Skin Medicine (28 page)

It was, all in all, an interesting and enjoyable way to spend the afternoon and evening.

But there were hazards, of course.

More than one whore wished to show her appreciation in a more intimate way, and Cabe found himself in bed twice that day with grateful ladies—one a handsome high yellow girl and the other a flame-haired vixen from Alabama. But every job, of course, had its waters that had to be waded through.

He visited cribs that were no more than wooden shacks to sporting houses where expensive French girls ran the gaming tables and would take you straight to heaven for several hundred greenbacks. There were high dollar joyhouses like the Red August Social Club that featured deep-pile carpeting, cut chandeliers, gold leaf mirrors and tables, and imported European tapestries and Greek sculpture. A man could drop thousands in such a place, enjoying exotic delights beneath stained glass ceilings…but was assured of satisfaction and refined sin. Then there were mid-range bordellos like the San Francisco Common House where the girls were no less attractive, but they were all trained thieves who specialized in picking pockets and rolling drunken men. And if your poke wasn’t full enough for those places, there were cheap brothels like the Russian Café where you could get drunk and fucked for the price of a grubsteak…long as you weren’t too picky about the cleanliness of your lady.

Cabe hit them all and heard all the stories.

He found that while most of the girls were just your average poke-and-tickle painted ladies, many went the extra mile. One particular high-priced Asian girl named Songbird could do amazing things with oils and hot candle wax. Abilene Sue, a buxom free-living Texan, generally employed a double-cinch saddle and riding crop into her act. And Fannie the Fortune Teller liked to start her sessions by diving your future. A future which always ended the same way—with her riding on top of you, trying to break you like an ornery bronc.

Somewhere along the way, Cabe met Mama Adelade, the proprietor of Mother French’s Old Time Theater. What it was, was basically a steakhouse with vaudeville acts and imported French girls—or just girls who could affect a convincing French accent—and a booming business upstairs. Place smelled of fine French perfume and offered Parisian wine and cuisine.

Mama Adelade

a slight black woman who could not have weighed much more than ninety pounds

dressed in a yellow silk dress with embroidered purple roses sprouting at the bosom.

“
Honey,” she told Cabe after he introduced himself, “I surely appreciate what it is you’re doing. My girls are getting more than a little skittish. And I can’t have that, no sir. For here we offer only one real thing and we offer it three different ways. And that would be love—the fine, the mighty fine, and the very fine. Now, I’m thinking what you need is the mighty fine. The very fine…no, boy, you ain’t up to it.”

“
What’s the ‘very fine’?”

“
Hee, hee,” Mama Adelade tittered. “The very fine is just about dying and going straight on to heaven. It involves two girls and sometimes three, hot oil and busy hands.”

Cabe admitted he surely wasn’t up to it.

Mama Adelade told him that she had been a slave on a Baton Rouge plantation. When she got her freedom and, Lord, how she’d wanted that, it wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. “Boy, the massah, you know, he might of owned us, but least he fed us and put a roof over our heads. I think maybe some of us forgot about that. For when we was freed…hell, we had to fend for ourselves. No easy bit, that.”

Mama told him that it wasn’t long before she realized that there was only one way a black woman was going to make any money in a white man’s world. So she started small and built up her stable year by year.

“
Had me a son, too, Mr. Cabe. But as he grew to manhood, he found religion and didn’t care much for how his mama made her living. Last I heard of him, he went out to Indian Territory to preach. Hee! You imagine that? A black man slinging the white man’s gospel to a bunch of red heathens! Something funny about that, you think?”

It was a long day, but by the time Cabe retired from Horizontal Hill, he was no closer to the Sin City Strangler than he had been before. But something had to give. Sooner or later, it was going to.

While he was at a teahouse, he bumped into Henry Freeman, the Texas Ranger, who claimed he was out “inspecting the stock.” And that made Cabe remember he had to wire the Rangers in Texas, see if old Henry was who and what he claimed to be.

Because, honestly, Cabe had his doubts.

6

The riders thundered into Redemption like demons loosed from the lower regions of Hell.

The vigilantes had arrived.

They came pounding up the dirt street on black mounts, seven men wearing long blue army overcoats and white hoods set with eye slits pulled over their heads. They carried repeating rifles and shotguns and Colt pistols. They charged down the streets and down alleyways with an almost military precision.

What they brought to the little Mormon enclave of Redemption was death.

And with it they brought every intolerance and prejudice that had been boiling in the black kettles of their hearts for weeks and months and even years.

Without haste then, they started shooting.

The Mormons knew they would show, but had hoped it would not be for some time for they were ill-prepared to fend off such a bold attack. Men carrying muskets and bolt-action rifles ran out to oppose the riders and were cut down in lethal rains of well-directed gunfire. Women screamed and children cried and shotguns boomed and pistols barked. Lead was flying like hail, peppering doors and shattering windows and killing livestock that had not been carefully stabled.

One of the town elders stomped out onto the porch of his house, his three sons at his heels. A rider passed by, giving the elder both barrels at close range. The buckshot blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest and splattered gore over his sons. And the sons had little more time than to shriek as gunfire from Winchester and Sharps rifles raked them, killing them on the spot. An old woman ran out amongst the vigilantes, waving a prayerbook at them and they rode her down, crushing her beneath the hooves of their horses. The same fate met three young children who’d seen their mother and father put down by pistol fire.

The wise townsfolk stayed behind locked doors or returned fire from gunports cut into shutters. But they were not seasoned fighters, and very few of their rounds came within spitting distance of the vigilantes. Though a single bullet—whether directed or ricocheted

ripped through the throat of a vigilante and he collapsed in his saddle.

But that didn’t even slow the killers down.

They reigned and fired, tossing flaming kerosene torches into bales of hay and piles of lumber and very often right through the windows of stores and homes. And in the midst of that, they kept riding and shooting and killing and scattering horses and mules, using cattle and sheep for target practice.

Within twenty minutes of their arrival, Redemption was blazing like the nether regions of Hell. Flames engulfed barns and livery stables. Licked up the walls of houses. Vomited from exploded windows. The town became an inferno of fire and smoke and screaming. Bucket brigades worked to douse the conflagration even as the vigilantes shot them dead.

In the noise and confusion and shouting, a lone figure clutching the Book of Mormon stumbled into the streets, already bleeding from a stray bullet that had creased his temple. He made quite a sight out there on foot, shouting prayers and oaths, trails of blood streaking down his face.

“…
the Antichrist will come among the people, commanding his legions…and ye shall know him by his name! Nation shall make war, horrendous and godless war upon nation, man will kill his brothers in a rapture of evil! Evil! And…and…the unclean shall make unclean laws to enslave the righteous and the fornicator will be smitten by the hand of the Almighty…”

He never got much farther than that, for a lasso of horsehair rope swung down and over him, locking his arms tight against his body. The rope was tied off to the saddlehorn of a vigilante’s horse and then lastly, finally, the riders rode out of the purgatory they had created.

Rode out, dragging the preacher behind them.

***

They dragged him for maybe a mile.

Over rocks and stones and stumps, through dry ravines and up craggy hillsides. When the vigilantes did finally stop, atop a low flat-topped hill fringed by rabbit brush, the preacher was barely alive. He looked, if anything, like a threadbare scarecrow. His rag and straw stuffing was hanging out and sticks were protruding from his legs and arms…except it wasn’t rags and straw and what stuck out weren’t sticks. The flesh had been worn from his face and the backs of his hands. He had numerous compound fractures and broken bones. His jaw was dislocated and still he tried to speak, a bloody gurgling sound bubbling forth.

One of the vigilantes pulled off his hood. It was Caleb Callister. Squinting his eyes in the darkness, he watched the glowing, flickering bonfire in the distance. Redemption.

“
If your people are smart, preacher-man,” he said, slipping a thin cigar between his lips, “they’ll heed our warning this time. Because next time, next time—”

“
Next time there won’t be anybody left when we ride out,” another vigilante finished for him.

This got a few chuckles from the others.

The preacher, though broken and peeled, tried to crawl, straining at his leash like a fool dog testing his boundaries. The vigilantes watched him, just expecting him to curl up and expire…but it wasn’t happening. He coughed out loops of blood, legs pistoning him forward, arms still fixed to his sides. Slinking and inching along like some human worm. And just as freedom, maybe, seemed to beckon…the rope snapped taut.

“
Best accept the fix you’re in, preacher,” one the vigilantes said to him. “It ain’t like rain…it won’t go away.”

“
Much as you might like that,” said another.

They sat on their mounts, smoked, passed a bottle of whiskey, and watched Redemption burn like a torch in the distance. Gradually, slowly, the blaze became separate fires that were brought under control one after the other.

Then they drew straws on who got the preacher.

Luke Windows was the lucky man. He decided to drag the preacher around for awhile. And he did. After another twenty minutes or so, he got tired of it and the preacher still wasn’t dead, so he emptied his Colt Navy .44 into the man.

Then he joined the others to celebrate.

7

After a somewhat exhausting day spent making the rounds of Horizontal Hill’s varied brothels, Tyler Cabe walked back to the St. James Hostelry. His belly was empty and his temples were pounding like jungle drums from all the free liquor he’d swallowed. He walked into the dining room and Jackson Dirker was there, along with his wife and five or six other guests. Dinner consisted of roast chicken and potatoes with an apple crumb for dessert. It was damn good and Cabe’s respect for Janice Dirker went up a notch.

Jackson Dirker was surely a lucky man.

Cabe and Dirker made small talk, but mostly just listened. One of the tenants was a medical supply drummer from Wichita named Stewart. He spoke at some length—and in unsavory clinical detail—about his products which ranged from liver pills to trusses, hygienic whiskey to colonics. Particularly the latter…which, of course, didn’t do much for the digestion of the apple crumb.

After he excused himself and the other tenants slipped off, it was just Cabe and Dirker together, with Janice flitting back and forth collecting dishes.

“
Mr. Cabe tells me that the two of you are acquainted,” she said to her husband.

He barely looked up from his newspaper. “In a manner of speaking.”

Same old Dirker, Cabe found himself thinking. Cool as ice. If he had any emotions buried in that thick hide, it would have taken twenty men with shovels to unearth them. Maybe if Dirker had simply said, yes, yes, we know each other. We fought against each other…but that was years ago. Maybe had he said something like that, Cabe would have been satisfied to let it go. But now he felt surly.

“
Yes,” he said, “once upon a time, your husband and I were brothers in arms. We fought on opposite sides, but spiritually we were one. Ain’t that so, Jack?”

The newspaper lowered an inch. A set of crystal blue eyes found Cabe, did not blink. The newspaper slid back up. “I wouldn’t go that far,” was all he would say.

“
Nonsense. Maybe your recollections of me are vague, Jack, and rightly so…but mine of you? Hell, sharp as a whip. How I remember you at Pea Ridge! What a fine and striking figure you were!”

“
That’s enough, Cabe.”

Cabe smiled now, fingers brushing the webbing of scars that ran across the bridge of his nose, cut into the cheeks. “Your husband is modest, Madam. I would say that Jackson Dirker was an officer and a gentleman. Fair and sympathetic in all matters.”

Dirker was staring holes through him now.

Cabe was staring right back.

Janice, sensing something was terribly amiss here, just cleared her throat and picked at imaginary lint on her velveteen dress. “If I may be so rude and impertinent, Mr. Cabe…did you, did you get those scars in the war?”