“I guess all I’m saying to you,” Carny began, “is that this Sin City Strangler of yours, he couldn’t have found a better place to squat. He’ll fit into this madhouse like a needle into a button hole.”
Cabe didn’t doubt that at all.
8
Later, in his room, Cabe did some thinking.
A mining town. Dance houses, gambling halls, saloons, brothels. There was nothing money could not buy in such a place. The riches coming out of the ground would attract killers and thieves and scoundrels of every conceivable stripe. Immigrants would flood in, bringing trash from every corner of the country with them. The mining companies would pay men three-dollars a day for ten and twelve-hours workdays, six days a week if not seven. Drillers and muckers and jackers. Powermen would gouge out drifts and slopes, gut the mountains to extract ore. And the mines would hum around the clock and timber would be stripped from hillsides for bunkhouses and shacks and offices. Run-off from the smelters would kill the vegetation and foul the creeks and rivers and the lake with waste. The fish would all die and those that remained would be fouled with toxins. The town itself would be just as filthy and stinking as a boring cob. The company-or three of them, in this case-would own just about everything and everyone. It would have stores that sold everything from beef to Bibles to bed sheets and the miners would pay in company script, keeping the workers nicely in debt. There would be company doctors and company housing and company stables. And, if all else failed, a company coffin in six-feet of rank company earth.
Men would come by the hundreds to sell their souls to the malefic company god. Lots of men would die in the shafts-from cave-ins, from gas, from explosions, from dangerous equipment-but that wouldn’t bother the company none because they had ten men lined-up and ready to take the company oath… soon as they pushed your corpse out of the way.
Yeah, that was Whisper Lake.
Like some huge human hive where flesh and blood were as cheap as desert dirt and the rich owners and their lily-white board of directors sat up in the high offices, pressed and starched and spotless. Never caring how much blood was on their hands because it always washed off and if there was enough green, it canceled out oceans of red.
Whisper Lake. A human cesspool where humanity was a commodity like hides or whores.
Then you add to that heady mix these murders and the Mormons and the vigilantes and too many hot-hands and not enough cool heads and you had real trouble.
And that, Cabe knew, was Whisper Lake laid bare. The town stripped of skin-raw quilts of muscle, yellow fat, and greasy rank blood that stank of mordant corruption.
The perfect stalking ground for the Sin City Strangler.
Looking out his window at the muddy streets below, Cabe waited. Maybe for the Strangler. Maybe for something else. Because whatever it was, it was coming. And it was going to be bad.
9
The prostitute’s name was Katherine Modine, but folks in Whisper Lake just knew her as Mizzy Modine, Dirty Mizzy, or “Old-Squirm-and-Kick”. Behind her back she was called “The Crab Queen of Beaver County”… and more than one scratching miner could attest to that one. But to her face she was never called anything but Mizzy. And mainly because she had a vile temper and packed a Smith amp; Wesson pocket .38 and was not afraid to use it. She had killed one man and shot up three others.
Mizzy was freelance, operated out of a crib over on Piney Hill, which sat in the brooding, gray shadow of the Arcadian mine… or one of them, at any rate. Her crib was a glorified shack that stunk of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume, body odor and twenty-dollar sex. When the wind blew, the shack rattled and swayed and quite often it rattled and swayed when no wind blew. While townspeople might have said old Dirty Mizzy was “horizontally employed”, Mizzy didn’t look upon herself as a whore. She’d been selling what God gave her since she was fifteen and had worked dozens of mining camps, cow towns, and military depots from West Texas to the Wyoming Territory and had missed very little real estate in-between.
Mizzy considered herself something of an entrepreneur.
And maybe she was. In Whisper Lake, she serviced a steady stream of customers who weren’t real particular as to where they stuck their business… just grateful there was such a place. For those with more respect for what dangled between their legs, there were always the painted ladies who operated out of the sporting houses or high-dollar brothels where ten minutes with an imported French or Portuguese delight could cost you $400 or more.
Mizzy was an equal opportunity nightworker and was willing to spread her legs for any who could pay the price, regardless of race or cultural affiliation. And at twenty bucks a pop, what she offered was a bargain. And particularly in a mining town where prices tended to get inflated. And if you didn’t have twenty dollars, Mizzy was always willing to take what you did have in trade. Be that horses or cattle, buffalo furs or customized Winchester rifles, injun ceremonial daggers or a fancy pair of lizard boots. Because when she wasn’t whoring, she was selling goods out of her little shop… and she always had an eye on the inventory.
Some nights were busy, some nights were slow.
And tonight was just plain dead. So when there was a knock at the door of her crib, Mizzy grinned and the cash register in her mind rang up a sale. She quick lighted up the red tapers and turned down the oil lamp and prepared to receive a gentleman caller.
He came in out of the wind, his face just as pallid as spilled milk, offset by a sharp black mustache and eyes just as dark as chipped coal. He was tall and thin, dressed in a ankle-length frock coat and matching bowler hat.
“Well, come in, kind sir,” Mizzy told him, “and just make yourself comfortable. Name’s Mizzy. Can I get you a drink Mister—”
“No thank you, madam. That’s not why I’m here.”
Music to Mizzy’s ears. She sat back on the bed, a large fleshy woman with breasts the size of bunk pillows and a face painted-up brighter than carnival glass. Her visitor dropped a twenty-dollar gold piece in Mizzy’s glass compote tray and set his hat on the chiffonier, laid his coat across it. Mizzy loved the sound of that money ringing out against the glass. Maybe she didn’t like this fellow with those dark eyes and that graveyard marble skin and that hard slash of pink mouth… but she liked his money just fine, thank you very much.
He was not the romantic type.
He ordered her to strip and she did and he pushed himself into her almost immediately, an odd passionless look on his face as if he found the very act tedious and banal.
“Oh yes, baby, oh yes,” Mizzy said, going through her spiel, pretending to be beside herself with his masculine talents, moaning and groaning and making the sharp little squeaking sounds that always got them going.
But it wasn’t getting this one going.
His thrusts had not become more frantic; they were even and slow, impartial really, possibly disinterested. His face betrayed no emotion… it was white and smooth set with those opaque, unblinking eyes and was for all the world like the face of a manikin or a bust cut from granite.
Mizzy was a businesswoman. She liked to bring things to a close quick as could be. Hated to keep other customers waiting in line… even though there probably weren’t any more on a stormy, bleak night like this.
She laid it on thick, just totally beside herself at the sight of his greased member sliding into her, cooing and muttering filthy words and throwing down the whore-talk spicy and hot like Mexican peppers.
“Close your eyes,” the man suddenly said, his voice just as dead and flat as a crushed possum.
Mizzy did so, hoping he was getting close now. He was squeezing her breasts roughly, but if that’s what he liked, that’s what he liked… so be it. Her eyes pressed shut and her pelvis meeting his every thrust, Mizzy heard a swish of something satiny and before she could do more than gasp, he’d looped a silken scarf around her throat, pulling it tight and tighter like a jungle python trying to squeeze her life away.