Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini
Crucifixion River
© 2007
End of the Road
“Are you going to send me back?”
No, I thought, I’m going to put a bullet in your silly head and dump your body in the slough. Be rid of one problem, at the least. I’d never killed a woman before, but there’s a first time for everything, and she was a burden I couldn’t bear. I eased back the tail of my coat.
“If you take me with you,” she said, “I’ll tell you how we can go on.”
“Go on? With this blasted tree blocking the road?”
“There’s a way around, another road intersects with this one about a mile farther south.”
“What road? You mean the one we passed a ways back?”
“Yes. It leads to Crucifixion River.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s…a kind of ghost camp.”
“Nobody lives there?”
“Nobody.”
“Easy to spot, this track?”
“It’s overgrown. But I know where it is…I can show you.”
“You’re not lying to me?”
“No! I swear it.”
I stared at her, long and hard. Her blue eyes were guileless. Some of my rage began to ease and I let the coattail fall closed. Her death sentence had been reprieved-for however long it took us to reach Crucifixion River.
Crucifixion River
T.J. Murdock
Bad storm making up. And moving in much faster than I’d expected.
You could tell it from the bruised look of the southwestern sky, the black-bellied cloud masses, the raw whip of the November wind. Already the muddy brown water of Twelve-Mile Slough-Crucifixion Slough to the locals-had roughened, creating wavelets that broke high against the muddy banks. The ferry barge, halfway across now, rocked and strained against the bridle looped over the taut guide cable. It took nearly all the strength I possessed to keep the windlass turning. If the storm broke with as much fury as I suspected it would, the crossing would be impassable well before nightfall.