A Dangerous Man (21 page)

Tam Sullivan rode into Comanche Crossing holding the dead girl in his arms. His horse stepped fastidiously through the mud of the street toward the gathering of people who stood on the boardwalk outside the town hall.

The clock struck ten and did its best to cover Polly York's screams.

He drew rein and passed Lisa's body into the outstretched arms of her father.

“She's dead,” John York said. “Oh my God, my daughter is dead.”

Mrs. York screamed and screamed, her tears falling on Lisa's white, upturned face.

Clem Weaver was among the crowd and Sullivan said to him, “Bill Longley.”

Weaver's weathered face was shocked. He managed only one word. “Why?”

“I don't know why,” Sullivan said. “I can't think like Longley thinks.”

Drawn by the screams of Mrs. York and other women, more people showed up, among them Dr. Harvey.

Polly saw him and shrieked, “Doctor, save my child! Save her!”

The physician's practiced eye told him the girl was dead. With a question on his face, he stared up at Sullivan who was still mounted.

“Bill Longley,” Sullivan answered the unspoken question.

“Doctor!” Polly York shrieked.

Harvey put his arm around the woman's trembling shoulders. “She's gone, Polly.”

In a state of profound shock, John York held his daughter in his arms and said nothing. But Mrs. York gave way to profound grief.

Amid the hysterical woman's wails and shrieks, Harvey said, “John, let's get them inside.”

Stiff-legged, walking like an automaton, John York let the doctor usher him along the boardwalk, followed by his wife and a group of sobbing women.

Sullivan's throat worked as he swallowed hard. “Damn.” Seeing the grief of parents over the death of their beautiful child was hard to take. He stepped out of the saddle onto the walk and tossed the reins to Weaver. “You know what to do, Clem. Where is Buck Bowman?”

“I talked to him just after Longley killed Booker Tate an' took pots at you. He said he was headed for the Wainright place,” Weaver said. “I heard shootin' from up that way and decided to march right into the saloon and stay there.”

“Anybody else head up the hill?” Sullivan asked.

“There was some talk about it, but everybody decided to let the sheriff handle it. Buck Bowman was a Ranger, you know.”

The few men remaining on the boardwalk listened to what Weaver said.

“You going up there?” one of them asked Sullivan. “If you want company, you can count me in.”

“Yeah, I'm going up there, but I'll do it alone.”

The man persisted. He wanted to do something, anything. “Should we organize a posse, go after Longley?”

Sullivan raised his eyebrows. “In this weather?” He shook his head. “You'll never find him.”

“Then Longley goes free?”

“No, he doesn't go free. One day I'll find him and I'll kill him.” The bounty hunter felt empathy for the young man eager to avenge Lisa York's murder. It was an emotion new to him.

Talking to all three of the men who stood watching him, Sullivan said, “If you boys hear a heap of shooting going on up at the Wainright house, grab your rifles and come a-running. It means I'm in trouble and so is Sheriff Bowman.”

“We got you covered.” The earnest young man turned to his companions. “Let's get our guns and meet back here.” He turned back to Sullivan. “At the first sign of trouble, we'll be right behind you . . . Mr. Sullivan, isn't it?”

“You can call me Tam. And you are?”

“Hank. Hank Lively.”

Sullivan put his hand on the young man's shoulder. “I know I can count on you.” He felt something strange slam inside him—like a kicked open door. Had he really said that?

I know I can count on you.

The old Tam Sullivan didn't count on anybody. He didn't need anybody. Even in bed with a woman, he took refuge behind an impenetrable wall and always felt the better for it.

As he watched Lively leave with his friends, Sullivan shook his head. “Ebenezer, what the hell have you done to me?”

He left the boardwalk and took to the dubious path that led up the hill to the Wainright house. The place was lit up, its windows glowing gold through the ashy mass of the riven night. The dragon wind vane hissed in the north wind and the air was thick with ice crystals.

Ahead of him, lying across the walk, sprawled an enormous carcass.

Sullivan stopped and drew his Colt from the holster. He walked on slowly, warily, afraid that the great beast was sleeping . . . or worse, wounded and enraged.

But the massive dog was dead.

A shotgun blast had torn great holes in its shaggy coat just under the high shoulder hump formed by a mass of powerful muscles that had driven the animal's front legs. Its great yellow fangs were bared in death, black eyes open, glittering as though it was still alive.

Sullivan shuddered and stepped around the creature . . . and his boot hit an even greater horror . . . a round thing that rolled.

Buck Bowman's body lay close to its severed head, stiff and ungainly in death.

The sheriff's face was upturned, crusted sleet on his hair, eyebrows, and mustache giving him the look of an old man. He had no serenity in his expression, only transfixed horror at the manner of his death . . . frozen during the split second before his brain had ceased to function.

Bowman's death didn't affect Sullivan as deeply as the murder of Lisa York. The man was a lawman and had taken his chances. But it had been Sullivan who'd sent Bowman to his death.

And it wasn't a peace officer's death. Beheading was foreign, vile, unnatural—savage in the extreme.

Bowman's soul must be crying out for revenge.

Sullivan stared at the house, shining brightly in the night as though for a Christmas imagined by Mr. Dickens. He used the back of his gloved gun hand to wipe sleet from his eyes, his gaze fixed on the house door where the restless dead beckoned to him.

Ebenezer Posey . . . Lisa York . . . Buck Bowman . . . big Frank Harm . . . and all the others . . . each demanding justice, standing in the light of Clotilde Wainright's windows, each dead face as white as a skull.

Rage beyond rage ravaged Tam Sullivan. He roared his terrible fury and ran for the door, its polished brass gleaming in the light. He roared still as the door splintered and crashed open under his kick. Still roaring, he charged inside.

His gun up and ready, Tam Sullivan's reception was not what he'd anticipated—the hallway was empty. Recalling that the parlor lay to his right, he stepped quietly . . . and warily . . . to the open doorway that allowed a rectangle of light into the hall.

Lady Clotilde sat in a leather chair by the fire, licking blood from the blade of a great curved scimitar. Her mouth scarlet, she said, “Ah, Mr. Sullivan, how nice to see you again.”

Sullivan stood fixed in place, overcome by horror.

The fire crackled in the hearth and the close air smelled of incense and burning pine.

“Surprised?” Clotilde said. “You shouldn't be. Fresh blood is good for a woman.” She smiled, raised the blade, and her pink tongue slid along its gory edge, making her mouth bloodier.

Sullivan found his voice. “Lisa York is dead.”

“Really? How unfortunate. But hers was such a little life it hardly matters.”

“It mattered to Lisa,” Sullivan said.

Clotilde laid the sword at her feet and dabbed her mouth with a dainty lace handkerchief that turned red. “How remiss of me. May I fetch you a brandy?”

“Where are Cheng and Hong-li?”

“Dr. Cheng is probably in his office, and I'm sure that Hong-li is fast asleep. Because of his infirmities, he goes to bed early, you see.”

“Did you order him to kill Ebenezer Posey and Hogan Strike?”

“Who?”

“The two men Hong-li murdered at the undertaker's office.”

“Oh that. I can't recall, nor do I care. Does the butcher remember all the rabbits he ever hung in his shop window?”

“Ebenezer was my friend.” Sullivan's anger was cold as steel.

Clotilde rose to her feet, her face twisted. “He was nothing, a nonentity who stood in the way of a great man.”

“You mean your husband?”

“Yes. I mean Dr. Cheng, the surgeon who will one day remove cancerous tumors and leave the host brain intact. He will pass his knowledge on to others, and tens of thousands of lives will be saved . . . because of him.” Clotilde's expression changed to one of pure hatred. “And you, you uneducated dancehall lout, won't stand in his way, either. Do you think I care a fig for that little slut Lisa York? Medical science needed her carcass and now its been wasted.”

“Your boy Bill Longley killed her,” Sullivan said.

“Is he still alive?”

“As far as I know.”

“Then we'll meet again and I'll square accounts with him.”

“Get Cheng and Hong-li down here,” Sullivan ordered. “I've accounts of my own to settle.”

“As you wish,” Clotilde said.

Sullivan caught a slight flicker of the woman's eyelids and moved toward her, avoiding the worst of the two-fisted blow to the back of his neck that would have shattered his spine. The huge, meaty fists hit between his shoulder blades, but the blow was powerful enough to send him sprawling to the floor.

Dazed and hurting badly, the instincts of the trained Texas draw fighter cast Sullivan, the man, aside and Sullivan, the skilled killer, took his place. He rolled on his back, raising his Colt . . . and beheld a creature from the lowest pit of hell coming at him.

A hunchbacked, monstrous white thing, vast rolls of fat overlying a seven-foot frame, advanced on him, its clawed hands the size of steam shovels ready to tear him apart.

The man, for that's what nature had intended him to be, was completely hairless. His piggy eyes seethed with black intensity and the desire to maim and kill.

“Destroy him, Hong-li!” Clotilde shrieked.

Sullivan fired. One shot at a distance of six feet. He aimed for the head, afraid that the man's mass of blubbery body fat might stop a ball. But the .44 shot true. The ball smacked the monster right between the eyes.

No matter how big and tough he was, a man could not survive a hit like that.

Despite his enormous body size, Hong-li's head was small. The ball plowed though his brain and erupted from the back of his skull in a halo of blood and bone.

His eyes rolled up in their sockets and the monster staggered . . . then fell forward.

Sullivan tried to roll out of the way, but the man's body crashed on top of him, a mountain of fat, sweat, blood, and stink.

No matter how he struggled, Sullivan couldn't get out from under Hong-li's vast bulk. Worse, his gun hand was pinned between his chest and the man's body.

“No, Clotilde, not the head!” Cheng's voice, a frantic yell at the top of his lungs. “The brain! Save the brain!”

Gasping for breath, crushed under Hong-li's weight, Sullivan twisted his head and saw Clotilde lower the bloodstained scimitar.

“Where's his gun?” she yelled.

“It's under him.” Cheng grabbed a pillow from the back of Clotilde's chair and kneeled next to Sullivan. His face in an evil grimace, he shoved the pillow over the bounty hunter's face.

Helpless, Sullivan tried moving his head, but Cheng was a man of great strength, and he was relentless.

Desperately trying to wrench his gun free, Sullivan felt his hand move perhaps an inch—no more than that—across Hong-li's sweaty chest. The big Colt was trapped as though in a vat of hardened concrete. As was Sullivan. He couldn't catch a breath, feeling as though his lungs would explode.

As sudden darkness overtook him, his movements slowed, and he knew he was seconds away from death.

BLAAAM!

The rifle shot hammered loud in the close confines of the parlor.

Immediately, the pressure on the pillow stopped, and Sullivan felt Cheng fall away from him.

Someone pulled away the pillow, then a man's voice said, “Mr. Sullivan, are you all right?”

Sullivan looked into the concerned face of young Hank Lively and gasped, “Get . . . him . . . off . . . me.”

“Deke, Les, help me here,” Lively said.

It took the strength of three men to roll Hong-li off Sullivan. He didn't get up immediately but lay there, breathing heavily, until Lively helped him to his feet. Cheng lay in front of him, a bullet hole in his temple.

Like a female cougar at bay, Clotilde shrank against the fireplace, her green eyes fixed on Sullivan, aglow with hatred. “You stupid, miserable wretch. This night you killed a better man than yourself. My husband could have saved the world from a great scourge and you destroyed him.”

Sullivan glanced at Cheng's slender body. “Seems like.” His voice was level, cold.

“You haven't beaten me, Sullivan.” Hatred and anger had transformed Clotilde's beautiful face, twisted it grotesquely like a gargoyle as she spewed her venom. “Bill Longley will find you and kill you, and I'll go on. There will other towns, big cities, free from savages like you, and I'll find other doctors to carry on my husband's work.”

“No, you won't, Clotilde, You're done,” Sullivan said. “When you killed Ebenezer Posey, you stepped over the line I'd drawn in the sand.”

“You won't stop me, Sullivan. You're a midget among giants and you know it. Now, get out of my house, all of you.”

Sullivan, chilled to the bone, thumbed back the hammer of his Colt.

Clotilde smiled. “You won't kill me, Sullivan. You don't have the nerve.”

Sullivan fired and his ball crashed into her chest.

She slid slowly downward to a sitting position beside the fireplace. “You shot me . . .” she said, the light dying in her eyes. “You . . . killed me.”

Sullivan stared at her. “Yeah, I did. Now you know how Lisa York felt.”