The Rock Child Read Online Free PDF

or sober didn’t matter. He was smarter than most of them either way, quicker of hand, and especially meaner. He’d found that mean made all the difference.
    It surely helped in his line of work. Porter Rockwell was an avenger. The Destroying Angel, the gentiles called him. The apostates called him the same. If the powers judged someone a threat to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, especially a fallen-away Mormon, one of a group of destroying angels, the Danites, got rid of the trouble. Rockwell was a Danite leader, and his solutions tended to be permanent. If he was an embarrassment to some of his people now that Mormons were better established, he didn’t give a damn. If he occasionally got other work, like delivering gold coin to Hard Rock City, Idaho, he was glad.
    It was done. He wasn’t worried about this Conlan for a moment, or any other lawman. Now he wanted a woman.
    Rockwell paid his dollar and took the copper from the heathen’s palm. He eyed the Chinee hard. Rockwell knew his impact on people. He was taller than most, well formed, strongly built. His hair hung wild and stringy below his shoulders—Joseph had prophesied that he would always be safe if he did as Samson should have done, leave his hair uncut. His eyes, he knew, looked halfway between cunning and mad. Which, Porter Rockwell sometimes thought, might be the truth.
    I could almost gag on the booze and lust . Fourteen men wanting the nun, gambling for the chance to mount her, inflamed by the thought of violating sacredness. Rockwell didn’t give a fig for their sacredness.
    The room breathed like a panting toad. He didn’t like crowds. He didn’t like gentiles. Sometimes he didn’t even like Saints.
    He himself didn’t need to pant. His need was colder than that. He was going to win.
    Everyone said the woman was beautiful. She’d been on display this afternoon riding through town on the wagon. Everyone had heard—a nun whore coming!—and ninety percent of the town was male.
    Rockwell had watched from behind the lined-up mob. He didn’t judge her beautiful. She was off-color. Rockwell preferred white anddelightsome. She had an air about her that snagged his interest, though, something in her carriage or in her eye—she felt untouchable.
    Tonight Rockwell would touch her, and she would never forget it. Once he’d banged into a whore and banged and banged, deliberately, insatiably, not stopping even when she threw up on him. It made him feel powerful.
    This whore was floating on opium, the Chinee said, but Rockwell would wake her up. She would make him feel his juices flow.
    It was a stiff price, a dollar just to gamble for a chance to top a woman. It would be the first time any man mounted this woman, said the Chinee, but you couldn’t trust him—no telling what heathen had been at her on the other side of the world or the long trip here. And Poly-damnesians and white men, too, for that matter. Rockwell didn’t care. The one she’d never be able to forget was him.
    “Ready, everybody ready,” called the Chinee. His body poised like a banty rooster, head cocked high, eye bright. Each man perched his copper on his thumb, ready to flip. “Throw your prayers and coppers into the air. When the coppers come down, may the prayers go up.” The heathen flipped his queer little noisemaker to a crazy climax. “Now!” Fourteen coins spun high in the air. At the top of the spin the Chinee called heads or tails. Then fourteen coins landed in palms (three drunks dropped theirs but picked them up), fourteen hands slapped them over onto the back of the other arm, and thirteen mouths smiled or frowned.
    Cries of joy and agony. The fools were getting very worked up. Not Rockwell. He would win this round and every round by a simple stratagem. He was dexterous with his hands. He could make a coin appear in an empty palm faster than anyone’s eye could detect. He could stick an empty hand to your nose and make a playing card pop out. He