“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 2nd 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?