scent.”
Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against…these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”
Slade said, “I think these boys…I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”
Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.
A cleansing then, of a sort.
3
Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.
Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men-James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows-were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.
“ It’s worse than anything thus far,” Caleb said to them. “An out and out slaughter and I think we all know who’s responsible.”
“ Scalped, too, you say?” Caslow asked.
“ Yes.”
Horner looked angry. “I’m not surprised. Them goddamn Mormons think this is their place, that the whole of Utah Territory belongs to them. They’ll do anything to push real Christians out.”
Windows lit a cigarette. He was a blacksmith and his hands were huge, callused. “See? What they got in mind is for us to blame injuns. That’s what they want. But we ain’t rising to that bait. We got us a pack of them Danites, them Destroying Angels hiding over in Redemption or maybe Deliverance.”
“ Exactly,” Caslow said. “It’s only a matter of deciding which snake pit we root out first.”
“ Redemption,” Caleb said to them.
He knew if he suggested Deliverance, he’d get no takers. No man in his right mind wanted to ride up to Deliverance, not with what was said about that place. Maybe all of it wasn’t true, but if some of it was, then it was enough. Besides, even the Mormons shunned the place.
“ Tonight then,” he said. “Tonight we sack that heathen nest and burn it to the ground.”
No one disagreed with that.
4
Sitting atop packing crates in the alley behind the Red Top Saloon, Jack Goode was saying, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie Graybrow. Just between you and me and that heap of dogshit over there, this town has the curse all it over it. Yes sir, right from its bones to the roofs above, cursed, that’s what. Lookit me for instance. Just take a look at me and tell me what you see.” Goode paused, pulling from a bottle of whiskey, wiping a few drops from his white beard with the back of his hand. “No comment? That’s fair. Sure enough. Well, I’ll answer it for you. You’re looking at a man what won’t see sixty again. Hell, won’t see sixty-five, I reckon. A man that’s been here and there and everywhere. I fought in the army, I trapped in the mountains. I whipped a mail coach down the Overland trail and I was even a Pony Express rider until some Cheyenne bucks in Wyoming Territory filled me so full of arrows they could’ve used my ass to water flowerbeds. What I’m saying, my red brother, is that I ain’t afraid of shit. Never have been.”
Charles Graybrow took the bottle, had a taste. “But now?”
“ Now things is surely different, ain’t they?”
Charles Graybrow agreed with that silently. He knew bad things were happening and would continue to happen. All those disappearances and killings out in the hills. And now this latest massacre. Bad medicine. That’s what it was. Then the vigilantes out tormenting the Mormon squatters and now that prostitute getting slit from kitty to chin.
Not good, not good at all.
Even a fool (or a white man) had to sense the bad aura in and around Whisper Lake these days. It was so thick you could hold it in your hand. Almost as if that particular corner of Beaver County was a gathering point for noxious forces. Made a fellow think. Even made an injun think.
“ Things keep up,” Graybrow said, “well have the army in here.”
Goode pulled from the bottle. “Yes sir, you probably got a point there, my friend. Damned and dandy if you don’t. Because I’ll admit before God and the Democrats and gladly so that I’m shit-scared over this place and what’s happening here. You ask me, there’s a poison here and old Whisper Lake is just rotten to the roots. And it’s getting worse by the day. This town, my friend, is as surely fucked as a three-dollar whore.” He sighed, looked skyward as if he expected the hand of the Lord to smite him from above. “And you know the worse thing of all, Charlie?”
Graybrow shook his head.
“ I think I’m to blame,” Goode admitted. “Somehow, some way…I brought hell down upon this here burg.”
Graybrow took the bottle from him. “How do you figure that?”
Goode sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ll make it quick for you, I reckon.”
“ Yeah, I’m an injun and all, so don’t go confusing me. I’m real simple.”
“ Now, don’t be like that, Charlie. That’s not what I meant. You know I got nothing but respect for your people.”
Graybrow nodded. “Surely. Amongst my tribe we consider you to be something of a holy figure. Many is the day we pray for your guidance.”
“ No shit? Goddammit…you’re tugging my cord again.”
“ I’m funny like that,” Graybrow said. “Maybe it’s because I’m an injun.”
Goode told him that might be the reason, yes sir. “Anyway, about seven months ago I landed me this job. I was hired by this injun, a Goshute, from the Skull Valley Band. He wanted me to transport this body from up there down here to Whisper Lake. A hundred U.S. Treasury greenbacks he promised me. I jumped on it. Figured I’d come down here, maybe do a little panning up in the hills. Now, this body we were talking about belonged to a fellow name of James Lee Cobb. You hear of him?”
Graybrow washed whiskey around in his mouth. “Some sort of killer, I think. Outlaw. Pistol fighter. Something like that.”
Goode clapped him on the shoulder. “And then some. A cold-blooded killer is what we’re talking, Charlie. Cobb came out of Missouri and his trail was red and hurting. Fought in the Mex war. Robbed. Killed. Raped. Got trapped up in the high Sierras with a few saddle tramps, ate the sumbitches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, you get the idea. Old Cobb…why he was just as low as the belly of a squashed rattlesnake in a wagon wheel rut.”
“ Why’d that Goshute have you bring him here?”
Goode shrugged, shook his head. “Hell if I know really. Said something about it being Cobb’s last wish. Had some sort of half-brother living in these parts. About all I could figure is that Cobb was wanted for just everything just about everywhere, so he was on the dodge in injun country.”
“ So you brought the body here?”
“ Yes, damn if I didn’t. Me and this little squirt of piss name of Hyden brought the box clear from Skull Valley
