A Time for Vultures (10 page)

Flintlock said, “King, do you recollect the Scarlet Garter cathouse in San Antone? Remember Fifi la France, the blond gal who was so tall we called her High Timber?”

Fisher nodded. “I remember her.”

“Could you still do her, King?” Flintlock said.

“What a disgusting thing to say,” le Strange said, wrinkling his nose. “Have you no manners of any kind?”

Flintlock ignored that. “King, could you still do her?”

Le Strange opened his mouth to speak, but Fisher held up his natural hand in a silencing gesture. “No, Sam, I couldn't. My body has not recovered all of its functions, at least not yet.”

“It will, King,” le Strange said. “Trust me. One day it will.”

Ignoring that, too, Flintlock said, “Could you drink champagne out of her slipper like you and Ben used to?”

“No, Sam, I couldn't. I couldn't eat Russian caviar off her belly like I used to either. I have trouble digesting food.”

“I will repair that function, as well one day,” le Strange said.

Flintlock said, more prolonged sigh than statement, “King, I'm saying this for old times' sake . . . this man gave you back life, but you're no longer a human being. You're some kind of machine.” His fingers strayed to the Colt in his waistband. “Say the word and I'll send you back where you belong . . . with the dead.” He expected a bad reaction from Fisher, a draw-and-shoot within the close confines of the tent where there would be no winner, only losers, but King surprised him.

His face impassive, incapable of revealing emotion, King said, “Women, champagne, and caviar were the childish things I once pursued and cherished. Now my interests are very different, Sam. I want power, vast power. I mean the power of a United States president and later the ruler of the world.”

Fisher read the shock and surprise on Flintlock's face and said, “I'm in no hurry. I have nothing but time. Sam, when we are both dead and buried, my shadow will still fall on the earth. A hundred, two hundred years from now people will talk of my time of unlimited authority and how I used it to change the world for the better. Those are the things I now cherish. I am done with all carnal desires.”

“It's in the blood, King,” Obadiah le Strange said, smiling. “Your power lies in the blood.”

“King, I think you'd be better off sticking with High Timber,” Flintlock said.

“Sam, I grow weary of you.” Fisher's mechanical hand streaked out with the speed of a striking rattler and plucked the Colt from Flintlock's waistband. He held up the big revolver. “This is for your own good, Sam. I don't want to be forced to kill you before I decide if you have any role to play in my future.”

“Find yourself another boy, King,” Flintlock said. “You're mad and so is—I was going to say your doctor, but he's an engineer, isn't he?”

“Don't say anything further that you may later regret, Sam,” Fisher said. “Now get out of here.”

“Aren't you scared I'll run away?” Flintlock said.

“You won't get far on a lame horse. Go have yourself some coffee and stay close. We're moving out in an hour.”

Flintlock lifted the flap of the tent, but stopped as Fisher said, “I've been told you're on a hunt for your rightful name, Sam. Behave yourself and I just might give you one.”

Flintlock nodded. “I already have one for you, King. It's son of a bitch.”

“I'll very much keep that in mind.”

“Damn it all, Sergeant Martin. They've flown the coop,” Captain Gregory Usher said. “Letting the mule escape cost us time and the element of surprise.” The officer unscrewed the top of his hip flask and took a swig. Then, as he always did, he glanced at the Usher crest engraved into the flask's silver side before he put it away again. The Usher arms dated all the way back to medieval times and in hundreds of years of existence had never been known disgrace . . . until Dead Tree Pass.

“We'll run 'em down, Cap'n,” Martin said. “They're only hours ahead of us.”

Black arcs of sweat stained the armpits of Usher's shirt as the heat of the new day intensified. His protruding, pale blue eyes were bloodshot, his mouth tasted as though it was full of cotton dipped in cat piss, and he badly wanted this detail to end.

“Huh?” Rollo Martin said.

Usher knew a moment of panic, thinking he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. But Martin stared over his shoulder into the distance. “It's Luke Gamble coming in, Cap'n. Maybe them outlaws are in sight.”

“Is he carrying a head?” Usher said.

“Only the one on his shoulders,” Martin said.

Gamble drew rein, hawked up phlegm, and spat over the side of his horse. “Found another one . . . over there a ways like he was carried away from the campsite. Old feller, a tinpan by the look of his duds, and the whitest white man I ever did see.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Gamble?” Usher said.

“I mean he looks like the Mex we found, only whiter. Looks like every last drop of blood drained out of him. I can't find a gunshot or knife wound on him, just like t' other one.”

“Take me to him.” Captain Usher swung into the saddle and said, “Sergeant Martin, we'll noon here. Use the water from the canteens for coffee.”

“There's a creek,” Martin said.

“I know that, Sergeant, but I don't trust it. I wouldn't put it past King Fisher and his gang of desperadoes to poison the water.”

“It's running water, Cap'n,” Martin said. “It ain't easy to poison running water.”

“Carry out my order, Sergeant.” Usher looked hard into the noncom's hard eyes. “And take that smirk off your face. I will not tolerate dumb insolence.”

Martin saluted. “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir.”

As he and Usher rode away, Gamble said, “One day you'll have to kill that man, Captain.”

His jaw muscles bunched, Usher stared straight ahead and said nothing.

* * *

“Proud, what the hell are you doing?” Sergeant Rollo Martin said.

“Doing like the captain said, using the water from the canteens for the coffee.”

“Use the water from the creek,” Martin said.

“But—”

“But nothing. High and mighty Captain Usher is a drunken idiot. Use the creek water. We may need full canteens before this detail is over.”

Corporal Ethan Stagg was a man with a full beard and shaggy gray eyebrows. Twenty hard years in the frontier army had taken their toll and had stooped his shoulders and made his face look like the cracked mud at the bottom of a dried-up pond. He said, “Before what's over? You got something in mind, Rollo? Something maybe we should all hear about?”

“I got nothing in mind, Ethan,” Martin said. His eyes flicked to the troopers who stood to the corporal's right and watched their sergeant intently.

Stagg knew what that glance implied. “Don't you worry none about Booker and Vesey. They'll do as I tell them. Ain't that right, boys?”

The two privates nodded in unison.

Harvey Booker was a thickset man with iron gray hair, Clint Vesey a long, tall drink of water with muddy, unintelligent brown eyes. Both had served six years and were regarded by their superiors as below-average soldiers.

“Ethan, you've had a burr under your saddle since we left Fort Concho,” Martin said. “If you got a gripe, let's hear it.”

“No gripe, but I do got something sticking in my craw,” Stagg said. “A stolen thirty-thousand-dollar army payroll that by rights should be ours.”

Martin smiled, then found his pipe and studiously considered the bowl before he said, “Last I heard, the payroll belongs to the army.”

“And we're the army,” Stagg said. “We got as much claim to the money as them bigwigs in Washington. We'll be the ones as finds it.”

“Aye, and maybe some of us will die taking it back,” Booker said.

Martin fingered tobacco into the pipe bowl. “Let me get this right. No, wait. Proud, are you in on this?”

“Damn right,” Seth Proud said. “The army owes me that much and more, payback for all the rotten beef, wormy biscuits, and green salt pork it's fed me for the past ten years. And what about the alkali water I drank that gave me bad blood and running sores? I figure it's fair recompense for the long days, weeks, and months a-setting a McClellan saddle that galled my hide in the heat of the Staked Plains sun. And what about the Apaches? How many of us have seen the carcasses of men we bunked with and knew like brothers lying in the cold ashes of an Apache fire and the officer saying, ‘Boys, it took this soldier three, maybe four days to die. Let this be a lesson to you. Save the last cartridge in the gun for yourself.' As if we didn't know that already.”

Inspired by Private Proud's oratory, Vesey pulled up his shirt and showed the raw scar that ran from his navel to the bottom of his ribs on his right side. “A Mescalero woman done that to me with a Green River knife. Near gutted me, she did.”

“Hell, Clint, you got that there cut in a brothel in Abilene,” Stagg said.

“Bitch was still an Apache,” Vesey said.

Martin joined in the laughter that followed and then lit his pipe, got it going with his second match, and said through a cloud of smoke, “You boys say we take back the payroll and then split it among ourselves?”

“Like Booker says, shared among them of us who're still alive, you mean,” Stagg said.

Martin nodded and smiled as though the troopers had fairly stated their case. “I got two ways of thinking on this. The first is that I arrest all of you and see you hung by the thumbs and flogged to death at Fort Concho. The second is that I consider what you said about us having a rightful claim to the payroll money—a very profound statement, a soldier's way of thinking. I'll study on it tonight and give you my answer tomorrow.”

“Captain Usher won't throw in with us, Rollo,” Stagg said. “You come up with the right verdict and we'll have to do for him.”

Martin smiled. “You mean I'll have to do for him.”

“Whatever you say, Rollo. Whatever you say,” Stagg said.

“Somebody done for him, Captain, but I sure as hell don't know how.” Luke Gamble said. With an irritable hand, he brushed away the fat fly that crawled across his face. “You seen any dead man look that white?”

“Bloodless.” Captain Gregory Usher took a knee next to the naked body and stared into the man's dead face. “All right, old-timer, what killed you?”

“Not a mark on him,” Gamble said, stating what Usher had already determined. “Maybe somebody smothered him with one of them feather pillows they got in the Denver brothels.”

“Maybe,” Usher said, “but judging by his appearance, he was wiry—one tough old buzzard. I'd expect to see some sign of a struggle.”

“Then he just dropped down dead,” Gamble said. “But that don't explain the Mex we found earlier.”

“No it doesn't. Hello, what have we here?” Usher lifted the dead man's arm and closely studied the inside of the man's elbow. “There's a tiny red mark here that I can barely see. What do you make of that, Mr. Gamble?”

The scout kneeled and grabbed the arm. After a while he said, “Insect bite. Plenty of mosquitos around.”

“Looks like a small incision to me,” Usher said.

“What's that?”

“A cut. A very small cut.”

Gamble said, “Well, that sure as hell didn't kill him.”

“No, it didn't.” Usher rose to his feet and, as eagerly as a baby seeks a feeding bottle, took a long swig from his flask and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess we'll never know what killed this man.”

“Seems like,” Gamble said, the smell of bourbon in the air around him.

Usher stared at his scout for long moments. “Mr. Gamble, are you a man to be trusted?”

“With little children and most animals. Beyond that, you never know where my loop will land.”

“I have to trust someone,” Usher said.

It was Gamble's turn to use his stare to peel the skin off the officer's face and leave the bare skull exposed. “Miss it, don't you, Gregory? You miss it real bad.”

Normally Usher would have taken the use of his first name as gross insubordination, but he swallowed the slight because he needed this violent, conscienceless man for his gun skills and the strength of his muscular, brutal body.

“Miss what?”

“You know what you miss, Captain Usher. Don't play coy with me.”

Usher did know. He remembered another time and place, remembered men, women, and manners unknown to savages like Gamble but once so familiar to himself. He recalled the regimental balls in Washington. Beautiful officers in blue and gold. With sad, lovely faces, tall elegant women wore ball gowns so vivid, so colorful they looked as though they waltzed through rainbows. Drifting like ghosts among the guests, flunkies, black enlisted men in white jackets, carried silver trays of champagne. The drone of male voices and the crystal notes of female laughter entwined with the strings and brass of the infantry band. In moonlit terraces, deep in the shadows, the musky sweetness of a woman's naked shoulders, her skin like velvet on his lips, the tiny beads of sweat between her breasts, each as precious as a rare diamond.

Usher was lost in the memories.

Startled, Usher blinked his way back the present.

Gamble had just clapped his hands and he looked amused. “Where were you, Captain?”

Usher managed a smile. “Somewhere else . . . picking up the shattered fragments of lost dreams.”

“You can't ever go back there,” Gamble said. “Not after Dead Tree Pass.”

“I know that. Don't you think I know that?” Usher again took solace in his whiskey flask.

Gamble grinned. “The Fall of the House of Usher. Ever read that story, Captain?”

The captain nodded. “I'm familiar with Mr. Poe's work. And yes, my house has fallen and with it what's left of my fragile sanity.”

Gamble, a man he'd long considered an ignorant, illiterate lout, a brutish degenerate, surprised him. “‘. . . an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.'” The big scout smiled. “But no opium for you, Captain Usher, at least not just yet, though its time will come. For now, you are a reveler upon whiskey and you fill every sorrowing glass to the brim.”

“What the hell are you, Mr. Gamble?” Usher said. “Some kind of poet?”

“My father was some kind of poet,” Gamble said. “Poets make lousy farmers. That's why Ma died of neglect, and the day after we buried her, I blew his brains out. My father, Reynolds Gamble, smoked opium with Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore the night before the great man died. Pa said Poe passed away whispering his name. I don't know if that's true or not.”

Usher watched a hawk drop out of the immense sky and with incredible violence hit some crawling creature in the long grass. A squeal, a small death, and the day fell quiet again.

Smarting from the tongue-lashing he'd gotten from Gamble, Usher stared hard into the scout's face and said, “How the hell could someone like you be the son of a poet?”

“Because,
mon capitaine
, I hated Reynolds Gamble like I never hated a human being before or since. All he was, I set out to be the opposite. Where he was weak, I am strong. Where he scribbled his doggerel while my mother died, I held her head in my arms and planned his execution. He presented himself up as a good man who was misunderstood, but I present myself a bad, violent man who everybody understands, including you. That's why you want me to help you steal the army payroll when we catch up with King Fisher and them.”

“As I asked you before, Mr. Gamble, can I trust you?” Usher took a swig from his flask. “Give me a straight answer.”

“No you can't trust me. Is that straight enough?” Then, before the officer could answer, Gamble said, “I'll help you gun them as need gunned and after that we'll talk about how we divvy the money.”

“I'll settle for fifty-fifty,” Usher said.

“Maybe so, but we'll discuss it when the time comes.”

“Leave Sergeant Martin to me.”

Gamble shrugged. “I don't care who I kill or who I don't kill. I never have.” He smiled. “Now, shall we rejoin Sergeant Martin and the rest of the ladies?”