Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (10 page)

They were coming from the other side of the building, somewhere out back, opposite where he’d entered. A horse whinnied, another nickered, snorted, and made blowing sounds. The thuds were probably just a horse, he thought, trying to break out of the stable, though he wasn’t convinced by his own explanation even as he tried it out on himself. Especially when he heard the whimper. Not a loud whimper, but nothing like he’d ever heard from a horse. The Smith and Wesson was in his hand and he couldn’t have told you how it got there. His pulse was up, his adrenaline flowing. He crept forward, no longer aware of all those hours of missed sleep.

The back door opened on an avenue between pens with fences that were more functional and less pretty than the white pickets along the driveway—amputated phone poles on which two-by-six rails had been bolted to contain beasts regularly weighing in around a thousand pounds.

The source of the thuds was obvious. The last pen contained a mare, likely in season, and its rails separated her from a massive white stallion with a saddle of red hair and three stockings to match. The stallion wanted in. If his erection was any indication, the sheriff knew why. The top rail bulged, jagged splinters of wood gave proof of the stallion’s determination. The mare chewed at the rail, tearing bits of it away and indicating her interest was probably similar to his. Her efforts were less productive but the stallion reared up and punched at the fence with his forelegs. The top rail split and collapsed against the one below it. The stallion was bleeding. He’d cut himself on the broken beam, but the injury seemed more evidence of determined lust than serious damage. The big white wheeled, threw himself in a quick circle, and launched himself over the fence. He cleared, but not by much and the sheriff felt himself involuntarily draw in every muscle of his groin as he thought, for an excruciating moment, the beast would catch that most delicate portion of his anatomy on the sharp splinters of the shattered rail.

The horses greeted each other, whickering and nuzzling and then the stallion moved behind her, nibbling at her rump before he mounted. The sheriff felt a renewed appreciation for the expression “hung like a horse,” and some of the wistful envy that probably prompted it.

As the Saddlebred and the Arabian began mixing a pair of pedigrees in a way the Starks would not approve, the sheriff heard the whimper again, louder this time, and close. It was more like a moan now. It sounded human. It sounded like someone in pain.

A vivid picture of the butchered remains of the Reverend Simms flashed across the sheriff’s mind. He had the awful feeling he might be about to discover a similar product of someone’s awesome anger, one that had, so far, failed to find release in death. He experienced a momentary desire to tear his badge off, hurl it at the nearest manure pile, and abandon the job and this search to someone with the stomach for it. Then he remembered, Judy and Heather had been here. They might be victims. All doubts disappeared. The sheriff had to find the source of those sounds.

He couldn’t tell where they’d come from. The stallion was snorting and the mare interjecting breathless little whinnies. Cicadas hummed, inordinately loud in the absence of the constant Kansas wind. There were only a couple of piles of used straw mucked out from the stables along with a few bales of hay and a portable sledge-like feeding trough standing between him and the line of heavily fenced corrals where an act of renewal was doing its best to offset what the sheriff feared he might find for a second time today.

He moved forward in an unconscious half-crouch, .38 cocked and extended before him. He rounded a stack of hay bales and thought he saw a furtive movement off to his right behind the trough. He was right. It was part of a gunny sack that a hint of breeze had found and toyed with and the sheriff almost put a couple of rounds into it before he was able to convert it back into a harmless bit of cloth instead of the savage killer his mind was expecting to find.

With his eyes occupied, however, his feet found and tangled with something else. He felt himself falling. He frantically looked down and saw, to his horror, human flesh. Naked human flesh streaked with parallel lines of fresh blood. He knew this was the source of the sound but he couldn’t decipher the confused blur of images that confronted him as he lost his balance. Was this another victim, or were there two figures, victim and perpetrator, the act of butchery still underway, the fiend surprised while still at his mutilations? The sheriff fought for balance, fought for comprehension, and found neither.

He went down hard. He’d tried to catch himself with his right hand as he fell and got it partly under him, just enough to knock the .38 loose and send it skittering out of reach. He was part of a confused jumble of thrashing arms and legs. Fingernails slashed at his eyes and just missed. A fist slammed into his temple and flooded one eye with blood and made him turn his head away from the source of the attack, but also away from seeing what he was up against. Something hit him hard in the ribs but it was a glancing blow, more painful than damaging. He reached out blindly, encountered flesh, grabbed hold with all his might, locking one set of the arms and legs that pummeled him. Another set disengaged themselves and bare feet pounded away.

The sheriff shook the blood out of his eyes in time to watch a blond man run bare assed and buck naked around the end of the stables. The youth’s long gold hair suggested it was probably Cody Mathews, one of the Starks’ hired hands. There were bloody scratches on his back and buttocks.

The sheriff turned his attention to the source of those scratches, finally realizing exactly what he’d stumbled on and heard, and gotten hold of. She was tall and muscular and dark, much older than Cody, but with a body still suitable for stapling into a centerfold. She wasn’t hurt, or hadn’t been before the sheriff fell over her. She was apparently one of those women who had a thing about horses and, in Cody’s company, had been caught up by the stallion’s excitement. She and the boy had been in the midst of a private ride, their plans interrupted by the sheriff’s arrival. They’d been down behind the hay bales—her spandex outfit and shorts lay atop Cody’s jeans and cotton shirt—when the sheriff literally stumbled onto them. She still lay half under him, eyes wide, breathing hard, still writhing to get free.

There’s something erotic about terror. Some ancient instinctive reaction takes over when we’ve been frightened, reminded of our mortality. It tells our bodies nature designed us to procreate before we die. That’s probably why horror movies are so popular. The sheriff had been living his own personal horror movie all day. As he realized what was in his arms, he also discovered his body wanted her. If the painful bulge in his Levis was any indication, he wanted her pretty badly. It made him feel hot and embarrassed and ashamed. Letting go was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

The sheriff lay in the dirt by the hay while the stallion finished and a dark exotic stranger sprawled under him, no longer fighting him now that he’d released her. Her eyes were deep brown, the irises such a rich chocolate color that they nearly blended with her pupils and made them seem even wider than they were—and they were wide. Those eyes seemed to look right past him, and the sheriff wondered if she’d even noticed that she was with a different partner than the one with whom she’d begun. He was about to offer some sort of apology, look for a graceful exit from this bizarre situation for both of them. He’d just opened his mouth in hope of finding something moderately appropriate to say when a voice spoke from the spot where her wide-eyed stare was focused.

“You slut!” it said. It didn’t sound happy. The sheriff wondered how he was going to explain, or if he’d get the chance.

***

Doc Jones’ Buick station wagon was a nondescript beige that blended well with the layers of Benteen County dust it collected, lying thick enough in places to have begun developing their own stratigraphy. The Buick’s patina was nearly indistinguishable from the twin columns of dust that rolled up off its back wheels to hang suspended in the heavy afternoon air.

Just past the third crossroad from the highway, and after navigating around a washed out bridge over Calf Creek, Doc began to slow down and watch for mailboxes. There was a time when he’d been a regular visitor at the Simms’ place, but that was years ago. He hadn’t been to the house since Old Man Simms decided Doc Jones was personally responsible for medical science’s inability to cure Mrs. Simms’ fatal breast cancer.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to read mail boxes after all. He recognized the place at once. It still sported a lush stand of hardwoods behind an evergreen windbreak that separated it from the road.

The Buick swung into the driveway and slid through a verdant tunnel that allowed entry to Doc and the car while filtering out the dust he’d brought along. The big two-story wooden frame house sat in an enchanted glade dappled with shadow and sunlight. Doc had almost navigated the entirety of the drive before he realized Mad Dog’s Saab was parked under a maple behind the house and that Mad Dog, himself, was sitting on the steps of the front porch. It gave Doc a momentary pause. Until today he might have questioned Mad Dog’s sanity about any number of things and never considered him dangerous, but until today he’d never conducted an autopsy on someone who’d been tortured to death and scalped and otherwise treated in very much the way the ancestors Mad Dog claimed might have welcomed another White pilgrim to this stretch of prairie in a previous century.

The sheriff should be here to deal with this, Doc told himself with a brief flash of hostility that evaporated almost as soon as it surfaced. The sheriff probably should be lots of places this afternoon. Wherever he was, Doc knew, he was doing his best. This was just one of the places the sheriff would get to as soon as he had the time. Until then, and until this thing was over and solved, Doc would just have to pitch in and help shoulder the load. He remembered the day the sheriff had spent almost fifteen minutes giving CPR to the Hoffman girl after the family’s pickup avoided a Hereford bull and rolled into an adjoining field tossing Hoffmans, and pieces of Hoffmans, every which way while Doc had been too busy performing a Caesarian in an unsuccessful effort to save the girl’s mother and baby brother to come tell the sheriff that even those heroic efforts couldn’t have saved her. In other words, the sheriff would do what he could for others, so Doc would do what he could for the sheriff. Still, Doc wished he’d stopped by Bertha’s to see if someone would come along for the ride, or that he had a pistol hidden in his medical gear, or that Mad Dog hadn’t felt the need to wait for him. Hell, he wished he was young again, and rich….

He pulled up near the front door and crawled out from behind the steering wheel and into a steam bath this riotously green patch of vegetation and shadow had fooled him into forgetting. It was still summer in Benteen County.

“Mad Dog.” Doc Jones said, bobbing his head as he extracted his leather satchel from the car and proceeded toward the porch.

“Hi Doc,” Mad Dog said, coming slowly to his feet and extending a hand that was still streaked with a little body paint.

Doc wasn’t about to refuse it on that account. They shook. “Mrs. Kraus tells me you found another one,” Doc said. Maybe Mrs. Kraus had somehow got it wrong and Mad Dog would tell him so and he could turn around and go home and try not to think about what someone had done to Peter Simms, try not to let his thoughts drift back to what he’d left in a body bag and a series of containers in the refrigerated back room of Klausen’s mortuary. He could see from the unhappy look on Mad Dog’s face that this was one more wish that wouldn’t come true.

“Old Man Simms,” Mad Dog said, nodding and turning to open and hold the door. “He’s right in here, on the stairs.”

Doc didn’t go in yet. He stood there and let his free hand rub the bridge of his nose. Just at that moment, he couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on Mad Dog.

“How’d you come by this one?” Doc asked.

Mad Dog stood there, holding the door and shrugged his shoulders. They were broad shoulders, strong enough to have stuffed the Reverend Simms, or what remained of him, head first down the toilet in Veteran’s Memorial Park, adding the insult of a post-mortem swirly to the injuries of ante-mortem butchery.

“I felt pretty guilty about Peter Simms,” Mad Dog said. “When I heard he’d been identified, and when neither Englishman nor any of his deputies were available to come break the news to his old man…well, I thought it was the least I could do.”

There it was, the part about guilt. That was what bothered Doc. Why should Mad Dog feel guilty? Doc decide he’d rather ask straight out, face to face, than feel the razor’s touch from behind as he went through the door.

“Guilty?” he asked. “You trying to tell me you killed the Reverend?”

“I’m not real certain,” Mad Dog replied. Hardly the reassurance Doc had been seeking.

“I don’t understand,” Doc observed.

“Me either,” Mad Dog said. “That’s the problem.”

Doc found his hand at the bridge of his nose again. It was the sort of gesture a man might use whose glasses didn’t fit right. Doc didn’t wear glasses, he wore contacts. He decided it was also the sort of gesture a nervous man might make to waste time in the hope that something might come up to let him avoid doing what frightened him. The realization made Doc mad.

“Well, fuck this!” Doc exclaimed. “If you’re the murderer and you’re going to kill me too, get it over with. Otherwise, show me the body.”

Mad Dog didn’t say anything, he just stood there looking sad and holding the door and Doc used the burst of anger and adrenaline to get past him. He made it safely, and once inside, the sight of Simms’ lying on the staircase captured his full attention.