The Payback Man

Allowing Dr. Grayson to become a distraction would be a mistake. He’d have to watch himself.

ELEANOR WAS MILDLY ANNOYED when she found that the men had to march all the way back to the mess hall for lunch. She decided to ask the warden if they could bring their lunches with them in future. Although the cows wouldn’t require a great deal of coddling, she’d need the men on site for as many hours as possible during the day if she was to teach them.

She drove to her cottage for a quick lunch, looked at the pile of packing boxes and the small empty rooms with dismay, and wound up eating her salami-and-cheese sandwich standing at the counter in the galley kitchen before she drove back to the barn.

The men had returned before her. Like soldiers detailed to dig latrines, they didn’t seem anxious to start without her. They lounged on the grass, enjoying the late-October weather. She heard Sweet Daddy groan as she got out of her truck, and she motioned him over to her. He smirked at the others and sauntered toward her truck.

“Move it!” the CO snapped. She knew from Precious that Newman had a reputation for sadism, and that his nickname was Lard Ass. She doubted he’d be pleased if she called him that.

Sweet Daddy’s saunter changed to a lope.

“Hold out your hands,” Eleanor said when he reached her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I noticed you seemed to be having difficulty earlier. I don’t know how you’ve managed to avoid manual labor thus far in your sentence, but at the moment you’re courting a bad infection in those blisters. Possibly some of the rest of you are, as well. Mr. Newman, I believe I asked that these men be issued heavy leather work gloves.”

Every head turned toward the guard. For a moment he said nothing, simply glared at Eleanor with angry, piggy eyes. “Yeah. Some kind of mix-up.”

Eleanor inclined her head. “You don’t by any chance have the gloves with you, do you? It would certainly be easy to forget to give them out.”

Newman glared at her.

“Oh, well, I can call the supply office on my cell phone. No doubt they’ll issue the gloves in the morning,” Eleanor said. She kept her voice mild, but she could see Newman knew a threat when he heard one. She was furious with herself for not checking on the gloves earlier.

She also didn’t know why she guessed that Newman might have the gloves, but one look at his enraged face told her she was right. She had to fight to keep her eyes on his. He looked away first. Good thing. She was starting to shake.

“Yeah. Maybe I forgot I had ’em.”

“Perfectly understandable. But I’d appreciate your distributing them now. Elroy, let me clean those hands and put some bandages on them.”

“And I get to sit down, right?”

“No. You’ll be fine with gloves.”

She heard the snickers from the other men. Sweet Daddy curled his lip and threw her a glance of such malevolence that she stepped back a pace.

She treated his hands and watched as Newman gave him a pair of heavy gloves, which he pulled on with a grimace.

“Anybody else have bad blisters?” she asked. No one answered.

“Fine, then put on your gloves and let’s go back to work. I think we can finish cleaning out this muck before quitting time if we really try.” She knew she sounded like a schoolmarm with a bunch of kindergartners, but she couldn’t seem to strike the right note with them.

The way they watched her and moved around her reminded her of Rick Hazard’s remark about her whip and chair. It was like being in the midst of a pride of lions. She had no way of knowing whether they’d had their fill of prey or not.

Newman couldn’t have forgotten he had those gloves. He had withheld them out of pure meanness. And for half the day he’d gotten away with it. She’d be more careful in the future.

She squared her shoulders and walked ahead of the men toward the tractor, which sat on the concrete pad in front of the barn. They followed.

Without warning, she felt a pair of muscular arms around her waist. She was lifted off her feet and swung violently away from the tractor.

“Hey!” Newman yelled.

She was hoisted across Steve Chadwick’s chest. His cheek brushed hers. She could feel the stubble and smell the musky scent of his sweat.

“Snake!” Big screamed.

From her position on Steve’s hip she looked back at the concrete. In the shadow cast by the tractor curled the largest copperhead she’d ever seen. One pace more and she’d have stepped on it. It had been sleeping, but now it lifted its triangular head and prepared to defend itself.

“Damn!” Newman hauled out his gun.

Steve said quietly, “If you plan to shoot at that concrete, I’m sure the doctor and the rest of us would appreciate the chance to take cover from the ricochet behind one of the posts.”

“How else we gonna kill it, smart ass?” the CO hissed.

Gil Jones, as though his dragon tattoo conferred immunity from copperhead venom, took one step to the side, reached down, grasped the copperhead right behind its skull, hefted it one-handed while with the other he kept the writhing tail from wrapping itself around his arm. He took a couple of steps toward the open meadow and hurled the snake end over end the length of a football field into the tall weeds.

He threw an arrogant glance at Newman and returned to his place in the group.

“Thanks. You can put me down now,” Eleanor gasped.

“Right,” Steve said, and let her slide down his body.

She could feel her pulse thrumming in her throat. Her skin tingled where his hands had touched her. Fear. The residue of fear. That was all it was.

To cover her nervousness, she went to Gil. “Thanks. How on earth did you learn to handle snakes? I have to work with them from time to time, but I’m still terrified of the poisonous ones.”

For a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he looked across the meadow to the general area where the snake had fallen and said so softly that she could barely hear him, “My people’s into snake handling. They say that if you got enough faith, you can drink poison and handle snakes and not be hurt.”

“Have you been bitten often?”

“Hell, no. I had faith, all right, faith that if they sank those fangs into me I was dead. I can throw a rattler clear to the Mississippi River. First chance I got, I run away, and I ain’t never been back.”

He smiled. Eleanor thought it was even more chilling than his normal stony expression.

“I was a great disappointment to my daddy,” he finished.

Not for the first time, Eleanor wondered if she was doing the right thing by not finding out what the members of her “team” had done to wind up in prison. Maybe imagining was worse than reality. Even if Gil looked like an ax murderer, he might be inside for nothing more sinister than stealing motorcycles.

She realized that Big hadn’t moved since the snake was spotted, and his face was ashen. If such a man could cower, that was what he was doing. “Big?”

He made an inchoate sound deep in his throat. He was petrified.

“Big man, scared of a little ol’ snake,” Sweet Daddy crooned.

“Hush, Elroy,” Eleanor said. “I didn’t notice you stepping forward to deal with it.” She touched Big’s shoulder. “It’s all right, he’s gone.”

“He’s out there someplace. He could come back.”