Slocum and the Comely Corpse

by Jake Logan

  A breathless minute passed. The wind blew, pelting the trees with raindrops. Another minute passed.

  Suddenly, from the front of the house, there was a scream, just as suddenly choked off. There was a flurry of shots.

  The third man kicked open the back door and threw himself inside. As soon as he went through the doorway, he started shooting. Muzzle flashes flickered inside, like lightning.

  He fired six shots, emptying his gun. Silence and darkness once more fell inside the house.

  After a pause, the man materialized in the doorway, framed by it. He stepped outside. His hat was gone, and what looked like a handle was sticking out of his head at an odd angle.

  He collapsed, spilling facedown into the yard. He lay still, motionless as a rock.

  The back door hung open, the doorway a black oblong.

  One of the riders’ horses hadn’t been securely hitched and broke free, running away. No one chased it. The two men who’d been at the front of the house were nowhere to be seen.

  The house was dark, silent.

  16

  Slocum tied the horses up to the trees. He took the sawed-off shotgun from the saddlebag, closing it. The piece came together with a metallic locking sound.

  “Let’s go, Maud. I want to see what happened in the house.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  “You come too.”

  “No, thanks. If you want to risk your neck, that’s your business. I’m in a different line of work.”

  “You were the one who was telling me how Nedda was a big dumb farm girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Maud eyed the unmoving body in the yard. “I’m not so sure now. She’s one of those religious types, and you never can tell how that kind is going to jump.”

  “She’s religious and she’s working for you?”

  “My money’s as good as anybody else. You ought to know. You’re stealing it. Besides, she’s no whore. She’s a drudge, a scullery maid. She cleans, fetches, washes, and does the donkey work around the house.”

  “Maybe she decided to go into business for herself.”

  “I always thought she was too stupid to steal.”

  “That’s the kind you’ve got to watch.”

  Maud shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t understand it. She was always spending her spare time with Deacon Mulch, doing charity work for the church.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s not holding a prayer meeting now.”

  “If it’s her inside the house. Maybe it’s somebody else.”

  “Who? You told me that she lives alone.”

  “She does.”

  “If that’s the way she treats company, I can see why she doesn’t have more visitors.”

  “Who were those three men?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Slocum said.

  “Uh-uh. You go if you want to. Not me.”

  “I’m not leaving you here with the horses, Maud. Now, come on.”

  He took hold of her wrist and started forward, pulling her after him. She came along reluctantly, hanging back.

  She said, “Why do we have to walk?”

  “We can’t sneak up on the house on horseback. Those three rode up bold as you please, and things don’t seem to have worked out too well for them.”

  Freezing rain fell, sleeting slantwise. The tiny ice particles stung where they struck bare flesh. They made pattering noises against the ground, like sifting sands. It would help cover the sound of the duo’s approach.

  The wind was at the backs of Slocum and Maud, beating against them, the icy cold creeping through their garments like water soaking through a sieve. They walked bent forward, crouched almost double.

  The house stayed dark, silent.

  Slocum held the sawed-off in his right hand, and Maud’s sleeve in his left. He approached by a route that put the outbuildings between them and the house, screening them from view.

  Maud said, soft-voiced, “Give me a gun so I can defend myself.”

  “Who’s gonna defend me against you?” said Slocum.

  Ice pellets fell hissing on dead weeds and grass, forming a slippery crust which crunched underfoot. The outlines of the outbuildings and house were blurred in the murk.

  They reached the back of the barn, leaning against it. Their hair and eyebrows and garments were powdered with wet ice crystals. The narrow roof overhang did nothing to protect them from the sleet.

  From inside the barn came the sound of a heavy body lurching against stall rails and clomping hoofbeats: a horse. Only one, from the sound. The animal was restless but not panicked. The barn door was closed, so it had missed the brunt of the mayhem.

  Slocum’s hands were stiff with cold. He flexed his fingers, working them. He beat his hands against his thighs to restore circulation. After a bit, the life came back into them. They lost their numbness and started to hurt, but at least the flexibility had returned.

  Slocum peeked around the corner of the barn, at the house. The back door hung open on its hinges, each gust of wind slamming it against the wall with a loud bang. The sound reminded Slocum of the trapdoor falling open on the gallows, dropping the condemned into eternity at the end of a rope. It was a reminder he could have done without.

  The open doorway looked like a black coffin standing upright. At the threshold sprawled the dead man. He lay facing away from the house, with his arms stretched out in front of him.

  There was a handle sticking out of his head, an ax handle. The blade was buried deep in the top of his skull.

  From it gushed a large dark puddle of gore, which was being churned by the sleet.

  Ice crystals covered his back, making him look like he’d been covered with glazed vanilla frosting.

  The heft and balance of the sawed-off in his hand was a comfort to Slocum.

  From the road, fresh hoofbeats sounded, slowing as they neared the house. Maud frowned.

  “More gentlemen callers,” Slocum said.

  17

  Marshal Hix and Deputy Dick Wessel slowed their horses when they saw the two horses hitched to a fence post in front of Nedda’s house. They reined in, stepping down into the rutted road, which was frozen solid and smeared with a thin coating of slushy snow. The icy rain was tapering off, replaced by a fall of fat wet snowflakes. The flakes made soft plopping sounds as they pelted Wessel’s hat, which was pulled down tight on his head to keep the wind from blowing it off.

  They had their guns drawn, and hitched the horses to the rail and stood over to the side, at the northeast corner of the white picket fence enclosing the front yard. On the other side of the fence was a line of man-high bushes, bare now, but still providing some cover from the snowy winds.

  The house was a simple structure, basically a one-story white-painted clapboard box with a peaked roof. It fronted the road. The front gate hung open.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Wessel said. “The horses must belong to the three men we saw ride out of town like bats out of hell, but where are they?”

  “They must be around here someplace,” Hix said, snowflakes clinging to his walrus mustache. When he spoke, the flakes looked like they were going to fall off, but they never did. Flecks of tobacco clung to his yellowed teeth.

  “They can’t have gone far. We took out after them right after we saw them swing wide of the road guards. They were only a couple of minutes ahead of us,” Hix said.

  Wessel was only half listening. He was up close to the strangers’ horses, eyeing them closely.

  Hix said, “What’re you doing over there?”

  “These look like Pierce horses,” said Wessel.

  “How can you tell that? Hell, one horse looks pretty much like another.”

  “I can tell. I’ve got an eye for horseflesh. These are big fine animals, the kind that all of Pierce’s guns ride. The regular ranch hands ride ordinary cow ponies, but the shooters ride these big mounts.”

  “They could be stolen. That’d explain why those fellows were r
iding so hard and fast. Steal something from Pierce, and you better ride fast.”

  “Why’d they stop here, at Nedda’s of all places?”

  “When we find ’em, we’ll ask ’em,” Hix said. “In the meantime, let’s stop mooning about the horses and start dealing out some professional-style law enforcement, like the folks of this county pay us to do.”

  His breath melted the snowflakes on his mustache, but more fell to take their place.

  “It was a mistake to deputize Pierce’s bunch,” Wessel said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “They’re a tough bunch,” Hix said.

  “They’ll tear up the town unless they get whipped into line.”

  “They’re rowdy but they mean well. They’re high-spirited young fellas.”

  “Maybe some of those young fellas got a hankering for a woman and decided to drop in on Nedda.”

  Hix looked at him. “I said they’re high-spirited, Deputy, not blind. That’s enough palavering. Let’s see what kind of a situation we got here.”

  They moved along the fence, past the line of bushes, and into the unbuffered wind and snow, which hit them in the face. Hix clapped a hand on top of his hat to keep it from blowing away, mashing the crown.

  There was about a quarter inch of snow on the ground. It crunched under their boots as they stepped. They had to swing wide out into the road to get past the horses. When they moved in front of the house, the wind lessened.

  There were tracks in the snow, footprints leading through the open gate and across the lawn. The lawmen went through the gate. Two sets of footprints led up to the front of the house, while a third went around to the back.

  It had begun to snow so hard in the last few minutes that the footprints were already beginning to fade under the newly fallen snow.

  Wessel, who was in the lead, indicated the footprints going around to the back of the house, then gestured that he was going to follow them. Hix nodded, motioning that he would tackle the house from the front.

  Wessel angled off to the side, where he could see the side wall of the house and some of the backyard and outbuildings. The snow on the ground brightened the scene, but the wind-driven snow whipped into his face, cutting down visibility, so the two factors, the brightness and the wind, tended to cancel each other out.

  Wessel swung wide as he moved to the back of the house so no one could surprise him by lurking behind a blind corner. He didn’t know what he would find, but he had his gun ready. The snow tended to muffle sound, but one thing he could hear was the wailing wind.

  Hix advanced at the front, gun leveled. Behind curtained windows, the house was dark. The front door was firmly, solidly shut.

  A ball sat on the top step of the front stairs, teetering near the edge. It was about the size and shape of a child’s ball, and that was funny, because Nedda lived alone and didn’t have any kids and wasn’t the type to let the neighbors’ kids play on her property.

  Hix started climbing the steps. That set the ball into motion, making it rock gently back and forth. It was not so much round as melon-shaped, and lay on its side.

  Something about it unnerved Hix, who was a hard man to get a rise out of. Maybe it was because a melon doesn’t have hair. He stepped back onto the walk at the foot of the stairs.

  The melon rolled off the top stair and fell the rest of the way, bouncing down the steps. It was heavy and made thunking sounds each time it hit a riser. It plopped into the snow at Hix’s feet, looking up at him.

  It was a head.

  A man’s head. The expression on its face wasn’t nice. Hix thought he might have recognized its owner, but he couldn’t be sure because the grimace of fear, pain, and outrage on it distorted the features into something inhuman.

  The head had part of a neck too. The cut was very clean.

  Hix looked up. The front door was still solidly shut, the house still dark inside. Was it his imagination, or was one of the curtains slightly moving, as if someone had lifted the edge to peek outside?

  With his gun raised, the hammer thumbed back, Hix started backing away from the house. The head took a little half roll toward him, and for one awful instant Hix had the feeling that the damned thing was following him.

  But the head came to a stop against a bump in the ground, and Hix realized that its seeming volition was just an illusion. That didn’t mean that whoever had separated the head from its body was an illusion, though.

  He backed away, trying to look everywhere at once. He took small, careful, almost dainty steps that looked comical in a man of his size and ruggedness.

  This is going to take some serious strategizing, he said to himself.

  Meanwhile, Wessel had found the body in the backyard. He stood near the corner of the house, with his back to the wall.

  He didn’t like that open back door. He didn’t like it at all. There were footprints leading into the house, and a much shorter set of prints leading out of the house, where the man with the ax parting his hair had taken a few staggering steps before flopping facedown on the ground.

  But there was no second set of prints, left by the escaping killer while making a getaway. Which indicated that the killer was still inside the house.

  He didn’t like the banging door either. Each time it slammed into the wall, it sounded like the crack of doom. The unholy racket made it hard to hear anything else.

  A shadow of motion flickered on his right side, away from the door, where his attention was focused. He sensed more than saw a heavy bearlike form looming beside him. His heart skipped a beat. Then he saw that it was Hix, and his heart started beating normally again.

  Then Hix stuck a gun in his back.

  “It’s no joke. I’ll blow a hole in your liver,” Hix said, his tone conversational but fraying at the edges. He smiled tightly, showing yellow teeth.

  Wessel didn’t think it was a joke. He knew it was real, horribly, frighteningly real. It crystallized a lot of suspicions he’d been nursing about Hix for a long time, and he realized that he’d guessed right, only Hix had thought faster and this was the payoff.

  Hix took the gun out of Wessel’s hand. He eased down the hammer, then tossed the gun aside. The pressure of his gun muzzle boring into Wessel’s back was a reminder that death was near.

  “Another one, eh?” Hix said. “Who is it? Engels?” He prodded Wessel with the gun. “I don’t know,” Wessel said.

  “It looks like him. A big man. Engels is a big man too,” Hix said. “He don’t look so big now. Who’da thunk Nedda had it in her?”

  “What’s Nedda got to do with it?”

  “What? You mean you ain’t figured it out yet, a bright fella like you? I’m disappointed in you, Deputy. It’s a cinch you’ll never make marshal.”

  “Nedda, the murdered whore, Lonnie and Sutton, Pierce—and you, Hix—you’re all tied up together.”

  “Well, sure, it’s easy for you to put it together now that the bodies are piling up and I’ve got you under the gun. But you still ain’t got the half of it, and from the look of things, you never will.”

  “Suppose you tell me, Marshal.”

  “Stalling, eh? I’d like to oblige you, but it’s cold out here, and Nedda’s waiting inside. It ain’t polite to keep a lady waiting. Not that Nedda’s no lady. She’s a damned fury, is what she is. The Big Boss sent three men to do her in, and instead she did for them, all three of them. With an ax. It don’t hardly seem natural that a female could be that ornery, does it?”

  “The Big Boss? Who’s that? Pierce?”

  “You ain’t even close.” Hix’s toothy grin widened, while his eyes were narrow. “Pierce takes his orders from the Big Boss, same as I do, same as plenty of others in this town do, only most of them honkers ain’t got the faintest idea who’s sitting at the top of the heap, pulling the strings on the rest of them.

  “Call yourself a manhunter, Deputy? Sheeyit, you couldn’t find a turd in a sugar bowl. Here you been a peace officer in Bender for the last
couple of years, rattling doors, rousting drunks, and generally walking around with your head up your ass, and all the time the sweetest little outlaw setup of all time has been going on right under your nose and you never got a whiff of it, you dumb son of a bitch.”

  “I’m not as dumb as you think, Hix. I knew there was plenty of things about this town that didn’t add up: all the stagecoach robberies with no survivors, the travelers who disappear into the mountain passes and never come out, the bones found bleaching out in the desert, Pierce and his gang of guns, when that phony ranch of his that doesn’t do enough business to meet a weekly payroll. Sure, I knew there was something plenty rotten in Bender, but like everybody else, I held my nose and kept my eyes shut.”

  “Well, now you’re going to shut them permanently,” Hix said. “There’s a crazy woman in this house and she’s got to be stopped pronto before she can do any more damage, and you’re elected. You’re going in through that door and I’m coming in right behind you, and when the smoke clears, I’ll be the only one standing.

  “We’ve jawed enough. Start walking.”

  “And if I don’t?” Wessel said.

  “Then I’ll kill you where you stand, set fire to the house, and burn the bitch out,” Hix said.

  “Like you did at the Doghouse? I knew there was something wrong about the way that went down, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

  “Those small-timers get big ideas. Sneaking around, night-riding, doing their petty rustling and horse-thieving, they see things they shouldn’t. They got too big for their britches, so it was time to light a fire under ’em.

  “Come to think of it, why should I stick my neck out trying to take Nedda in her own den? Hell, the last fellow who tried that lost his head over her, heh-heh. Reckon I’ll just play it safe and put the house to the torch. When she tries to make a break, it’ll be a turkey shoot. A good hot fire’ll warm up those tired old bones of mine too.

  “Course, that leaves you holding the short straw, Deputy.”

  “Going to shoot me in the back, Hix?”

  Hix took a few steps back from Wessel, away from the house. He said, “I’m going to give you a sporting chance, Deputy. Go for your gun.”