A Dead Man's Tale

by James D. Doss

  Parris scowled at the heavy door the clever man closed behind him. “He lays the phone he swiped from his wife right on the table, knowing there’s no way I can use it to prove how he set up his wife and her boyfriend. And he gives you the cassette tape the ‘ape’ made the break-in sound effects on. That barefaced bastard is determined to twist our tails!”

  “It does look like Professor Reed enjoys the last laugh.” But what’s done is done. And he did it with style. Charlie Moon enjoyed his final smile for the day.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Scott Parris Raises the Critical Issue

  One of the allegedly legendary lawmen was already chowing down on a full pound of grilled trout.

  As the other picked listlessly at his lasagna with a silver fork, he addressed his friend in the morose tone of a diner who has lost his manly appetite. “Charlie, d’you mind if I ask you something?”

  The famished Indian kept his eye on the platter. “Would it matter if I did?”

  “No.”

  “Then go right ahead and ask.”

  “This stuff about Reed slipping backwards in time—d’you figure there might be any truth to it?”

  “No.” Charlie Moon paused to return the trout’s flat-eyed gaze. “I don’t think so.”

  Parris laid his fork aside. “But you’re not absolutely dead certain.”

  “The things I’m absolutely dead certain about, I can count on the fingers of one hand.” As he slipped along toward tomorrow on the presumably illusory arrow of time, the practicing Catholic counted all four of them.

  The chief of police started to say something, then decided to let it ride. At least until Charlie had finished his meal.

  A Reflection on Life’s Mysteries

  After dessert, Charlie Moon was ready to settle back and let recent events recede into the past.

  Not Scott Parris. The man who could never leave well-enough alone felt compelled to broach a worrisome subject. “Charlie?”

  Uh-oh. Moon reached for the last cookie. “Don’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Whenever you say ‘Charlie’ in that tone of voice, you generally end up ruining my good mood.”

  “All I wanted to say was…well—I don’t know how to account for the fact that a smart man like Sam Reed believes the strange things he does.”

  Moon didn’t agree with the premise of his friend’s concern. The fellow who’d outsmarted both of them was smart enough and then some, but what the fellow actually believed was hard to pin down. As far as the Ute was concerned, Reed’s story was a tall tale and that was the end of the matter. “Maybe Professor Reed’s too smart.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The rancher bit off half the cookie and took his time enjoying it. “When a man’s IQ gets beyond a certain point, sometimes he slips off the deep end.”

  That was an interesting notion. “You figure Reed’s a genius who’s also a nutcase?”

  “Let’s just say that he’s an overly clever fellow who occasionally lets his imagination run away with him.” Moon pointed the half cookie at his friend. “Don’t ever let that happen to you.”

  “You figure I’m that smart?”

  “Nope. I figure you for the other type.”

  “What?”

  “Gullible.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say, Charlie.”

  “Okay, consider it unsaid. How about ‘highly impressionable’?”

  “That’s better.” But not much.

  “So let’s forget all about Sam Reed dying in June and coming back in May.”

  Parris nodded. “And ending up in world that was more or less like the one he left, and remembering his future.”

  “Yeah, forget about that too.”

  “I’ll try.” A pensive sigh. “But it ain’t as easy as you think, Chucky.”

  “I hope you’ll notice that I’m not asking ‘why?’”

  “Well, because that tale Reed told us kinda got me to thinking.”

  “That’s your problem, pard—don’t go giving me heartburn.”

  “I can’t help it.” Parris belched and felt the sting of acid in his throat. After crunching a Tums, he explained, “Since Sam Reed told us all that weird stuff—I’ve recalled about a half-dozen peculiar things that’ve happened to me over the years. Any one of ’em could be explained by me slipping back and forth between this universe and another one like it.”

  “I don’t want to hear a single, solitary word about it.”

  “Okay, here’s a f’r instance. About a year ago, I woke up one morning with a mole on the back of my right hand. One that wasn’t there the night before.”

  “Maybe some moles are like tomatoes, pard—they grow fastest at night.”

  “This was a great big one, Charlie. Size of a nickel.”

  “That’s a whopper all right.”

  “You haven’t heard the really creepy part.”

  “And I don’t want to.”

  “The very next day, that mole was gone—I mean there wasn’t the least sign it’d ever been on my hand. Now explain how that happened.”

  “I don’t have to; it wasn’t my mole.” Glancing at the clock on the wall, Moon began to unfold his slender frame from the chair. “Discussing your skin blemishes is great fun, pardner—but I’ve got to be rolling on down the road toward home.”

  Parris was gazing at his unfinished meal with a glassy-eyed expression. “One morning when I was a kid, I was fishing for catfish in Pigeon Creek and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was a good twenty miles away.”

  “Maybe you got abducted by undocumented aliens.”

  Parris shook his head. “I was in Aunt Minnie’s house in Midway and it was the day before yesterday.”

  Charlie Moon didn’t try to conceal his surprise. “There’s a Midway in Indiana?”

  “Sure.” Parris blinked. “It’s midway between De Gonia Springs and Richland City.”

  “Sounds like a nice spot. I’ll check it out next time I’m in the neighborhood.”

  Charlie’s trying to make me forget what I was talking about. “You oughten to make sport of me.”

  “Why not, pard?” Moon reached for his hat.

  The displaced Hoosier jutted his chin. “Because some fine morning…” He turned a blank stare on the candy jar.

  The happy man flicked a fleck of white fluff off the brim of his Stetson. “Some fine morning what?”

  Parris elevated his gaze to glower at the tall, thin man. “Some fine morning, you’re liable to wake up and find out you’re somewhere else. And in another time.”

  As the rancher donned his handsome black hat, he thought about that. “I hope it’s on a nice beach in Tahiti in 1950, and pretty girls in grass skirts are bringing me pineapples and papayas and whatnot.” The Ute saluted his best buddy in this universe. “See you later.”

  “Drive careful.” For quite some time after his Indian friend had departed, the chief of police tarried in the private dining room. After taking a tentative taste of the cold lasagna, the famished man commenced to consume samples of every treat in the candy jar except for the Gummi Bears. While absorbing about three thousand sugary calories, the lawman contemplated his conversation with the tribal investigator. I guess it’s a good thing that Charlie’s so down-to-earth and levelheaded. But Scott Parris’s grunt suggested that a “but” was in the offing. But every once in a while, he sure does go against the grain. The discomfited soul comforted himself with the hopeful thought that sooner or later, Mr. Moon’s gonna get his comeuppance.

  Sooner.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  “And the cowboys now as they roam the plain,

  For they marked the spot where his bones were lain,

  Fling a handful o’ roses o’er his grave

  With a prayer to God his soul to save.”

  A Trivial Detail

  As Charlie Moon was making his way to the Silver Mountain Hotel parking lot, he was smiling about his conversation with Sco
tt Parris. I guess I spurred Scott a little too hard. The semirepentant offender unlocked and opened the Expedition door. I’ll find a way to make it up to him. As he eased himself onto the driver’s seat, something caught Moon’s eye. Something that wasn’t there.

  What? Why, a facsimile of a spider on the windshield, of course.

  This doesn’t make sense?

  Patience. All will be explained.

  What the driver was surprised not to see was the break in the safety glass where—just last month—a chunk of gravel had made a pit. Over the past week, the thing had grown eight little legs.

  Moon inspected the windshield with considerable care. Didn’t help. It just ain’t there. He continued to stare at the unbroken glass. There had to be a simple, rational explanation. But try as he might, Moon couldn’t think of one. That spider break was there this afternoon when I parked the car, so unless somebody replaced the windshield while I was inside having supper with Scott… But even that outlandish explanation wouldn’t work. This windshield isn’t a new one, not by a long shot. The glass was dirty, and the lightly sandblasted surface still had the wiper marks from a rain days ago. And the sticker from the last oil change is still in the upper-left-hand corner.

  Well. What does a man make of a weird thing like that?

  As he pulled out of the parking lot and aimed his trusty automobile in the happy direction of hearth and home, Charlie Moon made up his mind to forget about it. Every once in a while, something peculiar happens. Like the big mole that showed up one morning on the back of Scott Parris’s hand, only to be gone the next morning. And little Scottie going to sleep beside the creek and waking up twenty miles away and two days earlier in Aunt Minnie’s house in Midway, Indiana. Like those inexplicable conundrums, the missing break in the windshield fell into that category of sleeping dogs that a sensible man leaves alone.

  And so he did, with the aid of a musical distraction.

  When Granite Creek was about mile and a minute behind him, Charlie Moon plugged Reed’s audition tape into the dashboard cassette player. The leader of the Columbine Grass was impressed as he listened to the rich man sing and finger the strings. Sam Reed has a fine tenor voice and he sure knows how to make that mandolin sing. Moreover, the member of the Velvet Frogs barbershop quartet had selected a fine old song for a lonely man to listen to around about sundown.

  As the Ute rancher rolled along on the darkening high plains, his consciousness slipped backward in time to away back then when the dying cowboy had begged his friends not to bury him out here on the lone prairie.

  Epilogue

  Loose Ends

  Concerning the so-called Crowbar Burglar

  To date, this particular pest has been neither identified nor arrested, but it is gratifying to report that the troublesome felon no longer plagues the peaceable folk of Granite Creek. His chosen vocation was abruptly terminated during a break-in on a balmy August evening when a sweet little eighty-six-year-old retired schoolmarm got a bead on the center of his belly with her single-shot Remington rifle and popped a .22-caliber projectile into his Coors belt buckle. Upon hearing the metallic ping of a lead slug on brass and the thug’s startled yelp, the shooter made the following observation: “Thunder and damnation! I did so want to gut-shoot the foul miscreant!”

  Alas, before the lady was able to reload, the startled intruder had vanished like a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze, and has not been seen or heard from since. Chief of Police Scott Parris opines that the undesirable element has found a more congenial place to settle down and pursue a less-stressful vocation.

  Which he has.

  Among his other transitory enterprises, the habitual criminal is using the Internet to sell Idaho real estate. We are talking prime shoreline lots on Lake Colette, which is located approximately six miles east of Taffy Creek.

  Potential buyers who bother to consult a map will conclude that both the lake and the creek are entirely fictitious.

  One Last Detail

  An inconsequential postscript. Hardly worth mentioning.

  But in the interest of fair play, it must be reported that Charlie Moon was mistaken in his suspicions of Samuel Reed. We do not refer to the golf-course-ape escapade, where the tribal investigator’s speculation was right on the mark. Reed did indeed make his break-in recordings at the groundskeeper’s toolshed, and he was the “gorilla” who chased Ms. Bernice Aldershott.

  Moon’s wrongful suspicion has to do with the investor’s uncanny prognostications. The wealthy man never made a dime on insider information. Moreover, Samuel Reed was convinced that he slipped between parallel universes, and he firmly believed his assertion that there were as many otherworldly copies of Charlie Moon and Scott Parris as himself. And for that matter, yourself.

  Speaking of whom—brace yourself for some serious bad news.

  That’s right. Professor Reed’s enormous multiverse is also populated by gazillions of Daisy Perikas. Each copy, no doubt, up to malicious mischief specific to her peculiar circumstances. The mind reels, boggles, and so forth at the contemplation of such a calamity. (Parenthetically, let us say multiuniversal calamity.) Notwithstanding the fact that in many of these worlds Miss Daisy would have clubbed Chico Perez (aka Posey Shorthorse) to death. In which instances, Mrs. Reed might well have lived happily ever after.

  But enough of this pseudoscientific twaddle.

  Let us dismiss all that does not lead to bliss.

  Good night.

  May you sleep in perfect peace and dream visions of multihued autumn hills, rainbow fields of wildflowers, and crystalline mountain streams wherein speckled trout dart about.

  And just on the off chance that Professor Reed is right, may these same blessings be enjoyed by all your hypothetical counterparts, doppel-gängers, doubles, and whatnot.

  Wherever they might be.

  And whenever.

  Also by James D. Doss

  The Widow’s Revenge

  Snake Dreams

  Three Sisters

  Stone Butterfly

  Shadow Man

  The Witch’s Tongue

  Dead Soul

  White Shell Woman

  Grandmother Spider

  The Night Visitor

  The Shaman’s Game

  The Shaman’s Bones

  The Shaman Laughs

  The Shaman Sings

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Epigraphs that appear throughout A Dead Man’s Tale are taken from the Western folk song known variously as “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” and “The Cowboy’s Lament.”

  A DEAD MAN’S TALE. Copyright © 2010 by James D. Doss. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doss, James D.

  A dead man’s tale / James D. Doss.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-61369-3

  1. Moon, Charlie (Fictitious character: Doss)—Fiction. 2. Police—Colorado—Fiction. 3. Colorado—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.O75D38 2010

  813'.54—dc22

  2010032509