Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (27 page)

“Ah, it ain’t nothing I haven’t heard before when a cur was caught stealin’ a dead man’s boot. Under similar circumstances, I’d probably indulge in an epithet or two, myself.”

The old man’s eyes sparked as he stared fondly up at the redhead. “I’m Hank DeRosso, owner of this fine establishment behind me. Some call me an artisan. Soon to be a dog killer.” His shoulders jerked as he wheezed a short laugh. “Who might you be, young lady, and any chance you’re lookin’ to settle down here in Tucson? Maybe git yourself hitched? I never been married, but…” He winked. “I reckon it ain’t never too late to give her a shot!”

Angel laughed. “I’m Angel Coffin. These two polecats are Uriah Zane and Al Hathaway. Unfortunately, we’re here on business, Mr. DeRosso. Otherwise, I could do worse than hitch my star to a man with his own business.”

Uriah was staring up the street, toward the Rincon Dance Hall and Beer Parlor, against the front gallery of which several open coffins leaned. The watering hole was a block away, but the coffins appeared to have dead men inside, some with placards hanging around their necks. “What was that old train robber Cole Younger doin’ in Tucson?”

“Him and Jesse and the boys come out to hunt wolves up in the White Tanks. There’s an especially large bounty on ’em since a railroad’s surveyin’ track through that range into California, and the track layers and rock breakers been droppin’ like june bugs on a goose pond.”

“And likely runnin’ from the law,” Angel added. “The bounties on those fellas’ heads is as big as that on the wolves they hunt.”

“All I can tell you,” said Hank DeRosso, “is we need all the ghoul hunters we can get. Especially after what happened day before yesterday to Cole and Frank James and nearly the whole damn James-Younger gang, ’ceptin’ Jesse hisself. And half a
dozen other ghoul hunters and two deputy town marshals.” He shook his head, baffled. “How Jesse ever survived them wounds o’ his, I’ll never know. Reckon he must have some ghoul in him his ownself.”

Hathaway spat chaw on a rock in the street and gave the man a pointed look as he ran the back of his buckskin glove across his mouth. “Charlie Hondo leave his callin’ card, did he?”

“Charlie Hondo?”

“Four men ride into town day before yesterday?” Zane asked, studying the coffins tilted against the Rincon House. “With a pretty Mex gal?”

“Shit,” the oldster said. “How’d you know?”

“I’m clairvoyant.” Zane gigged General Lee ahead, starting up the street. The others fell in behind him, and they angled over toward where the coffins were lined up against the Rincon House.

There were five open coffins, each containing a woeful-looking dead man. All five of the men were naked. Bullet holes showed in their chests and bellies and elsewhere, like round, gray discs. The blood had been cleaned away. Likely, their clothes had been too torn and bloody to bury them in. One had had an eye shot out. Another had two bullet holes in his forehead. A placard hung around the first man slouched in a coffin nearest the beer parlor’s front steps.

The placard read: DO YOU KNOW THESE MEN? An arrow pointed to the right, indicating the four others.

A living, breathing man sat on the steps of the Rincon House, holding a frothy beer schooner on his lone knee. His other leg was wooden, and it ended in a peg where his foot should have been. He was middle-aged, and he wore an eye patch.
He was drawing deep on a long, black cigar as he eyed the three newcomers sitting their horses near the coffins.

“Them’s the five we can’t identify. Unknown ghoul hunters in these parts. Probably here to hunt the White Tanks, just like Cole and Jesse James was.”

Zane said, “How many others killed?”

“Shit, damn near fifteen men. Including Nevada Lewis, owner of the Rincon. Half-breed’s runnin’ it now. He’s one of only three who survived the maulin’ and shootin’, ’cause he was smart and kept his head down behind the bar. The others probably won’t make it.”

“What do you mean mawlin’?” Angel inquired.

“That Mex bitch turned herself into a wildcat. Went wild as hell with the fires stoked.” The one-legged man drew deep on the cigar and let the smoke out his nostrils, running a grimy thumbnail down the several-days’ growth of beard on his pale cheeks. “The men with her opened up with their six-shooters. Coulda heard the din as far away as Phoenix or Fort Bowie.”

“Did the men change?” Zane asked, looking past the Rincon Beer Parlor across the street to a cemetery flanking the church. There were several men digging graves among the titled gravestones and sage, while another man sat in a wheelchair in the minimal shade cast by a large saguaro.

“No, they didn’t change. What—you think they were ghouls, too? This was day before yesterday, not
night
before yesterday. Won’t be a full moon again for four nights, praise Jesus and Jezebel.”

Zane glanced at Angel. “Well, they’re still not changin’,” she said. “That’s good.” She turned to the one-legged man. “Which way did they head?”

He pointed his cigar toward the gap between buildings on the south side of the main street. “Through there. A passel of hunters went out after ’em yesterday, led up by Sheriff McQueen his ownself. The town marshal lost both his deputies, who were also his sons, in the bloodbath. Pretty broke up about it. He took a couple bottles and two old Civil War pistols, and lit out for the Santa Catalinas. Doubt we’ll ever see ole Carney again…poor bastard. If he don’t drink himself on over the divide, he’ll likely blow his brains out. Them boys was all he had.”

Zane cast his gaze back behind the old Catholic church. “Is that Jesse out at the cemetery?”

The one-legged man turned to look, then turned forward again, nodding and taking another drag off his cigar. “Poor bastard’s overseein’ the buryin’ of his brother, Frank. He don’t normally drink, but he took a couple beers with him.”

“Didn’t know the Jameses were Catholic,” Angel said dryly.

The one-legged man only shrugged. “Only cemetery we got.”

Zane glanced at Angel and Hathaway, then swung down from General Lee’s back. He tossed his reins to the scout. “You wanna stable our mounts? I’m gonna go powwow with Jesse.”

“Sure thing,” Hathaway said.

Zane slid his rifle from his saddle sheath, set it on his shoulder, and walked on around the corner of the Rincon toward the cemetery. He walked on past the half-ruined adobe wall that surrounded the old Spanish church that had likely been erected a hundred years ago, and began striding up the hill over which the boneyard sprawled among greasewood, bleached rocks, and Spanish bayonet. Some of the stones had been carved in the 1700s, and their edges had been weathered by time. Some of the names and years had eroded away completely, leaving flat faces of gray rock.

Zane walked up toward the crest of the hill, where two men were digging a grave with their shirts off. Their shovels clattered and scraped against the rocky earth. They were breathing hard and sweating, hat brims shading their faces.

Jesse James sat up the hill about fifteen feet, near the saguaro, though now its shade had angled away from him. Even with his left arm in a sling and a bandage around his right thigh, he was a tough-looking little man in a gray Stetson with a braided rawhide band. The hat appeared almost too big for his head. His face looked carefully chiseled from granite with its grave, deep-set eyes, delicate nose, and long, jutting jaws. The lines were clean and hard and gave the man an air of knotted‑up power and barely bridled rage.

He had an open beer bottle clamped between his thighs. Another beer bottle, unopened, was wedged between his right leg and the arm of his wheelchair. Between his thin lips smoldered a quirley emanating the sweet smell of marijuana. His chin was dipped downward, eyes on the lined pad on which he was writing in pencil.

Zane walked up on his left side and, glancing at the pad, saw that the tough-nut gorilla border dog had a fine cursive hand. Almost girlishly slanted and looping.

Zane was six feet away from the chair when, not turning his head toward the newcomer, Jesse said quietly as though speaking to himself, “Uriah Zane.”

Zane stopped, looked at the two men digging the grave, then at the sealed coffin sitting beside the mounded, red-brown dirt. “Sorry to hear about your loss, Jesse. Frank was a good hunter. One of the best.”

“A good bank robber, too.” Jesse turned to smirk at Zane
towering over him. His pale blue eyes were rheumy and red from the beer and Mexican marijuana. “Wouldn’t you say, Uriah?”

“I reckon he was, at that. Leastways, he earned a fancy price on his head.”

“You was too good for all o’ that, weren’t you?” Jesse’s eyes turned accusing though somehow they did not lose their bemused cast as well. “No train robbin’ for you…even if it was Yankee money you was stealin’.”

“I didn’t come here to discuss our differences, Jesse. After the War, some of us who survived went one way, others another. You’re a good ghoul hunter, as Frank was, and while I wish you’d concentrate more on the ghouls and less on robbing innocent folks of their hard-earned savings, I wish you all the best.” Zane pinched his hat brim and started to turn away.

“Innocent folks?”

Zane glanced over his shoulder at the little man in the wheelchair. “It was the government that turned those ghouls loose on the South, Jesse. Not the citizens. Lincoln’s dead. Grant’s wallowing around inside a bottle somewhere in Tennessee.”

“The government is its citizens, Uriah—don’t you know that?”

“Like I said, sorry for your loss.”

Zane had walked a good ten feet back down the hill, his Henry rifle resting on his shoulder, when Jesse said, “They was Hell’s Angels, weren’t they? And that
puta
bitch…she was that witch from Chihuahua, Ravenna somethin’ or other.”

Zane kept walking.

“I’ll be ridin’ with you, Uriah, when you set out after them ghouls.”

“No, you won’t.”

Zane kept walking, the tough soles of his high-topped moccasins crunching gravel and brushing against shrubs.

Behind him, Jesse sighed. “I’m gonna change your mind, Uriah.”

“Doubt it.”

Zane kept walking as Jesse chuckled softly beneath the
snick
s of the shovels digging Frank’s grave.

Chapter 26
    

THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR

Zane dined on hot, spicy Mexican food in a little, no‑name eatery in an adobe shack near the flophouse he always threw down in when he visited Tucson and where he and Angel and Hathaway had each taken a room after stabling their mounts. The trio of ghoul hunters ate without speaking, fatigued from the long pull down from Colorado.

Afterward, they left gold coins on the table and headed on back to the Santa Catalina Inn, where they muttered their intentions of rising at dawn and heading out before sunrise. Zane went into his musty room furnished simply with a few sticks of crude furniture and a crucifix over the lumpy bed with its corn-shuck mattress and moisture-stained pillow.

He opened a shutter to the cool, desert air, taking a deep breath of the sage and the perfume-like fragrance of burning piñon pine and mesquite. Standing at the window, hearing the
mournful strains of a mandolin twanging in some smoky cantina and the love moans of a soiled dove in the whorehouse that slumped on the other side of this dark side street, its shaded windows showing pink lamplight, Zane kicked out of his boots and stripped down to his balbriggans, which stretched across his broad-shouldered frame like buckskin soaked in a creek, then dried and shrunk in the hot sun.

He took another lungful of the fortifying desert air, lifting his chest so that the long underwear top drew even tighter against his shoulders. Then he turned the sheet and quilt back and eased into the bed, resting his head against the pillow and drawing the covers up to his chin.

He leaned over and blew out the candle on the bedside table. He closed his eyes, drew another slow, deep breath, and released it. He beckoned sleep, called for it, finally gritted his teeth and ordered it to come.

Like a rotten cur, it ran in the opposite direction.

For some reason, every muscle in his body leaped and writhed beneath his skin. His mind was a restless, twisted tangle of random, half-formed images flashing like the sun off a looking glass.

Finally, he threw the bedcovers back, dropped his feet to the floor. He’d go out and have a few drinks in the first watering hole he came to, maybe goose a few whores, and get his mind settled down. Then he’d return to the Santa Catalina, get a few hours of restful sleep, and be ready to ride at first light.

He dressed, left his rifle in his room with his other gear, and strode off down the hall lit by a single, smoky bracket lamp. Behind the doors off both sides of the corridor, he could hear men snoring, one whimpering childlike. He stole down the creaky, uncarpeted stairs with their rickety railing, walked past
the hotel’s middle-aged proprietor sleeping behind his desk with a
Policeman’s Gazette
spread open across his chest, gold spectacles hanging down his nose, and headed out into the night.

Several pockets of lamplight shone up and down the main street, casting saddled horses tied to hitchracks in ghostly silhouette. The air was still and cool, the sky alive with stars, the desert around the ancient pueblo so quiet that Zane could hear coyotes calling from miles away.