Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Stransky looked at Troy. See? That fucker’s done got cocky.

It’s just a rumor, Troy said.

But it sounds like him, don’t it? Dancin on our graves. She turned back to the guard. Well, honey, we’re gonna have somethin to say about that.

The guard found the strength to look defiant. Just kill me, you seditious harpy. Send me to the bosom of my Lord. I need to make my apologies.

Okay, Stransky said.

She stood and drew her sidearm and shot him in his ruined face. He jerked once and lay still. Blood oozed from half a dozen wounds.

Bushrod was wiping off his instruments in the grass. The other Troublers turned away and chatted as if at a picnic.

Troy felt sick. Everybody we ever lost, the ones who went out on patrol or walked home alone and just disappeared. How many of em ended up like this man? A brutality worse than hell itself.

Stransky was looking at him, waiting. He supposed he had to get on with it. He had come this far. God help him.

He cleared his throat. Them canals—those are the same places that breached durin the ancients’ time. In the storm they called Katrina.

Stransky holstered her weapon. Yeah. Looks like Rook knows his New Orleans history.

We didn’t learn nothin here we couldn’t have figured out by ourselves.

She shrugged. Had to be sure. Ain’t all of us got that McClure kid workin for us.

Troy frowned. She’s got nothin to do with this.

Stransky cackled. Sure, she does. You’re lookin at us like we’re monsters, but sendin a little kid into the lion’s den all these years—you’re cold, Gabe. Colder than me, and smart like a goddam rattlesnake. You been runnin the wrong outfit all along. She turned to Bushrod. Dump this dead-ass motherfucker in the bayou.

What about the inspection? Bushrod asked.

Send somebody else. I got too much to do here.

She brushed past Troy and walked through the cabin’s back door. Bushrod untied the Crusader. A thick coat of blood covered the Troubler’s hands, his clothes, his face. A savage from a time when the ancients were but babes. He picked up the body as if it were a child’s and slung it over his shoulder, flinging blood about the yard, and then he traipsed around the cabin and down the hill.

I could follow him to the water’s edge. Gun him down, knife him in the liver and then cut his throat, bash his skull in. Be the lord of order one last time. And all it would cost me is the town I love and everybody in it. Troy swallowed his rage yet again like the bitter pill it was and turned back toward the house, hoping that his sick stomach could hold down some gumbo. It would be a long day.

26

When Jack Hobbes joined the lord of order’s office, Troy gave him a house on North Rampart. In ancient times, it had been a small inn, big enough for perhaps a dozen people if they shared rooms. It faced an old and crumbling vacant lot. Hobbes had always expected Troy to fill that lot someday, but he never had, perhaps because Hobbes liked the open space when the everyday burdens he bore like hundred-pound sacks of grain—all the violence, all the death—threatened to crush him. He had always dreaded Troy’s resignation, retirement, or death, not only because of their friendship but also because it would likely force Hobbes to move into the lord’s traditional quarters. Too much room for a man’s thoughts, his guilt, to echo and distort into something even worse.

Now, Troy’s home had been razed, the ashes picked through and scattered, and Royster had turned Hobbes’s sanctuary into a prison. LaShanda Long was lord of order, but she had received neither the traditional Temple office nor a new lord’s residence nor much actual power. What could you count on in times like these? Everything seemed made of smoke and rain.

Hobbes sat in the den, the lamp turned low, an island of light in a dark sea. Outside, nothing moved in his yard or the lot. The guards’ conversations, muted and unintelligible, blended with cricket song and the deep and bellicose croaks of frogs. If Hobbes were to set foot outside, those guards would gun him down. And sometimes that seemed like a sweeter fate than boiling to death indoors, gelded and meek.

All the crews had done their jobs as well as ever. Firewood in the kitchen tinderbox. Fresh water in the barrel out back. Chamber pots emptied. Food in the cupboards. Later he would take a cool bath and then sweat himself half to death all over again. Then he would probably take another bath because what else was there to do?

Santonio Ford’s people would be planting and growing and watering and tending and hunting and fishing. Hobbes had always loved to fish in his downtime, taking the occasional dip in the river to cool off. But now he could not even smell the water. He could not open the windows, for then the guards’ prattle would drift in, would tempt him to dig under the floorboards and drag out his pistols and splatter brains and viscera all over the street. Such an end would be wasteful and selfish.

No matter what else happened, he had marked his guards’ faces. He would send them to their rewards before he met his own.

He took up the carafe of tepid water from the side table and poured a glass, drained half of it, and set it back in the pale ring it had formed on the varnished wood. Wonder what Ernie and Gordy’s up to. And if Gabe’s alive.

Outside, an unseen guard tittered. The stars winked and glittered, as if the very universe mocked Hobbes’s hopes and dreams.

27

Tetweiller lay on his sofa, windows thrown open to whatever breeze might come. Outside, the guards conversed about the wall’s completion and how the Troublers were squeezing the city’s population out of their homes.