A Dangerous Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “It’s Comanche Crossing’s fight, not mine.”

  Bowman got testy again. “Answer the question. Can you shade Longley?”

  “On a good day, yes I can.”

  “But you won’t.”

  Sullivan shook his head. “Not unless he does me some personal harm.”

  “He’ll step around you, Sullivan, and then shoot you in the back,” Bowman said. “Take my advice. Get out of this town.”

  “Sure, when I find Crow Wallace’s body.” Sullivan glared at Posey, “This man here won’t fake it for me.”

  “I safeguard my integrity at all times,” Posey said, feeling the brandy.

  “Sometimes a lie greases the wheels,” Bowman said.

  “Not from these lips,” Posey said firmly.

  Sullivan was about to say something further when the door opened . . . and he knew he was about to hear more bad news.

  Big Jim Lloyd, the shotgun guard, walked into the saloon. His entire posture was tense and stiff, a man with a story to tell. He ignored Sullivan and Posey, stepped right to Buck Bowman. “You’re the new sheriff?”

  “That’s what they call me.”

  “Then let loose the bloodhounds. Deke Dillard is gone.”

  “Mr. Dillard, the Butterfield driver? But he’s dead,” Posey said.

  “Yeah, he’s dead, but you’ll have a hard time proving it. His body’s been stole.”

  “Not another one,” Bowman said, his face ashen.

  “Seems that dead folks can’t stay dead around here,” Lloyd said.

  “How did that happen, and when?” Sullivan asked.

  “When? Sometime earlier this evening,” Lloyd said. “How? Hogan Strike, the undertaker, says he was embalming Dillard for a trip back to Santa Fe so he could be planted by his family. He went out front to lock his door and that’s when the body was stolen from his back shop.”

  “Did he see anything, hear anything?” Sullivan questioned.

  Lloyd shook his head. “Not a damned thing. Dead men don’t walk by themselves. Gimme a whiskey.”

  “Drink up, Ebenezer, I want to take a look at the undertaker’s place,” Sullivan said. “All these body-snatchings are linked and Crow Wallace is in the mix somewhere.”

  “Hogan Strike is still there,” Lloyd said. “I’m sure he’ll be glad of company. He lives at the back of his shop.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Posey insisted. “I feel so ill.”

  “Damn, but you’re a complaining man, Ebenezer.” Sullivan hauled him up. “Get on your feet.”

  “Sullivan, if you find anything let me know,” Bowman said.

  “You’ll be the first to hear, Sheriff.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Sullivan Turns His Back on Danger

  “Quit whining, Ebenezer,” Tam Sullivan said. “Like I told you already, you began the whole damned thing with your talk of Burke and Hare, and body snatchers.”

  “And now I rue it very much, Mr. Sullivan. My words were spoken in an ill-considered moment.”

  Their feet thudded on the boardwalk like dim drums as they walked toward the undertaker’s premises. Snow plastered their fronts, driven by a frigid, scudding wind, and the unseen cloud-deck had dropped lower, shrouding the town in Stygian darkness.

  “My feet are freezing,” Posey complained. “I can’t feel them anymore.”

  “Ah, here’s the place.” Sullivan rapped on the door.

  A wide alley separated the undertaker’s from the rest of the stores, as though they wished to put distance between themselves and a business that dealt in death.

  Posey was uneasy and tried to withdraw into his coat as the door opened a crack and a man’s unsteady voice said, “Yes?”

  “We’re here about the missing body,” Sullivan said.

  It seemed that Hogan Strike was either a trusting man or badly shaken because he didn’t ask for Sullivan’s bona fides. “Come in.” He opened the door wide. “And welcome.”

  After they introduced themselves, Strike led Sullivan and Posey along a narrow hallway lit by a single, guttering oil lamp. As befitted his profession, the undertaker was a thin man, pale as a cadaver. Blue shadows pooled in his sunken cheeks and temples.

  He spoke with an echoing, booming voice as though he was talking from within a marble sepulcher. “The deceased was resting in the slumber room you see at the end of the hallway . . . before . . . before this terrible thing happened.”

  “An unhappy business, Mr. Strike,” Posey said. “One senses an evil hand at work.”

  “Ah, yes indeed, one does,” Strike agreed, sensing in Posey a fellow traveler. “The trials and tribulations of the undertaking profession are many, but this is beyond even my experience.”

  “Smells mighty strange in here,” Sullivan said as he reached the door.

  “That’s the embalming fluid,” Strike said.

  “Very necessary in your profession, I’m sure, Mr. Strike,” Posey added.

  “Yes, a valuable tool of the trade, Mr. Posey. And, as you will appreciate, a vital one. I always keep an adequate supply on hand to cater to the demands of the dear departed.”

  “Very commendable, Mr. Strike,” Posey said. “My dear wife says something similar about the demands of the bloomer manufacturing profession.”

  Sullivan stood next to a steel table surrounded by glass vessels and coils of rubber tubing. “The stiff was lying here, Strike?”

  “Yes. This is where Mr. Dillard slumbered,” the undertaker said.

  “Was that window shut and locked?” Sullivan pointed to a large one, cut into the far wall.

  “Apparently not,” Strike said. “When I got back from securing the front door, it was wide open.”

  “These days one can’t be too careful, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Posey. Not fastening the window was—if you’ll forgive a little undertaker humor at this sad time—a grave omission on my part.”

  “A little joke helps one bear up in times of stress, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

  “Indeed it does, Mr. Posey. That’s exactly what I tell my bereaved. I say, what is Mr. Sullivan doing?”

  “Searching for clues, I suspect, Mr. Strike,” Posey said.

  Sullivan had opened the window and climbed outside. The distance of the windowsill from the ground was only about three feet. The body could have been shoved, dragged, or even carried through comparatively easily.

  He kneeled and examined the muddy ground just under the window. As he’d expected, tracks led from the window and disappeared around a gable wall of a timber shed with a tarpaper roof about ten feet behind the building. The area between was sheltered from the worst of the snow.

  The boot prints were huge and the soles seem to be studded.

  Sullivan whistled through his teeth. A mighty big feller had left those tracks, judging by their size and depth. The bounty hunter placed his boot in one of the prints and it looked like a canoe in a barge.

  Whoever he was, the body snatcher was a giant. Sullivan had seen no one answering that description in Comanche Crossing.

  He tensed.

  He’d heard a whisper of sound . . . like the rustle of a dead leaf across cobbles.

  Looking around him, his eyes searched the darkness, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Without thinking about it, he opened his coat and dropped his hand to his gun.

  Posey’s frightened face appeared at the window. “Mr. Sullivan, are you all right?” he whispered.

  “Shh. There’s something out here.”

  “Then come in at once.” Hogan Strike sounded scared.

  Sullivan ignored the man and listened into the black tunnel of the night. He heard it then, a low, primitive growl from somewhere to his right, in the direction of the alley. Then a whisper of stealthy movement, padded paws on giving ground.

  Something wicked this way comes. Where had he heard that? Sullivan swallowed hard.

  Yeah, he remembered. Pa reading Shakespeare aloud to Ma
by the midnight firelight. Macbeth. The Scottish play. The bad luck play.

  Drawing his Colt, Sullivan backed toward the window, staring wide-eyed into the menacing darkness. Fear grabbed at his gut, twisting, spiking, giving him no peace.

  He backed up slowly, followed by the snarl that seemed to come from everywhere, a malevolent presence hovering the air around him. He reached the window, a step away from safety.

  It was shut!

  “Let me in, damn it!”

  His wild plea unheeded, Sullivan did what a man who lives by the gun learns to never do—he turned his back on danger. He frantically tried the window. It was locked.

  Behind him came a frightening rush of sound.

  He caught a glimpse of something gray. Something huge. Something terrifying. He fired. Fired again. His shots scarred the darkness with dazzling flashes of scarlet light, then he heard a piercing whistle in the distance.

  Silence.

  His ears ringing, half-blind from muzzle flare, Sullivan stood in a drift of gun smoke and waited for what was to come.

  The wind sighed, snow flurried, and the night, shattered like a mirror by gunfire, slowly pieced itself together again.

  Booted feet pounded on the boardwalk and a man’s voice yelled, “Who’s there? Identify yourself or take the consequences.”

  “It’s me, Bowman. Tam Sullivan.”

  A few moments past as the sheriff seemed to absorb this information. Then he roared his exasperation. “Git the hell out here!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Death by the Sword

  Buck Bowman stood on the boardwalk, gun in hand, as Tam Sullivan stepped out of the alley. Before the bounty hunter could say a word, the sheriff demanded, “Are you drunk?”

  “No,” Sullivan answered.

  “Then you got no excuse for your behavior. Explain yourself.” Bowman looked mean as a curly wolf. He kept his Colt in his fist.

  “You ain’t going to believe this,” Sullivan said.

  “If you and Posey are involved, I’ll believe anything.” Bowman stepped closer to Sullivan, almost to kinfolk distance. “Doc Harvey came to see me tonight. He said he’d gone back to his surgery to mix a powder for old Mrs. Clark who’s down with the rheumatisms and found his place ransacked.”

  “It wasn’t ransacked—” Sullivan realized his slip and stopped. “Oh, hell.”

  Bowman waited.

  “I was looking for Crow Wallace’s body.”

  “You thought Dr. Harvey had it.”

  “Yeah. I thought that.”

  “But you didn’t find it?”

  Sullivan shook his head. “Not a trace.”

  “We’ll go into Strike’s store, or whatever the hell it’s called,” Bowman said. “I don’t want to hear the rest of your story in a blizzard. But first hand over your gun, Sullivan, real slow and easy, like.”

  The bounty hunter smiled, snow on his mustache. “I must be a real desperate character, Bowman.”

  “Yeah, I came to that decision a while ago.” The sheriff shoved Sullivan’s Colt into the pocket of his sheepskin. “Now get inside and don’t make any fancy moves.”

  They walked into the undertaker’s place. The lamp in the hallway glowed with feeble light, but it was bright enough to reveal the blood splashes on the walls and floor and the mangled bodies of Ebenezer Posey and Hogan Strike.

  Sullivan rushed to Posey’s inert form and took a knee beside him. He held the little man’s shoulders in his arm and looked up at Bowman. “He’s still alive. He’s breathing.”

  The sheriff looked closely at Strike and shook his head. “This one’s done for. All cut to pieces.”

  “Ebenezer, can you hear me?” Sullivan said, bringing Posey’s face close to his own.

  The little man’s eyes fluttered open. “If it’s all right with you, I want to go to bed now, Mr. Sullivan.”

  “What happened, Ebenezer?”

  “So tired now. Time for bed.” Posey’s voice was as weak as the mew of a newborn kitten.

  “Bowman, don’t just stand there, get the doc.” Sullivan held Posey closer to him. “Damn it, Ebenezer. Don’t die on me just as I got to liking you. Talk to me.”

  The little man’s fur coat was matted with blood and his hands, small as a child’s, were badly slashed.

  Sullivan frowned, suddenly angry. Someone had used an axe on Posey or a heavy knife and his tiny body had suffered terrible wounds.

  Gray shadows gathered in the little man’s face, something Sullivan did not want to see.

  “Damn you, Ebenezer. If you let yourself die I’ll put a bullet in you, I swear I will,” Sullivan said.

  Posey was silent. He still breathed, but barely.

  Suddenly Sullivan was angry with himself for caring about the little man. “Damn it, Ebenezer. I don’t need this. I don’t want to grieve for somebody.” To prove to himself that he was only person on earth he was concerned about, Sullivan said, “I need you to identify Crow Wallace’s body, you hear? Don’t die on me.”

  If Posey heard he made no sign.

  “Don’t die on me, Ebenezer,” Sullivan whispered again.

  “I give him maybe a one in ten chance of pulling through this,” Doctor Harvey said. “He’s badly injured.”

  “What do the injuries to Posey and Hogan Strike tell you, doc?” Bowman asked. He and Tam Sullivan stood in the physician’s spare bedroom.

  Ebenezer lay in the bed, his head and hands visible, swathed in bandages.

  “That someone tried to kill them both,” Harvey said.

  “With a knife or an axe?” Sullivan questioned.

  “Neither, I think,” the doctor said. “I saw wounds like these during the war, usually on cavalrymen. They were inflicted by a saber.”

  “You mean somebody used a saber on Posey and the undertaker?” Bowman was astonished.

  Harvey nodded. “Yes, an edged weapon of some kind. A sword in my estimation.”

  Sullivan and Bowman exchanged glances. Guns they knew . . . but swords?

  “That’s hard to believe,” Sullivan said. “Nobody carries a sword in Comanche Crossing.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s a fact,” Harvey said. “Now, if you will excuse me, gentlemen. Mr. Posey must rest. He’s very weak.”

  “Take care of the little runt, doc,” Sullivan said. “I kinda like him. His wife makes bloomers for ladies, you know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A Deal with the Devil

  Bill Longley sat in his dark hotel room, his chair pushed by the window. The boardwalk opposite was deserted. No sign of the woman, damn her.

  He didn’t regret shooting up the Negro street dance that time, but it began his association with Clotilde Wainright and her husband. That, Longley knew, was an ill-fated day.

  Of course, no one blamed him for killing the blacks, except the Yankee law. But the white people understood all too well why he did it.

  As old Colonel Thaddeus Walker, the Tiger of Kennesaw Mountain, told him, “By what God-given right do the sons and grandsons of slaves dance in the street while the South lies bleeding?”

  Longley nodded to himself, remembering . . .

  He and Johnson McKowen, as fine a man and as true a patriot as ever lived, were returning from a horse race down Lexington, Texas way when they saw a swarm of Negroes drinking and dancing in the street.

  They were celebrating victory day, they said.

  Longley’s eyes glittered in the darkness. Yes, the blacks had been whooping it up over the defeat of the South, the deaths of so many fine men and the end of the Noble Cause.

  “Such deviltry could not stand,” Longley whispered to himself. “I could not let it stand.”

  He and McKowen rode their horses off a ways and then drew their revolvers.

  “We’ll make but one pass, so shoot to kill, Johnson,” Longley said.

  The other man nodded and set spurs to his mount.

  Guns blazing, hollering the grand old Rebel yell, the galloping horsemen cras
hed into the packed ranks of the celebrating crowd. Men and women went down under the blazing guns and blood stained the dusty street.

  The Yankee law tried to play down the incident, saying it was the deed of desperadoes acting alone and did not reflect any hatred between black and white.

  Longley closed his pale eyes. Two dead and three wounded, the authorities had said. That ridiculous figure made him smile. His Dance revolvers had claimed at least eight blacks, all head or belly shots, and McKowen had downed close to that number.

  Longley figured in those few moments of hell-firing glory fifteen or sixteen Negroes had bitten the dust. They’d never celebrate their victory day again, damn them.

  Shots hammering into the night roused him from his reverie. That was strange. The only man allowed to shoot a gun in Comanche Crossing was him.

  He listened, his face intent, ready to catch any sound.

  He heard nothing but the wind.

  Sullivan?

  No. Why would he shoot at anybody? The only outlaws in town were Longley and Booker. Sullivan didn’t have the sand to brace either one.

  Longley sat back in his chair and dismissed the gunshots from his mind. It was probably some scared housewife taking pots at a scavenging coyote.

  He rose to his feet and stretched. Ah well, time he was in bed.

  Someone tapped on the door.

  Longley’s gun came up fast. “Who’s there?” He stood still, rigid as a steel rod.

  “Clotilde.”

  A jolt of surprise almost staggered him. “What do you want?”

  “We must talk.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “Only Dr. Cheng.”

  Longley turned the key in the lock, then stepped back, the big Dance up and ready.

  “May we come in?” Lady Wainright asked. “Or are you planning to shoot us both?”

  “Sit in the chair, Clotilde,” Longley said. “Cheng, get into the corner.” He stepped to the lamp.

  “No, please, no light,” Clotilde said.