And if Cabe kept pushing, there could only be one outcome.
God help him, if he made a nuisance of himself.
With all this bubbling away in his brain and making his temples throb, Dirker poured himself a cup of coffee. As he brought the tin cup to his lips, the door opened and the wind blew in, scattering papers from his desk.
Pete Slade stood there in the doorway, water dripping from the brim of his pinch-crowned hat.
“Shut that damn door,” Dirker told him, maybe a little more harshly than intended.
Slade did.
He was Dirker’s undersheriff. Whereas Henry Wilcox was big and fleshy, Slade was long and lank, a mustache just as thick as a grooming brush sprouting from beneath his nose. It completely covered his mouth. Slade was a dependable man and a tough one. He regularly hunted down horse thieves and gunmen single-handedly in the mountains.
And right then he looked scared, looked weary… looked something.
“Sheriff,” he managed and that voice was filled with dread. “Sheriff… we got us a murder.”
Dirker stared at him, wondering why a simple killing had him so spooked to the point of being physically ill. But, deep down, he knew it would be nothing simple.
“Bad?” he said.
Slade nodded. “Dear Christ… I… I never seen nothing like it…”
12
Once upon a time, Sunrise had been a booming gold town, but the ore had all but played out within a year or two and now it was nothing more than a little placer camp. A collection of hollow-eyed buildings and skeletal cabins, it sat on a little gravel butte between two towering rises of shale that sheltered it from the elements. The town was maybe two miles as the crow flies from Whisper Lake, but in reality more than a dozen along treacherous roads that climbed steep hills and plunged into rugged canyons.
It was isolated, hard to reach, and pretty much forgotten in its remote location. Except by the placer miners that worked the mountain streams and the prospectors who came there but two, three times a year to provision up at the remaining general store. A place that was a combination store, brothel, assayer’s office, and saloon.
It had whiskey. It had women. It had gambling.
And for the hard luck miners that refused to move on when the real deposits dried up, it was home. If you broke your ass panning for gold from sunup to sundown, you might get a few nuggets… enough, at least, to keep you in whiskey and gambling until it was time to crawl off to one of the dozens of abandoned homes and buildings to sleep it off. Most of these places were little better than shacks. Many had been torn down for firewood. But if you weren’t too choosy and didn’t mind the wind howling through the walls or the rain dripping through the roof, you had yourself a bunk.
That was life in a failed mining town.
It was night and Sunrise was dark.
The red-earth that showed through clumps of witchgrass and broomweed had turned to mud with the passing of the storm. Everywhere, it seemed, water dripped and pooled and ran.
Jack Turner, pissed to the high seventh on Taos Lightening, was leaning up against a shack across the road from the store. He was shaking the dew off his lily? and pissing most of it right down his leg? when he saw the riders coming in down the high trail. Though his vision wasn’t much after all the juice he’d swallowed and the night was just blacker than a mineshaft, he could see that there were maybe six or seven of them.
Quiet forms on quiet mounts.
No talking, no laughing, no griping. No nothing. Just the sound of hooves sinking into that muck and being pulled out again. The rustle of cloth and the muted jingle of spurs and equipment. They rode down into the remains of Sunrise single-file in that busy flurry of silence.
Turner stood there, swaying, his business in his hand, thinking for one crazy moment that the riders’ eyes… all of them… shined a luminous yellow-green in the darkness. Like the eyes of wolves reflected by firelight. But then it was gone and he blinked, figured it was just the hooch kicking up hell in his brain.
Sometimes, you got a belly full of that stuff, you saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.
The riders came on, just as silent as tombstone marble. Turner was going to call out to them, but he was just too damn drunk.
He slipped into the shack, threw the bolt on the door so someone else wouldn’t fall on top of him, found his bedroll on the floor and it was enough for him, enough for one night. As he drifted off, the riders passed by his shack, then paused outside the store, their horses snorting. For one moment, Turner smelled something, something sharp and musky like the stench from a snakepit… but he did not acquaint it with the riders.
Maybe it was just his britches.
He passed out.
Inside the store, Hiley was telling a tall tale of a gigantic gold nugget he’d pulled out of a streambed in California during the big rush of ’49. How the damn thing was so heavy he near threw out his back dragging it up the hillside. Said it took two mules and three stout men to get it up into the assayer’s office there. “But I made it, all right,” he told them. “Shit if I didn’t. It kept me in booze, cards, and hot women for near two months. Maybe if I’d been smart, I’d have banked it, but, damn, nobody ever said I was smart.”
“Amen to that,” a scraggly miner said, tearing off a strip of jerky with his remaining teeth.
There was laughter at that.
Hiley laughed, too. He could afford to laugh. Of all the men in the room, Hiley was the only one really making it. He owned the store. He owned the rooms above. He took a juicy cut from what his whores took in. The booze was his. The barrels and sacks of dry goods. The sides of ham and salted beef. Anything worth having in Sunrise belonged to Hiley. He’d long ago given up hardrock mining, deciding and deciding wisely that there was more money to be made selling than digging and panning.
While most of the men in the room were a slat-thin, desperate-looking bunch whose worldly possessions consisted of a pick, a sluice box, and the ratty, stained clothes on their backs, Hiley was ruddy-cheeked with a belly just as round and full as a medicine ball. That gut was a source of endless barbs, but Hiley took them all, smiled, and proudly said it was merely a trapping of success. As he was often wont to point out: “When you got a tool like mine, boys, you gotta build a shed over it.”
There was a plank bar down one side and maybe a dozen grubby men pushed up to it. There were a few tables where the whores were working their prospects, trying to part the ragged, leather-faced men from the gold dust they’d collected in their buckskin pokes. Under the glare of hurricane lamps a half dozen others were playing a hand of poker with greasy cards and well-thumbed chips.
The whores were laughing, the men were drinking, the gamblers were losing… and all and all it was an average night in Sunrise and by dawn the only one richer would be Hiley.
The double-doors opened and two men in gray dusters stepped in. They wore wide-brimmed hats that thrust their faces into pools of shadow. Their eyes seemed to glisten like wet copper.
Everyone stopped what they were doing, watched the strangers.
The two of them stood there a moment, looking around, drinking it all in. Behind them, out in the darkness, a horse snorted… or something did. The strangers closed the doors. They looked on all and everyone with flat, dead eyes, hungry eyes. The eyes of wolves taking in a tasty herd of steer, wondering which one they would take down first.