Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  Maier blinked behind his thick glasses. “No,” he said.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “You are wrong.”

  “Alf, you were there. You saw the guy. I don’t even know if that’s the right word. That thing, whatever it was. Black as a lump of coal. You’ve got to remember the stink of it, if nothing else.”

  “No,” Maier said again. “That was a man. Just a man.”

  “Look, Maier,” Tuck said, trying to rein in his anger. “You were there. I was there. There’s nobody else here, just you and me, so I don’t know why you’re pretending.”

  Maier was shaking, his face turning violet. “Mr. Bringloe. He was a killer, a terrible person. But he was a person, that’s all. I think you had better go now. And do not spread stories you cannot prove. Leave this alone. It is better that way, trust me.”

  “What do you know, Alf?”

  Maier showed Tuck as phony a smile as he had ever seen in his life. “Me? I am a simple merchant. I know nothing. Nothing at all. Now please, Marshal. I am a busy man, as I am sure you must be.”

  Tuck wasn’t getting anything more out of Maier. He didn’t know what had changed the man’s mind, but he obviously wasn’t getting anywhere with him. At any rate, he knew what he had seen; he would have liked someone else’s confirmation that the claws Senora Soto had given him were similar to the killer’s, but Maier was the only other person who’d been there.

  It didn’t matter. Tuck knew what he knew.

  Still, what he didn’t know would fill a much deeper well.

  * * *

  Wilson Harrell was trying to pack up his desk when Alf Maier bustled into the bank looking like his pants were full of bees. Harrell’s desk was right out on the floor, so customers could easily find him. Sometimes it was inconvenient, as when he had to turn down someone for a loan or tell them he was foreclosing on their property. People were ashamed when that happened, ashamed that their financial situations had become so dire, and often upset that they were, in their view, being denied the help they needed. For his part, it didn’t bother Harrell. He thought it was good for the townsfolk to see one of their own go through tough times—it taught them to take better care with their own finances. Or so he liked to tell himself.

  But because his desk was accessible, he didn’t like leaving anything out on top of it. When it was covered with paperwork, he had to make sure it was put away before he left for the day. On most days it wasn’t so bad, because he stayed until the bank closed, or a little later, and he opened the door in the morning, so he knew nobody would disturb his work. But today, he was leaving well before noon, which meant clearing everything off and finding places for all the paperwork.

  The last thing he needed was an agitated grocer getting in his way.

  As he feared, Maier made straight for him. Harrell shoved some papers into a leather case and put the last of them into a desk drawer, turned the key, and slipped it into the pocket of his vest. “Wilson,” Maier said as he approached, his tone sharp with urgency.

  “What is it, Alf?” Harrell asked. “I’m just about to leave for the day. I’ve got very important business out of town. You know what I mean.”

  “I will walk outside with you,” Maier said. “Better we talk out there.”

  Harrell suppressed a sigh. A man couldn’t always control who he went into business with—he had to deal with those who had something to offer in return. But that didn’t mean he liked them all equally well. His patience for Alf Maier was limited at the best of times, and this moment was not that. “Fine,” he said, snatching up the leather case. “But quickly.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.” Maier walked beside him to the door and out to where Harrell’s wagon waited in the road. The grocer’s odd, waddling gait was one of the things—one of many things, in point of fact—that Harrell most often mocked when he discussed Maier with others, and he noted it now, despite his impatience. It was as if the man walked around with pebbles of uneven size inside his shoes.

  Harrell stopped beside the wagon, dismissing the clerk who had brought it around with a hasty nod. He wanted to get his business taken care of. Jed Tibbetts would make a fuss, but he was a law-abiding man, and he knew when he’d been beaten. He would sign the paperwork transferring the deed to his place over to Montclair, though he would act as if it was killing him to do it. Harrell didn’t like emotional scenes, and he would as soon skip this one. But what had to be done had to be done, and this was the moment. As much as he dreaded the encounter, his deeper fear was what price might need to be paid if he failed to get that signature. “Out with it, Mr. Maier. My business can’t wait.”

  “It is the new marshal, Bringloe. I know I supported him, at first. I wanted to keep him where we could watch him, and I believed he could be trusted.”

  “What about him, then?”

  “I no longer think that. Now, I believe he is dangerous. He asks too many questions. He knows things he should not.”

  “What would you suggest, then?”

  “He has to be fired.”

  Harrell climbed aboard and settled his bulk on the seat. “Fired? That’s all?”

  “At least,” Maier said.

  The banker took up the reins and the whip. “Alf, I’ll back you up. I’m sure Montclair will, too. Talk to Chaffee, and make any arrangements that have to be made. I’m on your side, and you can tell Chaffee that. But I’ve got to get going. The hour’s growing nigh.”

  “Yes, yes,” Maier said, waving his hands. “Go on, Wilson. I will talk to Chaffee. We will work things out, do not worry.”

  Harrell applied the whip, delicately, and the two horses in the traces started forward. “I’m not worried,” he said as Maier slipped past him. “I’m not worried at all.”

  Which was a lie. He was plenty worried. A man would be a fool not to be.

  But he wasn’t worried about Maier, or Chaffee, or even that Bringloe fellow. They were pawns, dispensable pieces whose absence from the board would hardly be felt.

  No, the things that worried him were much, much more consequential. But he would do his part, and then he would have no worries at all.

  * * *

  Sadie moved through the house slowly. Her ribs felt like she’d been mule-kicked, and under her dress, her torso was already showing bruises that would be there for days, if not longer, turning colors as they aged. There were days—and this was one of them—when she hated her husband.

  As she made her way down the stairs, every inch of her aching, she heard Del and Jimmy coming in the front door. She thought about turning around and going back up, but it was too late; they would see her anyway, and she didn’t want to look like she was trying to escape.

  “… going on,” Jimmy was saying. “I can’t explain them, and I doubt that anyone can. But we need to be aware of—” He cut himself off as he entered and saw Sadie on the staircase.

  Del glanced up at her without giving any indication that he saw her. “And we are aware, Jimmy,” he said, continuing the conversation as if her presence didn’t matter at all. “Because you keep telling me.”

  “I keep telling you because I’m worried,” Jimmy countered. “The men are—”

  They swept into Del’s office and shut the door with a bang. Neither man had greeted her or given the slightest indication that she was there, except for Jimmy’s momentary hesitation. The business of men took precedence over everything else, she supposed. Even simple decency to one’s wife.

  With them hidden away behind closed doors, she continued down the stairs and into the kitchen. There was only one thing that could take the edge off her physical pain and the emotional anguish that went with it. The bottle behind the spices, in the pantry. A few sips of that and she would be able to face the rest of the day.

  It wouldn’t dispel the anger that coursed through her. But it would make the anger easier to take, and that was good enough for now.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Mo Kanouse had piled stacks of Tom
bstone Epitaphs all over the office, grumbling the entire time. Tuck sat at his desk with about thirty of them, paging through them one by one. He didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, but he figured he would know it if he saw it.

  Maier claimed the murderer they had killed was only a man. Tuck didn’t know what he was, but men didn’t have skin that could have been torn from the deepest shadows or the darkest part of the night sky. Men couldn’t squeeze through a space between two boards barely large enough for a cat. Men didn’t melt when you wrapped them in a blanket and draped them over a horse’s back.

  And men didn’t have three-inch claws like the ones in Tuck’s desk drawer.

  He hadn’t slept at all during the night. The words on the page swam before his eyes, but he blinked and rubbed them and tried to focus. Most of the articles were about fights or shootings in saloons, mining news, and rampant gossip and speculation. There seemed to be a particular interest in an ongoing conflict between the Earp faction and outlaws known as the Cowboys, a group that included folks like the Clantons, the McLaurys, Curly Bill Brocious, Frank Leslie, and Johnny Ringo. Tuck had heard of them; they had reputations as hard men, quick with a gun or their fists. They were Confederate sympathizers and Democrats, so Sheriff Behan was on their side despite what the Epitaph described as repeated violations of local law.

  But the Earps didn’t come off much better in its pages. They were northerners, Republicans, and therefore—like Tuck—not always welcome in this area. And although they were the law—Virgil Earp was Tombstone’s town marshal, his brother Morgan an undersheriff—from the sound of things, they abused their authority so egregiously they might as well have been outlaws, too.

  Still, Tuck pored over the pages, occasionally shoving a stack of papers off his desk onto the floor and bringing up another. He found reporting of some strange incidents, but they didn’t match up with what he had encountered, and most sounded far-fetched. One group of men had been hunting in the Mule Mountains when they shot a dragon, or so they said. Eleven feet long, it had sky-blue scales and translucent wings and six legs. Unfortunately, although they had successfully brought it back to Tombstone, it had disappeared from one man’s barn before they’d had a chance to show it to anyone else. The Epitaph hinted that there might have been a significant amount of liquor consumed on that “hunting” trip.

  Another man reported seeing something rise up out of a pond created on his property by a monsoon storm, two summers earlier. He said it had a long neck—at least twenty or thirty feet long, he claimed—and a small, rounded head, and when it saw him it smiled and spat water at him. But when the pond dried up again, it was nowhere to be found.

  And a woman told a tale of a bizarre creature, multi-legged like a spider, but nearly as big as a Conestoga wagon, that had appeared one hot afternoon when she was watching a dust devil spin across the valley. It was, she said, the creature that had created the dust devil. It had been whirling like a dervish, pausing at her place just long enough to snatch up a goat with its many limbs, and by the time it was out of sight, the goat had been half-eaten.

  Those and similar stories were one of the Epitaph’s specialties, it appeared. Anyone who had anything out of the ordinary to report went to them, and the paper printed the tale in all its breathless glory.

  Tuck was willing to admit that there were things in the world he didn’t understand. The dark man he had fought, and whatever had left those claws behind, fell into that category. He closed the newspaper he was reading and dropped it onto the nearest pile, then slowly rose from his seat and stretched, going up onto his toes and arching his back. He was beat, and every muscle he had ached. Some he hadn’t even been aware that he had ached. He put his hands against the hollow of his back and twisted this way and that, trying to limber it up.

  As he did, he watched out the window. Morning sunlight washed the street and blazed off the windows on the other side, almost blinding in its yellow fury. Between him and those windows, Sadie Cuttrell walked, straight up the middle of the street. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her jaw tight, her gaze fixed on the way directly before her. She walked with rapid, deliberate strides. Tuck wouldn’t want to be whoever it was she was on her way to see, because she had the air of someone ready to commit violence.

  He was turning back toward the newspapers, ready to take up the next stack, when another motion outside caught his attention. A dark wagon rolled past, black as a hearse, drawn by a pair of magnificent black horses. Tuck didn’t even have to look up to know that Jasper Montclair was driving it. The first time he had seen it, he’d assumed it belonged to Chalmers. But the undertaker’s rig wasn’t as impressive, or as somber.

  Montclair sat rigidly upright. The reins were loose in his hands, but the animals knew what he wanted. If he didn’t slow, he’d run right over Sadie Cuttrell. Remembering how their last encounter had gone, Tuck stepped out of his office, ready to intervene if necessary.

  It wasn’t. Mrs. Cuttrell heard the wagon behind her, and spun around to meet it. Montclair brought it to an easy halt, and she walked up to him. Tuck couldn’t hear their conversation, but it appeared civil, and the rage that had seemed to be driving her was no longer in evidence. She rested a hand easily on the bench, and her face had softened. She even smiled briefly. Tuck could only see part of Montclair’s back, but his posture had relaxed as well. They might have been two old friends catching up on the news.

  Then Montclair surprised Tuck, and Sadie took the surprise a step further. He reached out a hand, and she took it and used it to hoist herself up onto the wagon. She lowered herself to the bench, sitting with her thigh pressed against Montclair’s.

  The street was uncrowded by its usual standards, but there were more people out than the night before, when fear had ruled the darkness. Tuck observed the other townsfolk, and on every face, he read shock. If Montclair and Sadie had any kind of relationship at all, these people hadn’t been aware of it. Montclair and Sadie seemed to ignore the wide-eyed gazes of their neighbors. Montclair gave the reins a jerk, and those big horses started up the street again, drawing Montclair and his passenger toward the end of town.

  With that many witnessing their departure, it wouldn’t be long until Colonel Cuttrell heard about it. Tuck wondered what might happen then. Anybody’s guess, he supposed. He didn’t know the colonel, and didn’t care to speculate on his reaction. What would happen would happen. With luck, it would happen at Montclair’s ranch or on the fort; out of his jurisdiction, either way.

  Tuck returned to his desk and his newspapers, slightly refreshed by the few moments outside. He thumbed through the papers, glossing over the parts that didn’t interest him. But in the fourth paper he studied after getting back to it, he found an item, buried on the sixth page. Not trusting his own tired senses, he read it over four times. It was only a few paragraphs long.

  It described some killings at a ranch between Tombstone and Carmichael. An eleven-year-old boy had survived, because he had been playing in the barn instead of inside the house like the rest of the family. He reported having seen a “shadow” leaving the house and riding away on a similarly midnight-black horse. He insisted that what he had seen was no man, because it had no features but was just a black form with blazing yellow eyes. His mother, father, and two sisters had been ripped to pieces, the paper reported, as if by a pack of wolves.

  The newspaper was from seven months earlier. Was it possible that Daisie’s killer had been in the area then?

  Of course it was, he decided. When one was dealing with the seemingly impossible, it was foolish to put artificial limitations on it. Daisie’s murderer had not been human, and describing him as a shadow made as much sense as anything. And there had been another one killing people in the alleyway behind Senora Soto’s, just last night. And maybe one in his own jail, while he slept nearby, as if drugged. He couldn’t try to impose any kind of normal standards on these things, whatever they were.

  The writer of the Epitaph piece expresse
d a degree of disbelief at the boy’s story, and ended it with a thinly veiled suggestion that the boy himself had likely been the killer. Tuck didn’t believe that. He was heartened by the boy’s description, which so closely matched his own experience. He dug into the other papers with renewed vigor, and before long had come across five additional articles describing similar events—killings in which the bodies had been torn apart, or at which mysterious yellow-eyed, ink-black beings had been observed, or both.

  In one from a little more than a year earlier, the reporter had tried to track the creature that had been seen near the murder scene. He had followed its trail into the fringe of the Huachuca Mountains, he wrote, before he’d lost it. His writing was flamboyant and at times hard to follow, but the implication that Tuck read was that the man had not so much been unable to follow the trail as he had been chased away from it, once he’d reached the mountains.

  There were still stacks of newspapers around the office. Tuck could page through each one, but he was satisfied. Six tales of savage killings, all with hints of the same sorts of creatures Tuck had seen. Seen, and killed. Someone else had managed to wound one, cutting off some of its claws.

  They weren’t human, and he didn’t believe they were animal, either. He wasn’t sure what that left. Hellspawn of some kind? That didn’t seem far from the truth.

  He lay the last newspaper down on a pile, and sat back in his chair. If he hadn’t seen the thing—hadn’t fought with it, felt it in his own hands, smelled it, then watched as it melted away to nothing—he wouldn’t believe any of it. Not for an instant.

  But he had. Now he didn’t know what to make of it. But he had no problem believing. Whatever they were, wherever they had come from, he believed.

  * * *

  He was still at his desk, reflecting on his findings, when Mo Kanouse came into the office. “You read those already, boss?” he asked with a dismissive scowl.

  “Enough, Mo. Thanks for fetching them.”