“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 gra
dually, 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.
“Hey, where you goin’, honey?” Borgland said, spreading his arms. “I done told ya—I’ll be back in a minute.”
“You paid for an hour, Pete. That hour was up pret’ near two hours ago.”
Dixie, dressed in a low-cut, cheap, pleated dress with a red sash to match her hair, and taffeta flowers pinned to one thin shoulder strap, rolled her hips as she approached Zane, who stepped to one side, making room. She blinked slowly and spread her thin lips in a smoky smile. “Hi, there, Uriah. Long time, no see.”
Zane removed his hat and dipped his chin. “How you been, Miss Dixie?”
At the door, she swung around and slid a slender lock of hair behind her ear, caressing the doorframe with her rump as she raked her eyes across the big ghoul hunter’s tall, brawny frame. “Come on over to the Wildcat later, and we’ll discuss it.” She cut a wry glance at Borgland. “I’ll give you a good deal.”
She rolled on out the door and pulled Junius’s battered canvas hat down over his eyes as she stepped down off the veranda and headed out into the street.
Borgland sighed as he removed a small canvas sack from the safe, whose only other content was an old Civil War–model Colt Army, straightened his back with a slight crunching sound, and, wincing, tossed the sack onto his desk.
“Twenty-one ghouls,” he muttered, shaking his head and tipping up the sack to allow a mess of gold coins to spill out onto the blotter half covering the scarred top of his desk. “And here I thought we were runnin’ them ghouls to ground, cleanin’ ’em out good. Ain’t that what the Army’s been tellin’ us—that we’re winnin’ the goddamn war against those creatures?”
“That’s what the Army says,” Zane said, digging a small hide makings sack out of an inside pocket of his wolfskin vest. “But I been out there in them mountains and canyons as much or more than any Army patrol, and I can tell you, you can’t ride from Bozeman City up Montaway to Denver without runnin’ into more than I got bullets and arrows for. Everywhere you go, settlers are havin’ a time of it—losin’ stock to the swillers’ and werewolves’ night raids and bein’ attacked right out in open ground by the hobgobbies.”
Thoughtfully, Zane dribbled chopped Mexican tobacco onto a sheaf of wheat paper troughed between the first two fingers of his left hand. “And I don’t know if the altitude’s gettin’ to me, or what, but I think I saw a dragon on the way into town.”
The government paymaster stopped counting and sliding coins around with his index finger to glance up at the bounty hunter skeptically. “What’d you say?”
Zane rolled the wheat paper closed around the quirley and stuck the cylinder in his mouth to seal it with spit. “You heard me right.”
Borgland studied him for a time, then went back to sliding gold coins away from the scattered group on his blotter. He laughed and shook his head, as though Zane had told him an especially funny joke. But his expression soured suddenly, and, still counting under his breath, he said, “I just hope you’re as mad as you must be. The swillers, werebeasts, and hobgobbies are all the monsters I need. Don’t need no more.”
He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small canvas pouch, which he held open beside his desk while he slid the counted coins into it. “At least Charlie Hondo’s all sealed up tighter’n a tick on a dog’s ear in Hellsgarde Pen.”
Zane frowned over the match he’d lit to fire his cigarette. “Hondo’s in Hellsgarde?”
“Sure as shit in the hogpen.” Borgland smiled though he had only two gold coins left on his blotter. The rest were in the burlap sack he now set down hard on Zane’s side of his desk. “They run him to ground two weeks ago in Denver, playin’ faro if you can believe it. Drunk as a damn English lord. A barman recognized him from a wanted dodger, sent over to the federal building for marshals, and eight of ’em came in, snugged their rifle barrels up against Charlie’s neck, and dragged him away, howlin’ like a fork-tailed devil, in chains. They had a quick trial and, since it was obvious they really did have the fearsome leader of the infamous Hell’s Angels in custody, hauled him out to Hellsgarde in one o’ them armor-plated jail wagons accompanied by an entire company of federal soldiers, three cannons, and four Gatling guns.”
“What the hell they go to all that work for?” Zane said, anger burning in him as he remembered that horrific night in the green hills around Gettysburg, when he lost not only a brother, three cousins, and an uncle, but nearly every Confederate soldier bivouacked in the area that night excepting a few wise and desperate enough to throw up a white flag with General Lee’s own tearful blessing.
Lee had been mangled and would later take his own life with a silver bullet, just as Abraham Lincoln did a few weeks later, disgraced by his unforgivable sin.
“Shoulda taken his murderous hide out and shot ’im! Course, they shoulda shot Abe right alongside him—if he wasn’t already dead, that is—but the least they coulda done is killed the sonofabitch!”
Zane’s face was swollen with rage, veins standing out on his forehead. He clenched both fists tightly at his sides until his knuckles nearly popped. Tobacco from his crushed quirley sifted between his fingers. Borgland backed away from the enraged hunter, genuine fear bleaching his pasty features.
“Christ almighty, Uriah—I myself personally had nothin’ to do with it. You know what the policy is—those ghouls they think might be more
dangerous dead than alive, they lock up in Hellsgarde and throw away the key. They don’t want none of ’em comin’ back even stronger than they was when they was alive.”
Jaws hard, eyes blazing, Zane said, “The superstitions of foolish old men. You kill a werewolf, he’s dead. That’s all there is to it.” He oughta know as well as anyone, Zane vaguely reflected with a moment’s feeling of dread.
“Well, some Europeans more experienced with them vermin than even we are seem to think the most powerful of ’em gain more strength if they’re killed by humans. Takes a werewolf to kill the most powerful werewolf and keep him dead.” Borgland shook his head. “I reckon after the big mistake they made at Gettysburg, trusting those devils who just seemed so honest and sincere, they ain’t takin’ no more chances. It’s Hellsgarde for the worst.”
“Ah, hell, Uriah,” Junius said, standing near Zane, looking apprehensively up at the big man towering over him and Borgland. “It ain’t like Hellsgarde’s a Sunday picnic along the river. They don’t treat ’em none too well there. I hear they cage the werebeasts up tight in stone-walled cells without windows and with stone, iron-banded doors that need to be opened with three keys.”
The prospector whistled his appreciation of the government’s thoroughness. “I say it’s a fate worse than death.”
Zane drew a deep breath but he still looked swollen up and ready to rain. “They get the rest of ’em—the other three still on the loose?”
The original band of Hell’s Angels had been comprised of forty-five mercenaries, most of whom had been run down and killed by bounty hunters, including Zane himself, who’d personally taken care of a half dozen. Last he’d heard, four remained on the run somewhere in the West, keeping low profiles, including Hondo himself.
“Ain’t heard nothin’ about them.” Borgland sagged down in his chair and pocketed the remaining two coins on his desk. “All I got to say is folks everywhere is gonna be sleepin’ a whole lot sounder now that old Charlie Hondo’s been run to ground and locked away at Hellsgarde on a diet of cornpone and piss water.”
Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) Page 4