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  Murder Haven: Gallows Pole

  Book Two

  By

  Will Molinar

  Edited, Produced, and Published by Writer’s Edge Publishing 2015

  All rights reserved.

  © 2015 Will Molinar

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Other Books by Will Molinar

  * * * MURDER HAVEN SERIES* * *

  Den of Thieves

  Gallows Pole

  Death’s Reckoning

  Rogues Gallery

  Lair of Killers

  Chapter One

  The sermon was very deep and poignant. Castellan basked in the glory of his Maker and listened with rapt attention as the Arc Lector shared with them his wisdom and insight.

  Castellan closed his eyes at times, letting the choir’s chant, in between portions of the sermon, wash over him with the glory of its sound. The orchestral music was more spectacular than ever as if he had never heard it before. Perhaps Castellan was more in tune with the beautiful music because he walked the righteous path with more accuracy.

  The music sent him soaring and added together with the message of deriding disloyalty, Castellan glowed with peace and serenity. When he opened his eyes during a lull in the music or speech, it was clear all the people around him shared the vision of a peaceful Sea Haven. They believed in what was happening was for them.

  The Arc Lector’s necklace lay close to his chest. The soft warmth of the crystal flared from time to time when the Arc Lector spoke. It was a sign from the Almighty, that their cause was just. It was so obvious.

  Morlin finished his preliminary sermon, and they had a break for soft music. It gave a chance for any individual to approach the holy man and ask for initiation into the conclave.

  Castellan waited and watched several people do what he had done many years ago when he first came to Sea Haven to make his life exceptional. Now they too would become one with the faith. Good for them.

  Later, the Arc Lector continued his sermon, broaching a different subject:

  “I know these are troubled times for our fair city. But as I said on the subject of disloyalty, we must remain true to our beloved home and fight for what is good and moral. This is the only path to salvation. Stay true to your city. I have a story for you now.

  “This is the story of Gerald, and I believe it bears repeating in these troubling times for our town. Gerald was a man of the most devout passions. Some of these passions were of the noble kind, those that were of benefit to the people that shared his life. For example, Gerald was passionate about his family. “He had three brothers, of which he was the oldest, much older. When their father died, Gerald took it upon himself to help raise them as their grieving mother failed to ruin. Time passed. When springtime came upon, it found the family struggling. When time came to plant crops, his brothers turned to Gerald to lead them, to teach them what their father had taught him before they were old enough to understand.

  “Gerald, however, was still young himself in the scope of the world. With the burdening pressure to save his family from starvation and destitution, added with the sharp pain of the loss of their father, a seed of pain planted into his mind.

  “They fought through the harvest season, Gerald had given up any type of life outside that which helped the family to survive. He grew bitter from the loss of youth that would come upon him as the years began to turn. There would be no other life for him. The family needed the eldest son more than ever.

  “It was around this time that Gerald met a girl, the most beautiful girl of the village, prized above all others for her physical attributes as well as her strong family connections with wealth and social standing. To win Matilda’s heart would be a boon to any man, and she felt the same as he. Soon, they made plans to become man and wife and live their lives together hand in hand.

  “Meanwhile, his family suffered. He no longer helped them, spending his time in the company of the woman he loved. It was easy for him, you see, to choose what was right in front of him, the soft touch, the wanton eyes of a young girl, and thus Gerald drifted away from his brothers and mother. With winter fast approaching, they became desperate.

  “Their crops did not get their due attention and hence withered and died. The family faced both starvation and default on their contracts with other farmers. They were doomed.

  “Gerald did not see their plight, so wrapped up in his own love affair. Matilda became his passion, his only passion, to the detriment of all else. They married and moved away from the village of his birth, not knowing the fate of his family. But that tale is a sad one, for they died, cold and alone. They became no more than a passing thought for the man, all through his days.”

  The Arc Lector took a moment to let his words sink in, and he sighed, looking weary at that moment, as if he had put much more effort into telling the tale than might’ve been expected. Castellan was almost in tears. So much pain and passion, mixed together in a life most could relate to.

  “Tis a sad tale,” Arc Lector Morlin said. “But the lesson is simple: do not shirk your responsibilities my dear ones, no matter your personal desires or dreams. Your family, your town, these are the bedrock upon which we lay our attentions. These are what matter in the end.

  “I urge you all to take this story to heart, for it is true, and there are many similar tales throughout time that demonstrate the futility of a life lived for hedonistic desires. We must all make sacrifices in this time of woe for our city, and in the end it will be worth any sacrifice if we only save our town, our people. Is there anything greater?”

  The Arc Lector bowed his head and put his arms up to the side. The people joined and intoned as one voice as he gave the benediction.

  “Bless the souls of our fathers and mothers, our brothers and sisters, and those of our neighbors, for in their hearts and minds ours are one… for all time.”

  “….for all time,” Castellan said.

  He wept.

  * * * * *

  Things were getting interesting. The guards had let him keep the iron shackles off, and the agony was over for a time. Jon wanted to rub the sore wrists, but he couldn’t without rupturing the clotted blood where scabs developed. Two thick bandages covered the area and dark spots soaked through. The skin would be scarred for life, however long that was.

  Death could be eminent. The young man didn’t want to believe it at first. It would never go that far, but whenever he heard the guards speak, they always said things like, “hangings are fun,” “can’t wait to see the necks stretch,” or “hear the pop of their heads when the rope goes tight!” The speech was dreadful and reminded him of being in the taverns.

  Jon sat on his dirty cot and fear sank deep into his bones. From what he could catch from the guard’s conversation—they never spoke to him, only around him—there hadn’t been a hanging for almost a month, and the populace was hankering for one.
The last one took place a day or two before Jon and Zandor set foot in the city. He remembered hearing about it that first day.

  The young Dock Master thought it ironic the city would live up to its moniker the last day of his stay as well as the day before he arrived.

  Any thoughts of escape had fled earlier that morning. It was impossible. Even though the shackles were off, the door was locked and guarded by many armed men. He’d seen the scope of the jail and the way it was built. Strong wooden doors reinforced with iron, with several layers of doors upon doors in between, up and down staircases. The design was simple but effective. Almost the entire building was made of thick stone. There was no hope.

  Jon slipped into a dull state of despondency and despair. Any thread of a rescue evaporated with every passing hour. The hanging, his hanging, was set for the very next day. The guards were very specific about that. They couldn’t stop being excited about it.

  “…got them others rounded up too.”

  “Yeah, right here. Twelve of ‘em. Never seen any of ‘em afore.”

  “Bunch of scrubs anyway. Shoulda cleaned them off better. It stinks in here!”

  “Well, I tell ya….”

  The speech fell lower into indecipherable gibberish that Jon didn’t bother to try and understand. He was thankful for the reprieve, though part of his mind wanted to hear the coarse language out of morbid curiosity.

  Later it picked up again. The men laughed. “…that they say about it. I know.”

  “Yeah, kinda like that. You can smell it. I been there, I have. They shit themselves right after, I mean right after! It’s so fast when it happens, bang! Right like that when them necks break.”

  “They piss themselves too. You can see right there on front of their pants. Poor bastards.”

  They laughed again, and it faded away.

  Jon felt a shiver strike him. He wanted to shit and piss himself already. He half wanted to provoke the men into perhaps killing him now to mitigate the all the suffering to endure from now until the hanging. Waiting and thinking was the worst part.

  The young man tried to remind himself that everyone died at some point. He had a good life, a lucky life. He was born with certain skills that had helped him rise to the top of a profession that other men coveted. Jon had more than any man could want and then some.

  But Jon would miss his family, his mother the most. He loved her a great deal. His father was not lovable but still his blood. His older brother, a statesman in a city deep east into the continent, was over a decade older. They hadn’t grown up much together, and Jon wished he had gotten to know the man better.

  His younger sister Sara was a pretty girl of eighteen, but she was estranged to the family. She’d run off a couple of years ago, and Jon hadn’t seen her since. There should have been an effort to find her, at least for their mother’s sake. She would have appreciated that even if they never found her, the sweet woman.

  There was no chance to ever see any of them again.

  * * * * *

  Someone shouted. There was anger in the voice along with animal hatred that came from too much work, too much drink, and not enough humanity to balance out the forces against them.

  Jerrod flicked his head over to the section of the wharf and wondered what the hell was going on. He gave a mental sigh and headed over.

  They were due another shipment of weapons and all manner of armor. Most of which would be assigned to the new group of mercenaries coming into town. Castellan had told him many of the hired men were coming in soon and were to be well armed.

  An entire group of men bickered. Jerrod did a quick headcount as he came up behind them. Most of them were dockworkers, a dozen strong, and though it was getting harder to distinguish between the regulars and the converted thieves, he saw four or five of the trouble making thieves mixed in with a few merchants.

  Several dock security officers and police stood nearby with their thumbs up their asses doing nothing but gawking. The workers looked about to form a lynch mob and smash the merchants into the boardwalk.

  Jerrod didn’t understand why the merchants even came out anymore. He paused and half considered leaving them to a well-deserved beating. That would teach them real quick, but in the end it would only cause trouble for him. To have to explain to Castellan would be a bigger headache than stopping the commotion.

  Shoving his way into the line of by standers, he pushed them off. “Get your dumb asses back to work, you slugs! C’mon! Move it!”

  Jerrod shoved a few more, and the onlookers started moving away. None wanted to face his wrath. They were smart. The men involved in the altercation were not so quick on the uptake.

  The thieves giving the merchants a hard time continued to yell at them. “You people can’t tell us what to do! We got our assignments straight from Cutter. You ain’t his boss. Shove off and let us do our job!”

  “Your job is to get on board and report to the ship’s captain,” one of the merchants said. Along with several other well dressed men and one woman, the merchants stood their ground.

  “You damn bean countin’ bastards,” the thief said. “That ain’t my assignment today. My assignment’s the warehouse, always has been ‘round here. So shove off ‘fore you get stuck real hard.”

  “Your assignment has been changed. Go to it now, or you’ll be on my report. That is something you do not want.”

  The thief laughed. “Your report?! That’s rich, it is. That ain’t nothing to—”

  Jerrod shouldered past more of them, slammed into a merchant that wasn’t paying attention, and stood before the worker. The man’s face was full of fury, but when Jerrod grabbed it with his massive paws and bent his head back, he shut his mouth and gagged. The thief tried to lock his hands down on Jerrod’s wrists, but the bigger man already had a superior position on him, and with proper leverage, the thief could do nothing but squirm like a fish on a hook.

  “You little bastards get back to work,” Jerrod said, his voice a deep hiss like scraping metal. He spun the man around and glared at the rest of them. “So help me, I’ll slag every single one of you fucks for the morning gallows. You ain’t gettin’ paid to bitch and moan about your assignments. Move it!”

  Most of them looked afraid, but there were a few that did not. The thieves were lean and tan, drawn out from too little food and too much physical labor. There was desperation in their eyes, but more than that, there was abject hatred.

  One man, tall and skinny, stepped forward and pointed at Jerrod’s captive, “Robert here,” the tall man said, “see, he don’t like water much. Makes him sick, see? That’s why he gets warehouse duty.”

  Jerrod grunted. Seemed reasonable enough. He shoved the man away and into his fellows. “Then put the little cunt back in the warehouse. Move your ass.”

  They stared but did as requested. With plenty of dirty looks over their shoulders, they walked off. The lead merchant, his name was Carlos, eyed the merchants then looked back to Jerrod. The smirk on his face a mile wide. Jerrod wanted to knock the look off his face, the damn fool.

  The dock master, Samuel Becket came out. He was middle-aged but young enough looking. He waved the men, including the merchants, out of the area. “Let’s get back to work, gentlemen,” Becket said. “That’s enough, now. We have loads more to go before the work’s done. Get to it, please.”

  They listened to him and dispersed to their separate stations. Becket and Jerrod shared a look. Jerrod frowned and shook his head, wanting to curse the man and tell him to get his act together, along with the other dock masters, but it wasn’t worth it. They wouldn’t listen to him.

  Jerrod went back his post, near the center of the wharf area, as things began to get back to normal. More troubled brewed; it was in the air, but the brutal man had learned long ago to shut down any dissent before it got too large. Only that wouldn’t work much longer.

  The hanging set for tomorrow would include twelve men. Many of them came from within the cadre of the dock workers. Th
ese people here wouldn’t like that. They knew about it and talked about it. Maybe that was why they were fighting.

  For the first time since Castellan had begun his plan for taking over control of the city, since the first time he’d ordered a hanging to quell any thoughts of rebellion these battered and angry men might have, Jerrod had some serious doubts as to the validity of the move.

  It wouldn’t help. It would only stir the burning coals of hatred and avarice. Jerrod decided then and there to stay as far away as possible from the gallows the next day. It wouldn’t be pretty.

  * * * * *

  Jon didn’t sleep the night before his scheduled hanging. Instead, he thought it possible to have the calm serenity necessary to get some rest, that he had made peace with the stark reality of his mortality. But that had not happened. The fear of facing eternity was too great.

  Perhaps during some portion of the longest night of his life, he snatched a minute or two of restless slumber. There was no way to be certain, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the time would never end.

  When dawn crept its way over the horizon, it was with surprise to see it crest the lone window in the cell. It seemed another lifetime ago since freedom. The jailors came in and gave him his last meal.

  The food was edible. In fact it was very good. A sizable potato and some carrots filled out the plate while a piece of overcooked meat made his mouth water. He hadn’t eaten in a while, and though his stomach would churn over, he got the full meal down.

  A dull ache began in his loins and spread to his stomach. Jon always assumed he’d die an old man in bed or lost at sea. The latter at least was more romantic than an unlawful hanging.

  Thoughts of Zandor were not filled with hate, for Jon was beyond anyone’s rescue. He was lost.