Regardless, he knew the dim figure was Jackson Dirker.
“Sorry to disturb your beauty rest, Cabe,” he said. “God knows you need it, but you don’t belong in here. C’mon, we need to talk.”
Cabe, after some effort, got his boots down on the floor and managed to sit up. His head pounded and his guts tried to climb up the back of his throat. “Shit,” he said. “I feel pretty much like shit.”
In the cell next to him, Graybrow was snoring away louder than a crosscut saw biting into hardwood. Cabe once heard that Indians were real quiet, that they didn’t even snore. So much for that one.
He splashed water in his face, gulped some down, and pissed into the pot, getting some on his boot. Making moaning sounds, he followed Dirker out into the front office. Dirker shoved a cup of hot coffee into his hand.
“Drink it,” he said. “I need you fresh… or as fresh as you can be.”
Cabe drank the coffee and it tasted like maybe they had made it with water dredged from a privy, but it went down, all right. Dirker poured him another cup, leaning up against the wall, looking very dire. Cabe had to wonder when the hell it was that Jackson Dirker slept.
He set his cup down. “Now, listen to me, Crazy Jack or Sheriff or whatever the fuck they call you here… it was self-defense. Before you go off on some wild tangent on how I’m shooting up the town… that boy there… goddamn Virgil Clay… he pulled on me, got off the first shot. I put one in him because I didn’t have much of a choice.”
Dirker just nodded. “I know that. I heard all about it.”
“Then you ain’t charging me with nothing?”
“No, not this time around, anyhow,” he said. “But hear me on this and hear me good. I won’t have you going around shooting people whenever the need strikes you. After awhile folks are going to start tripping over the bodies and they’re not going to like it.”
Cabe told him it couldn’t be helped. And Dirker said maybe and maybe not. He had no love for Virgil Clay or the clan that hatched him. They were trash and everyone knew it. If it hadn’t have been Cabe, it would have been someone else. But… and he emphasized this pretty sternly… the witnesses, a lot of ’em anyway, were saying that Cabe had been drunk and running his mouth. That he could have walked away from it at anytime, no harm done.
“Oh, but there would have been harm done, Dirker,” Cabe said. “I would have lost all credibility with them people there. They would have thought I was some sort of coward.”
Dirker licked his lips. “Those people you talk about, Cabe, they’re not exactly high-stepping gentry. Most of ’em would slit your throat for a ten-dollar gold piece. You got nothing to prove to that bunch.”
Cabe knew he was right, but wasn’t about to admit as much. He finished his coffee. “Can I go now?”
“No.” Dirker unlocked the property cabinet and gave him back his Starr, knife, and cartridge belt. “You’re gonna take a little walk with me. There’s something I want you to see.”
“Unless it looks like a bed, I don’t want to see it.”
“You will, I think.”
“Why?”
Dirker swallowed down something. “Because your boy is in town. He’s finally struck.”
16
Figuring that he was hungover, trail-weary, and hadn’t had much sleep, Cabe didn’t need to be looking at this. Didn’t need to be seeing the slashed and hacked remains of a whore named Mizzy Modine in all their ghoulish splendor.
He stood there in the doorway, his guts percolating away, bile kicking up the back of his throat. His jaws were locked tight.
Dirker was standing there with him. “Well?” he said. “Any question in your mind that this is your boy?”
Cabe did not answer him, could not answer him. His jaws were still locked-up and his voice had sunk down into some dark, muddy pit. All the rooting around he did down there did not produce it. What he was looking at… Christ, it was the worse yet. The very worst.
“Excuse me,” he finally said, stepping out into the chill air.
Cabe had seen a lot of death over the years. A lot of blood and flesh mangled up in the worse possible ways. He’d come to the conclusion long ago, that the human being… though possibly God’s finest creation… was also the most disgusting when you opened it up and saw the slimy, drippy things that made it operate.
Cabe had not been physically ill in years looking at a body, but, damn if he wasn’t real close right now. That bile in his throat tasted of cheap whiskey, flat beer, and things far worse. He tried to roll a cigarette, but his fingers were thick and clumsy and maybe the light from the lantern hanging outside Mizzy Modine’s crib just wasn’t enough.
Dirker rolled one for him. Rolled it, stuck it between his lips, struck a match and cupped it against the wind while Cabe puffed it into life.
Dirker said, “It hits you hard the first time you look on it. I been looking on it for hours now… but the shock just won’t go away.”
Cabe nodded, pulling off his cigarette.
Okay, he thought, enough. You went on a good one tonight and you put a man down, but pull yourself together because you have to look at what’s in there. You have to take a good, long look. Dirker wants to know if it’s the Strangler and he expects you to tell him.
Can you do it? Can you?
But Cabe knew he could. Somehow. Some way. Still dragging from his cigarette, he thought about when he took up the trail of the Sin City Strangler. It was in Eureka, Nevada. The fourth victim. The fifth was in Osceola and the sixth in Pinoche. In Pinoche, Cabe got his first good look at the handiwork of the Strangler. The sheriff there was a hardcase named Cyrus Long who carried a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in a sheath at his hip. The stock was plated in iron and it was dented from Long smashing it over the heads of miscreants… or anyone that pissed him off. Long was rumored to have been a Kansas redleg during the war whose obsession, it was said, was hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and skinning them alive. He was a cruel, evil sort and that look in his eyes… like simmering death… even made Cabe bristle. Cabe had been asking questions about the victim and finally Long himself took him to view the body.
Working a plug of chew in his cheek, Long said: Now I’m only gonna do you this favor once, Johnny Reb, hear? You bounty hunters… you come stomping about my town, kicking things up, leaving your bootprints all over my ass… and not a one of you ever had the decency to let me know he’s even here or what for. But you have, Reb, so I’ll do you a good turn back… ’cept, you ain’t gonna think it’s so good once we’re done. One thing, though, Reb… yeah, I don’t give a good fucking shit what your name is, Reb… you just listen and shut that cracker mouth for two minutes or I’ll goddamn well do it for you. I had my fill of your peckerwood Southern asses during the War of Rebellion, so shut it and shut it quick, boy. Okay. Now, I don’t mind you bounty hunters coming here and all, just as long as you let me know straight away what you’re dirtying up my town about. Don’t matter if you’re hunting wolves or injuns or men… I wanna know.
He was a real sweetheart, that Long. You just had to love him. Reconstruction had never touched this boy. He was as mean and ornery and intolerant as he’d been during the war. He took Cabe upstairs of a brothel and into a room at the end of the hall. A white sheet was thrown over a form on the bed. There were great red stains on it. Long pulled it off the body and it came away with a sticky sound like tape pulled from a board.
Long took out a knife and began. See here, Reb? See how she’s been opened from belly to crotch? That’s a sure sign of the Sin City Strangler. Trust me… I saw the other one in Osceola. Slit right open, see? Ain’t that something? Long followed the incision with the blade of his knife, using it like a pointer. Like he was an anatomy instructor. See, this crazy bastard, he stuck the knife right in her business there, dragged it up to her throat. Then he cut her widthwise just below her tits here and then again right at her bellybutton. Opened this bitch like a Christmas present. See? She’s all hollow inside on account this bastard scooped out all her goodies, spread ’em around like birthday streamers… you see that? One thing missing, though, is her heart. Yep. He always takes that part with him. Now, out in San Fran they had themselves some hotshot surgeon what looked at the body and said the woman there died about the same time she was strangled. I wouldn’t know about that. But see those purple marks at her throat… yeah, them ones… them are from fingers. You can see ’em fine, thumbs and fingers. Now, she died from strangulation and was opened afterward, Reb. I know that on account of what I’m seeing. No, don’t turn away. This is the important part. Her eyes are full of blood and her color is blue… oxygen starvation causes that they tell me. She was strangled, all right. Now, Reb, what you’re looking for here is a dirt-mean, deranged cocksucker who fancies whores and likes to fuck ’em and choke ’em and gut ’em. Got another secret for you, too, Reb… he fucks ’em after they’s dead, too. So you find this character, he’ll have a long, sharp knife and maybe a heart and a few other things boiling in a pot… where you going, boy?