Authors: Tim Curran
And above all, nobody guessed that the disappearance of James Lee Cobb’s body and the hideous degeneration of Deliverance from a God-fearing Mormon hamlet to a place of dark, nameless rites was not coincidental, but very much connected.
Like the Callisters, these secrets were tended in the lonely tracts of the town’s sordid soul.
7
Despite being warm from his bath and just as relaxed and easy as a kitty curled up in a drawer, Tyler Cabe threw on a deerskin jacket and a pair of gray woolen pants and went back out into the elements. The rain had stopped and the wind had died down, but it was still cold and his boots sank four inches into the mud sea of the road.
At the Oasis, Frank Carny was still on duty. A swamper was mopping bloody sawdust from the plank floor. There had been a knife fight, Cabe learned. No one had died, but it had been a messy affair as such things often were. A few men were playing poker and a few others were huddled at tables, telling stories of strikes in the Montana goldfields.
Cabe drank beer and told Carny why he was there and the two got down to some serious talking.
“
Well, I’m sorry to hear that you and the sheriff don’t get on so well. All I can say is that he’s a good man, far as I can tell,” Carny said. “Like him or not, you gotta admit that boy’s got a real set on him. Shit, I’ll wade in on anybody with my bare fists…but they got a gun? Forget it. I become a coward then. Dirker? Hell, he goes right after anybody, he figures they’re causing trouble in his county.”
Cabe sipped off his beer. “I ain’t saying he’s a bad sort, Frank. Ain’t saying that at all. We just have a history is what. So much water under that fucking bridge, it’d drown a bull elephant.”
He hadn’t told Frank Carny everything. Just enough so he’d understand the lay of the land, so to speak. Understand who and what Tyler Cabe was and who and what Jackson Dirker was to him. Cabe figured that was important, because he needed a friend in this town, someone he could trust and was plugged into the local grapevine. Sometimes a little confession softened a person. Sometimes you had to expose your flanks to win the battle.
Carny put his elbows on the bar, looked Cabe dead in the eye. “Listen, Tyler. You seem like a right sort to me, so I’ll tell you something. Dirker’s got a lot friends in this town…and he’s got a lot of enemies. I tell you this, just so as you don’t speak out of school to the wrong person. I like Dirker…but I’ve been around, I understand how it must be for you. I’ve got enough lumps and bumps and scars…but, we’ll say they were self-inflicted. Your scars are of a different stripe, aren’t they?”
Cabe swallowed his beer. “I would say so.”
Carny drew himself a beer from a wooden keg. “Can I be bold here, Tyler?”
“
I wish you would be.”
Carny poured half the mug down his throat in a single swallow, wiped foam from his wiry mustache. “Wars are bad business. Never been in one, but you don’t have to be to figure that. You and Dirker…you were twenty years younger back then. Full of piss and vinegar. Both fighting your asses off for a cause you firmly believed in. But you were kids, neither of you had the common sense and tolerance that comes with age and experience. Keep that in mind.”
Cabe licked his lips. “Young and randy?”
Carny laughed. “Exactly. Hot-headed, pissed and pumped with the sort of craziness only youth knows and which wars—and the bastards who start ‘em—like to exploit. Just keep that in mind, friend. I’m of a mind that neither of you are the same men you were.”
Part of Cabe didn’t like Carny telling him his business and how he should feel about the shit he’d waded through…but, damn if he hadn’t asked for it. It was food for thought. So Cabe took a bite, swallowed, found it didn’t lay so bad in his belly after all. He didn’t hate Yankees like some. Maybe the rich easterners pulling the strings, but not your common man or soldier. Just cogs was what they were, he figured. Hell, up in Dakota Territory he’d struck up a friendship with a Union vet who’d lost a leg at Gettysburg. And the bottom line there was that, old enemies or not, sometimes only vets could understand other vets and what they’d been through.
“
I’ll keep that in mind,” Cabe told the bartender in all sincerity.
Carny served a few beers, poured a few shots, came back. He clipped the end off a cigar and fired it up, lighting Cabe’s cigarette for him. Watching each other, maybe understanding each other, they did not speak for a time.
“
Tell me about Whisper Lake,” Cabe finally said.
“
It’s a mining town, Tyler. Not a company town per se, more of a three-company town—the Southview, the Arcadian, Horn Silver. They don’t own everything here, but most of it. They’re always trying to buy one another out and steal away each other’s workers and the like. The strings they pull are big ones. Caught in-between are the miners and prospectors and some of ‘em are pretty tough types. They come from back east or across the sea, just about everywhere. Then you got the usual assortment of prostitutes, gamblers, shootists, outlaws, petty criminals, you name it. Stuck in the mess are the business owners. Just one big human soup simmering away and, as you might figure, the worst possible things can and do happen here.”
“
Sounds like every mining town I’ve ever known.”
“
Sure. World’s full of places like Whisper Lake, Tyler. Once they strike ore, it’s all over but the dying and the scheming. Once the paint’s dry, the people show and the garbage starts piling up and said garbage collects flies.”
Cabe listened and didn’t hear anything he hadn’t heard before…yet, he had the oddest feeling that Carny was trying to say something without saying it. He finished his beer. “And?” he said.
“
And what?”
Cabe studied him long and hard, his green eyes refusing to blink. “There’s something else. I can hear it in your voice.”
Carny set his cigar in the ashtray, put his elbows on the bar again. “This place is a cauldron like I was saying. Only it’s about to boil over. See, there’s trouble here. We’ve got hardrock miners vanishing out in the hills and people saying it’s Mormon militias that are responsible.”
“
You believe that?”
Carny shook his head. “No, I don’t. I mean, hell Utah Territory is mostly Mormons. But mining towns like this one or Frisco are mostly gentile. Mormons don’t care for places like this—bastions of sin, they call ‘em—but I can’t see them murdering folks on account of it. They have some blood on their hands after that Mountain Meadow Massacre and the rest, but I found them to be generally peaceful folk. Clannish, but always willing to help a stranger in need. You can understand how they might not like places like this, places that might corrupt their sons and daughters.”
Cabe understood that. Mormons were no different from ordinary Christians in that respect. Places like Whisper Lake had a way of expanding their boundaries, drawing in the worst sort of people and practices. He said, “But you don’t think they had anything to do with these disappearances?”
“
No, sir, I do not.” Carny re-lit his cigar. “But get folks around here to believe it. Shit. I’ve heard there’s vigilantes that have formed, are planning revenge against the Mormon camps.”
“
Sounds like Dirker’s got his hands full.”
“
In more ways than you can guess, friend.” Carny’s voice dropped down to a whisper and he continued. “See…there’s been not just disappearances, but
murders.
And I’m not talking shootings or knifings because people here don’t pay them any more mind than the brothels or gamblers. These murders I’m talking about…goddamn, folks have been
slaughtered,
Tyler. Mutilated in the worse ways. Heads torn off, bellies opened up, limbs ripped free. I’ve heard rumors that these bodies,
they were eaten.”
A long gray ash fell from Cabe’s cigarette.
“Eaten?
Well, shit, sounds more like wolves or a wild dog pack. I’ve heard stories about Mormons, but never that they ate folks.”
“
I agree. But, again, get people here to believe that. They’ve formed vigilance committees and are shooting at shadows. Things are getting crazy.”
But Cabe could understand it. The Mormons. They were different, they made good targets. Good ones to vent your frustrations on. Because when people got scared, they formed into gangs and these gangs needed a common enemy. If they couldn’t find one, they created one.
“
I guess all I’m saying to you,” Carny began, “is that this Sin City Strangler of yours, he couldn’t have found a better place to squat. He’ll fit into this madhouse like a needle into a button hole.”
Cabe didn’t doubt that at all.
8
Later, in his room, Cabe did some thinking.
A mining town. Dance houses, gambling halls, saloons, brothels. There was nothing money could not buy in such a place. The riches coming out of the ground would attract killers and thieves and scoundrels of every conceivable stripe. Immigrants would flood in, bringing trash from every corner of the country with them. The mining companies would pay men three-dollars a day for ten and twelve-hours workdays, six days a week if not seven. Drillers and muckers and jackers. Powermen would gouge out drifts and slopes, gut the mountains to extract ore. And the mines would hum around the clock and timber would be stripped from hillsides for bunkhouses and shacks and offices. Run-off from the smelters would kill the vegetation and foul the creeks and rivers and the lake with waste. The fish would all die and those that remained would be fouled with toxins. The town itself would be just as filthy and stinking as a boring cob. The company—or three of them, in this case—would own just about everything and everyone. It would have stores that sold everything from beef to Bibles to bed sheets and the miners would pay in company script, keeping the workers nicely in debt. There would be company doctors and company housing and company stables. And, if all else failed, a company coffin in six-feet of rank company earth.
Men would come by the hundreds to sell their souls to the malefic company god. Lots of men would die in the shafts—from cave-ins, from gas, from explosions, from dangerous equipment—but that wouldn’t bother the company none because they had ten men lined-up and ready to take the company oath…soon as they pushed your corpse out of the way.
Yeah, that was Whisper Lake.
Like some huge human hive where flesh and blood were as cheap as desert dirt and the rich owners and their lily-white board of directors sat up in the high offices, pressed and starched and spotless. Never caring how much blood was on their hands because it always washed off and if there was enough green, it canceled out oceans of red.
Whisper Lake. A human cesspool where humanity was a commodity like hides or whores.
Then you add to that heady mix these murders and the Mormons and the vigilantes and too many hot-hands and not enough cool heads and you had real trouble.
And that, Cabe knew, was Whisper Lake laid bare. The town stripped of skin—raw quilts of muscle, yellow fat, and greasy rank blood that stank of mordant corruption.
The perfect stalking ground for the Sin City Strangler.
Looking out his window at the muddy streets below, Cabe waited. Maybe for the Strangler. Maybe for something else. Because whatever it was, it was coming. And it was going to be bad.
9
The prostitute’s name was Katherine Modine, but folks in Whisper Lake just knew her as Mizzy Modine, Dirty Mizzy, or “Old-Squirm-and-Kick”. Behind her back she was called “The Crab Queen of Beaver County”…and more than one scratching miner could attest to that one. But to her face she was never called anything but Mizzy. And mainly because she had a vile temper and packed a Smith & Wesson pocket .38 and was not afraid to use it. She had killed one man and shot up three others.
Mizzy was freelance, operated out of a crib over on Piney Hill, which sat in the brooding, gray shadow of the Arcadian mine…or one of them, at any rate. Her crib was a glorified shack that stunk of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume, body odor and twenty-dollar sex. When the wind blew, the shack rattled and swayed and quite often it rattled and swayed when no wind blew. While townspeople might have said old Dirty Mizzy was “horizontally employed”, Mizzy didn’t look upon herself as a whore. She’d been selling what God gave her since she was fifteen and had worked dozens of mining camps, cow towns, and military depots from West Texas to the Wyoming Territory and had missed very little real estate in-between.
Mizzy considered herself something of an entrepreneur.
And maybe she was. In Whisper Lake, she serviced a steady stream of customers who weren’t real particular as to where they stuck their business…just grateful there was such a place. For those with more respect for what dangled between their legs, there were always the painted ladies who operated out of the sporting houses or high-dollar brothels where ten minutes with an imported French or Portuguese delight could cost you $400 or more.
Mizzy was an equal opportunity nightworker and was willing to spread her legs for any who could pay the price, regardless of race or cultural affiliation. And at twenty bucks a pop, what she offered was a bargain. And particularly in a mining town where prices tended to get inflated. And if you didn’t have twenty dollars, Mizzy was always willing to take what you did have in trade. Be that horses or cattle, buffalo furs or customized Winchester rifles, injun ceremonial daggers or a fancy pair of lizard boots. Because when she wasn’t whoring, she was selling goods out of her little shop…and she always had an eye on the inventory.