Skin Medicine Page 11

  He splashed water in his face, gulped some down, and pissed into the pot, getting some on his boot. Making moaning sounds, he followed Dirker out into the front office. Dirker shoved a cup of hot coffee into his hand.

  “Drink it,” he said. “I need you fresh…or as fresh as you can be.”

  Cabe drank the coffee and it tasted like maybe they had made it with water dredged from a privy, but it went down, all right. Dirker poured him another cup, leaning up against the wall, looking very dire. Cabe had to wonder when the hell it was that Jackson Dirker slept.

  He set his cup down. “Now, listen to me, Crazy Jack or Sheriff or whatever the fuck they call you here...it was self-defense. Before you go off on some wild tangent on how I’m shooting up the town…that boy there…goddamn Virgil Clay…he pulled on me, got off the first shot. I put one in him because I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  Dirker just nodded. “I know that. I heard all about it.”

  “Then you ain’t charging me with nothing?”

  “No, not this time around, anyhow,” he said. “But hear me on this and hear me good. I won’t have you going around shooting people whenever the need strikes you. After awhile folks are going to start tripping over the bodies and they’re not going to like it.”

  Cabe told him it couldn’t be helped. And Dirker said maybe and maybe not. He had no love for Virgil Clay or the clan that hatched him. They were trash and everyone knew it. If it hadn’t have been Cabe, it would have been someone else. But…and he emphasized this pretty sternly…the witnesses, a lot of ‘em anyway, were saying that Cabe had been drunk and running his mouth. That he could have walked away from it at anytime, no harm done.

  “Oh, but there would have been harm done, Dirker,” Cabe said. “I would have lost all credibility with them people there. They would have thought I was some sort of coward.”

  Dirker licked his lips. “Those people you talk about, Cabe, they’re not exactly high-stepping gentry. Most of ‘em would slit your throat for a ten-dollar gold piece. You got nothing to prove to that bunch.”

  Cabe knew he was right, but wasn’t about to admit as much. He finished his coffee. “Can I go now?”

  “No.” Dirker unlocked the property cabinet and gave him back his Starr, knife, and cartridge belt. “You’re gonna take a little walk with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

  “Unless it looks like a bed, I don’t want to see it.”

  “You will, I think.”

  “Why?”

  Dirker swallowed down something. “Because your boy is in town. He’s finally struck.”

  16

  Figuring that he was hungover, trail-weary, and hadn’t had much sleep, Cabe didn’t need to be looking at this. Didn’t need to be seeing the slashed and hacked remains of a whore named Mizzy Modine in all their ghoulish splendor.

  He stood there in the doorway, his guts percolating away, bile kicking up the back of his throat. His jaws were locked tight.

  Dirker was standing there with him. “Well?” he said. “Any question in your mind that this is your boy?”

  Cabe did not answer him, could not answer him. His jaws were still locked-up and his voice had sunk down into some dark, muddy pit. All the rooting around he did down there did not produce it. What he was looking at…Christ, it was the worse yet. The very worst.

  “Excuse me,” he finally said, stepping out into the chill air.

  Cabe had seen a lot of death over the years. A lot of blood and flesh mangled up in the worse possible ways. He’d come to the conclusion long ago, that the human being…though possibly God’s finest creation…was also the most disgusting when you opened it up and saw the slimy, drippy things that made it operate.

  Cabe had not been physically ill in years looking at a body, but, damn if he wasn’t real close right now. That bile in his throat tasted of cheap whiskey, flat beer, and things far worse. He tried to roll a cigarette, but his fingers were thick and clumsy and maybe the light from the lantern hanging outside Mizzy Modine’s crib just wasn’t enough.

  Dirker rolled one for him. Rolled it, stuck it between his lips, struck a match and cupped it against the wind while Cabe puffed it into life.

  Dirker said, “It hits you hard the first time you look on it. I been looking on it for hours now…but the shock just won’t go away.”

  Cabe nodded, pulling off his cigarette.

  Okay, he thought, enough. You went on a good one tonight and you put a man down, but pull yourself together because you have to look at what’s in there. You have to take a good, long look. Dirker wants to know if it’s the Strangler and he expects you to tell him.

  Can you do it? Can you?

  But Cabe knew he could. Somehow. Some way. Still dragging from his cigarette, he thought about when he took up the trail of the Sin City Strangler. It was in Eureka, Nevada. The fourth victim. The fifth was in Osceola and the sixth in Pinoche. In Pinoche, Cabe got his first good look at the handiwork of the Strangler. The sheriff there was a hardcase named Cyrus Long who carried a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in a sheath at his hip. The stock was plated in iron and it was dented from Long smashing it over the heads of miscreants…or anyone that pissed him off. Long was rumored to have been a Kansas redleg during the war whose obsession, it was said, was hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and skinning them alive. He was a cruel, evil sort and that look in his eyes…like simmering death…even made Cabe bristle. Cabe had been asking questions about the victim and finally Long himself took him to view the body.

  Working a plug of chew in his cheek, Long said: Now I’m only gonna do you this favor once, Johnny Reb, hear? You bounty hunters…you come stomping about my town, kicking things up, leaving your bootprints all over my ass…and not a one of you ever had the decency to let me know he’s even here or what for. But you have, Reb, so I’ll do you a good turn back…’cept, you ain’t gonna think it’s so good once we’re done. One thing, though, Reb…yeah, I don’t give a good fucking shit what your name is, Reb…you just listen and shut that cracker mouth for two minutes or I’ll goddamn well do it for you. I had my fill of your peckerwood Southern asses during the War of Rebellion, so shut it and shut it quick, boy. Okay. Now, I don’t mind you bounty hunters coming here and all, just as long as you let me know straight away what you’re dirtying up my town about. Don’t matter if you’re hunting wolves or injuns or men…I wanna know.

  He was a real sweetheart, that Long. You just had to love him. Reconstruction had never touched this boy. He was as mean and ornery and intolerant as he’d been during the war. He took Cabe upstairs of a brothel and into a room at the end of the hall. A white sheet was thrown over a form on the bed. There were great red stains on it. Long pulled it off the body and it came away with a sticky sound like tape pulled from a board.

  Long took out a knife and began. See here, Reb? See how she’s been opened from belly to crotch? That’s a sure sign of the Sin City Strangler. Trust me…I saw the other one in Osceola. Slit right open, see? Ain’t that something? Long followed the incision with the blade of his knife, using it like a pointer. Like he was an anatomy instructor. See, this crazy bastard, he stuck the knife right in her business there, dragged it up to her throat. Then he cut her widthwise just below her tits here and then again right at her bellybutton. Opened this bitch like a Christmas present. See? She’s all hollow inside on account this bastard scooped out all her goodies, spread ‘em around like birthday streamers…you see that? One thing missing, though, is her heart. Yep. He always takes that part with him. Now, out in San Fran they had themselves some hotshot surgeon what looked at the body and said the woman there died about the same time she was strangled. I wouldn’t know about that. But see those purple marks at her throat…yeah, them ones…them are from fingers. You can see ‘em fine, thumbs and fingers. Now, she died from strangulation and was opened afterward, Reb. I know that on account of what I’m seeing. No, don’t turn away. This is the important part. Her eyes are full of blood and
her color is blue…oxygen starvation causes that they tell me. She was strangled, all right. Now, Reb, what you’re looking for here is a dirt-mean, deranged cocksucker who fancies whores and likes to fuck ‘em and choke ‘em and gut ‘em. Got another secret for you, too, Reb…he fucks ‘em after they’s dead, too. So you find this character, he’ll have a long, sharp knife and maybe a heart and a few other things boiling in a pot…where you going, boy?

  But Cabe had had enough. Only a ghoul could linger in such a place. There was something definitely wrong with Cyrus Long. He was too clinical, too detached. It almost seemed he’d been enjoying it. Sick redleg sumbitch.

  “You ready now?” Dirker said.

  Cabe crushed out his cigarette. “You?”

  “Nope. Not in the least.”

  They went back in, Cabe leading. They went in and stood at the foot of the bed. The air was redolent with the stink of voided bowels, fresh blood, and salty meat. It was a heady, nauseating odor that crawled down inside both men and made something shiver in their bellies. Cabe looked at everything but what he was supposed to be looking at. He took in the velvet tapestries, the oak chiffonier, the red tapers melted down now. Everything was red and warm and selected to induce passion, he supposed. But what was on the bed induced anything but.

  Like the whore in Pinoche…Mizzy Modine had been eviscerated.

  But it was worse this time. All her internals had been cut out, arranged next to the body in some unguessable sequence. Her bowels had been draped over the headboard and coiled around her head in a halo. Her eyes had been plucked out and replaced with coins. Her breasts hacked off and set on the nightstand along with her eyeballs and privates.

  “Yeah…it’s him,” Cabe breathed. “I got a firsthand tour in Pinoche. It looked like this. Only this time it’s even worse.”

  Dirker just nodded. “All right, then.”

  Together they went outside, stood together, let the wind blast them clean. A light mist hung in the air…but even if it had been pouring, it couldn’t have hoped to wash the stink off of them. A stink that was mostly in their head by that point.

  “You can go, Cabe,” Dirker said. “Get some rest. There’s no more you can do here.”

  Cabe looked at him, started to say something…then just shook his head and started down Piney Hill through the muddy, damp streets.

  17

  At the St. James Hostelry, Janice Dirker said, “My, my, Mister Tyler Cabe, but you smell like the Devil’s own brewery. For a man who didn’t come to Whisper Lake to ‘hell around’, you certainly managed to dip in the waters of our taverns quite thoroughly.”

  Cabe just stood there. “Yeah…it was a hard night.”

  “You look like hell, Mr. Cabe. If you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I don’t, ma’am.”

  He wanted very badly to get into bed, to sleep away the day, but she insisted he join her for breakfast. He didn’t figure it would be polite to resist. So he followed her into the dining room, thinking it was going to give old Crazy Jack a heart attack if he came in and none other than Tyler Cabe was breaking bread with his woman. Maybe yesterday that would have given Cabe pleasure…but after what he’d been through this day or night or whatever in hell it was, he just didn’t have the strength to feel any animosity for Dirker.

  It just wasn’t there.

  The cook brought out eggs and hotcakes, maple syrup and coffee.

  Cabe stared at the food, his belly growling, but he kept seeing Mizzy Modine laying in that slaughterhouse. He picked up his fork and set it down again.

  “Please, Mr. Cabe, eat,” Janice Dirker said. “The other guests are not up yet. I usually dine alone, but I’m grateful for company. I can remember the days when my husband would share breakfast with me. But he’s simply too busy these days.”

  “I think I need sleep, ma’am,” Cabe said.

  “Of course you do. But sit with me for a moment or two.”

  She cut a small bite of cakes and chewed it quite delicately. Cabe could see she had fine breeding. Womenfolk he knew back in Yell County shoveled it in before somebody snatched it off their plates.

  “So where do you hail from, Mr. Cabe?” she asked.

  “Arkansas. Yell County. Yourself?”

  “Georgia. Daddy owned a plantation there. He owned lots of things.” Her eyes misted for a moment, but something wouldn’t let the pain come, maybe breeding. “Daddy’s gone now…everything’s gone.”

  She went on to tell him of her life in Georgia, the sort of life she’d had that he could only dream of. The privileges. The fine schools. The genteel upbringing. It was all in great contrast to the South Cabe had known…which had always been hard and unforgiving. She was a lady and the Yankees had destroyed her family’s holdings and yet she had gone and married one of them. She was an enigma to say the least. But the war, he knew, had created a great many of those.

  “Were you in the war, Mr. Cabe?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But you don’t like to talk about it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She seemed to understand. “My husband was in the war, also. He, too, does not like to discuss it.”

  “It was a bad time, ma’am. A real bad time for all concerned.”

  She smiled conspiratorially. “But, perhaps, worse for us Southerners…wouldn’t you agree?”

  He nodded. “I would. The Yankees what stayed behind, stayed home…they probably had it all right. But the ones that did the fighting? No, I can’t say they had a good time of it. No one who went through that hell could possibly have fond memories. The Yankees were better equipped than us without a doubt. But they bled and died all the same.”

  Janice admitted that her husband was a Yankee. “I remember him…this was a few years after the war. How tall and proud he was on his horse, how handsome. He wooed me and won me. I am not ashamed of the fact.”

  “No reason you should be. North and South, men are men and women are women.”

  Janice told him she appreciated his understanding for there were many Southerners who did not feel that way. Regardless, many girls married Yankee soldiers. She wasn’t sure what it was…maybe there was a certain attraction in that they were the victors. Maybe it was a matter of power. Powerful men were…enticing. And maybe it had something to do with wanting badly to get out of the South, the ruin it had become. To escape memories and demons and melancholy things that were buried along with the antebellum South and wouldn’t rest quietly in their graves.

  “I knew many dashing men that went off to war, Mister Cabe. Those that returned, well, they were broken, beaten men. Their eyes were vacant and they were bitter, angry. At the Yankees, maybe at themselves, their commanders, the politicians that had put them in such a situation to begin with,” Janice explained. “Many of them did nothing but drink and fight amongst themselves. Some were touched in the head, didn’t believe the war was over. It was all very sad. Maybe I had to escape all that.”

  Cabe understood. He knew nothing of the life she had led. Privilege and money were alien things to him. When he left for war he had nothing. When he came back, he still had nothing. He got out of Arkansas soon as possible, wanting desperately to be anything but what his father was—just a rich man’s belonging. He would not be a tenant farmer, a sharecropper. So he rode west with all the others, looking, looking for something he still had not found.

  Cabe cleared his throat. “Your husband…he is a good man?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Janice said. “He always tries his best, always tries to do right by people…sometimes he fails as we all do, but he never stops trying. In his job, well, let’s just say he is unappreciated when things go smoothly and vilified if they do not.”

  Cabe listened and heard, but was not sure if any of it registered. His thought processes were garbled and he wasn’t sure what day it was. He kept seeing the hacked prostitute, Virgil Clay, the old Indian at the jail, Henry Freeman, Jackson Dirker…a parade of faces and incidents that flowed t
ogether and lost solidity.

  Sipping his coffee, but not tasting it, he thought: Everyone but me seems to think Dirker is a good man…maybe I’m wrong and maybe they don’t know him and maybe he’s changed and I have, too.

  “Do you know my husband?” Janice asked of him.

  “The sheriff,” Cabe said, nodding. “I’ve met him.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  Cabe swallowed. “No, ma’am, I guess I don’t know him well at all.”

  18

  The next morning, Henry Wilcox released Charles Graybrow from his cell, told him to keep away from the booze and he’d keep out of trouble. Graybrow told him that he had a powerful taste for the whiteman’s devil-brew and that him keeping away from it was like a cloud trying to stay away from the sky.

  Wilcox just shook his head. “On your way, Charlie.”

  At the door, Graybrow stopped. “What did I do, anyway?”

  Wilcox sighed. “You don’t remember? You honestly don’t remember? Or are you playing me again? No, I guess you don’t recall. Well, Charlie, you gotta take a shit, we’d appreciate it you don’t do it on someone’s porch. People are touchy about things like that.”

  Graybrow scratched his head. “I’m just an ignorant savage, what do I know of your ways?”

  “Oh, get the hell out of here.”

  Although outwardly somber, inside Graybrow was grinning like a kid that had written dirty words on the blackboard. Maybe whites didn’t find him amusing, but he enjoyed himself immensely at their expense.

  He stepped out and although the sun was shining and drying up the mud, there was a chill in the air.

  Another deputy, Pete Slade, tied his horse to the hitch post and nodded to Graybrow. “She’s a cold one today, eh, Charlie?”

  Graybrow shrugged. “I’m an injun…we don’t feel the cold.”

  Slade just shook his head and went inside.