The Shotgun Arcana (7 page)

She now had the mountain lion pinned. She felt the cougar’s vertebra as she gripped the cat’s neck. Using the spine as her map, Maude was confident that the nerves she sought were there. She applied pressure to the site with her thumbs, the exact amount to affect a human. The cougar snarled and thrashed, fighting to get free. As it felt the pressure on its neck it fought harder. It wasn’t working. A thrill of panic ran through Maude, but then she applied more pressure, more. Maude squeezed with all her might and hung on. The cat kicked and clawed as best it could with its rear legs. A stray swipe caught Maude’s shin. The stab of pain made her wince and gasp, but she held on. This would work. This had to work.

Time expanded and contracted as the struggle continued. The cougar began to shudder; its struggles became weaker and weaker. It made one last violent attempt to break free, which almost succeeded, but Maude held steadfast. Finally the cougar was still, becoming blessed dead weight in Maude’s aching, trembling arms. If she maintained the pressure now, the cougar’s fluttering heart would still. It was the right thing to do, the practical and the tactically sound decision. Her strength was faltering and her wounds were demanding attention. She might not be able to do this again.…

She let the slumbering cougar slip to the cave floor. If she needed to do this again, she would. She knew it.

She bound the cougar with knots that would tighten the more the cat struggled to free itself. She wrestled with loose rocks and small boulders to choke up the cistern and conceal it. No other animals would be poisoned by whatever unearthly force slumbered beneath the cold water. Maude went out into the chill predawn of the scrubland and scouted a few plants she needed to undertake what she was trying next: some wild licorice and creosote.

She ground up the plants she harvested and added some of the powders in her satchel and then worked the compound into the bloody carcass of a small desert hare Maude hunted down and skinned. She left the medicated meal in easy reach of the unconscious and bound cougar. She ran her hands over the cat’s sleek flank, scratched it behind the ears and felt a tremble of a purr rumble in the golden lady’s chest.

She mended her wounds as best she could, given her resources, applying poultices to the wounds to ease blood loss and minimize infection.

Maude collapsed, hot, tired and exhausted from battle and blood loss, onto a cool corner of the temple floor. She dreamed of Constance’s city of bones and its inhuman inhabitants.

She awoke to a low growl and a foul smell. Maude was sore, tired and cold. The wound on her back was warm and pulsing with pain. She stood silently and banished her own discomforts as well as she could, using her training. The mountain lion was awake. It had eaten the hare. It seemed that Maude’s concoction had worked. The cougar had gotten ill and had vomited on the cavern floor. It was thrashing and trying to free itself. Maude approached it slowly.

“It’s all right, golden lady,” she said, keeping eye contact with the cat. “That feels better, doesn’t it?”

Maude’s hand flashed out. Her nails sliced through the rope effortlessly. And the action seemed to startle the big cat as it shook off its bonds. Maude stood her ground, her hands at her side. The cougar snarled at her.

“Go,” Maude said. “I’m glad this ended with no one dead. If you hunt people again, I’ll find you. It won’t end this way twice.”

The mountain lion ascended the stone stairs out to the open air, to the scrubland. She paused to regard Maude with a roar. Maude met her eyes. The cougar looked away and continued her climb and was gone.

Maude looked around the temple, frowned at the mystery of it and then began her own climb upward, back to the fading night and the trek to Golgotha. She knew she would make it home.

Strength

Mutt shouted to two local men he recognized riding a buckboard wagon down Bick Street, headed out of town. George Minter and Eustace Bloom were new hires, working for Sarah Pratt, the mayor’s wife, out on her ranch. They pulled the wagon to a halt.

“We got a mess in the alley, fellas—a murder,” Mutt said. “You have horse blankets or cloth we could pitch up to cover up the entrance?”

“Yeah, I think we do,” George said. “Happy to oblige, Deputy.”

“You gonna take orders from some damned heathen savage, George?” Eustace rumbled. He was drunk, but even when he was sober Eustace was an ass. “Hell, it’s a damn miracle the fucking ‘deputy’ isn’t running up and down the street, naked and drunk off his ass on firewater.”

“You caught me on a rare clothed, sober day,” Mutt said, and turned back to George. “Appreciate the help, George.”

George turned and whispered to Eustace, “You are lucky he’s too busy right now to pay attention to you, or your stupid ass would be in jail.”

Hatred aimed at you was kind of like being caught in the rain, Mutt reasoned. It was uncomfortable as hell at first but once you were good and soaked in it, you really didn’t pay it too much mind, even though it was still unpleasant. Mutt had been hated by so many people for so long, he hardly felt the sting of it anymore. At least that was what he told himself.

With George’s help, Mutt was able to nail a pair of horse blankets up as a crude curtain at the entrance of the alley. It was less than two hours to sunup and most folks were off the street by now and home in bed, hoping their wives hadn’t heard them sneak in. A small crowd of the hangers-on gathered on the narrow mud- and shit-rutted path that was Bick Street. Others lurked on the partly warped wooden planks that were laid out on either side of the street, acting as sidewalks to allow gentlefolk to avoid the filth of the road. Many of the Dove’s working girls and some of their clients gathered on the porch to see what the commotion was about. There was almost a festive, party atmosphere to the gawkers, which made Mutt want to shoot each and every last one of them in the face. A few of the “Doves” ducked through the side door of their building to peek in the alleyway. When they saw what remained of their sister, the screaming began. The cry went up on the wind. Sadly, such sounds were all too familiar in the night air of Golgotha.

“Y’all git on back inside now,” Mutt shouted to the girls. Most obeyed, but a few and their male company crept out into the alleyway to get a closer look. Mutt desperately wished the sheriff were here. Jon Highfather was a leader; people respected him, liked him and listened to him. Mutt was none of that on his best day. He didn’t talk pretty and most of the town hated him and the rest were afraid of him. Jon wouldn’t be back till tomorrow, so Mutt had to do it his way and Jon could apologize to everyone for him when he got back.

“Listen up!” Mutt shouted. “This is now an official investigation of the sheriff’s office.”

“And what does that mean, Deputy Red Nigger,” one of the drunken miners on the Dove’s porch shouted back. A roar of laughter came up from the crowd. Mutt walked over, grabbed the miner by the collar and pulled him off the porch and over the rail, into the dirt. Mutt drew his pistol as fluidly as breathing and cocked and aimed at the stunned drunk on the ground. Mutt fired a single round. The crowd gasped and a few of the Doves screamed. One swooned and fainted.

The miner blinked and opened his eyes. There was a smoking bullet hole in the dirt next to his head.

“That’s Deputy Crazy Red Nigger, sir,” Mutt said loud enough for everyone to hear. “The next one of your pasty-faced lick-fingers who says anything other than ‘yes sir, Mr. Deputy, sir,’ to me, I will put a hole in you and let all the stupid leak out. Y’hear!”

The miner struggled to his feet. Mutt frowned and wrinkled up his nose. “Get your ass home, and for God’s sake, clean it up, you done gone and shit yourself.”

The miner staggered-ran toward his buddies, who rushed him away into the night, at arm’s length. He was rubbing his ears from the blast of the gun.

Jim walked up, still a little pale, with a big gent beside him.

“Doc Tumblety weren’t home,” Jim said. “I left a message with his boy, Rowley. Clay said he’d come, but he weren’t none too happy about it. And this here is the Dove’s manager.”

The man was over six foot eight, a good foot taller than Mutt at least. His muscles were barely contained by his clothing. He was dressed in an odd mixture of workingman and dandy: a simple linen white work shirt with a short collar, denim dungarees and heavy boots like those the miners wore, but also a proper gentleman’s waistcoat, made of brown dyed linen with brass buttons, and a gold watch chain attached to the coat and arching to the pocket. The man had brown hair cut fashionably short with a thick part from forehead almost to his nape. He had a short, neatly groomed beard and hazel eyes that gave away nothing of the intent behind them. He had an ugly wooden cudgel that looked small in his hands. He carried it as a walking stick. Mutt nodded at the giant.

“You’re the manager now?” Mutt said. “What happened to Ladenhiem?”

“Left town,” the man said. “Seems there was some kind of a problem with spiders? Things crawling out of people’s dreams, webbing them up, drinking them dry, or some such nonsense. Man was obviously a laudanum fiend.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mutt said, snapping his fingers. “He was one of the ones got caught up in all that. Funny, I thought old Ladenhiem had more sand in him than that. Oh, well. Handle’s Mutt, pleased to make your acquaintance.”

The manager nodded. “The girls call me the Scholar,” he said. “As good a name as any. How do you do, Deputy? Mr. Negrey here says we have an issue in the alleyway.”

“If by issue you mean a cut-up whore, then yes, we do,” Mutt said. “Can you tell me who she is?”

“I’ve seen her about,” Jim said. “Never got her name, though.”

The Scholar nodded in the direction of the body and the two men started back toward the closed-off alleyway. Jim fell in to follow them, but Mutt stopped him.

“Crowd control, Jim,” Mutt said.

“Mutt, I ain’t gonna fire and fall back no more,” Jim said. “Promise.”

“I need you out here,” Mutt said. “These folks like you a damn sight more than me. I’ll fetch you presently. And don’t worry about getting sick. A man sees something like that and don’t get queasy, something broken in him.”

Mutt and the Scholar parted the blankets and entered the alleyway. The stench hit them instantly. Mutt noticed the Scholar seemed unaffected. They moved down past the open alleyway door and around the small crowd of Doves and clients that were gathered. One man, with salt-and-pepper hair and wide muttonchops in an unbuttoned pair of trousers and nothing else, was ducking under one of the slimy lengths of suspended gut, trying to reach the dead girl’s torn body.

“Take another step and I’ll throw your ass in jail,” Mutt said to the man’s back.

“Go to hell, Chief,” the man said, trying to avoid the blood and bile dripping off the intestines. “I don’t gotta listen to you when the real law is out of town. ’Sides, I always wanted to know what it was like to diddle a dead…”

The Scholar grabbed the man by the spine. His fingers, the sizes of gun barrels, squeezed the flesh and bone. He yanked the man back and lifted him several feet off the ground, one-handed. The man screamed. The Scholar tightened his grip on the spine.

“Be quiet,” the Scholar said softly. “Take the pain.” The man tried to stop screaming, and began to sob and whimper. Mutt stood back and pushed his hat up on his head, watching the show.

“If I apply a little more pressure, you will never feel pain again below your neck,” the Scholar said to the man, turning him around to view his face. “Mr. Macomber.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Mutt said, “Max Macomber. Your wives know you out cattin’ about, Max? Not very churchgoin’ kind of behavior, now is that?”

“I’ll have your filthy mongrel hide hung up to tan,” Macomber snarled through tears of pain. “I am a personal friend of Mr. Bick and when he…”

“Mr. Bick has entrusted me to manage his business here,” the Scholar said. “You disgust me with what you proposed to do with the dead woman’s body and furthermore, you had not negotiated an acceptable price with the house to undertake such activities, Mr. Macomber.”

The Scholar moved the dangling man back to the alley door of the Dove’s Roost and set him down. Macomber doubled over in pain, gasping. He looked up at the manager and the deputy.

“I’ll see both of you fired for this! That popinjay, Pratt, was a fool to ever let Highfather hire you. Can’t trust a savage like you to guard an outhouse, and I will talk to Malachi about you tomorrow, you lummox, I assure you.”

“Very good, Mr. Macomber,” the Scholar said. “Good evening, sir.”

Macomber disappeared inside, aided by a few of the Doves. A few girls and patrons still hovered by the open door.

“Could y’all please stay the hell back!” Mutt said. He and the Scholar moved closer to the girl’s body. Someone had set a lamp near the edge of the black lake of blood.

“Old Max means it,” Mutt said. “He’s part of the Bevalier machine. Rich as he is ornery. He’s going to give Harry Pratt a hard time next year in the mayoral election. You may not be at this job very long.”

The Scholar said nothing. He leaned closer to look at the dead woman’s sliced face, wrapped in blood and shadow.

“Molly James,” the Scholar said. “They call her Sweet Molly, or called her, to be more precise. She was an employee here for the past year, I believe.”

Mutt looked hard at the Scholar. “This means less to you than a spit, doesn’t it?”

“Deputy, I’m paid to look after Mr. Bick’s business interests here,” the Scholar said. “Miss James was a commodity and, as such, her loss is regrettable. But I sincerely doubt you will go home and shed any tears for a dead whore, as you so elegantly put it.”

Mutt didn’t reply. There was a commotion from the alley entrance as Jim and Clay Turlough stepped through the blankets. The sky was lightening to a slate blue. Somewhere a nightjar was singing.

“Well, I want to know who the ‘commodity’ was dating tonight,” Mutt said. “I’m sure a meticulous fella like you has all kinds of records and such.”

“I’ll discuss it with Mr. Bick,” the Scholar said.