The sheriff raised an eyebrow, showed no sign of recognition. “Do I know you, sir?”
Cabe smiled and that smile burned with hate. “You should.” He touched the old scars running from one cheek, across the bridge of his nose, and to the next cheek. “These marks I bear…”
“What about them?”
“You gave ’em to me,” Cabe said.
2
The Beaver County Sheriff’s Office.
A dirty single-story brick edifice stuck in-between the county courthouse and a mine broker’s office, looking straight out at the town square and the taverns lined-up beyond like prostitutes offering an easy time.
Cabe stood outside in the blowing, wet wind, his boots caked with mud like wet cement.
He wasn’t sure what he was feeling just then, but it wasn’t good. Part of him wanted to kick though the door and gun down that arrogant sonofabitch of a county sheriff. But that wouldn’t do and he knew it. That was not how things were done in real life. He had thought of Jackson Dirker for years, playing out revenge fantasies in his mind for the time when they met up again-if ever-and now it all fell to his feet. Like the shed skin of a snake, these fantasies were simply dead.
He came through the door and saw the big deputy sipping from a tin cup of coffee. He was a large man, heavy in the middle, but broad in the shoulders and powerful-looking. He wore no gun. He hadn’t at the saloon either. Cabe figured he was like old “Bear River” Tom Smith down in Abilene years back, enforcing law and order with his bare fists.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “I’m Henry Wilcox, deputy.”
“Tyler Cabe. I have business with Sheriff Dirker. He about?”
“In the back,” Wilcox said. “I’ll get him.”
Cabe found a straight-backed chair and pulled it up to what he assumed was Dirker’s desk-a big oaken antique outfit, papers and the like organized very neatly. Yeah, that would be Dirker. Officious, stern, militaristic.
Sure as shit.
Cabe had been in lawmen’s offices in dozens and dozens of towns, if not hundreds. Some were nothing more than tumbledown shacks with shackles bolted to concrete blocks to hold prisoners. Planks set over barrels for desks. But not here. Not in a rich mining county. The job of county sheriff would be a very lucrative one.
You could expect nothing less of Jackson Dirker.
Cabe waited there, lighting a cigarette and studying the wanted dodgers on the walls, town ordinances, a rack of repeating rifles chained into a hardwood case.
The door to the back-the holding cells, Cabe figured-opened and Dirker stepped out and Cabe felt butterflies take wing in his belly. Dirker wore a striped suit with a gold watch chain and a string tie. The sort of duds a banker might wear. But Dirker had impressive bearing and he would’ve looked like the man in charge had he worn a corset and dress.
He sat down across from Cabe. “You have business here, Cabe?”
Cabe felt his voice catch in his throat, snag there like denim on a nail head. For a moment he wondered if maybe he had the wrong man here… but no, there was only one Jackson Dirker. Cabe had known it was him the moment he’d come into the Oasis. The face was older, lined impeccably by experience. There was a touch of gray at the temples. But those eyes, you couldn’t forget them. Twenty years had not tempered their ferocity. They could still burn holes in cinderblock.
“You remember me, Dirker?”
The sheriff nodded. “I do.”
“Didn’t seem like you did back at the saloon…”
“It took a moment.”
“The scars refreshed your memory?”
Dirker arched an eyebrow. “Scars are hardly a novelty in this country, Cabe. Now what is it you want?” he said. “What’re you doing here?”
“I came to see the ocean, feel the spray.”
“The ocean is hundreds of miles from here.”
Cabe slapped his hat against his knee. “Damn… I must’ve taken a wrong turn.”
Dirker was not amused. “Is this business or personal?”
Now there was a question. Good old Crazy Jack Dirker. You just couldn’t rattle the man. He could talk about dismembering a baby same way he talked about trimming his toenails. That chiseled face was incapable of emotion. It knew not hate or anger, love nor happiness. Only the eyes were alive in that mask. Course, last time Cabe had seen him, he was wearing the dark blue sack coat and Jeff Davis hat of a Union Army lieutenant.
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—”