A Dangerous Man (15 page)

Ebenezer Posey was in such a low state, battered, bruised, and woebegone, that Tam Sullivan felt a twinge of conscience. “We'll stop at the saloon and I'll buy you a brandy.”

Posey shook his head. “I'd rather go straight to bed, thank you, Mr. Sullivan. I feel most unwell.”

“A brandy will do you good, Ebenezer. Hell, we might even see Montana Maine.”

“I don't think so. I—”

“Doctor's orders,” Sullivan said. “Besides, we've got to make future plans.”

“My only future plan is to return to the bosom of Mrs. Posey.”

“And you will, just as soon as we find Crow Wallace.” Sullivan settled the agitated Posey in a chair then stepped to the bar. “Where's Bowman?”

“He went to visit the mayor,” the gray-haired man behind the bar said. “I'm filling in until he gets back.”

“That's odd, Bill Longley and Booker Tate are doing the same thing,” Sullivan said. “Except Booker is there to spark Miss Lisa.”

“I wouldn't know anything about that, mister,” the bartender said. “I'm only here to serve the drinks.”

Sullivan ordered two brandies and took them back to the table.

“Mr. Sullivan, I fear I have broken bones,” Posey said.

Lost in thought, it took Sullivan a while to say anything. “Huh?”

“I think I have broken bones. Both my wrists hurt and my back is very sore.”

“Listen, Ebenezer, let's take a shortcut. When you get back to Santa Fe, all you have to say is that you saw and identified Crow's body. You hand over the reward to me tonight and then get back to your Mrs. Posey and her bloomers.”

“Oh, I couldn't do that, Mr. Sullivan. I would betray the sacred trust placed in me by the Butterfield company.”

“Hell, they'll be so glad to get money back from the stage robbery, they won't even question you.”

Posey shook his head. Swaddled in his fur coat, he looked like a little bird poking its head out of a nest. “No, no, Mr. Sullivan, that would never do. Ebenezer Posey's honesty is a byword among the stage line fraternity.”

Sullivan leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It would be so easy.”

“Easy, yes. But a dead weight on our consciences.”

“Not on mine. My conscience isn't inclined in that direction.”

The saloon door opened and Buck Bowman stepped inside, wafting snow following him. A usually affable man, the big sheriff's face was bleak, as though his smile had been crumpled like a piece of paper and tossed away. He nodded to Sullivan then stepped behind the bar. “Everything all right, Joe?”

The relief bartender nodded. “It's been quiet. Maybe six customers since you left and now only those two gents.”

“Montana Maine make an appearance?”

The man called Joe shook his head.

“She won't come in on a quiet night like this. It ain't worth her while.”

Bowman nodded. “All right.” He called across the room, “Sullivan, you and Posey drink up. It's time to close the place.”

“How did it go at the mayor's house?” Sullivan asked.

“Bad. How else would it go?”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Why would you care?” Bowman frowned.

Sullivan shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Bowman seemed to reconsider his testy remark. “Longley aims to see Mayor York's daughter wed to his friend Tate. And he pretty much laid it on the line that he plans to rob the bank.”

“That's nothing new,” Sullivan said. “He's made no secret of those things.”

“There is one thing new—I'm going to stop him.”

“You can't, Bowman. I know you were a Texas Ranger an' all, but you're hardly in Bill Longley's class. Not even close.”

“Then I can outlast him.”

“A couple of .44 balls in the belly can change a man's mind about that real quick.”

“And what about you, Sullivan? I hear plenty of talk from you but see mighty little action. Can you shade Longley? I've heard he may have killed as many as sixty, seventy men.”

“It's Comanche Crossing's fight, not mine.”

Bowman got testy again. “Answer the question. Can you shade Longley?”

“On a good day, yes I can.”

“But you won't.”

Sullivan shook his head. “Not unless he does me some personal harm.”

“He'll step around you, Sullivan, and then shoot you in the back,” Bowman said. “Take my advice. Get out of this town.”

“Sure, when I find Crow Wallace's body.” Sullivan glared at Posey, “This man here won't fake it for me.”

“I safeguard my integrity at all times,” Posey said, feeling the brandy.

“Sometimes a lie greases the wheels,” Bowman said.

“Not from these lips,” Posey said firmly.

Sullivan was about to say something further when the door opened . . . and he knew he was about to hear more bad news.

Big Jim Lloyd, the shotgun guard, walked into the saloon. His entire posture was tense and stiff, a man with a story to tell. He ignored Sullivan and Posey, stepped right to Buck Bowman. “You're the new sheriff?”

“That's what they call me.”

“Then let loose the bloodhounds. Deke Dillard is gone.”

“Mr. Dillard, the Butterfield driver? But he's dead,” Posey said.

“Yeah, he's dead, but you'll have a hard time proving it. His body's been stole.”

“Not another one,” Bowman said, his face ashen.

“Seems that dead folks can't stay dead around here,” Lloyd said.

“How did that happen, and when?” Sullivan asked.

“When? Sometime earlier this evening,” Lloyd said. “How? Hogan Strike, the undertaker, says he was embalming Dillard for a trip back to Santa Fe so he could be planted by his family. He went out front to lock his door and that's when the body was stolen from his back shop.”

“Did he see anything, hear anything?” Sullivan questioned.

Lloyd shook his head. “Not a damned thing. Dead men don't walk by themselves. Gimme a whiskey.”

“Drink up, Ebenezer, I want to take a look at the undertaker's place,” Sullivan said. “All these body-snatchings are linked and Crow Wallace is in the mix somewhere.”

“Hogan Strike is still there,” Lloyd said. “I'm sure he'll be glad of company. He lives at the back of his shop.”

“I'm going to bed,” Posey insisted. “I feel so ill.”

“Damn, but you're a complaining man, Ebenezer.” Sullivan hauled him up. “Get on your feet.”

“Sullivan, if you find anything let me know,” Bowman said.

“You'll be the first to hear, Sheriff.”

“Quit whining, Ebenezer,” Tam Sullivan said. “Like I told you already, you began the whole damned thing with your talk of Burke and Hare, and body snatchers.”

“And now I rue it very much, Mr. Sullivan. My words were spoken in an ill-considered moment.”

Their feet thudded on the boardwalk like dim drums as they walked toward the undertaker's premises. Snow plastered their fronts, driven by a frigid, scudding wind, and the unseen cloud-deck had dropped lower, shrouding the town in Stygian darkness.

“My feet are freezing,” Posey complained. “I can't feel them anymore.”

“Ah, here's the place.” Sullivan rapped on the door.

A wide alley separated the undertaker's from the rest of the stores, as though they wished to put distance between themselves and a business that dealt in death.

Posey was uneasy and tried to withdraw into his coat as the door opened a crack and a man's unsteady voice said, “Yes?”

“We're here about the missing body,” Sullivan said.

It seemed that Hogan Strike was either a trusting man or badly shaken because he didn't ask for Sullivan's bona fides. “Come in.” He opened the door wide. “And welcome.”

After they introduced themselves, Strike led Sullivan and Posey along a narrow hallway lit by a single, guttering oil lamp. As befitted his profession, the undertaker was a thin man, pale as a cadaver. Blue shadows pooled in his sunken cheeks and temples.

He spoke with an echoing, booming voice as though he was talking from within a marble sepulcher. “The deceased was resting in the slumber room you see at the end of the hallway . . . before . . . before this terrible thing happened.”

“An unhappy business, Mr. Strike,” Posey said. “One senses an evil hand at work.”

“Ah, yes indeed, one does,” Strike agreed, sensing in Posey a fellow traveler. “The trials and tribulations of the undertaking profession are many, but this is beyond even my experience.”

“Smells mighty strange in here,” Sullivan said as he reached the door.

“That's the embalming fluid,” Strike said.

“Very necessary in your profession, I'm sure, Mr. Strike,” Posey added.

“Yes, a valuable tool of the trade, Mr. Posey. And, as you will appreciate, a vital one. I always keep an adequate supply on hand to cater to the demands of the dear departed.”

“Very commendable, Mr. Strike,” Posey said. “My dear wife says something similar about the demands of the bloomer manufacturing profession.”

Sullivan stood next to a steel table surrounded by glass vessels and coils of rubber tubing. “The stiff was lying here, Strike?”

“Yes. This is where Mr. Dillard slumbered,” the undertaker said.

“Was that window shut and locked?” Sullivan pointed to a large one, cut into the far wall.

“Apparently not,” Strike said. “When I got back from securing the front door, it was wide open.”

“These days one can't be too careful, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Posey. Not fastening the window was—if you'll forgive a little undertaker humor at this sad time—a
grave
omission on my part.”

“A little joke helps one bear up in times of stress, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

“Indeed it does, Mr. Posey. That's exactly what I tell my bereaved. I say, what is Mr. Sullivan doing?”

“Searching for clues, I suspect, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

Sullivan had opened the window and climbed outside. The distance of the windowsill from the ground was only about three feet. The body could have been shoved, dragged, or even carried through comparatively easily.

He kneeled and examined the muddy ground just under the window. As he'd expected, tracks led from the window and disappeared around a gable wall of a timber shed with a tarpaper roof about ten feet behind the building. The area between was sheltered from the worst of the snow.

The boot prints were huge and the soles seem to be studded.

Sullivan whistled through his teeth. A mighty big feller had left those tracks, judging by their size and depth. The bounty hunter placed his boot in one of the prints and it looked like a canoe in a barge.

Whoever he was, the body snatcher was a giant. Sullivan had seen no one answering that description in Comanche Crossing.

He tensed.

He'd heard a whisper of sound . . . like the rustle of a dead leaf across cobbles.

Looking around him, his eyes searched the darkness, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Without thinking about it, he opened his coat and dropped his hand to his gun.

Posey's frightened face appeared at the window. “Mr. Sullivan, are you all right?” he whispered.

“Shh. There's something out here.”

“Then come in at once.” Hogan Strike sounded scared.

Sullivan ignored the man and listened into the black tunnel of the night. He heard it then, a low, primitive growl from somewhere to his right, in the direction of the alley. Then a whisper of stealthy movement, padded paws on giving ground.

Something wicked this way comes.
Where had he heard that? Sullivan swallowed hard.

Yeah, he remembered. Pa reading Shakespeare aloud to Ma by the midnight firelight. Macbeth. The Scottish play. The bad luck play.

Drawing his Colt, Sullivan backed toward the window, staring wide-eyed into the menacing darkness. Fear grabbed at his gut, twisting, spiking, giving him no peace.

He backed up slowly, followed by the snarl that seemed to come from everywhere, a malevolent presence hovering the air around him. He reached the window, a step away from safety.

It was shut!

“Let me in, damn it!”

His wild plea unheeded, Sullivan did what a man who lives by the gun learns to never do—he turned his back on danger. He frantically tried the window. It was locked.

Behind him came a frightening rush of sound.

He caught a glimpse of something gray. Something huge. Something terrifying. He fired. Fired again. His shots scarred the darkness with dazzling flashes of scarlet light, then he heard a piercing whistle in the distance.

Silence.

His ears ringing, half-blind from muzzle flare, Sullivan stood in a drift of gun smoke and waited for what was to come.

The wind sighed, snow flurried, and the night, shattered like a mirror by gunfire, slowly pieced itself together again.

Booted feet pounded on the boardwalk and a man's voice yelled, “Who's there? Identify yourself or take the consequences.”

“It's me, Bowman. Tam Sullivan.”

A few moments past as the sheriff seemed to absorb this information. Then he roared his exasperation. “Git the hell out here!”

Buck Bowman stood on the boardwalk, gun in hand, as Tam Sullivan stepped out of the alley. Before the bounty hunter could say a word, the sheriff demanded, “Are you drunk?”

“No,” Sullivan answered.

“Then you got no excuse for your behavior. Explain yourself.” Bowman looked mean as a curly wolf. He kept his Colt in his fist.

“You ain't going to believe this,” Sullivan said.

“If you and Posey are involved, I'll believe anything.” Bowman stepped closer to Sullivan, almost to kinfolk distance. “Doc Harvey came to see me tonight. He said he'd gone back to his surgery to mix a powder for old Mrs. Clark who's down with the rheumatisms and found his place ransacked.”

“It wasn't ransacked—” Sullivan realized his slip and stopped. “Oh, hell.”

Bowman waited.

“I was looking for Crow Wallace's body.”

“You thought Dr. Harvey had it.”

“Yeah. I thought that.”

“But you didn't find it?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Not a trace.”

“We'll go into Strike's store, or whatever the hell it's called,” Bowman said. “I don't want to hear the rest of your story in a blizzard. But first hand over your gun, Sullivan, real slow and easy, like.”

The bounty hunter smiled, snow on his mustache. “I must be a real desperate character, Bowman.”

“Yeah, I came to that decision a while ago.” The sheriff shoved Sullivan's Colt into the pocket of his sheepskin. “Now get inside and don't make any fancy moves.”

They walked into the undertaker's place. The lamp in the hallway glowed with feeble light, but it was bright enough to reveal the blood splashes on the walls and floor and the mangled bodies of Ebenezer Posey and Hogan Strike.

Sullivan rushed to Posey's inert form and took a knee beside him. He held the little man's shoulders in his arm and looked up at Bowman. “He's still alive. He's breathing.”

The sheriff looked closely at Strike and shook his head. “This one's done for. All cut to pieces.”

“Ebenezer, can you hear me?” Sullivan said, bringing Posey's face close to his own.

The little man's eyes fluttered open. “If it's all right with you, I want to go to bed now, Mr. Sullivan.”

“What happened, Ebenezer?”

“So tired now. Time for bed.” Posey's voice was as weak as the mew of a newborn kitten.

“Bowman, don't just stand there, get the doc.” Sullivan held Posey closer to him. “Damn it, Ebenezer. Don't die on me just as I got to liking you. Talk to me.”

The little man's fur coat was matted with blood and his hands, small as a child's, were badly slashed.

Sullivan frowned, suddenly angry. Someone had used an axe on Posey or a heavy knife and his tiny body had suffered terrible wounds.

Gray shadows gathered in the little man's face, something Sullivan did not want to see.

“Damn you, Ebenezer. If you let yourself die I'll put a bullet in you, I swear I will,” Sullivan said.

Posey was silent. He still breathed, but barely.

Suddenly Sullivan was angry with himself for caring about the little man. “Damn it, Ebenezer. I don't need this. I don't want to grieve for somebody.” To prove to himself that he was only person on earth he was concerned about, Sullivan said, “I need you to identify Crow Wallace's body, you hear? Don't die on me.”

If Posey heard he made no sign.

“Don't die on me, Ebenezer,” Sullivan whispered again.

 

 

“I give him maybe a one in ten chance of pulling through this,” Doctor Harvey said. “He's badly injured.”

“What do the injuries to Posey and Hogan Strike tell you, doc?” Bowman asked. He and Tam Sullivan stood in the physician's spare bedroom.

Ebenezer lay in the bed, his head and hands visible, swathed in bandages.

“That someone tried to kill them both,” Harvey said.

“With a knife or an axe?” Sullivan questioned.

“Neither, I think,” the doctor said. “I saw wounds like these during the war, usually on cavalrymen. They were inflicted by a saber.”

“You mean somebody used a saber on Posey and the undertaker?” Bowman was astonished.

Harvey nodded. “Yes, an edged weapon of some kind. A sword in my estimation.”

Sullivan and Bowman exchanged glances. Guns they knew . . . but swords?

“That's hard to believe,” Sullivan said. “Nobody carries a sword in Comanche Crossing.”

“Nonetheless, it's a fact,” Harvey said. “Now, if you will excuse me, gentlemen. Mr. Posey must rest. He's very weak.”

“Take care of the little runt, doc,” Sullivan said. “I kinda like him. His wife makes bloomers for ladies, you know.”