Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (29 page)

JESSE’S DREAM

In his balbriggans and still holding his heavy, cocked LeMat, Zane threw the door open and stood barefoot, staring down at the wheelchair-bound, wiry little creature in the too-big hat, pale blue eyes still sparkling crazily, as they had been earlier in the day.

The outlaw/ghoul hunter was no longer drinking or smoking, but he hadn’t quit long ago. He reeked of both alcohol and marijuana. He was dressed in a long, gray duster, and pistols jutted up from holsters on his hips. He held a Spencer repeater across his bony knees with his good hand, the left one still in a sling.

“We done talked at the boneyard, Jesse,” Zane said, voice raspy from the sleep he’d been drifting into.

“Hear me, damn you,” Jesse said, narrowing his eyes menacingly, his delicate face flushing, veins bulging in his temples. “You’re gonna need me when you go after them ghouls.”

“I doubt it.”

“I know where they’re headed, Uriah.” Jesse’s lips shaped a slow smile. He let that sink in, and then he added, “Seen the place in a dream last night. And it’s still right here.”

He lifted his right hand from the carbine’s breech and set a long, slender index finger against his right temple. “You don’t got time to track ’em, ’cause they’re racin’ the full moon, four nights away. And now they’ll be coverin’ their trail. Won’t take no chances.”

He lifted his chin to glance out the window behind Zane, where the milky wash of a three-quarter moon was brushing Tucson’s rooftops. “You need me to lead you to where they’re goin’.”

“Bullshit.” Zane started to close the door.

Jesse wheeled himself forward and stuck a boot out to stop it. “Don’t you do me that way. I know where they’re headed, goddamnit, and you need me to show you. My men are dead, and I need you, Uriah, though I’ll likely rue this night for sayin’ it. But you need me, too.”

“I won’t ride with you, Jesse.”

Zane had been invited to join the James-Younger gang years ago, just after the War, when they’d all found themselves together in Kansas. Zane had declined then, because the gang was a pack of angry killers led by a demented, kill-crazy hillbilly in Jesse James. The War had given him a good excuse to kill and rob banks, but even without the War, his severe visage would be adorning wanted dodgers throughout the West. That was just who Jesse was. It was also Cole Younger and even Jesse’s late brother, Frank, to some extent, though Frank might not have been as het up without the War and the Hell’s Angels giving him a cause.

“Don’t be a fool, Uriah. You an’ me fought on the same side. We’re still fightin’ on the same side.” Jesse made his red-rimmed eyes bulge crazily. “And I got the gift. Handed down by my grandmammy. Second sight.” His eyes danced as though there were lights behind them. “And I seen where them killers o’ Frank and our Confederate brethren are headed, Uriah.”

He cackled like an old woman, sitting there shaking in his chair. Just then Zane smelled cigar smoke and saw one of the men who’d been digging Frank’s grave standing in the shadows near the end of the hall, near the stairs. He stood with one hand against the wall behind him, smoking desultorily, waiting to take his crazy benefactor back down the stairs.

Across the hall, Angel’s door opened. The marshal stepped out in a striped nightshirt that hung to her bare knees. She had a pistol in her hand, and as she moved out into the hall, she aimed it at the back of Jesse’s head, loudly ratcheting the hammer back.

The Missourian had heard the door latch click and the hinges squawk, and now he turned to see the redhead bearing down on him, and he grinned. “Well, if it ain’t the lovely Marshal Coffin.”

“Sorry for your losses, Jesse, but I reckon I’ll be lockin’ you up in the local hoosegow. Pick you up on my way back to Denver. Several rail lines will be very happy to see you hanged.”

Zane sighed in frustration. “Forget it, Angel.”

She furled a skeptical brow. “How’s that?”

“The crazy bastard’s pullin’ out with us tomorrow.”

Zane stepped back into his room and closed the door.

The next day, at high noon, the hunting party, including Jesse James, riding his black-socked buckskin, was angling southwest of Tucson, the direction in which the outlaw from Missouri said they were heading. The tracks made by both the Hell’s Angels and the posse that had followed them out from town bore this out.

It was a cool, sunny day, though high, thin clouds moving in from California threatened rain later. Al Hathaway, who was riding ahead, checked his mule down suddenly and rose in his stirrups to inspect the trail, swinging his head slowly from left to right and back again.

“What is it?” Zane asked.

Hathaway said nothing. He swung heavily down from the mule’s back, dropped the reins, and walked ahead a ways, where the trail narrowed between two piles of cracked and sun-bleached granite heaved up from the earth’s volcanic bowels eons ago. Chin dipped, he swerved off the trail’s left side where a thin corridor in the rocks rose up a low shoulder along an outcropping. He walked forty yards to the top of the shoulder, then turned to stare back down where Zane, Angel, and Jesse James waited astride their horses.

“They came this way, swingin’ back east. The posse from town was still followin’ ’em.”

“Nope.” Jesse shook his head.

He no longer wore the sling but kept his left arm sort of hanging gingerly at his side, gloved hand resting on his thigh. He’d changed the bandage on his right thigh that morning before they’d left, and so far no blood spotted it. A tough little Missouri devil, Zane silently opined.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Hathaway asked, indignant. “I got eyes; I can see their trail.”

“They mighta gone that way for a time, but they would have swung back west. They were just tryin’ to shake the posse and anyone else trailin’ ’em—includin’ us. I told you fellas… and ladies… I know where they’re goin’. There’s no need to waste time scourin’ for sign!”

He booted his buckskin ahead between the scarps and disappeared behind a bend in the trail, his dust sifting behind him.

Sitting to Zane’s right, hands crossed on her saddle horn, Angel gave the ghoul hunter a pointed look. “How can you be so sure he really does know where the Angels are heading? He’s crazier’n a tree full of owls, Uriah.”

“That’s sorta how I know.” More to the point, the wolf in Zane sensed the medium in Jesse. Saw it in his eyes. He’d seen it before in the Southern hill folk, many of whom practiced the art of clairvoyance and witch doctoring and all manner of magic, black and otherwise. Besides, Jesse hadn’t been studying the trail at all, but he seemed very confident about the path he’d chosen south of Tucson.

When Hathaway had stepped into his saddle, he gave Zane a skeptical glance before shuttling it to Angel, who shrugged. With a grunt, Hathaway touched heels to his mule’s flanks, and Zane and Angel followed the scout on up the trail a half mile before they spotted Jesse squatting atop a hill to the right side of the trail. His buckskin lazily foraged short, green grass spiking among the black rocks.

Jesse looked at the trio below him and jerked his head, beckoning. “Take a look, friends.”

Zane dismounted, dropped his reins, and started up the hill. Angel and Hathaway glanced at each other dubiously once more, then stepped down out of their saddles. They followed Zane up
the hill to where Jesse knelt, staring off toward the southwest. He pointed toward a series of rocky, sun-blasted sierras rearing up against the western horizon—long, toothy-tipped ranges that appeared as dark and foreboding as the mountains on the moon.

“See that second range there, a little higher than the first with that high peak in the middle?”

Zane tipped his hat brim down a notch and squinted, following Jesse’s finger. “I see it.”

“That’s the Lobo Negros. From a different angle—from the angle I saw in my dream of two nights ago—that high peak there looks like the head of a giant, snarling wolf, both ears sticking straight up in the air.”

“And that’s where you think the Angels are headed?” Angel said.

Jesse nodded.

“Since you know so much about where they’re headed from this dream of yourn,” Hathaway said, “you must have some idea why they’re headed thataway.”

“Nope, can’t help you there, Mr. Hathaway. I got the powers of seein’. Not readin’ what’s in a man’s—or, most ’specially, a wolf’s—heart. But that’s where they’re headed, and if they keep movin’ as fast as they was through here, they’ll be in the heart of them mountains in three nights.”

“The night of the full moon,” Angel said, staring pensively off at the dark, volcanic range dappled in sunlight and shadows cast by the high clouds. She glanced quickly at Zane and away again.

A hunting hawk screeched in the far distance, though in Zane’s ears it sounded no farther away than their horses.

“Let’s shake a leg,” he said, and walked back down the rise.

The others followed, approaching their mounts.

Angel turned to Jesse. She had her rifle on her shoulder. “James, you an’ me need to get somethin’ straight, because it’s been gallin’ me ever since we left Tucson.”

The Missouri outlaw turned to her with that lascivious grin he reserved especially for the buxom, redheaded deputy marshal. “How can I help, Miss Coffin?”

Her hands and arms moving in a blur, she swept her rifle off her shoulder and rammed the butt hard into the outlaw’s belly. Jesse gave a great, pained
whoosh
of expelled air and dropped to his knees, kicking up a dust cloud.

“What…in Christ…?” he grunted, making a face while pressing the heels of both his hands to his battered midsection.

“That ain’t much, but that’s for all the trains you robbed and all the people, including badge toters, you killed over these years since the War. And that’s my promise to you that when our mission here is over, you’ll be accompanyin’ me back to Denver in cuffs and shackles.”

She spat into the trail beside the grunting, panting Jesse, gave his dislodged hat a kick, and turned toward her horse.

“Feel better?” Zane inquired.

“I do.”

As Angel mounted her horse and Hathaway shook his head, choking back snickers, Zane crouched over the damaged outlaw and grabbed one of his arms. “You all right, there, Jesse?”

He helped the man to his feet and gave him his hat.

“Law, law,” Jesse said, shaking his head as if to clear the cobwebs, limping over to his horse, “she is a caution!”

They camped that night about seventy miles southwest of Tucson, having made good time and seeing enough of the Hell’s Angels’ sign as well as that of the posse behind them to convince them all, including Angel, that the outlaw was indeed leading them in the right direction—pretty much on a cross-country beeline toward the Lobo Negros.

They rose well before dawn and traveled by the light of the large moon still high in the western sky and shedding nearly as much light as the dawn sun would. They followed arroyos and shallow canyons, crossed two low jogs of dun-brown hills, and found a bowl in the hills where Apaches had once camped, the jacales still standing and waiting for the wandering hunters and warriors to return. Five horses had been picketed nearby, and there was a pile of fresh ashes in the middle of the camp.

Without a doubt, Hondo’s group had camped here.

The posse from Tucson had followed about three hours later but did not camp. As it turned out, they would never camp again, for as Zane’s party headed into a deep, narrow canyon between two shelving escarpments of cracked sandstone boulders, they found seven of the nine posse riders and their horses lying smashed to bloody pulps beneath the rocks and boulders that had been loosed from one of the ridges.

The killings had occurred about a day ago, judging by the state of the carcasses after the carrion eaters had been at them. They were still at them. The canyon was aswarm with quarreling buzzards and coyotes that pranced among the rocks on the sides of the ridges, tongues hanging, eyes bright with the feeding frenzy. They’d likely been hard at work in the canyon bottom, fighting with the buzzards, before they’d heard the approach of the four riders and scrambled away.

The buzzards were more persistent. Some refused to leave the bodies, flapping their ragged, dusty black wings in challenge, or flying awkwardly onto boulders nearby to bark and curse the interlopers, their proprietary eyes sharp and wicked.

No one said anything as they weaved their horses around the dead men and their dead mounts and the boulders now nearly jamming the canyon. Zane’s casket-carrying coffin scraped against the rocks, occasionally getting hung up until Zane clucked to General Lee and nudged it free. He was riding point, the others riding Indian-file behind him, when he jerked back on the palomino’s reins, slid his cross-draw pistol from its holster, and raised the piece, clicking back the hammer.

He loosened his trigger finger. A man sat atop a flat-topped boulder with his back to the scarp behind him. His legs were stretched straight out before him, the badly worn, pointed toes of his boots tipped slightly to each side. He was dressed in dusty denims and a canvas coat.

His head had been hacked off of his shoulders.

The head was now resting in his lap, cradled in his arms as though its owner was afraid he might lose it.

Chapter 28