Skin Medicine (10 page)

God help him, if he made a nuisance of himself.

With all this bubbling away in his brain and making his temples throb, Dirker poured himself a cup of coffee. As he brought the tin cup to his lips, the door opened and the wind blew in, scattering papers from his desk.

Pete Slade stood there in the doorway, water dripping from the brim of his pinch-crowned hat.

“
Shut that damn door,” Dirker told him, maybe a little more harshly than intended.

Slade did.

He was Dirker’s undersheriff. Whereas Henry Wilcox was big and fleshy, Slade was long and lank, a mustache just as thick as a grooming brush sprouting from beneath his nose. It completely covered his mouth. Slade was a dependable man and a tough one. He regularly hunted down horse thieves and gunmen single-handedly in the mountains.

And right then he looked scared, looked weary…looked
something.

“
Sheriff,” he managed and that voice was filled with dread. “Sheriff…we got us a murder.”

Dirker stared at him, wondering why a simple killing had him so spooked to the point of being physically ill. But, deep down, he knew it would be nothing simple.

“
Bad?” he said.

Slade nodded. “Dear Christ…I…I never seen nothing like it…”

12

Once upon a time, Sunrise had been a booming gold town, but the ore had all but played out within a year or two and now it was nothing more than a little placer camp. A collection of hollow-eyed buildings and skeletal cabins, it sat on a little gravel butte between two towering rises of shale that sheltered it from the elements. The town was maybe two miles as the crow flies from Whisper Lake, but in reality more than a dozen along treacherous roads that climbed steep hills and plunged into rugged canyons.

It was isolated, hard to reach, and pretty much forgotten in its remote location. Except by the placer miners that worked the mountain streams and the prospectors who came there but two, three times a year to provision up at the remaining general store. A place that was a combination store, brothel, assayer’s office, and saloon.

It had whiskey. It had women. It had gambling.

And for the hard luck miners that refused to move on when the real deposits dried up, it was home. If you broke your ass panning for gold from sunup to sundown, you might get a few nuggets…enough, at least, to keep you in whiskey and gambling until it was time to crawl off to one of the dozens of abandoned homes and buildings to sleep it off. Most of these places were little better than shacks. Many had been torn down for firewood. But if you weren’t too choosy and didn’t mind the wind howling through the walls or the rain dripping through the roof, you had yourself a bunk.

That was life in a failed mining town.

***

It was night and Sunrise was dark.

The red-earth that showed through clumps of witchgrass and broomweed had turned to mud with the passing of the storm. Everywhere, it seemed, water dripped and pooled and ran.

Jack Turner, pissed to the high seventh on Taos Lightening, was leaning up against a shack across the road from the store. He was shaking the dew off his lily

and pissing most of it right down his leg

when he saw the riders coming in down the high trail. Though his vision wasn’t much after all the juice he’d swallowed and the night was just blacker than a mineshaft, he could see that there were maybe six or seven of them.

Quiet forms on quiet mounts.

No talking, no laughing, no griping. No nothing. Just the sound of hooves sinking into that muck and being pulled out again. The rustle of cloth and the muted jingle of spurs and equipment. They rode down into the remains of Sunrise single-file in that busy flurry of silence.

Turner stood there, swaying, his business in his hand, thinking for one crazy moment that the riders’ eyes…all of them…shined a luminous yellow-green in the darkness. Like the eyes of wolves reflected by firelight. But then it was gone and he blinked, figured it was just the hooch kicking up hell in his brain.

Sometimes, you got a belly full of that stuff, you saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.

The riders came on, just as silent as tombstone marble. Turner was going to call out to them, but he was just too damn drunk.

He slipped into the shack, threw the bolt on the door so someone else wouldn’t fall on top of him, found his bedroll on the floor and it was enough for him, enough for one night. As he drifted off, the riders passed by his shack, then paused outside the store, their horses snorting. For one moment, Turner smelled something, something sharp and musky like the stench from a snakepit…but he did not acquaint it with the riders.

Maybe it was just his britches.

He passed out.

***

Inside the store, Hiley was telling a tall tale of a gigantic gold nugget he’d pulled out of a streambed in California during the big rush of ’49. How the damn thing was so heavy he near threw out his back dragging it up the hillside. Said it took two mules and three stout men to get it up into the assayer’s office there. “But I made it, all right,” he told them. “Shit if I didn’t. It kept me in booze, cards, and hot women for near two months. Maybe if I’d been smart, I’d have banked it, but, damn, nobody ever said I was smart.”

“
Amen to that,” a scraggly miner said, tearing off a strip of jerky with his remaining teeth.

There was laughter at that.

Hiley laughed, too. He could afford to laugh. Of all the men in the room, Hiley was the only one really making it. He owned the store. He owned the rooms above. He took a juicy cut from what his whores took in. The booze was his. The barrels and sacks of dry goods. The sides of ham and salted beef. Anything worth having in Sunrise belonged to Hiley. He’d long ago given up hardrock mining, deciding and deciding wisely that there was more money to be made selling than digging and panning.

While most of the men in the room were a slat-thin, desperate-looking bunch whose worldly possessions consisted of a pick, a sluice box, and the ratty, stained clothes on their backs, Hiley was ruddy-cheeked with a belly just as round and full as a medicine ball. That gut was a source of endless barbs, but Hiley took them all, smiled, and proudly said it was merely a trapping of success. As he was often wont to point out: “When you got a tool like mine, boys, you gotta build a shed over it.”

There was a plank bar down one side and maybe a dozen grubby men pushed up to it. There were a few tables where the whores were working their prospects, trying to part the ragged, leather-faced men from the gold dust they’d collected in their buckskin pokes. Under the glare of hurricane lamps a half dozen others were playing a hand of poker with greasy cards and well-thumbed chips.

The whores were laughing, the men were drinking, the gamblers were losing…and all and all it was an average night in Sunrise and by dawn the only one richer would be Hiley.

The double-doors opened and two men in gray dusters stepped in. They wore wide-brimmed hats that thrust their faces into pools of shadow. Their eyes seemed to glisten like wet copper.

Everyone stopped what they were doing, watched the strangers.

The two of them stood there a moment, looking around, drinking it all in. Behind them, out in the darkness, a horse snorted…or something did. The strangers closed the doors. They looked on all and everyone with flat, dead eyes, hungry eyes. The eyes of wolves taking in a tasty herd of steer, wondering which one they would take down first.

The men looked at each other, nodded, then came into that crowded room just as smooth and oily as serpents sliding up out of a crevice. Their spurs rang out on the plank flooring, their dusters swished. They took their time, admiring the racks of picks and shovels, the barrels of salt pork and beans, the soiled doves working the miners. They seemed to like what they saw, grinning with smiles of narrow yellow teeth. One was bearded, the other clean-shaven with pitted scars along his jawline.

Together, they leaned against the bar, set identical sawed-off Remington pumps on its surface.

They did not speak and all eyes were on them.

Maybe everyone was smelling something bad coming off these two, some inexplicable, savage odor that turned their insides to sauce. Because it was definitely there. A strange and heady odor of slaughterhouses and bone pits. The smell, say, wild dogs might carry with them from hunting and scavenging, chewing on dead things.

Hiley managed to clear his throat of whatever was lodged in it. “You gents thirsty?” he asked.

The bearded one laughed and it was a hollow, barking sound. “You hear that, Hood? Man wants to know if we’re thirsty.” He laughed again. “You thirsty, son?”

Hood stroked that scarred jaw. “Reckon I am. But I don’t see my favorite drink distilled anywheres. Figure I’ll have to tap my own keg in my own way. You understand my meaning, Cook?”

“
Suspect I do.”

A miner at the bar with a Remington model 1858 .44 hanging at his hip, said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“
Here that, Hood? This one wants to know what that means.”

That made Hood laugh. A staccato, metallic laugh like a hammer banging at a forge. It was not a human sound. “I heard him. Figure this feller just don’t understand what we’re about is all.”

“
Maybe you should show him,” Cook said.

“
Maybe I’ll have to.”

Hiley, behind the bar, his hand resting on the stock of an Army carbine just out of view, licked his lips carefully. “We don’t want no trouble here, gents. All of us are just drinking and playing cards and minding our own. I suggest you do the same.”

Hood was grinning again and it was the sort of grin a corpse might have…two months in the ground. “That some sort of threat?”

The miner with the .44 nodded. “Damn straight it is, boy. You can either be sociable and peaceful…or things can happen the hard way. There’s only two of you and there’s about two dozen of us, give or take. You might want to weigh that out.”

“
I suspect I will,” Hood said, “being outgunned and all.”

Cook wiped the back of his hand over his beard, said, “You’ll have to excuse us. Hungry is what we are. Bellies are just plain empty, growling something fierce.”

It was Hiley’s turn to laugh now, only it was more of a nervous tittering. “Shit, boys, all you had to do was say so.”

“
Believe we just did,” Cook reminded him.

Hiley didn’t seem to catch that or want to. He could feel every set of eyes in the place watching him now, seeing how he was going to handle these hardcases. He knew the situation had not been pacified yet, that just about everyone in the room was armed and lead could begin flying at any moment. He did not want this. This was his place and bullets caused damage. That cost money. Bodies he could sweep out with the trash…but stock, now that wasn’t easily replaceable up here on the far left side of the Devil’s asshole.

“
What you boys need,” he said, “is a some meat in your bellies. That’ll fix you up.”

Hood and Cook looked at each other and laughed. Then they looked around the room, taking in all they saw. Their faces were drawn and sallow, their eyes wide, unblinking, just as dark as open graves.

“
Meat,” Cook said. “You hear that? Feller here’s offering us meat.”

“
I heard it and I figure that’s right neighborly of ‘em,” Hood said, wiping drool from his lips. “Because meat’s what we came for. Fresh meat. I like my meat raw. That’s what. Nice and raw. Like that taste of blood, hear? Puts iron in my pants.”

Some eyes widened at that. Others narrowed. Bodies shifted in chairs. Fingers slid down towards holstered pistols. One whore made a face, another smiled…finding these men
interesting.

The miner with the .44, said, “What is it you boys do?”

Cook drummed his fingers on the bar. Hiley saw that a pelt of reddish hair covered the man’s wrist, that it flowed over the back of his hand like wild grass and furred his fingers…which were oddly long, thin enough to pick locks.

“
We’re what you call Hide-Hunters,” Cook told him. “Thing is we don’t hunt animal hides. We hunt the other sort.”

The miner was about to say something about that and maybe Hiley was, too

or any number of others

but there was a pounding at the door. A thudding sound and not like a fist would make, but maybe the butt of a rifle. Whatever it was, it kept banging away.

“
You gonna answer that, Hiley?” one of the poker players said, but in such a voice like maybe he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.

Hiley looked at the strangers, then at the others. He swallowed hard. “I suppose I’ll have to.”

“
It would be neighborly,” Hood said. “Wouldn’t want them out there bursting in uninvited and all.”

All eyes on him again, Hiley went to the doors, taking the carbine with him. He stopped a few feet away, seemed to smell something or hear something that just laid on him wrong. He looked back into the bar, maybe for help, maybe for divine guidance, but got none.

“
See who it is,” someone said, a strange edge to their voice.