There were bullet holes everywhere-in the walls, the ceiling. Slugs had ripped through barrels of salt pork and jerky, had shattered the liquor bottles behind the bar. Shotgun blasts had blown holes in tabletops and pellets were peppered in the plank flooring.
Doc West sighed. Examined an obvious bite mark in a woman’s buttocks. “Some sort of animal did this… but the spacing of the teeth, I just don’t know. Like the others before.” He stood up slowly, a immense weight bearing down on him. “These people were killed in a number of ways. Some were shot. Others stabbed. Still others had their throats torn out or were eviscerated. But, ultimately, they were all partially eaten. Killed for sport and for food. And as a bonus, most of them were scalped.”
That was a new wrinkle, Dirker knew. The other bodies they had found in weeks previous had not been scalped.
Dirker cleared his throat. “So we’ve got ourselves a pack of animals that carry weapons and scalp folks like Indians?”
“That would be correct, yes.”
Dirker licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “The scalping… we’d better keep that to ourselves. People hear that and they’ll be running Indians again.”
Doc West nodded. “We had better keep most of this to ourselves.”
Dirker walked back outside, to get that abattoir stink out of his face. Outside the wind blew and howled amongst the leaning, ramshackle structures. In his mind, it was the wail of ghosts demanding justice. He thought of the bounty he had put out. The one on the animals he had hoped were responsible. So far, hunters brought in three pathetic black bear, two slat-thin wolves, and a badger of all things.
It would have been mildly humorous, if it weren’t so terrible.
Henry Wilcox was leaning against the shack across the road. The door was open and there was another body sprawled in there. This one had taken a load of double-ought at point-blank range. Probably the only truly normal death in Sunrise.
Wilcox and Dirker avoided looking at each other.
Dirker, his belly filled with something like wet sand, followed the muddy, overgrown road up amongst the empty buildings. The killers had impaled a series of heads on waist-high stakes to mark the path. Considerate of them. They had found three other bodies in one of the shacks-an old assay office. They had been hung by the feet and disemboweled. Dirker tried to suck in fresh air, but all he could smell was decomposed, maggoty death.
There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.
He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.
And right away he smelled it-a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.
Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too… the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.
Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.
A man stood there before him.
Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.
Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.
Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.
He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.
He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it was-
Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.
“Anything?” he said.
Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ’em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so… but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for scent.”
Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against… these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”
Slade said, “I think these boys… I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”
Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.
A cleansing then, of a sort.
3
Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.
Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men-James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows-were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.
“It’s worse than anything thus far,” Caleb said to them. “An out and out slaughter and I think we all know who’s responsible.”
“Scalped, too, you say?” Caslow asked.
“Yes.”
Horner looked angry. “I’m not surprised. Them goddamn Mormons think this is their place, that the whole of Utah Territory belongs to them. They’ll do anything to push real Christians out.”
Windows lit a cigarette. He was a blacksmith and his hands were huge, callused. “See? What they got in mind is for us to blame injuns. That’s what they want. But we ain’t rising to that bait. We got us a pack of them Danites, them Destroying Angels hiding over in Redemption or maybe Deliverance.”
“Exactly,” Caslow said. “It’s only a matter of deciding which snake pit we root out first.”
“Redemption,” Caleb said to them.
He knew if he suggested Deliverance, he’d get no takers. No man in his right mind wanted to ride up to Deliverance, not with what was said about that place. Maybe all of it wasn’t true, but if some of it was, then it was enough. Besides, even the Mormons shunned the place.
“Tonight then,” he said. “Tonight we sack that heathen nest and burn it to the ground.”
No one disagreed with that.
4
Sitting atop packing crates in the alley behind the Red Top Saloon, Jack Goode was saying, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie Graybrow. Just between you and me and that heap of dogshit over there, this town has the curse all it over it. Yes sir, right from its bones to the roofs above, cursed, that’s what. Lookit me for instance. Just take a look at me and tell me what you see.” Goode paused, pulling from a bottle of whiskey, wiping a few drops from his white beard with the back of his hand. “No comment? That’s fair. Sure enough. Well, I’ll answer it for you. You’re looking at a man what won’t see sixty again. Hell, won’t see sixty-five, I reckon. A man that’s been here and there and everywhere. I fought in the army, I trapped in the mountains. I whipped a mail coach down the Overland trail and I was even a Pony Express rider until some Cheyenne bucks in Wyoming Territory filled me so full of arrows they could’ve used my ass to water flowerbeds. What I’m saying, my red brother, is that I ain’t afraid of shit. Never have been.”