Comstock Cross Fire by Gary Franklin Read Free Book Online Page A

until we either get killed by Holt or hanged by Peabody?”
    â€œI’m dead serious,” Joe whispered. “Dead damned serious!”
    Fiona nodded, trying her very best just to believe. She had to believe. Otherwise, she was going to go mad, and then how would Joe ever survive being shackled to a crazy woman?
    Â 
    That night Ransom Holt built a bonfire and dragged Joe and Fiona closer to the fire. “There’s a chill in the air and you two are worth a whole lot more to me alive than dead,” he explained as he uncorked a bottle of whiskey, pulled up a blanket, and enjoyed his fire.
    Holt tilted the bottle up to the stars and drank deeply. He sighed with contentment and smiled, his meaty face highlighted by the flames. “I have always enjoyed a good, big fire,” he told his two prisoners. “When I was a boy growing up on a farm in Connecticut, I would build bonfires out of the tree stumps that we used to pull out to clear our fields. I’d sneak some kerosene out of my father’s shed and drench those stumps, then pile dead branches and leaves all around them and set ’em afire! Lordy, but they burned high and bright. I’d dance around the flames pretending I was a wild Indian. I’d whoop and holler and have the best old time.”
    Holt took another drink, and it was clear that he wanted to go back in time and to reminisce. “My father was a circus freak,” he admitted. “He was an inch taller than I am now and thicker. He could lift a fully grown horse right off the damned ground, and he did all sorts of lifting feats for suckers who would pay to watch. Sometimes, he’d wrestle three or four men at a time for a purse. He never lost. My father was big, strong, and mean as a snake. He’d whip me just for the hell of it, and he’d whip my mother until she begged him to stop.”
    Fiona looked sideways at Holt. “Why didn’t your mother take you and run away?”
    â€œOh,” Ransom Holt said, still gazing deep into the flames. “She tried that once. But only once, because he broke her leg over his knee and then he smashed her kneecap with a hammer, shattering it all to hell so the best that she could do was hobble.”
    Holt’s voice was taking on rage. “My father broke Mother’s leg and kneecap, telling her that he would break her neck and mine the next time she tried to run away with me. And he wasn’t bluffing.”
    Fiona knew she shouldn’t say another word, but something made her blurt, “What eventually happened to your father?”
    â€œWell,” Holt said, suddenly grinning after taking another long pull on his bottle, “came the day I was sixteen and my father got drunk and brought home a young little whore not much bigger than you. He fucked her right in front of my mother, laughing all the time he did it, and then he told my mother to undress.”
    Fiona swallowed hard. “Why would he do such a thing?”
    â€œHe ordered her to undress because she was old and beat up and not good to look at anymore.” Holt’s lips twisted with hate. “My mother protested, and then Father began to beat her in front of the naked whore. When my mother couldn’t take any more, she started to remove the only old dress she owned, and that’s when something inside me just . . . just snapped. I went crazy.”
    Holt threw down his whiskey and his eyes tightened and his lips formed a thin, white slash across his face. “There was a hatchet resting by our fireplace, and I grabbed it up and started slashing at my father. He was strong, but he wasn’t made of steel, and when I chopped off his hand, he lost his nerve, and that’s when I split his head open from the hairline right down to his filthy mouth.”
    â€œThat’s what I’d have done, too,” Joe Moss said. “Only, I wouldn’t have waited until I was sixteen years old. I’d have