Shadow of the Hangman Page 4

  “Sure I am,” Jacob said. “When I’ve got something to say.”

  He looked at the girl, dark eyes, dark hair, and teeth that were still white and even. She might have been pretty once, but maybe not, it was hard to tell. “What brings you here?” he said.

  “Nothing, nothing at all. Somehow I just ended up in this place, at the edge of the world. One day I’ll take a walk, fall over the edge, and it will all be over.”

  Jacob smiled. “There’s a lot of world beyond the Manzano Mountains. You wouldn’t fall too far.”

  “A lot of world for you maybe, not for me.”

  As though she thought she’d stepped over a line, Amy nodded in the bartender’s direction. “Lou Rose lets me stay here free of charge, and he feeds me in winter when the miners are holed up in their cabins.” Her smile was faint, almost shy. “I guess I shouldn’t complain.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jacob said. “The world would be a pretty dull place if we’d nothing to complain about.”

  He pushed his empty plate away, sat back in his chair, and took the makings from his shirt pocket and held them up where Amy could see them. “May I beg your indulgence, ma’am?” he said.

  The girl was surprised. “Men never asked me that before.”

  “Well, they should’ve,” Jacob said. “It’s common courtesy when a lady is present.”

  Amy waited until Jacob lit his cigarette, and then she said, “Jacob, you don’t strike me as a man who pays for it, and I’m not a gal who gives it away free.” She smiled. “But I’m willing to make an exception in your case.”

  Jacob laughed. “Hell, Amy, look at me. Do I have the face of a man who sets female hearts aflutter? Of course I pay for it when I get the urge. Now my brother Shawn is different. He’s handsome and he has a way with the ladies and—”

  The door swung open and a man stepped inside. Jacob stopped talking as alarm bells clamored in his head.

  The newcomer was in his midtwenties, tall, thin, with white-blond hair and eyes the color of bleached bone. In a land where men were bronzed brown by weather, the man’s skin was fish-belly white, his mustache pale and sparse. He wore dusty range clothes and scuffed boots, but his gun rig of black, tooled leather was of high quality, as was the finely engraved, ivory-handled Colt that rode butt-forward in a holster on his right hip.

  It was a professional gunfighter’s rig and expensive, but, studying the man, Jacob decided he didn’t shape up as a draw fighter, not with that unhandy way of carrying a Colt. A sure-thing killer maybe, but he wasn’t a man who made a living with his fancy revolver up close and personal. When the stranger dismissed him with a cold, sidelong slide of his white eyes, Jacob sensed something about the man, something wrong enough to make his skin crawl.

  “What can I do you for, stranger?” Lou Rose said.

  “I want whiskey and a woman,” the man said. His voice was as soft and smooth as velvet drawn across glass, but he wheezed deep in his chest as though he found it hard to breathe in the close dugout.

  “The whiskey I can supply,” Rose said. “As to the woman, take it up with Amy.” The bartender nodded. “Settin’ over there with the tall gent.”

  The stranger’s eyes again crawled over Jacob, who felt they’d laid slime tracks all over him, like snails. The man’s gaze moved to Amy and lingered.

  Finally he said, “I don’t want to go dipping into another man’s honeypot.”

  Amy rose from the chair, her professional whore’s smile pinned in place. She stepped toward the newcomer, her hips swaying. “I’m available, cowboy. If you’ve got five dollars.”

  White eyes looked at the woman over the rim of his whiskey glass, stripping her naked. Then he laughed. “Five dollars for you? You’re making a joke, right?”

  “Mister, she’s the only available woman between here and Santa Fe,” Lou Rose said.

  “In a pig’s eye,” the man said. “I can get a dozen Apache women for that much money.”

  “Then you’d better put it back in your pants and head for the San Carlos,” Amy said. Her back was stiff, and a frown gathered between her eyebrows.

  “Two dollars,” the man said. “Silver money.”

  “You go to hell,” Amy said, turning away from him.

  “All right, five dollars,” the man said. “And only because I like your sand.”

  After Amy and the stranger closed the saloon door behind them, the old-timer in the bearskin coat whistled. “Hell, I never paid that much for a woman in all my born days.”

  “Because you’re a real famous cheapskate, Tom,” Rose said, grinning.

  “Hell, is that right?” Tom Linton said. “So that’s how come I’m always left with the ugly, skinny ones.”

  “You must buy your whores by the pound, huh?” Jacob said.

  Linton rubbed his hairy jaw. “I’ll tell you something, sonny,” he said. “Union whores was a helluva lot prettier than them bag o’ bones Reb scarecrows o’ your’n.”

  “Says who?” Jacob said.

  “Says me, and when Arkansas Tom Linton says it, you can bet the farm that it’s a natural fact.”

  “Well,” Jacob said, “I can’t argue with a man who talks natural facts.”

  “Damn right,” Linton said. He looked crafty. “Now, since I won another argument, I guess you should buy me a drink, young feller.”

  Jacob rose to his feet and walked to the bar. “I guess I should at that. Set ’em up, bartender. I’ll have a whiskey.”

  The wind picked up and hurled dust against the chattering dugout door and found enough chinks and crevices in the structure to set the oil lamp flames to dancing. The bulk of an entire peak rested on the saloon’s stone roof, and the trembling aspen on the slope above tossed and fretted and rustled a frantic warning that the mountain was falling. Howling, the wind tormented the aspen further and tossed down branches that hit the hard-packed earth below with a sound of breaking bones.

  Inside, Linton, his eye on another drink, tried to start an argument with Jacob on who had the better cavalry mounts, North or South, but Lou Rose put an end to it.

  “We’ve had enough of your natural facts for one night, Tom,” he said. “Leave the gentleman alone.” Over the old-timer’s protests, he said to Jacob, “It’s getting wild out there. You can bed down in the barn tonight if you want.”

  The barn was another dugout, set at a distance from the saloon and hog farm, and Jacob figured it would be snug enough.

  “Thank you kindly,” he said. “I’ll take you up on that.”

  “And what about me?” Linton said. “Are you just gonna throw me out into the storm?”

  “You know fine well where the barn is, Tom,” Rose said. “God knows, you’ve slept off enough drunks in there.”

  “Maybe so, and maybe I have, but it’s still nice to be invited,” Linton said.

  Rose smiled. “All right, Tom, you’re invited.”

  “I should think I am,” Linton said, somewhat mollified. “A man likes to be asked and—”

  The woman’s scream drowned out whatever else Linton had to say.

  Chapter Seven

  Gun in hand, Jacob O’Brien made a dash for the door. The wind pushed against him, and he had to throw his whole weight against the rough timber to force it open.

  Behind him he heard Linton yell, “By God, that was Amy!”

  Then Jacob was outside in the wind. Ahead of him, a horseman spurred into the torn night, and Jacob thumbed off a couple of fast shots at the fleeing rider. But the distance was too great and the light too dim. He was sure he’d missed the man.

  Tom Linton pounded past him, running for the door of Amy’s room. Jacob followed at a walk, his eyes on the darkness that had swallowed the rider. He cherished a slender hope that the man with the milky eyes and fancy gun rig would return and shoot it out. But he saw only the gloom of night and the restless rustle of wind-tattered trees.

  Jacob directed his attention at Linton. The old-timer slowly backed out of Amy’s room, his
stiff body betraying his shock. He turned his head and stared at Jacob, a strange, lost look on his weathered face.

  Like a broken automaton, Linton opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out. Jacob rushed past him into the room . . . and entered a charnel house.

  Amy had been cut from crotch to breastbone, “gutted like a trout,” as Tom Linton would describe it later. She lay spread-eagled on the bed, the sheets she’d fisted in her final agony scarlet with blood. The girl had cried out only once, so it had been quick, Jacob thought. Mighty quick and cruel.

  He looked around, but there was no sign of the knife. The killer had taken it with him.

  Lou Rose pushed past Jacob, then stopped in his tracks. “Oh, my God,” he said. The man swayed and Jacob supported him. “Amy . . . what . . . I mean . . . why . . .”

  “She fell off the edge of the earth,” Jacob said.

  He took a blanket from the bottom of the girl’s iron cot and spread it over the body. “I’ll come back and help you bury her,” he said to Rose.

  The man nodded dumbly, but then said, “Where are you going?”

  “After the man with the white eyes.”

  “He did it?”

  “Who else?”

  “I thought he looked like a strange one,” Rose said. “I told him to talk to Amy. I mean, I’m the one to blame, I should’ve—”

  “You’re not to blame, Lou,” Jacob said. “The man who murdered Amy is to blame. No one else.”

  He stepped out the door, only to be stopped by Linton. “Where you headed, young feller?” he said.

  “I’m going after him,” Jacob said.

  “And I’ll jine ye,” Linton said. He read hesitation in the younger man’s eyes and said, “I was an army scout for nigh on thirty years, an’ I can track like an Apache.” He slapped his guns. “And I don’t miss too much with these.”

  Jacob nodded. “Mount up, Tom.”

  “Here, what’s your name? You never did give it.”

  “Jacob.”

  “Mind if I call you Jake?”

  “A lot of people do.”

  The dugout had been blown out of a rock face in one of the Manzano Peak foothills, a mile west of Priest Canyon. It perched on a wide, sandy ledge that sloped gently on its north side into a series of rolling grass meadows cut through by stands of juniper, piñon, and mesquite, miles of rugged country, little traveled. But Tom Linton read the tracks and said the white-eyed man was headed in that direction.

  Linton stood by his horse’s head in the wind-flung darkness and looked up at Jacob. “And the feller ain’t just running,” he said. “I reckon he knows right where he’s headed.”

  “How do you figure that?” Jacob said.

  “He knows this neck of the woods well enough to cover country pretty fast, and he’s keeping low, being mighty careful not to skyline himself.” Linton spat. “Damn him, Jake, if he heads into the mountains we could lose him.”

  “Do you reckon he figures we’re after him?” Jacob said.

  “I don’t know. He might.”

  “Then mount up. We’ll press him close and hope he makes a mistake.”

  Linton climbed into the saddle, and the two riders headed due north. Ahead of them lay wild country cut through by deep arroyos, high peaks, and the ruins of ancient pueblos laid waste by Apaches. It wasn’t a long-riding land in daylight, and darkness slowed Jacob and Linton to a walk as they allowed their horses to pick the trails.

  After an hour Jacob’s eyes tired from the strain of constantly searching the tunnel of darkness ahead of him. The wind drowned any noise the white-eyed man might make, and to make matters worse, clouds constantly scudded across the face of the moon and turned the night even darker.

  Samuel’s wire resided uneasily in the pocket of Jacob’s shirt, and its brief content, COME QUICK BIG TROUBLE, gave him a world of worry. If the colonel and Samuel needed him at Dromore it meant gun trouble, the kind he was qualified to handle.

  He couldn’t afford to spend time on a long chase. He’d have to end it quickly.

  “Damn it,” Linton said, slapping his thigh, “I knew I recognized that ranny with the white eyes.”

  Jacob lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match flame. Through an exhaled cloud of blue smoke, he said, “So who is he?”

  “Last time I saw him was a couple of years ago at Fort Union up on the old Santa Fe Trail. He was a second lieutenant in a supply company then, but got himself arrested after he had his wicked way with the wife of a civilian quartermaster.”

  “You mean he raped her?” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean.” Linton found his pipe and stuck it in his mouth. “The boy was facing a court-martial, and there were them who said he should be hung, but his pa was a Union war hero with friends in Washington and the lieutenant was allowed to resign. I heard that the boy’s pa paid a pile of money to the woman and her husband. A sack of double-eagles helped smooth things over, as they say.”

  “Can you recollect the lieutenant’s name?” Jacob said.

  “I’m studying on it, Jake.” Linton scowled in thought, then his face brightened. “Shannon! Lieutenant Shade Shannon. I recollect that his pa, Cap’n Shannon, lost his legs during the war in some sea fight with blockade runners.”

  “What’s Captain Shannon doing now?” Jacob asked.

  Linton shook his head. “Now you’re asking me conundrums, Jake.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I mean I don’t know.”

  Jacob scanned the wall of darkness ahead of him. “Well, when we find Shade we’ll ask him,” he said.

  As the night shaded into dawn, Shannon’s trail faded into the mountains and Jacob’s hunt came to an end.

  “We’ve lost him, Jake,” Tom Linton said.

  “Seems like.”

  “Well, now what?”

  Jacob’s gaze wandered over the peaks where morning shadows slanted among the pines and the birds greeted the new-aborning day. “We go back and bury Amy,” he said.

  “It’s a hard thing, letting Shade escape like this,” Linton said.

  “He hasn’t escaped,” Jacob said. “One day I’ll run into him, and when I do, I’ll kill him.”

  Linton turned and saw the determined set of Jacob’s unshaven chin, the blue eyes iced to the color of a gun barrel. “Jake,” he said, “something tells me that right about now ol’ Shade felt a goose fly over his grave.”

  Jacob and Tom Linton helped Lou Rose bury Amy in a rock grave that overlooked a hanging valley where summer wildflowers bloomed.

  Linton, who’d stood at the graveside of many soldiers, said the words, and Rose, still racked by guilt, moved his lips in a Jewish prayer for the dead that Jacob reckoned had its origins back in the mists of time.

  The sun was directly overhead when Jacob again rode north, this time in the direction of Dromore . . . toward troubles he hoped were less than the ones he conjured up in his imagination.

  But he would soon learn that the reality was worse, much worse, than anything he’d envisioned.

  Chapter Eight

  Shade Shannon rode out of the Manzano Mountains and followed Buffalo Draw west. That night he made cold camp in a mission ruin near Jacinto Mesa and in the morning pushed his tired horse toward the small village of El Cerrito, a cluster of adobe buildings scattered along the south bank of the Pecos River.

  El Cerrito was populated solely by Mexicans and the occasional gringo drifter before Joshua DeClare had moved into an empty casa and made it his temporary headquarters.

  Shannon figured that DeClare, that damned, twisted cripple, would help him as he’d helped him once before.

  Shannon drew rein on the ridge above the village. He was tired, hungry, and gritty, his white eyes scorched by the morning sun. He reached into his shirt pocket and took a pair of round, dark spectacles from a leather pouch and settled them on the bridge of his nose before he hooked them behind his ears. He could smell the village from where he was,
a heady mix of spices, chickens, rooting hogs, and burning mesquite. Women were already bustling around, preparing breakfast. A man stepped out of his house, yawned, stretched, and then threw a disinterested glance at the horseman on the ridge. He went back inside and closed the door behind him.

  DeClare and his sister lived at the edge of town, in an adobe with a pole corral, outhouse, and small timber barn at back.

  Shannon knew the house well. He’d been there once before, the day DeClare hired him to do that uppity witch of a farmer’s wife.

  “It’s all set up, Shade,” DeClare had said. “Just rape the hell out of her and then get out of there without being seen. We’ll do the rest.”

  Shannon remembered that well. DeClare had sat in his wheelchair all pinched and white and sickly, his wasted legs like dry twigs, ready to break in a strong wind.

  Shannon’s mouth pulled into a tight line. God, he hated cripples. Until he’d done for him, his father had been one, the high and mighty Captain Miles Shannon. Damn him, his mind was as crippled as his body. He never understood that his son needed to hear the dying gasps of a woman like a Chinaman needed opium. Killing a woman after he’d had her nurture him made him feel whole again. Well again.

  Cripple or no, Joshua understood that and had recognized a kindred spirit that day in Georgetown when they’d first met. And so did his sister. Dora DeClare was the most beautiful woman Shannon had seen in his life, even prettier than his own ma, may she rest in peace. He’d do Dora real good one day, but not just yet. Today he needed her. Tomorrow—he smiled—well, so long poor, sweet Dora.

  Shannon rode down the rise toward the DeClare cabin. It was time to call in favors of his own.

  “Shade, you look terrible,” Dora DeClare said. “And you’ve got blood all over your shirt.”

  Shannon smiled almost shyly, shuffling his feet like a boy caught stealing apples. “Killed me a whore last night, Dora. Done for my daddy, too.”

  Dora’s expression didn’t change as her brother said, “Shade, that was naughty of you.”