Skin Medicine (5 page)

Cabe drew off his cigarette. “I tell you, Crazy Jack…folks still call you that?”

“
They do not. During the war, only Johnny Rebs referred to me as that, I understand.” He said this indifferently. Names meant nothing to him. You could call his mother a whore and if he didn’t want to kill you, you couldn’t make him do it. But if he was in the mood, look out.

“
I can’t tell you how long I’ve thought about you, what I’d do to you when I finally caught up with you.”

“
The war’s over,” Dirker said. “Act like a man and move on. That’s what has to be done. The South underestimated the will and strength of the North. Such assumptions lose wars. Everyone did what they felt they had to do. Now it’s over. We’re united and have been for many years. We have to look to the future and learn from the past.”

Cabe’s teeth were clenched. “Sure enough, sure enough. I’d like to forget the whole sorry mess…but every time I look in damn mirror, Dirker, I remember. These scars don’t let me forget.” Cabe let himself simmer down. Dirker was in control, like always. He would not let the man win this discussion, make him into some hot-headed fool Southerner. Not this time. “We lost, Dirker. When you lose, it ain’t so easy to forgive and forget. You think of how it could have been different. It’s tough on a man.”

Dirker arched that eyebrow again. “Sometimes it’s tough on the victor as well. You think of what was done and how you could have treated your foes more civil, excused them for their transgressions.”

Goddammit. The sonofabitch was acting like a poet and preacher and statesman now. Trying to make Cabe think he actually had some sort of heart beating in that empty chest of his. But Cabe did not believe it. “Pea Ridge. You remember it? I do. We got our asses cut to threads there. You bluebellies scattered us to the four winds. Me and my boys…we weren’t even sure where we were. No shoes. No food. No ammunition. You rounded us up, Dirker. That bastard sergeant of yours shot down Little Willy Gibson! Then you took that whip of yours to the rest of us. When I begged you…begged you to stop, you did this to my face. I was down and you were still whipping me…”

Dirker’s lips had formed into a tight line now like a saber slash. “You
boys
…yes, I remember you
boys.
I remember what you did to those soldiers we found. Their corpses were mutilated, Cabe. It was disgusting. I should’ve killed you and the rest of that gutless Southern trash then and there. But I didn’t.”

Cabe was on his feet now. “You bastard! You goddamn fucking Yankee bastard! I told you then and I tell you know, we didn’t touch them bluebellies! When we came upon them, they were already like that…guts hanging out and faces hacked-off…we just wanted their guns, their food! We were starving for the love of Christ!”

Dirker listened to Cabe’s dramatics, did not believe a word of it. “We can discuss this until we’re blue in the face, Cabe, but it won’t bear flower. I don’t believe you. I never have.” He folded his hands on the desktop. “Now, did you come here to debate the war or was there something else on your mind?”

Cabe shrank down into his chair, very much feeling the weight of the gun at his hip. But once a man had made up his mind, you couldn’t change it. You had to let it lay, like it or not. “All right, Dirker. All right. I been tracking a fellow. Hunted him through Nevada and he went to ground, I think, around here somewhere. I don’t know his name and I have only the vaguest description of this animal. But I know what he did—”

“
You’re a bounty hunter?”

“
A man’s got to make a living.”

“
I wasn’t judging you, merely establishing the fact. Go on.”

Cabe found it easier if he didn’t look at Dirker, so he looked at the wall, pretended he couldn’t hear the sound of that whip in his ears. “This fellow, newspapers call him the Sin City Strangler. He jumps from one mining town to the next, losing himself in the influx of strangers.”

Dirker nodded. “I’ve heard of this one.”

“
Be hard not to. This sumbitch likes himself prostitutes, Dirker. Has what you might call a special taste for them,” Cabe said grimly. “He likes to get ‘em off somewheres alone where he can get a scarf around their throats, you know? Likes to fuck ‘em whilst they’s dying. And then he takes a big knife—skinning knife maybe—and cuts ‘em open, spreads their goodies all over the place.”

Dirker was unmoved. “Disgusting,” he said, but it was hard to tell if he really meant it or not.

Cabe agreed with him on that. It
was
disgusting. The Sin City Strangler had murdered six prostitutes in the past five months. First one was at the Barbary Hotel out in San Fran, followed by two more at hell-for-leather mining camps in Churchill County, Nevada. Then Eureka, Osceola, and finally Pinoche—all sprawling mining towns, all veritable “dens of iniquity”, as the preachers and reformers said. For once money started coming out of the ground, it attracted the parasites and bottom-feeders like blowflies to a carcass.

A pissed-off miner had first put the bounty on the Strangler.

A thousand dollars…even though no one had truly ever seen him or had any real idea what he looked like. Eyewitness descriptions ranged from tall and fair to short and swarthy and everywhere in-between. Some said the Strangler was a Mexican who’d slipped from some insane asylum and others were certain it was some European immigrant. Regardless, sickened by the severity of the crimes—and it took a lot to sicken folks in mining towns—more money was thrown at the Strangler and now the bounty was up near five-thousand. The governor of the Utah Territory had thrown another thousand on top of it for information leading to the identity and/or whereabouts of the Sin City Strangler.

“
I been tracking this bastard since Eureka,” Cabe said. “That’s where I started after him. In Osceola I got a good long look at his handiwork…it was bad, Dirker. You and me…we both seen things in the war…but this, Jesus, I ain’t never seen nothing like this.”

“
And you think this animal is here?” Dirker said.

“
I think he’s in Beaver County. Whisper Lake is exactly the sort of place he’d come to hunt…I just have to wait and see. Sooner or later, he’s gonna fall into my lap.”

Dirker sighed, shook his head. “Cabe, ten years ago Whisper Lake was a placer camp with one store, a saloon, and a scattering of shacks. Then they struck a large silver ore deposit and pretty soon we had mining companies in here buying up everything—the Arcadian, Southview, Horn Silver. We have nearly five-thousand people in and around this town, another eight-thousand over in Frisco. Point being, we got hundreds of people tramping through here in a month…to find one man in that human stew, it’ll be a hell of a job.”

Cabe said, “I’ll get him, dead or alive.”

“
Just make sure you get the right one.”

Cabe stood up, stretched, pulled on his slicker. “One of these days, Crazy Jack, we gotta have ourselves a chat about the war. Just you and me.”

“
Get out of here, Cabe,” Dirker told him. “And don’t make any trouble. I already have my hands full.”

Cabe went out into the storm, grinning. Maybe if things worked out right, Dirker’s hands would be even fuller.

3

The hellbilly’s name was Orville DuChien.

His cell in the Whisper Lake lock-up was eight feet long and four wide. The walls were brick and the floor was covered with straw. It was cold and damp and water dripped from the ceiling. In the summer the cells were filled with bugs; in the winter, just as cold as an icehouse. The cot Orv sat on was barely wide enough to hold a man and the single army blanket issued was little protection against the frosty night.

So Orv sat there in his own commingled stench, scratching at his beard, thinking and remembering and becoming generally confused as always. For he was certain there was something he was supposed to remember, but for the life of him, he just drew a blank. But sometimes his mind was like that. Like some blackboard scribbled full of interesting and pertinent information, but if you didn’t run up there quick and read it, all those words and ideas just sort of faded away.

So Orv sat there and was glad it was cold because when it was cold it killed off the nits in his beard and hair. And those damn things, why, they could just about drive a sane man crazy with all the itching.

Orv thought:
Quit thinking about yer livestock, you damn idiot, you ain’t here on account of that. Yer her because…because…

Dammit, there went the old memory again. Like a chip of lake ice caught in July sunshine, it just plumb melted away. Made Orv wonder sometimes if he was crazy and maybe he was, but just because his brain had gone to grass, didn’t mean he was raving. Though, sometimes, sure, he raved and maybe got a little out of control. And when that happened, Dirker had Henry Wilcox or Pete Slade or one of them other deputies lock him up like a pea in a poke and that was okay.

Beaver County jail?

Hell, it was damn comfortable compared to that Yankee military prison at Camp Douglas. Food was better, too. You didn’t get beaten or used for target practice. You didn’t have to drink out of the cesspool or watch all them good boys with empty bellies wander about like living, breathing skeletons just this side of the grave. And that had been just pitiful, when you thought about it, because the bluebellies
had
food. Had plenty of it, but they liked to watch their enemies starve.

Starvation.

Now that was a hell of a plot to hoe. Used to be a sergeant at Douglas from Alabama had just gone mad. Was so thin you could’ve slipped him in an envelope. Orv only heard him say one sane thing whole time he was there.
Boy,
he said,
way I’m a-figuring it,
I’m about six-hundred miles from home and six-inches from hell.”
Orv never forgot that. Most of the time that sergeant was trying to dig bugs up from the dirt or hiding rat corpses under the shacks for a sweet midnight snack or telling the guards he wanted to speak with President Lincoln and that Andrew Davis could kiss his white Alabammy ass for leaving him rot in that hole. And if old Andy Davis wanted to bang his sister Nell, why just go right on ahead, because she’d laid with everything from injuns to wild boars and a lying politician ought to slide in just about right.

Orv tried to pull his head back out of the war and it was no easy feat.

Sometimes all he could see were Yankees. Dead ones and living ones. Dirker was a Yankee, so was Henry Wilcox. Peter Slade, too…no, that wasn’t right. Slade was from Mississippi. But he smelled like one. Orv hated that Northerner smell they had about ‘em. Like that one time over in the Oasis, that Yankee sumbitch said he was with the 2
^nd
Arkansas. Said he was at Pea Ridge, but it was a lie. Sumbitch carried a Starr revolver and had that red-blonde hair to his shoulders and them scars on his face. Probably some Kansas redleg out murdering honest folk. Yeah, goddamn Yankee, lying like that. Who’d he think he was?

Orv told himself to pay it no mind for that was years back.

No, no, that wasn’t right either. Yesterday or maybe today. Sure, because Dirker had taken away his 1851 Colt Navy, same gun he’d carried since the Bloody Tenth where he’d taken it off an officer. Taken if off him when he hid under them bodies…and, damn, where were Roy and Jesse?

Oh, dead and dead. Sure, for years now. Died in the war.

Orv clasped his head in his hands and tried to make his brain work, but it just didn’t want to and how was that for a bag of beans?

Listen.

Sure, Orv’s mind was clearing some now.

He could hear things up in the hills, bad things. Things riding horseback that looked like men maybe, but weren’t really men. Oh, it was bad, bad, bad. His people were from the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. His mother’s kin were all conjure folk and they had the second sight and sometimes Orv did, too. Sometimes he’d see things in his head before they happened…only it didn’t do him much good because he always forgot by the time they came around. Mother’s people were like that. Grandpappy Jeremiah Hill was like that, too. Time them farmers from up in Hawkins County had cheated him out of his prize hogs, but did it legal-like so Jeremiah couldn’t do much about it but curse and dance a jig. Only, Jeremiah went into a black mood and hexed them boys and crows came in the dead of night and pecked their eyes out which wasn’t a bad thing really, because Jeremiah’s witching had shown ‘em things they didn’t want to look on no more.

Orv went to the tiny barred window.

Damp wind blew in his face and it felt good and he looked up into the shadowy hills climbing above the town, knowing that was where the evil was, where the bad things roosted. He could see faces and forms in his mind, but they were indistinct and the voices were only a little clearer. And it all made something black and toxic twist in Orv’s belly because he could smell death, death circling the town. Just like he’d smelled it in Camp Douglas and heard it there at nights, picking through the piles of bones and rags and unburied corpses. Now death was here and his mind showed him that and he knew, as always, that death was always hungry and its belly always empty.

Knowing this, Orville DuChien slid down the wall like a teardrop and began to whimper, praying for dawn.