“But what about Cob?”
“Don’t have no choice,” Cane said. “We’ll just have to take it slow.”
Chimney stuffed the corn cake into his mouth and bent down to pry the Winchester from the clerk’s hands. “I think I’ll hang on to this.”
“Jesus Christ, brother, we already got enough guns to start a goddamn army.”
“We might need to before this is over.”
“Well, I hope that poor bastard took better care of it than he did his horse,” Cane said.
“I doubt it,” Chimney said. “You’d have to be an idiot to try what he did.”
“Aw, you can’t blame him,” Cane said, just as a loud clap of thunder shook the air and the rain turned into a steady downpour. “Fifty-five hundred dollars, that much money would fuck any man’s head up.”
Thirty minutes later, as they started away from the farmhouse in the gray storm light, Cob looked down with feverish eyes from his horse at the storekeeper’s wet corpse caught in the briars, his face turned up at the sky, and his open mouth overflowing with rainwater like some obscene fountain. “It’s funny,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Cane asked.
“I was just a-thinkin’ that one of the very last things I said to that man ’fore he shot me was I hoped we got some rain. And now look at him.”
30
FROM TIME TO time during that period, Jasper saw a couple of the men who sat on the city council stop by the Whore Barn, men who were always casting complaints about him shutting down this or that well or shithouse like he was some sort of despot lording it over the citizenry, when all he was trying to do was the job he’d been assigned. He had met up with the worst one of them just yesterday, Sandy Saunders. Dressed in a tailored blue serge suit and swinging a new cane, the insurance salesman started to pass by silently, with a look of disdain bordering on revulsion, as if the sanitation inspector were nothing but a maggot or a bit of offal stuck to the bottom of one of his custom-made shoes. However, when Jasper stopped in the middle of the sidewalk three or four feet in front of him and grinned, Saunders couldn’t resist a smart remark. “What say, shit scooper?” He tapped his cane on the sidewalk, then struck a rakish pose as he saw a couple of young ladies approaching.
“I wouldn’t call me that no more if I was you,” Jasper replied, the smile plastered on his face growing even wider.
“Oh,” Saunders said with a laugh, “and why not, you little turd?”
Moving closer, Jasper waited until the women walked on by, then said, “Because I saw you over at the Whore Barn the other night. Sucking on the toes of the fat one got the grease dabbed all over her face. And you a-courtin’ that nice daughter of Mr. Chapman’s and blowin’ off to everyone about how you’re gonna run for mayor next fall. That’s why, Sandy. From now on, you either start calling me Mr. Cone, or I’ll tell the whole goddamn town about ye.”
For at least a minute, Saunders stood speechless, staring openmouthed at the inspector. His face turned a ghostly white, then a bright red, and finally a deep angry purple. “You’re…you’re crazy,” he finally managed to sputter.