Outlaw Train (17 page)

“It was…I…Sir, why are you questioning me so closely? I feel like a witness in a court of law.”

“Mr. Anubis, may I ask you a question straight out?”

“Go ahead. Shoot.” While he spoke, Anubis put the hood back in place on the Tennessee Kid’s head.

“I have a theory, and I wish to ask you if this is correct. And I ask you in advance to take no offense, despite the fact my theory, if true, falsifies the story you have already presented.”

“It won’t be the first time I’ve been called a liar, sir. When you work in a showman’s trade, there are plenty who question every word out of your mouth.”

“Well, sir, here, then, is my theory. I believe that you did embalm this corpse, as you said. And I believe you have done so with a level of skill and technique that is perhaps otherwise unknown in the embalming profession.”

“Thank you.”

“But I also believe, sir, that this is not in fact the corpse of the Tennessee Kid. If it is the Tennessee Kid, it cannot be true that you preserved his remains ‘quite recently.’ It simply cannot be, given the date of the Tennessee Kid’s death.”

“What are you saying, sir?”

“I’m saying that I believe you are involved in a typical showman’s deception. I believe you obtained a body of some individual, embalmed that body ‘quite recently,’ to use your own phrase, and after that process was complete, decided—in consultation with your partner, no doubt—to transform the body into that of the infamous Tennessee Kid,
so you could display it as such, for profit. So you shotgunned the face and amputated the leg, and disposed of the latter by throwing it off your ‘Outlaw Train’ while it was en route to Wiles.”

Anubis looked like a cornered rabbit. But he cleared his throat and quickly gained composure. “You are an imaginative man, Mr. Brand. After only minutes of conversation you have constructed an elaborate scenario explaining my involvement in a situation about which I know nothing. I’m not in the habit of dumping severed legs off moving trains, sir.”

“Well, it’s a mighty big coincidence, that leg turning up, preserved just like that body sitting beside you there, and you and your train in the county just at that same time.”

“Well, there’s some other explanation, my friend. I may not know that explanation, but I am sure there is one. Because I know nothing about that leg.”

But Brand was not listening. His attention had been caught by the sight of the beautiful Katrina Haus walking hurriedly down the boardwalk on the far side of the street. She was taking the full brunt of the rain, hair stringing down across her shoulders and the fabric of her tight-fitting dress clinging to her shapely torso.

Suddenly Anubis and the Tennessee Kid were no longer of interest. Without another word Brand left the sheltered area and splashed across the muddy street toward Katrina’s swift-moving form.

Just then the wind buffeted him, sweeping down the street from west to east. This was no ordinary wind, though; it was so strong as to nearly knock
Brand off his feet. He lost his hat and saw it sail down the street, ten feet off the ground, until out of sight. When he turned again, Katrina Haus was climbing to her feet, holding to a nearby hitch post to keep her balance in the wind. She had been knocked off her feet by the powerful gust.

“Are you all right, Miss Haus?” Brand called over the howl of the wind.

Katrina seemed disoriented. Brand wondered if she’d struck her head on the hitch post when she fell.

“I’m…I’m fine, sir,” she said. Just then another, weaker, gust struck, and Brand saw what appeared to be an envelope blow out of her hand and dance down the wind as his hat had done.

“Shall I chase that down for you, ma’am?” Brand offered.

“No need, sir. But thank you. I doubt it can be found now. This wind is remarkably strong!”

“I’ve lived here long enough to know that such weather as this can lead to—” Lightning flared, a long flash that filled the roiling sky with brilliance like a bright noon.

Bess Keely marveled at the scarcity of saloons in this town. Not at all typical for a Western town. But at length she located the Redskin Princess, from whence Sheriff Crowe had been blasted off the mortal coil, and there purchased a cheap bottle of whiskey. She could not know, of course, that she was procuring for Dewitt Stamps a life-ruining poison up until his reformation…a poison of which he was now ready to partake again, despite
years of stubborn resistance and sacred vows to the contrary.

Bess was a woman of the outdoors by habit, and had trained herself to be attuned to the weather without much overt concentration upon it. Her instinct told her that the storm coming this night would be significant, perhaps unusually so.

She pulled her hat low against the rain and wind and pushed on up the street, back toward the jail with Dewitt’s bottle tucked under her arm. She noticed a few other people moving about despite the storm—a very pretty young woman in a pale blue dress, who happened to fall when a strong burst of wind threw her off balance and at the same time yanked something out of her hand and blew it down the street.

Then Bess noticed something else: a wagon parked under a sheltering cover on the opposite side of the street. Two men sat on the seat bench, one moving around restlessly, the other still as a statue and holding a sign. And wearing a hood that covered his entire head. Very strange.

Stranger yet was the inner disturbance that the unmoving figure caused when she looked at him. Even though she could see nothing beneath the hood, she had an uncanny feeling of somehow knowing this man. It was unaccountable.

Bess found herself drawn toward that wagon. She crossed the street, nearly falling herself in the strong and rising wind, and almost dropping Dewitt’s bottle. The driver of the wagon noticed her as she came close, and greeted her, as most did on first glance, as “sir.”

“I’m no ‘sir,’” she said. “But never mind it. I’m curious about who that is beside you.”

“This is none other than the famous and departed Tennessee Kid,” Anubis replied. “His face is covered because of the gruesome manner of his death.”

Bess opened her mouth to request that the hood be removed, but the issue was rendered moot when a new jolt of wind caught the hood and tore it off the dead man’s head. It blew away and Bess gasped at the terrible sight of the shotgun-ruined face.

Yet something drew her around the wagon to the other side, where the dead man was perched. She had to look more closely at the meaty remains of that face, hideous though it was.

Anubis seemed embarrassed by the exposure of the destroyed face, and actually tried to cover it with his hand, then his hat. No matter. Bess hiked herself up on the side of the wagon and looked closely at the dead man’s right ear, and the area just behind it.

“Good God!” she whispered.

“I know, ma’am,” Anubis said. “It is a horrible vision to see. That’s why we keep it covered. Damn this wind…”

Bess shook her head vigorously. “No…no. That’s not what I’m reacting to. Mister, this dead man beside you, I know him. I know him by the scarring around his ear…that’s scarring that resulted from him being attacked by a biting dog when he was only six years old. Almost tore his ear off, that dog did. And left him with very distinctive scars that stayed with him for good.”

“What are you talking about, ma’am?”

“This man isn’t any ‘Tennessee Kid,’ sir. This man is Ben Keely. My brother.”

Anubis’s mouth worked like that of a dying fish out of water, gasping vainly.

Bess Keely drew the Remington pistol she carried in a holster on her right hip, and leveled it at Anubis. “Is your name Raintree, mister?”

At that moment, from the railed platform in the open portion of the steeple of the Methodist church a little down the street, a boyish voice pierced through the howl of the wind.

“Twister!” Oliver Wicks, the climbing boy, called down. “Off to the west! Big one, and coming this way!”

Oliver Wicks clung to the platform rail, fighting the wind’s efforts to tear him away, and watched the monstrous, twisting funnel tear its way across the landscape. He could see almost nothing of it except in those moments lightning allowed it, but each new jolt of light revealed that the spinning finger of Satan was moving closer.

For the first time in his life Oliver felt afraid to be where he was, clinging like an ant to a high place. He was a confident boy, secure in his practiced abilities to move squirrel-like through the heights with little danger of falling…but his confidence faded in the face of the oncoming cyclone. Yet he made no move to descend; he was frozen, paralyzed by terror. All he could do was cling and watch and call out his warning to the town below, and pray that before it reached him, the twister would either die away of its own accord or leap over the area where he was.

The former option didn’t seem likely. The twister seemed to be growing stronger and larger, not diminishing. Oliver ceased his warning shouts; the wind was so strong now as to blow away his words like feeble straws, and the roar was louder than
anything the boy had ever heard. Oliver held fast to the railing and prayed hard that he would go to heaven when the twister got him, for he was sure now that it would. It was something he just knew.

A couple of streets over, another person watched the coming tornado from a high perch and began to anticipate his own death just as Oliver was. Simon Montague’s old eyes were feeble, but the lightning was so bright that even he could see with clarity what it illuminated…and what he saw was a black, moving, spinning wall that seemed intent upon reaching and striking the town of Wiles. The old man’s spit-dribbled lips moved in a silent prayer and he backed away from the window that provided his only accessible view of the world outside. The glass of the window was rattling hard in its frame, ready to break out under the buffeting air.

The old man moved back toward his chair, but stumbled and went down hard on his knees. He grunted at the impact of kneecaps on floor, but managed not to fall completely over. He groped at and found the chair he’d been attempting to reach, and used it to prop himself up.

“Lord God, forgive my sins and take me to your glory,” he said. “My time has come to die, and I am ready. Forgive me, Lord, for my transgressions—”

His further words were cut off by an explosive, shattering, splintering burst, a noise filling his ears like the roar of cannon, as the front wall of the emporium, struck by the hard winds moving in advance of the tornado funnel, ripped away and flew like a gigantic, mad bird across the rooftops of Wiles, Kansas.

The old man felt his feeble body being lifted by the incredibly powerful air and pulled toward the vacant space that had previously been filled by the front wall of his secret residence. Desperately he put his hands out and randomly found a hold on an upright beam. A half second’s decline in the wind’s force allowed him time to wrap his arms around that beam and clasp his hands together on its far side in an embrace of life.

Simon Montague expected to die, but he would not be pulled to his doom without a fight.

Katrina Haus wished she had not left the hotel. Perhaps she would have been equally unsafe there as she was here on the street, but at least she would have walls around her and not be exposed directly to the stinging wind and bulletlike rain.

She had left the hotel in order to fulfill the request on Howard Ashworth’s card, to meet him at the specified time near the emporium. Of course, at the time he’d written that request he had certainly not been expecting such weather as this. If he could have seen this coming, Katrina knew, he would have asked to meet her at a different time, and certainly at a different place, not in an open lot on the edge of town.

The weather had already been bad when Katrina left the hotel, but it had degraded much further and faster than she had anticipated as she walked across town. But she’d always been that sort who, once she had set her course or her plan, was not prone to deviate. If Howard Ashworth wanted to meet her tonight, she would meet him. Unpleasant, plain man
that he was, he was also a man of means, and was willing to pay well for what she provided him. Katrina had known many men such as Ashworth in her day, men whose wives had grown old and harsh and unloving. Men to whom a young beauty such as she was could hardly be resisted.

Finding a momentary refuge in an alley, where the rain was lessened and the wind deflected, she caught her breath and made herself think through her situation. Why should she go on? At this point, no one would be waiting for her in any open lot near the emporium. The storm had seen to that. Not even alley cats and skunks would undertake coition in this weather.

But perhaps Ashworth would be nearby, in some shed or barn or other shelter, watching for her. And if the storm lessened, she and he could have their rendezvous, she could collect her money for services rendered, and the evening would not be wasted.

Then she remembered the warning given her by Jimmy Wills back at the hotel. What if he proved right, and it wasn’t Howard Ashworth seeking to meet her at all, but Howard’s wife? Maybe the woman had learned somehow of her husband’s carnal tryst with the beautiful traveling prostitute. Maybe she had in mind a bit of vengeful repayment.

Katrina vowed to herself to be wary and ready, then began moving down the alley. She reached Emporium Street just as the wind doubled and tripled its intensity, and watched in shock as the upper front of the big building tore away and twisted
off in the stout wind almost as easily as had that piece of paper that had blown from her hand.

A stray and splintering board torn free from a shed at the end of the street struck Katrina in the side of the head and send her flailing to the dirt. Groaning, she managed to reach up and touch the tender and bleeding fresh wound on the side of her head before she passed out.

The huge twister entering the town made a sudden change, rising into the clouds and skipping over the rest of the town. Over in his church steeple, Oliver Wicks breathed a prayer of thanks that he had managed to hang on to his perch. Mere moments before it had looked as though the cyclone was going to strike the church directly.

Oliver’s sense of relief did not last long. Looking back out across the plains and low, rolling terrain west of town, he saw that another twister was forming, this one perhaps larger even than the one that had just spared him, and most of the town.

Time to descend. Even for a climbing boy who was at home in high places, the ground was sometimes the best place to be. There was a ditch beside one of the back alleys, and that, Oliver decided, was where he needed to place himself.

By the time Oliver had reached that ditch and thrown himself down in it, trying to ignore the water running beneath and around him, Katrina Haus was coming to and slowly pushing herself to her feet. Woozy and unfocused, she staggered to the left, her feet getting caught up in the hem of her dress and tripping her. She went down again, bumping her shoulder against the base of a telegraph pole.
She did not pass out again, but felt astonishingly weak.

She lost all ambition to meet Howard Ashworth in the designated lot near the emporium. The mere thought of trying to endure an encounter with a man while she felt this unstable was enough to sicken her. Yet she moved forward is if she had a clear destination. It was all done unthinkingly by this point; her only focused desire now was to find a place that was safe from the storm.

Yet she had just seen a portion of the biggest and strongest building in town ripped apart as if it were made of twigs. Where could she go? Was there any safe place at all in this town at the moment?

She looked up at the ruptured and gaping front of the emporium and saw something that brought her to a stop despite the driving rain in her face. An old man, bearded, was clinging in obvious fright to a support beam in what remained of the emporium attic. Wiping rain and grit from her eyes, Katrina looked at the man and decided she had never seen him before. He reminded her of Campbell Montague, but Campbell had no beard and did not seem as feeble as this man.

Lightning flashed and bathed the entire scene in bright light, and she knew he saw her as clearly as she saw him. He stared hard at her. Then darkness filled the street again, and when the next lightning flash came, she was no longer there, and Simon Montague could not see where she had gone.

At that moment Simon realized how exposed he was. He’d managed to hide from the world up here, behind the wall that was now a gaping hole, but
there was no hiding to be done now. All he could do now was hope that the building continued to stand until he could get out of it, and that no other funnel clouds would come ripping through to suck him out of the gutted attic portion.

“Uncle Simon!”

The call came from Macky, who appeared at the largely undamaged rear section of Simon’s attic, having climbed the private stairs from below. Macky came up and put his arm around his uncle’s stooped shoulders and looked with concern at his face.

“I’m fine, Macky, fine,” Simon said. “What about you?”

“There was, there was a big, huge thing, twisting all around, turning and blowing and roaring so
loud
!”

“It was a twister, Macky. A cyclone. They happen sometimes in this part of the country. Did it hurt you?”

“No…scared me. Scared me bad. It hurt the store, Uncle Simon. It tore off your wall, and now, if people look up here, they can see you’re here. Won’t be secret no more.”

“It won’t matter, Macky. People aren’t going to care about such things for a while, not with the weather this dangerous.”

Macky held to his uncle, shivering in fright. He stared out the open front of the emporium as though he expected to see Satan rise from the street below and float in to consume them like a great beast. The rain and wind continued, not at tornado force at the moment, but touched with a chill and somehow bitter on the lips and tongue.

“Macky, there was a woman in the street below, a young woman, very pretty. Nobody I had seen out the window before. Then she moved away and was gone. Do you know who it might have been?”

“It might have been my friend, Miss Haus. She’s a real pretty lady, and nice. She told me I could be her friend.”

“Why is she in town?”

“She talks to dead people, Uncle. They tell her things and she tells their kinfolk.”

“Don’t believe in such things, Macky. That’s not real. That’s not the way the world really works.”

The wind began to rise again suddenly, and from the west came a renewed roaring that seemed, as before, to be coming toward the town. “We should get down from here, Uncle Simon,” Macky said. “It might blow down the rest of the store with us in it.”

The old man loathed the thought of leaving what had been his refuge for a good while now, the place he could hide from a harsh and judgmental world. But he knew Macky was right. The upper reaches of an already damaged and weakened building were not where to be when a tornado was sweeping in.

Time to descend to the street before the next twister arrived.

“Let’s go, Macky,” the old man said.

They descended. Exiting the building into an alley, they were buffeted by the harsh weather and Simon found himself unsure where to go. After a few moments of indecision, during which the approaching roar grew much louder, they headed toward the rear of the alley and into a nearby lot filled with brush and wild grass. A couple of rough sheds
stood around the rear perimeter. They went to the closest one.

Inside, they stood in shock and looked down at what lay in the middle of the dirt floor. The old man shook his head. “The storm killed her somehow. Something hitting her in the head, I suppose.”

Macky, though, knelt and examined the corpse of Katrina Haus more closely. He opened his mouth as if to point out something, then seemingly changed his mind and stood again without a word.

Even if he had spoken, he would not have been heard. The sound of a second twister hitting the remnant of the Montague Emporium, and the sound of the building exploding, was so loud and intense that anything Macky might have said would have been masked and lost.

He and his uncle crouched together beside the body of the most beautiful woman ever to pass through Wiles, Kansas, and clung to each other, both wondering if they would survive, if their kinsman Campbell Montague had survived the storm, or would, and what would become of the town of Wiles when at last this horrible night was over.

Macky closed his eyes tightly, unwilling to be looking in case the twister struck the shed that sheltered them, or in case some heavy piece of the shattered emporium came falling through the shed roof. He prayed for safety, and while he did so, made a promise:
Lord, I’ll tell Luke Cable about what I saw when I looked at Miss Haus. Because I think I know what it means, and he needs to know.