Skin Medicine (29 page)

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.

Another said, “Why in Christ he rape ‘em? Whores? You don’t have to rape ‘em…they give it up for two bits, some of ‘em.”

“
Yeah, why did he rape ‘em?” another wanted to know.

“
He never says.”

A tall man in a gray wool suit and polished black boots was shaking his head. “Seems to me, sir, that this is no fit conversation in the presence of

ladies.”

The miners were looking around, trying to find the ladies. All they saw were a few whores mulling about. They didn’t figure that sort counted as being ladies.

“They ain’t no ladies here, chief,” a miner said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“I find it objectionable all the same.”

The miners laughed at that to a man. Looked like maybe they were going to start trouble over it…but then they saw the pistols hanging from the man’s belt. Fine and sleek they were, Colt Peacemakers with ivory handles. The weapons of a shootist.

The miners filtered away, figuring today wasn’t the day to die.

“And you, sir,” the tall man said to Cabe. “If you are a bounty hunter as you claim, if you are indeed hunting this man, then I seriously doubt you will find him in the bottom of a glass of beer.”

Cabe looked at Carny, just shook his head. “Listen, mister. I came in for a drink, not to listen you run that silver-plated mouth of yours.”

The tall man took a step forward. “All the manners of a rutting hog. How wonderful that is.”

“Like I said, I just want to drink my beer. So will you kindly go fuck yourself?”

The tall man’s face drained of color. “That, sir, is no way for a gentleman to talk. Profanity is the product of a weak mind.”

“Well, that’s me—weak-minded Arkansas trash. I claim to be nothing else.”

An easterner. A dandy. That’s what this fellow was. These days, didn’t seem you could spit without hitting one. Cabe generally just left them alone, regardless of how he felt about that sort. Most of ‘em didn’t bother no one. Then there were this kind.

“No, sir, you are certainly no gentleman, surely. You are rude, coarse, and obnoxious.”

“Yes, sir, as you said.” Cabe set his glass on the bar, put his hat on. “Now please kindly step out of my sight before the doc has to pull my spurs out of your fine white ass.”

But he wasn’t moving and Cabe was starting to wonder if he’d have to bury this sumbitch, too.

“If your mother had any sense, bounty hunter, she would’ve drowned you in a sack before you grew to stink up this country.”

Cabe felt the hairs along the back of his neck bristle. No, no, he wasn’t going to let this bastard push him into something he would regret. Just wasn’t going to happen. He was walking away from this one.

The tall man had positioned himself between Cabe and the door now.

Which meant that Cabe had two choices: go around him or right through. It wasn’t much of a decision for Cabe, being that he went around no man. It wasn’t his way. It had cost him in blood and bruises through the years, but he backed down from no one.

He thought: I will not pull my pistol, not if there’s any other way.

The dandy stood his ground and Cabe came right at him, not slowing, not so much as breaking stride. When he was precious feet away, the tall man pulled his Colts. Pulled ‘em pretty fast, too. But not fast enough. By the time he cleared leather, Cabe was close enough to smell. A few quick steps and he had hammered the dandy in the face with two quick, straight jabs that put him to his knees. Cabe kicked him in the belly to keep him down. Somewhere during the process, the tall man lost his pistols. Cabe saw them and kicked them away.

“Now,” he said, just plain sick of bullshit like this, “y’all go home to Boston or Charlottesville or where ever in the fuck you came from. You go back home to daddy’s money and his title. Because out here, you’re gonna get your fool self killed.”

Cabe went right past him, left him coughing and gasping, blood bubbling from his dislocated nose. He had almost made the front door when the dandy screamed out obscenities and pulled a little five-shot Remington Elliot .32.

Cabe just stood there, knowing he couldn’t move quick enough.

The gun was on him.

The tall man was filled with rage and hate.

Just then two men carrying shotguns burst through the door. They were dressed in dusty trail clothes and plainsman-style hats.

“You there,” the first said. “Drop that pistol or I’ll cut you in half.”

The dandy lowered it, let it slide from his fingers.

The second one turned to Cabe, looked him up and down. “You Cabe? Tyler Cabe? The Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“I would be.”

The shotguns came around in his direction now. “Then you better come with us.”

9

For some time after Tyler Cabe left, Janice Dirker found herself thinking about him. About how he carried himself, the way he spoke, that unflappable honesty that was the earmark, it seemed, of who and what he was. She found herself thinking about these things and knowing that he excited her. Excited some part of her that had lain long dormant like a volcano just biding its time until it would erupt.

Tyler Cabe was a free-spirit.

He seemed to be entirely unconventional. Had no true respect for money or position, for authority or cultural values. He lived as he chose, said what he pleased to whom he pleased. He was a rogue element. Seemed to have more in common with the red man than the white. Maybe this is what excited her. He was so different than the other men she’d known. Now, her husband Jackson, was completely the opposite. He had bearing, had station, had unshakable confidence. But he was stiff and unyielding and emotions seemed to be a foreign thing to him. Mere malfunctions of character, rather than compliments to it. For though Jackson was a good man who invariably did the right thing at the right time, he was cold. Terribly cold and methodical.