibbet above the sidewalk and lane.
    The noose hauled Valentine to his feet by his neck. His skin flamed.
    Valentine knotted the muscles in his neck, fought instinct, kicking as he strangled. The rope wasn’t so bad; it was the blood in his eyes that stung.
    Vaguely, he sensed that something was thumping against his chest. An object had been hung around his neck about the size and weight of a hardcover book.
    One of them wound up, threw, and bounced a chunk of broken pavement off his face.
    “Murderer!”
    “Justice is a dish best served cold,” that deep voice said again.
    They piled into the little putt-putt and a swaying, aged jeep that roared out of the alley behind the red-lit house. With that, they departed into the rain. Valentine, spinning from the rope end as he kicked, bizarrely noted that they left at a safe speed that couldn’t have topped fifteen miles an