Niceville

the park. Under the trees.”
    He stared hard at Merle.
    “You’re proposing we fight?”
    “I’m here to kill you. Glynis said that if you were willing to stand to the scratch line, I should let you. Are you ready to stand?”
    “I have no one to second me.”
    Merle studied his face.
    “I can find you a second. Will you stand?”
    A flicker of cunning rippled across his face.
    “I will. But I have no weapon.”
    “I brought two.”
    “Swords? Or pistols?”
    “Pistols.”
    The man stood looking at Merle for a full minute, and then he tightened his robe and began to shuffle towards the door.
    Merle followed him out.
    Albert Lee got to his feet when he saw them coming back down the long dark hallway, the tall old man in his bathrobe and slippers.
    Albert stood aside as they got to the door, the old man’s glittering eye studying Albert as he went slowly past. Albert had gone to the Pensacola shore one year, as a boy, and they had a bull shark in a big glass tank, the shark gliding around in there and looking out at the people, his gills working, his eyes like shiny black pebbles in his dead white hide. That was the look in the old man’s eye.
    Albert followed them through the waist-high mist, his feet leaving a dark trail behind him in the dewy grass. There was no one around, not a crow in the sky, no dogs barking in the distance.
    Just the drifting mist and the live oaks draped with moss and the willows hanging motionless, no noise but the shuffle of their shoes as they walked out into a wide space set around with benches.
    Merle stopped and Teague, after a moment’s hesitation, walked past him and went on into the park for about twenty paces. He turned around. Straightened up. Put his shoulders back.
    Faced Merle.
    “This about right?”
    “Yes,” said Merle, turning to Albert Lee.
    “Give Mr. Teague your pistol, Albert.”
    “John, he’s not worth that. Just shoot him like the coward he is.”
    “She asked me to try him, see if he’d fight. He says he will. So will you give him your weapon?”
    Albert looked at the old man.
    “He could kill you.”
    “Yes.”
    Albert smiled at him.
    “Worse yet, he’s got my gun, he could turn around and shoot me after he shoots you. What a pair of flats we’d look then.”
    “I won’t shoot you,” said the old man. “Against the rules to shoot the second. Come, let’s do this.”
    Albert checked the cylinder again, walked over to the old man, handed him the pistol, grip first.
    The old man turned it in his hand, studying it.
    “Don’t know this kind. Is it a single-action?”
    “No. It fires with the trigger pull.”
    “You’re bleeding, boy,” he said, looking at Albert’s belly.
    “Yes. I am.”
    “May I try a round or two, just to get the feel?”
    Albert shrugged.
    “He asks can he try a round or two?”
    “Tell him yes.”
    Albert stepped back as the old man lifted the revolver, steadied it with both hands, aimed it at a bench about the same distance away as Merle.
    He squeezed the trigger, the little revolver jumped with a muffled crack and a chunk of wood flew off in the middle of the back rail of the bench. He steadied the weapon, fired again, and the second shot struck less than an inch from the first.
    “All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready.”
    He turned his right side to Merle, narrowing the target he offered, holding the pistol in his right hand, down by the side of his leg.
    Merle stood the same way, his right side turned to the man, his Colt down. There was a silence. Merle could feel his heart beating in his chest.
    He did not want to die, but then he thought,
Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get through this and someday somehow I’ll get my old life back
. The old man was staring back at him with his flat shark eyes.
    “I’ll call it,” said Albert.
    “Please do,” said Abel Teague.
    “On the count of three. Ready?”
    Teague considered Merle, his expression alive with cold calculation.
    “I don’t want to go to that harvest, son.”
    “You can’t stay here.”
    “Well, I don’t know about that. Took her eighty years to find someone like you. Someone who could walk between two worlds. Might be eighty years before she finds another. If I can stay alive long enough, maybe my docs will figure out how to cure dying. All I have to do is kill you.”
    “That’s true.”
    There was nothing more to be said.
    After a pause, Albert began to count.
    “One.”
    “Two.”
    “Three.”
    Both weapons came up,