“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?”
But if she was rude or impertinent, it only made Cabe’s grin widen. His fingers explored the familiar slash-and burn-geography of those old scars. “Yes, I received them in the war. I carry them with a certain amount of honor. Battle wounds. You remember when I got these, Jack?”
Dirker set the newspaper down. “Yes, I do. But, tell me, Cabe, how did you find our brothels? Word has it you spent most of the day there. Did you find our red light district to your liking?”
Whatever Cabe was going to say evaporated on his tongue. Dirker. That wily sonofabitch. “I… um…”
Janice smiled thinly. “Our Mr. Cabe certainly is a saucy one.”
“Isn’t he, though?” Dirker said, enjoying himself now.
Cabe swallowed and swallowed again. “It was purely business, Madam. The man I’m hunting preys upon prostitutes, so what choice do I have but to befriend them? To know them and the places they work.”
“The things a man must do to make a living,” she said, shaking her head. “Tsk. Tsk. And all day you spent among them? How tired you must be… after such an exhausting enterprise.”
“Madam—”
Dirker was smiling now. “You are a most determined man, Cabe. If any man can root out this killer it will be you.”
Now here Dirker thought he was being funny and it made Cabe smile, too. If the man was more like that on a regular basis and not so damnably stiff and formal… he almost would have liked him. Cabe figured he was being baited, so he did what came natural to him: he rose up and bit down. “Yes, Madam, it was tiring, but I kept at it until most men would have been spent with fatigue.”
Janice blushed… blushed, but did not turn away. There was something smoldering behind her eyes and she made sure Cabe saw it.
Dirker raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? Gave them the what-for?”
“Oh yes.”
“I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” Janice said, leaving the room.
Cabe figured he’d either offended her… or excited her. In his experience, Southern women could be like that. Excited at what they found most offensive. It was the breeding, that’s what. Antebellum society said a lady had to repress her basal instincts. That such things as lust and desire had no place in the higher scheme of things… but like any beast, the more you starved it the hungrier it became.
And there was hunger in that girl. A barely-concealed need to cast-off her upbringing and get down and dirty.
Dirker said, “Is it going to be this way every time we meet, Cabe?”
Cabe looked away from him. So many things he wanted to say, but to what end? What true end? He’d already violated two rules of his upbringing-that a man did not bring his business or personal affairs to the dinner table and that he did not hash out problems with another man in the presence of a lady. Maybe now was the time… if he wanted a fight, then it was high time to quit beating around the bush.
But he did not want that, not anymore. “No,” he said, surprising even himself, “I would prefer we could put all that aside. I reckon it would be the proper thing to do. At least for the time.”
“Agreed. But just so you understand, Cabe. What happened at Pea Ridge is not something I am proud of. A day does not go by that I don’t think about it, wish things had been different.”
“You willing to admit that all we were doing was scavenging some essentials off them dead boys?”
Dirker nodded. “I know that, yes. Maybe I knew it then, too, but I lost my head. What I did was wrong.”
Damn. Now if that didn’t suck the wind right out of a man. Dirker admitting he was wrong. Cabe felt suddenly very loose, boneless. He almost felt embarrassed that he’d even brought it up. “All right, all right. Fair enough. We were all young and hot-headed, I guess.”
“What did you do after the war, Cabe?”
Cabe told him about his years riding steer and nightherding, being a railroad detective and shotgunner on the bullion stages. How it all led to bounty hunting. “Yourself?”
Dirker sighed. “I stayed in the army. Was sent west to fight Indians.” His eyes narrowed. “I thought what I had seen in the Civil War was bad. But it didn’t prepare me for what I saw out there. The atrocities, the wanton murder of innocents.”
Cabe didn’t press it. He knew plenty of what had happened out there, the indignities and cruelties pressed upon the tribes. And generally, unwarranted. Treaties were made between whites and Indians. And the ink was barely dry before the whites had again violated them.
“But you left the army?”
Dirker was smiling now. “No, I was relieved of my command. A band of Arapahos had raided a settlement and I was told to hunt them down and massacre them. Well, we couldn’t find the perpetrators, so my commander decided that any Arapahos would do. There was a village of maybe fifty on Cripple Creek. They had nothing to do with the raid and that fact was well known… yet I was ordered to go in there with my men. And when we came out, I was instructed, there was to be nothing left alive.”
“You refused?”
“Yes, I did. And I am proud of that fact. I was a soldier, not a hired killer.” Dirker sighed, licked his lips. “I was relieved of my command, court-martialed and discharged. Honorably, much to the dismay of some.”
“And after that?”
“I was a lawman. One town after another. Eventually Janice and I bought this hotel. Of course, there was trouble between the miners and the Mormons, the Indians and the settlers… I was approached and given the job of county sheriff on the spot.”
Cabe took it all in. His story was no different from that of many a veteran-trained as a soldier, they invariably became either lawmen or outlaws, sometimes both. Cabe rolled a cigarette, lit it up. “Tell me something, Sheriff. This business I’ve been hearing about a little camp called Sunrise… anything to it?”
Dirker nodded after a time. “Horrible, horrible.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to hunt down who’s responsible, of course.”
“Of course. And while you’re at it… there’s this fellow named Freeman. Says he’s a Texas Ranger. Think you could look into that for me? Maybe wire the Rangers?”
“You think he’s lying?”
Cabe told him he wasn’t sure what he was thinking. “All I know, Dirker, is that he’s giving me a real bad feeling in my guts. And I can’t figure out exactly why…”
8
Later, at the Oasis Saloon, a knot of men gathered around Cabe as he tried to drink his beer. Tried to relax a bit and put all this business with Dirker into some sort of perspective. Were they friends now or enemies? And what about his wife? Cabe had been around, he knew very well the way she was looking at him and what such a look entailed. She had gotten down right excited as he joked about the whores and what he’d done with them. He had not imagined it.
“So, this killer, this Sin City Strangler,” one of the men said, a miner with a shaggy gray beard and no upper teeth. “They say he slits ’em clean open. That true?”
“It is,” Cabe told him.
He had been casually discussing a few particulars of that business with Carny, the bartender, and it had drawn the others like a rope. They wanted to know everything, everything.