Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (5 page)

“I’ll be damned,” Junius said with awe, raking a hand across his patch-bearded face. “I didn’t know you two was kin.”

Lomax turned his agonized eyes on the wizened prospector. “Hold your tongue, Mr. Webb, or I will fabricate a reason for incarcerating your rock-breaking ass!”

“Double cousins,” Zane told the prospector. “We’re
real
close, Wayne an’ me. Least we were till I won a turkey shoot when we was tit-high to a sow’s belly, and Wayne had to take my turns in the tobacco barn that summer ’stead o’ sparkin’ Constance Summerfield, who ended up my brother’s betrothed.”

“So help me, Uriah, if this ever gets out…”

“Ah, don’t worry. I won’t ruin your reputation,” Zane said, touching heels to General Lee’s flanks and starting forward, his indignant cousin scrambling aside. “Just don’t go thinkin’ you can tell me what to do. Gravels me, and you know how we Zanes get when we’re graveled.”

As he and Junius rode forward through the blood splotch that Lyle McCreedy had left in the street, Lomax called behind him, “Marshal Angel Coffin was in town earlier…inquiring about you.” His voice owned a faintly mocking tone.

Zane sawed back on General Lee’s reins and looked over his shoulder. The marshal stood grinning at him, a fist on his hip, one boot cocked with self-satisfaction. Zane worked a corner of his broad mouth pensively and said with a wolfish growl, “Have I ever been tied to lace panties or apron strings, cousin?”

Undefeated, Lomax chuckled. “Just passin’ along a little news, is all.”

The marshal turned and started to stroll away.

Zane burned. “What’d she want?”

Lomax stopped, turned back toward him, his cheeks above the upswept ends of his mustache dimpling in delight. “She was goin’ after a gang of train-robbin’ hobgobbies down around Montrose; was hopin’ she’d find you here, since you’re familiar with the area, an’ all. I told her I hadn’t seen you in a month of Sundays, thank the good Lord, so she rode on toward Montrose.” His mocking grin broadened. “Alone.”

Zane’s brows furrowed.

“Hope she don’t run into no trouble out there. Me, I woulda backed her play, but I got no deputy, so of course it wouldn’t be right to desert my post here in Gunnison. Oh, she’ll probably be fine. I hear the girl can take care of herself.”

“That’s right—she can,” Zane said and heeled General Lee ahead once more.

Riding off his right stirrup as they continued along the street, meeting broad-wheeled mountain wagons and horseback riders, some of whom Zane nodded to, Junius said, “Who’s that your cousin was talkin’ about, Uriah?”

“No one,” Zane said curtly and began angling the palomino toward the right side of the street, where the low-slung, shake-roofed U.S. Bounty Office hunched beneath the glaring sun.
Smoke issued from the place’s tin chimney pipe and slithered forward over the brush-roofed gallery.

He dismounted General Lee, wanting to keep his mind off Marshal Coffin. Not that he figured he could. He and the redheaded marshal from Denver had thrown in together a few times to hunt ghouls—once in the Indian Nations and once in Dakota Territory, another in eastern Wyoming. She was the daughter of a famed senior U.S. marshal, and Zane, who didn’t normally cotton to badge toters, had found himself liking the young woman’s sand. She was pretty as a desert dusk, an Amazon straight out of a boy’s fairy tale with her straight, rose-red hair that fell to the middle of her back, and her curvy, high-busted figure decked out in black leather and a soft, butternut, doeskin vest.

Somehow Angel managed to wear the scar she’d incurred from a wolf’s claw at an angle across her right cheek as well as any man would. It not only didn’t mar her beauty but somehow heightened it by adding a touch of danger to complement the smoldering green eyes that were in heart-skipping contrast to her hair.

She was a few years younger than Zane, who was older than his years, and they’d ended up sharing each other’s blankets a few times, here and there in camps about the frontier. It had seemed a natural thing, them both being alone and naturally hot-blooded. They’d kicked up quite a storm, those nights. Kept the coyotes quiet, as the saying went.

The only problem was, after he’d shared the woman’s hot roll, she’d somehow gotten stuck in the back of Zane’s mind. He wasn’t used to women staying with him long—in his mind or anywhere else. Such a distraction wasn’t safe out here, where it served a man to keep his mind clear.

Besides, Angel Coffin was as much her own woman as he was
his own man. Hell, she was a deputy U.S. marshal. She could take care of herself even in known ghoul country.

But she had asked about him….

Zane tossed General Lee’s reins over one of the two hitchracks fronting the bounty office, and mounted the front gallery, Junius Webb falling into step behind him and batting dust from his buckskin shirt and baggy trousers with his hat. Zane punched the latch and stepped inside.

“Pete?”

There was no one in the office, though Zane could hear a man and woman laughing together behind a door in the opposite wall. The woman gave a little squeal, and leather bedsprings squawked raucously.

“Sounds like Pete’s bein’ entertained,” Zane told Junius. “Come on in.” He glanced at the bullet-shaped stove in the middle of the room, fronting the cluttered desk of the local U.S. bounty distribution agent, Lieutenant Pete Borgland. A battered black coffeepot chugged quietly atop the warming rack. Zane headed toward a crude wooden cupboard near the stove and grabbed a couple of relatively clean coffee mugs off a shelf.

“I’ve learned not to disturb Pete when he’s doin’ the mattress dance. He can get surly as an old squaw and find a reason to short your bounty money.” He filled both cups from the pot and thrust one at Junius. “Might as well enjoy his mud while we wait. Hasn’t killed me yet.”

Zane sagged down in one of the two visitors’ chairs fronting the desk. Junius sat in the second one, his eyes glittering, lips quirking a devilish half grin as the sounds of lovemaking continued emanating from behind the closed door that directly flanked the desk.

“Oh…oh, God…!” said the woman.

“Shut up, Dixie—I’m tryin’ to concentrate here,” said the man.

The woman laughed throatily. “Relax,” she said just loudly enough for Zane and Junius to hear through the door. “You’re doin’ just fine, hon. Much better than last time.”

“Goddamnit, Dixie—you gotta talk so much?”

Leather springs sighed. The headboard of Pete Borgland’s bed slammed against the wall with the regularity of a metronome.

Beside Zane, Junius snickered. He tried to sip his coffee but ended up choking on it for laughing.

Uninterested—even a little revolted—Zane sipped his own coffee and stared at a large map of the western territories to the left of the door behind the desk. It had been printed by the government offices in Washington several years ago, and it delineated the Ghoul Lands, the scattered chunks of the western frontier where the main ghoul populations were known to reside throughout the West.

The swillers’ main territory occupied a good portion of western Utah and southern Idaho—though any hunter worth his salt knew they could be found in and around any major town or city—while the hobgobbies dominated a large, egg-shaped portion of western Colorado Territory starting just outside of Montrose, where, according to Lomax, Angel was headed. The main packs of werewolves had spread onto two smaller chunks of land, one in the Anvil Mountains around Tombstone, Arizona, the other west of Laramie, Wyoming—though they, like the swillers, were known to haunt portions of every territory west of the Mississippi. According to untrustworthy Washington reports, their numbers were supposedly dwindling.

That was merely propaganda meant to keep President Sherman in office. Zane didn’t believe a word of it.

The ghoul hunter sighed and turned away from the map. He knew better than any map where the ghouls resided. He’d just been trying to keep his mind off what Deputy U.S. Marshal Angel Coffin was up to, because he wasn’t her damn keeper, and even if he started out after her now—which he couldn’t do until General Lee had had several hours of good rest and plenty of oats and water—he likely wouldn’t catch up to her before she caught up to the train-robbing hobgobbies she was after.

What plucked at him, however, was the fact that she was asking around for him. She was a proud woman, and she rarely asked for help even when she needed it. That must mean she really thought she needed it now.

“Ah, hell,” Zane said as the seemingly never-ending love cries continued behind the closed door.

Beneath the ruckus, he’d been hearing a rat scratching around in the room’s rear corner, behind Pete’s desk. The rat was still there, scuttling along the wall and munching up what looked to be the remains of a venison sandwich.

Zane’s heart thudding impatiently, he wrapped his right hand around the big Colt Navy conversion revolver holstered high on his left hip and raked the hammer back. “Stick your fingers in your ears, Junius.”

“How come?”

Zane answered with a thunderous blast of the.44. The rat disappeared in a spray of blood and fur, then landed in two quivering halves.

Chapter 5
    

VERMIN CONTROL

Behind the door, the woman screamed.

“What in God’s name…?” came Borgland’s indignant cry from the same room.

Zane let a devilish glint spark in his eyes as he holstered the hogleg. Bare feet slapped the bedroom floor. The door jerked open and Pete Borgland poked his wide-eyed, unshaven, double-jowled head into the room. He didn’t have a stitch on, and his pale belly curved forward like a big water bladder carpeted in curly black hair.

“Sorry, Pete,” Zane said. “Just doin’ a little vermin control. Hope I didn’t disturb you and Dixie back there!”

Borgland followed Zane’s glance to the dead rat that had fallen still amid its own spilled blood and innards against the wall. His eyes popped wide in his broad, round face. “Goddamn you, Uriah!” Then he slammed the door and, cursing and stumbling around, started dressing.

He and Dixie spoke a few words in hushed voices, and then the door opened again, and Pete Borgland was stomping into one boot, his blue cavalry bib-front tunic half-buttoned, as he stumbled into the main office and slammed the door behind him.

Borgland, a rotund man with thinning, curly dark brown hair and bulging blue eyes, stopped and pointed. “You’ve gone too far this time, Uriah!”

“Ah, sit down and have a cup of your rotgut mud, Pete. Besides, you said the same thing last time.”

Borgland scowled, his breathing slowing gradually, and pressed his hair against the sides of his head with both hands. He glanced at Junius. “What’s this drunkard doing here?”

“I bet I don’t drink no more than you do, Lieutenant.” Junius grinned, showing about four discolored, misshapen teeth. “I threw in with Uriah. Showed ’im where a devil’s lair of swillers was holed up. We got us over twenty heads out yonder—don’t we, Uriah?”

Borgland scowled as he drew up the suspenders of his cavalry trousers. “Where in the hell did you find that many swillers all in one place?”

“There were more than that,” said Zane, taking another sip of the bitter coffee. “Lost a whole passel in a river.”

Borgland continued to stare skeptically at Zane. Finally, he said, “Let me see these heads, so I know you two ain’t been on a bender the last few months.”

Zane led Borgland and Junius outside. He slid the staghorn-handled bowie knife out of his right moccasin and cut into one of the four bags draped over the casket holding his Gatling gun. One of the severed heads spilled out, hit the street with a thud, and immediately started to smoke and sizzle until the skin
melted and curled away from the bone. Flames licked out of the growing black hole in the head’s temple, where the sun hit it directly.

The fire exploded with a
whoosh!
and almost instantly the head was turned to a pile of gray ash from which a few lingering flames licked before dying.

The head hadn’t completely burned up before Zane was holding the cut bag up by its bottom and shaking out the four other heads in it, all of which hit the ground and rolled and burst into flame.

“That’s five there.”

Zane summarily cut into and emptied the rest of the bags while Pete Borgland watched ruefully from the veranda. Junius stood one step down from Borgland, letting his injured ankle hang lightly over the step’s edge, thumbs hooked behind the cartridge belt wrapped around his concave waist and bony hips, grinning gleefully.

When all twenty-one heads had hit the street and flared up like Mexican fireworks, quickly turning to dust, Borgland swung around and headed back into his office. “All right, all right. Quit showin’ off. Get in here and I’ll see if I got enough cash to cover the bounty.”

“He’ll come up short,” Zane said with a fateful sigh, cleaning the blade of his bowie on Junius’s ragged shirt as he mounted the veranda.

As he ducked through the door and into the office, Borgland was crouched over the safe abutting the back wall, to the right of the door, which just now opened. A pretty though tired- and disheveled-looking redhead with sandy eyebrows appeared. Borgland looked up as Dixie came out and started toward the front of the room.