Tyler Willis lay on the gurney, shivering from the cold and the loss of blood that now lay in thick congealing pools beneath him. The conversation outside of the door had ended, and he realized that Ethan Warner had failed. Beside him, Lillian Cruz stood with tape over her mouth and the heavy-set guard watching over them both.
Jeb Oppenheimer walked back into the lab, closing the door behind him and putting on his gloves. The old man walked across to Willis and picked up the scalpel once more, looking down and without hesitation pressing the sharp blade across Willis’s flank. A white-hot lance of pain surged through his body and he gagged in agony. Oppenheimer ripped the tape from his mouth, and through his tears and terror Willis spluttered, ‘I swear to you, I don’t know anything. I don’t know where Hiram Conley got that infection.’
Oppenheimer’s face filled his vision as he glared down at him.
‘So then, how about that kidney?’
31
The late-summer sun was sinking behind the mountains to the west, casting long black tiger-stripe shadows against the glowing desert as Lee Carson rode slowly down the main street of the town, a pair of tumbleweeds rustling as they rolled across the dusty earth, vanishing past the old merchandise store. His horse whinnied softly beneath him and he patted her flanks with a gloved hand, trying to forget the horrific image of what lay within it.
The store was made of bricks, but the long landing and porch were clapperboard, the paint faded beneath the wrath of a thousand suns. Rows of sagging buildings lined the streets, the low sunlight beaming through their long-abandoned interiors, while the crumbling ruins of the old San Francisco church and cemetery basked in lonely shadows nearby. Most people would never have dreamed of coming here at nightfall, but for Lee Carson it was one of the few places where he felt at home.
A ghost town.
Golden had been abandoned for at least a hundred years, its postal service discontinued in 1928. A town constructed far out into the wilderness like many others, its church had been built in the 1830s, but the demise of pioneers and gold rushes had seen the town eventually abandoned to the desert. There were others: La Bajada, Glorietta, San Pedro, Dolores. Carson remembered them all, not as they were now but as thriving towns built around mines and cattle stations, or along the routes of the great western railway lines that crossed the endless wilderness. Now, most of the roofs of the mud-brick buildings were sagging or had caved in completely, leaving skeletal timber frames exposed to the harsh elements. A few faded signs still adorned the awnings of shops, advertising ironmongery, farriers, even a jewelry boutique, distant memories of a once thriving community.
A hot wind moaned down the street, carrying with it the spectral sounds of horses, people and carts, whispers of the past haunting Carson’s ears. He turned in his saddle, looking over his shoulder into the deepening shadows behind him. Nothing moved but for a spiraling dust devil whipping up a vortex of sand.
Carson stopped his horse in the center of the street, listening to the ancient town’s soft noises, creaking timbers and rustling grass. He closed his eyes.
‘State your business!’
Carson’s heart bounced against the inside of his chest as he whirled around in his saddle, drawing a pistol from a holster beneath his jacket and aiming the weapon behind him.
An older man leaned back against the wall of the abandoned merchandise shop, lighting a pipe that flared orange in the shadows and illuminated his wide-brimmed Stetson and tasseled hide jacket. Blue smoke smoldered from the pipe as he extinguished the match, peering out at Carson from beneath the rim of his hat.
‘We need to talk,’ Carson said, lowering his pistol.
‘We ain’t got nothin’ to say, boy,’ came the reply, casual and without interest. ‘You’ll be on y’way now.’
The man turned, his boots striking the clapperboards the only sound echoing through the town’s long shadows. Carson cursed beneath his breath, turning his horse and cantering across the street to cut the man off.
‘I’d say we’ve got plenty to be discussin’,’ Carson snapped, yanking the horse up at the end of the shop’s landing.
The man looked up at him curiously, still sucking on his pipe.
‘You lost that right, Carson,’ he said, a thick moustache rising and falling with each word. ‘’Bout ninety-five years ago, if ma memory serves me, when you decided to spend your days bedding high-falutin’ women and your nights drinking Pop Skull from cheap bottles.’
Carson vaulted out of his saddle, tying the horse to the nearest awning pillar with a loose flourish of the reins before walking up to the man and standing directly in front of him.
‘As opposed to what? Foraging for scraps of hardtack out in the desert for ninety years gone by? That what you calling horse sense now, Ellison?’
Ellison Thorne stood to his full height, a good two inches above Carson’s, and Carson fought the urge not to take a pace back. Carson was young and strong of build, clean of features as they used to say, but Ellison Thorne was a legend amongst men, barrel-chested and well over six feet tall. It was once said that during a fire-fight with the Confederates out Fort Union way, a stray musket ball had started a fire near a barrel of powder on the siege lines. Most men had run away from the impending explosion. Ellison Thorne had run toward it, picking up the hundred-pound barrel and hurling it across the lines toward the enemy. Twenty yards, they said it had flown.
‘You turned your back on us,’ Ellison boomed, ‘right after you joined the Jesse Evans Gang.’
Carson sighed. ‘Jesus, Ellison, that was a hundred thirty years o’more ago. Can’t you let it lie?’
Ellison Thorne had fallen in with cattle farmer John Tunstall during the Lincoln County War of 1878, a bitter county-wide dispute over the control of the monopoly on the dry-goods trade. Thorne, along with his comrades from the Civil War, had served in the deputized posse of the Lincoln County Regulators alongside Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre and Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. Together, they’d killed a number of Evans Gang gunfighters, including Buckshot Roberts, at the gunfight of Blazer’s Mills. Carson, resenting Thorne, had gone across to the regulators’ arch enemies under Jesse Evans and Lawrence Murphy. The battles between the gangs had gone down into Wild West legend, although Billy the Kid had been pinned for far more killings than he’d been responsible for, and had never led the regulators. Ever since, Carson had ridden alone, rarely meeting Ellison Thorne.
‘I got somethin’ that’ll interest you now, Ellison,’ Carson insisted, ‘whether you like it or not.’
Ellison Thorne loomed over him, the glow from his pipe demonically illuminating his drooping moustache and craggy features.
‘What could you possibly have that would interest me, boy?’
Carson stood his ground and ripped off his gloves, holding his hands up.
Ellison Thorne looked at those ruined hands for a long few seconds, reaching up slowly for his pipe and puffing thoughtfully before nodding once.
‘Interesting.’
Carson stared at him for a moment.
‘That’s all you can goddamn say? Interesting? Jesus Christ, my hands are falling off and you’re more interested in your pipe than…’
Ellison Thorne stood back a pace and slipped off his jacket. Carson’s voice trailed off like the summer winds into the night as he stared. Thorne’s shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and in the golden half-light of the sunset his thick forearms were a tangled, sinewy web of desiccated muscle and sagging gray skin.