The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists (2015)
“Not out of pity or compassion, but as punctuation—a period against the red earth, big and round and implacable and unmoving.
Leaving the canteen was only a gesture. Curtain had broken Sanchez’s hands with a claw hammer while Kirby and Wyatt held the Mexican. Now Sanchez’s fingers were twisted and swollen like rotten sausages. Even so, Curtain had done a good job tightening the cap on the canteen. Sanchez would never be able to open it. Not in a month of Sundays.
Curtain watched as Sanchez reached for the canteen. Broken hands dripping blood on polished leather. Mouth open. Dry tongue on jerky lips. Swollen clown fingers smearing the cap with blood, then slipping off, slipping off…slipping off again.
Kirby kicked the canteen out of Sanchez’s hands. It skidded across the dirt at a slight angle, leaving a mark like an especially long comma.
No one said anything. Kirby and Wyatt paced the Mexican as he bellied across the floor of Apache Canyon like a crippled sidewinder.
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