“So Freeman…or whoever we got here…he just borrowed this man’s identity?”
“That’s how I’m figuring it,” Dirker said. “Just so happens, Freeman has a room over at Ma Heller’s.”
Cabe stood up. “Well, let’s bag that cocksucker.”
Dirker smiled thinly. “Figured you’d see it my way.”
It was Cabe who kicked the door in to Freeman’s room.
He kicked it in and Dirker went through low with a sawed-off shotgun. But the theatrics were unnecessary for Freeman was not there. In fact, nothing was there. The closet was cleaned out and the bureau was empty. The sonofabitch had made his run again.
But he left a parting gift to the men he probably knew would hunt him: a human heart in a mason jar of alcohol.
Cabe and Dirker just stared at the thing swimming in that brine. It was pale and bloated, obscenely fleshly. It seemed to move with a gentle, unknown motion.
“I guess there’s no doubt that he’s the Sin City Strangler,” Dirker managed, his throat tight.
Cabe just nodded, knowing there was little else to say.
The bastard had slipped away yet again. The only good thing was that Cabe had seen him, would recognize him if the chance came again. But he still didn’t know who he was or where he came from. And things like that, he’d found in his line of work, made hunting someone down far more troublesome.
As it stood, “Freeman” could show up just about anywhere.
And probably would.
18
In Redemption, the bullets were flying.
The vigilantes had rode in again in force, but this time the Mormons were ready for them. Or so they thought. The Danites instructed the townsfolk to stay in their homes and cabins, to lock themselves down tight. To wait it out. The Danites wanted them to adhere to the teachings of Brigham Young which meant to avoid violence at any costs. If there was killing to be done, the Danites would do it.
So the Mormons waited it out.
And outside, it was a shooting gallery.
Within the first ten minutes three vigilantes were dead and a fourth seriously wounded. Likewise, two Danites had been shot from their hiding places by expertly placed bullets.
And it became something of a standoff.
Caleb Callister did everything he could to reign in his forces and mount the attack in a precise military fashion, but his boys would have none of it. They wanted to shoot. To burn. To kill and pillage. They saw in the Mormons everything that had ever gone wrong in their lives. And this is why Caslow, McCrutchen, and Retting were now dead and Cheevers was moaning in the street, his guts shot out.
He wouldn’t last and Callister knew it.
It was just him and Windows now.
The bad thing was they were outgunned about twenty to one, if not worse. The good thing was they were still in possession of the dynamite that McCrutchen had gotten from the mine. Callister’s idea had been to ride into Redemption and start throwing the stuff immediately, but the others wanted to do some shooting and things had simply gone to hell.
Windows and he were hiding behind a barricade of cordwood with their backs against the outside wall of a livery barn. Escape was not in the cards, at least not yet…but on the other hand, the Danites were in no position to overrun their position.
Stalemate.
But it was night and it was dark and just about anything could happen. A few fires were burning, most of them set by the vigilantes, and the illumination they threw was enough to see and shoot by.
A couple townspeople rushed out with buckets of sand and water to extinguish a blaze that had started in bales of hay and was quickly working its way up the walls of a stable.
Windows brought up his Winchester 1866 carbine. Scarcely aiming, he sighted and fired, levered quickly, and fired again. The bucket brigade-both of them-lay dead in the streets.
“Two more dead nits,” Windows said.
A flurry of rifle fire grazed the log embankment they hid behind as the Danites tried to flush them out. Callister and Windows returned the fire which came from no less than four different locations.
Callister had no doubt that the Destroying Angels were trying to flank them. Probably crawling over rooftops in order to draw a bead on them. But it wouldn’t be easy in the murk.
More bullets ripped into their rampart, chips of wood flying like shrapnel. At that moment, two Danites charged in on horseback. Windows shot one of them through the throat as bullets whizzed all around him. Callister didn’t bother with his gun: He lit a stick of dynamite, let the fuse burn down some and tossed it at the other rider as Windows felled his comrade. It was a perfect throw, for the dynamite landed right in the Danite’s lap. He saw what it was, made to toss it aside, but somehow managed to get the burning stick caught between himself and his horse.
Then there was a booming explosion and both he and his horse were sprayed over the streets like bloody mucilage. Blood and smoldering bits of anatomy were everywhere.
The Danites had not expected this.
Callister lit another stick and tossed it onto the steps of a log house across the way from which they’d been receiving gunfire. The entire front of the place went up like kindling and what was left behind, collapsed into itself, burying alive anyone who’d survived the initial explosion. Flaming bits of wood rained over the town. The razed log house began to blaze.
“We got ‘em,” Windows was saying. “Sure as shit, we got ‘em.”
“Now they’re gonna have to make their move,” Callister said.
And they did.
A half-dozen men on horseback charged their position. They were spread out with an almost military efficiency. Callister watched them come on and had to admit, even to himself, that those Danites were a courageous, devil-may-care bunch. Tough as any men he’d ever fought with. In the their flapping black coats and wide-brimmed preacher’s hats, they were truly something to see, riding hard with smoking pistols.
But their strategy was all-too apparent.
The riders were trying to force the vigilantes out of their holes. Using themselves as bait, the Danites were riding right into the mouth of hell itself so the others could get a clean shot.
But it didn’t work that way.
More sticks of dynamite were tossed over the rampart. Not just two or three, but five or six that landed one after the other and resulted in a chain of resounding explosions that not only atomized horses and riders, but blew out the windows of houses and threw riders from their mounts. The shock waves actually knocked men from rooftops.
Whatever the Danites were planning, they gave it up.
They had lost no less than ten men now and had easily that number injured. There were only four or five left in any sort of fighting shape. For the next hour, there was silence broken only by an occasional gunshot so that both sides would know the other had not slipped away.
But slipping away was exactly what Callister was thinking.
And particularly when a dozen riders came pouring down the street, the lead man waving a white flag tied to the barrel of a rifle. Nobody shot at them. The Mormons called out to them to identify themselves, but the strangers would not. They just kept waving and smiling on those black mounts.
“I don’t like this,” Windows said.
