His fork jabbing and his teeth chewing and his throat swallowing, his mind gone to a formless putty. He ate and ate while Cobb watched him, all the while holding Gleer’s head by the hair. And the real bad thing was that Gleer was speaking, that white furrowed face was speaking. The eyes were rolling in his head and that black tongue was licking his lips. Cobb asked him questions and he answered in a dry, whistling voice, telling Gleer exactly what it was like down in that black pit of death and how Noolan’s kin were all down there burning with him.
Sometime later, Gleer’s head screaming and the cabin filled with chanting injun voices, Cobb slit Noolan’s throat and dressed him out.
In the Spring, Cobb came down from the mountains on foot, his parfleche still packed with dried human jerky. His travels after that were unknown for the most part. What is known is that he assembled a crew of blooded killers with similar leanings and tastes as his own. That they accompanied him back to Missouri where there was something he needed to collect. And sometime later he made for the Shoshoni peoples. Knowing he had something in common with them now.
And somewhere along the way, he heard about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon.
Part Four:
The Good, the Damned, and the Deranged
1
Whisper Lake by daylight.
It was afternoon by the time Tyler Cabe rolled out of bed and even later by the time he stepped out onto the streets, his brain still reeling with the sight of the murdered prostitute. He stood before the St. James Hostelry, breathing in the air which, although not cold as the night before, was kissed by a chill blowing down from the mountains.
He hadn’t even been in Whisper Lake a full twenty-four hours yet. It was hard to believe. He thought of the crazy hillbilly Orville DuChien. Jackson Dirker. The crazy tales that bartender-Carny-at the Oasis had told him about the local animal attacks. The Texas Ranger, Henry Freeman. Sir Tom English. Virgil Clay laying dead in a pool of his own blood. The jail and Charles Graybrow. And, yes, Mizzy Modine.
It all came together in his brain and made his head ache.
He lit a cigarette and wondered what would come next.
Licking his lips then, he made his way down the muddy, rutted street, taking in the town an inch at a time. It was his first real look at it. Whisper Lake was like other mining camps he had ridden through: a congested, dirty mess of humanity.
High above town, clinging to the rises and mist-cloaked slopes were the looming steel headframes and drum hoists of the mines themselves, the outcroppings of assorted buildings and sheds that rose up around them. There was a constant thundering and booming and clanking from up there, as the earth was gutted of silver. Ore wagons made the run continually from the chutes to the looming refineries down by the lake itself…you could see the gray, toxic smoke that belched from the stacks and fell back to earth, dusting everything in filth.
It looked oddly as if the town itself had once been part of the mine systems above and had slowly slid down the muddy inclines to its present position.
It was laid out with no plan or pattern, just a haphazard collection of log buildings and false-corniced stores, tents and shanties, brush huts and wooden shacks cut through by a maze of intersecting dirt roads that dipped into little hollows and climbed up low hills. There were a few brick buildings and an elaborate system of board sidewalks. Just a crazy-quilt of hotels and boarding houses, assay offices and saloons, brothels and churches, liveries and lumber yards with a Union Pacific railroad spur winding around the northern end.
Everything from privy to meat market was darkened with soot from the mines and refineries.
The roads were filled with horses and wagons, prospectors and business-owners, immigrants pushing carts and dirty children chasing balls with sticks. Cabe saw ladies with parasols clustered in whispering groups and whores in their petticoats emptying chamber pots into the streets. The ground rumbled from the industry of the mines above and voices chattered and people shouted and bodies threaded in every which direction. Unlike other frontier towns, you saw very few people lounging about. Everything was business and money and there was no time for loafing.
Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.
Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.
Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right…there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.
But he wasn’t about to give up.
He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.
But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.
2
Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors…but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”
Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.
“ Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”
Dirker did not disagree with that.
They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.
Dirker was studying what was on the door.
A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.
Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I’m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”
Dirker had already figured that.
