The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [342]
“You be quiet!” she seethed, turning to me. “You’re not even a man—just a boy! All you understand are your own damned needs, your own damned wants! A woman probably worked herself raw raising you, and how did you ever repay her, except by spitting in her face? By disobeying, by whining, by—” Tightening her grip on her pistol, Libby glared at me hotter than ever with those gold eyes. “You want to know about the boy in the grave, do you? I didn’t ask for him, and I didn’t want him. I had a beau—a respectable boy, from a family that had a place in our world—the kind of boy I could have brought home to my mother, to show that I could—that I could—” Her voice starting to wander, Libby glanced down at the tarred roof for an instant. “He would’ve done anything for me. And I did do anything for him—but then his family found out, and they wouldn’t…” Quickly, she looked back up. “And I was left with his lying, dirty seed in me! It wasn’t wrong, to prevent the disgrace! What could it have been but a bastard—something else, something more, that I’d done wrong? So I did what was right—but I couldn’t even tell anyone!”
Seeing that my plan was having the desired effect, I kept pressing: “And when you shot Matthew and Thomas and Clara? I suppose you didn’t want to do that, either—your finger slipped on the trigger, or they asked you to shoot them—”
The Doctor was by now staring at me, perplexed and alarmed. “Stevie, what are you—”
I ignored him. “What about that?” I went on harshly. “How did you do the right thing there?”
Her breath now coming in quick heaves, Libby shouted, “It was better for them! Do you think I wanted to shoot them? It was better for them, to be finished with this world—”
“Yeah!” I shouted back at her. “Better so’s you could take their money and go off with your boyfriend the preacher!”
“Be quiet! Goddamn you children, can’t any of you ever just be quiet?” Swallowing hard, Libby tried without much success to get a firmer grip on herself. “You know what this leads to! I’ve warned you, and now I have to show you!”
Looking at me all of a sudden the way she must, I figured, have looked at all the children she’d killed just before the act, she raised her pistol into the air and brought it down on the Doctor’s head, causing him to tumble to the ground, still conscious but bleeding from a cut above his temple. Brutal as the deed was, it gave me all the time I needed: when Libby yanked the Doctor back up by his collar, she turned again to find me holding Miss Howard’s Colt with both hands and training its barrel on her.
“Okay,” I said, my own heart racing. “Now, you want to start killing people, you go ahead. But I promise—you’ll be the second one to go.”
CHAPTER 56
She was looking at me with the same expression what’d been on her face when Mr. Picton had revealed that we knew about the grave behind her family’s barn: surprise and shock. Again I got the feeling that she hadn’t been in such positions many times in her life; and that fact, I knew, might lead her to do some unpredictable things. But I had my own little dose of unpredictability up my sleeve, one what I was getting set to administer.
Her eyes dancing in fear and anger, Libby’s mouth first tightened up, then cracked open long enough for her to say, “I’ll kill him! I swear I will!”
I nodded to her. “I know,” I said. “Question is, do you wanna go, too?”
“What choice do I have?” the woman shouted back. “Damn you, you’re just like the others—you don’t leave me any choice!”
“I’ll give you a choice,” I said. “You let the Doctor walk over here, then you run. We won’t follow.”
The Doctor, still reeling a little from the blow to the head he’d taken, looked as confused as Libby Hatch. “Stevie, what are you saying?”
Once again I paid him no mind. “Well?” I said, keeping my eyes on Libby.
She did a little dance in her head with the idea, looking tempted. Then I got some unexpected help when Mr. Roosevelt’s voice boomed up from down in the street:
“They’re retreating! Lieutenant