Shadow Man

by James D. Doss

  Blinkoe took a deep breath. “What now?”

  “That’s the question, ain’t it?”

  “It is indeed.” M. W. Blinkoe turned to face his assailant. “As I await your decision with the keenest anticipation imaginable, I am all a-twitter.”

  “Twitter this.” There was a quite audible click. Hitchcock pressed the business end of a switchblade knife against Blinkoe’s belly. “Getting your throat cut’s too quick and easy for the likes of you.” With a mere flick of the wrist, he snipped an ivory button off the silk shirt. “I intend to poke about sixteen holes in your guts, leave you here to bleed until somebody finds you, which will likely be after the sun comes up.” A dry chuckle. “Maybe the owl and the coyote’ll fight over your sorry little carcass.”

  Showing only a marginal interest in this colorful threat, the odd little man turned his head to look over his left shoulder. He also arched an eyebrow. “Well, it’s about time you showed up—where have you been keeping yourself?” Manfred Blinkoe paused, appeared to be listening to a reply—then: “Las Vegas is one of my favorite cities, second only to Reno—but then I’m such a degenerate.” He glanced at the man with the knife in his hand. “I do not believe introductions are necessary—you are already acquainted with Mr. William Hitchcock, our plucky aviator friend.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I hate to tell you this, but Bill has been up to some very naughty business. Murdering innocent women, blowing boats to smithereens, and smelling like something that crawled out of a highly polluted swamp.”

  The accused man furrowed thick eyebrows into a brutish scowl. “I know what you’re up to, Manny—you figure you can freak me out. But that mule won’t pull a plow—I never believed none of that silly crap about you having this invisible friend.”

  “Take care, old hardcase.” The medical practitioner fixed the man with a hypnotic gaze. “It would not be wise to offend my companion. He can become quite feisty when riled.”

  As the orthodontist’s words soaked into Hitchcock’s brain, a shadow of something seemed to materialize beside Blinkoe. Hitchcock’s jaw fell; the pipe drooped over his chin. “I don’t care whether he’s real or not. I’ll just stick you and let him watch!”

  “Oh piffle.” Blinkoe pouted. “Shan’t I have even a last word?”

  I wish he didn’t look so damn cocky. “Say it and die,” Hitchcock growled.

  The man at the tip of the blade opened his mouth, threw back his head in a haughty operatic gesture, sang it: “Zyz-zyvaaaaaaaaa!”

  As if a bee had stung him, Hitchcock’s limbs jerked in an involuntary spasm.

  “Sorry, William H. Didn’t intend to startle you.” Blinkoe smiled at the outraged expression on the other’s face. “Zyzzyva was merely my notion of a whimsical witticism.”

  “Let me get this straight—I’m about to perforate your gut and you make some kinda dumb joke?”

  The elfin jester was hurt. “Dumb, did you say?” Also generous. “But I forgive you.” And willing to assume responsibility. “It is entirely my fault—I should not have expected you to appreciate the literal quality of my quip. Even a remarkably erudite person might not comprehend the off-side pun.” Manfred Blinkoe now addressed the unseen presence. “You are quite right—I should not be discouraged by a single failure. I shall make one more attempt.” He turned back to Hitchcock. “Prepare yourself. Coming up—hopefully to meet with your hearty approval—is my absolutely final ‘last word.’” Blinkoe cleared his throat, licked his lips. “Velum.”

  His fascinated persecutor glared. “What’n hell does that mean?”

  “It is Latin, for ‘soft palate’—but never touch it unless you are prepared for the well-known gag reflex.” With that advice, the orthodontist’s right hand shot upward, the heel of his palm connecting with the bowl of the long-stemmed pipe. The force of the unexpected blow drove the pipe stem through Hitchcock’s velum, various nasal sinuses, a prominent artery, a thin sheath of bone, and six centimeters into the base of his brain. Death was virtually instantaneous.

  As Manfred Blinkoe drove away, he waved a comradely salute at the corpse he had left in his wake. “Adiós, amigo mío.” Down the road a piece, he broke into a song that suited the mood of the moment—a soul-wrenching dirge about the streets of Laredo. The singer could not recall the precise lyrics, but he (Manfred) saw himself as the young cowboy in the piece. The young cowboy who knew he’d done wrong.

  Southern Ute reservation

  While Dr. Blinkoe was crooning his melancholy lament, Daisy Perika stirred on the small cot. She blinked into an inky darkness that spilled through the camping trailer’s miniature window. Over the pattering of the rain, under the grumble of distant thunder, she could hear footsteps. And mutterings. Somebody’s out there.

  She pushed herself up on an elbow, peered through the plastic windowpane. Aside from the juniper and piñon branches shivering in the damp breeze, not a living thing stirred. But just as she was about to give it up, they materialized before her eyes. The shaman watched two somethings walk by—or, to put it another way, she observed some things that resembled human beings. They were holding hands.

  The misty specter was leading the solid-looking one.

  As she gawked at the remarkable spectacle, the one doing the leading was transformed from a shadowy assembly of torso and limbs into an entity with definite form and crisp features. He looked exactly like that oddball Blinkoe fellow—but Daisy knew he was not. The one being led was an older person, a skinny man she had never seen before. The odd couple was headed down the lane, toward the gaping mouth of Cañón del Espíritu, one of those appointed places for spirits to wait for the Last Day—and the earthshaking blast of that Final Trumpet. The apparitions vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.

  Daisy lay back on the cot, pulled the coat over her face.

  She considered herself a reasonable person. In the normal course of events, the tribal elder would have carefully considered all the evidence before reaching a preconceived conclusion. But lately, the course of events was anything but normal. She told herself that a person could stand only just so much, and enough was enough, and seeing wasn’t always believing. And so, in contrast to her general practice, Daisy ignored the evidence presented by her senses and jumped immediately to a judgment that made her comfortable.

  That wasn’t real. The weary old woman closed her eyes. And even if it was, there’s nothing I can do about it. She turned on her side, sighed. It’s none of my business. But after a while, she was reminded Whose she was, and what His business was. Thus touched with grace, Daisy Perika offered up an earnest prayer for those lost, wandering souls. Having done this, she was prepared for rest, and so she made a personal request. For sleep.

  And sleep she got. But not without dreams.

  Dr. Manfred W. Blinkoe’s shadow was perched on the foot of her cot, talking to Daisy as if they were old, dear friends. He had, he explained, just returned from a walk in Spirit Canyon, and it occurred to him that he should stop by and share an extraordinary story with the tribal elder. The tale’s conception had occurred almost sixty-two years ago, in a pleasant little town in southern Illinois. As it happened, the fertilized egg fissioned into identical twins. But as time passed and the plot developed—one of the siblings did not. There was some physiological confusion, an unfortunate fusion—and one brother absorbed the other! At birth, the proud parents were presented with a single little fist-clenching son. Judging by external appearances, he was a normal seven-pound, four-ounce boy-child.

  But deep inside himself, near his left kidney, little Manfred Wilhelm carried a tiny lump of angry, inflamed tissue. The mummified fetus contained microscopic bits of teeth and bone, patches of hair and skin, even components of a central nervous system. These contributions from father and mother had become the residue of his unchristened brother. Nevertheless, the internalized sibling did have a name. Teratoma.

  Daisy Perika awoke with a convulsive start. She sat up, stared at the far end of the
bed. There was, of course, no one there.

  Why do I have these awful, crazy dreams? She collapsed back onto the thin foam mattress, snuggled under the overcoat. I know what it is—it’s all that scary medical stuff I see on Oprah. Though she shuddered at the thought of such a sacrifice, virtue got the upper hand. I’ll have to stop watching so much of that educational television.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from

  the next Charlie Moon mystery by JAMES D. DOSS

  STONE BUTTERFLY

  Coming soon in hardcover from St. Martin’s Minotaur

  Colorado, Southern Ute reservation

  In the Shadow of Three Sisters Mesa

  This being his weekly visit to his aged relative, Daisy Perika’s long, lean nephew was seated at her kitchen table. It was evident that his entire attention was focused the tribe’s weekly newspaper, more particularly a column by a Granite Creek astrologer-psychic, wherein the seer predicted that (following an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude) the Lost Civilization of Atlantis would surface in the South Pacific! Though it was absolutely certain that the calamity would occur on February tenth at 9:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, the stars and planets were somewhat foggy on the precise year of the event—which might be 2007, or perhaps 2077—depending upon whether or not Saturn decided to visit the House of Uranus whilst that latter planet was in diametric juxtaposition to the Twenty-Sixth Planet, which had not yet been discovered. The whole thing was a sham, of course.

  (Clarifying Note: Reference is not made to the astrologer’s immodest prophecy—but rather to the more unpretentious sham currently being committed by Charlie Moon, whose apparent interest in the newspaper was a pretense.)

  As it happened, Moon had heard the tramp’s shuffle-footed approach when the intruder was a good hundred yards away, and the full-time rancher, part-time tribal investigator thought it would be entertaining to see how his aunt would deal with this unwelcome guest. In happy anticipation of the fireworks to come, he turned another page of Southern Ute Drum, and waited for the fun to begin. In about six seconds, he estimated. And began to count them off. One thousand and one. One thousand and two.

  If Daisy had not been concentrating all her attention on the preparation of a morning meal for herself and her nephew, she might have been aware of Yadkin Dixon’s arrival. Or perhaps not—the hungry man was intentionally making a stealthy approach.

  One thousand and three. One thousand and four.

  The way Mr. Dixon saw it, a hard-hearted old woman who kicked at chipmunks and heaved stones at pretty, flitting bluebirds could not be expected to deal kindly with a self-educated economist who firmly believed in the concept of a free lunch. Or free breakfast, as the case might be.

  One thousand and five. One thousand and six.

  The first evidence of his unwanted presence was the tap-tap of a knuckle on the kitchen window—and his long, horsy face gawking at her through the glass. After a startled twitch, the Ute woman quickly turned away. In Daisy’s Book of Bad Things, this particular pestilence fell into that same detestable category as the dull ache that visited her left hip on a rainy day. Her remedy was: Ignore the hateful thing, it would eventually go away.

  Her attempt to pretend that Dixon did not exist was wasted on the thick-skinned beggar who camped out somewhere in the vicinity of her home. The persistent fellow was not about to leave without some nourishment to occupy that hollow space betwixt the Coors pewter belt buckle and his spine.

  Shamming on unashamedly, Moon pretended to be engrossed in an article entitled “Treating Hemorrhoids With Acupuncture.” Ouch.

  After pretending for a full two seconds, Daisy gave up the game. Like Death and Taxes that were here to stay, Mr. Dixon was not going away. She wiped her hands on a polka dot apron, jerked the back door open.

  Before she had a chance to say something uncivil, Dixon tipped a tattered slouch hat. “Good morning, ma’am—and God bless you.” Though a greeting of this sort tended to disarm his ordinary marks, he might as well have expected a cheerful “Howdy-do” to charm a grinning-skull tattoo off the hairy hide of a whisky-soaked Hell’s Angel.

  Daisy marched outside, wagged a finger in his face. “Don’t you start ma’am-ing me, you two-legged coyote.” Ugh—he smells like last week’s fish. She glared at the filthy white man. “What d’you want this time?” As if I don’t know.

  Charlie Moon also knew. And unseen by those outside, he had made his way to the cook stove, plopped several fat sausage links into a cast-iron skillet.

  Mr. Dixon assumed a pitiful tone. “I wondered if you could spare a poor, homeless person a few leftovers from your table.” His hopeful smile exposed yellowed teeth that resembled hard little kernels of unpopped corn. “Some cold, pasty oatmeal—or a few potato peels?”

  “I gave you something to eat just last week.” Daisy tried to recall the details and did. “It was a cheese sandwich, big enough to choke a bull moose.” Though somewhat rusty from lack of use, Daisy’s conscience gently reminded her that the months-old cheese was fuzzy with blue mold and on top of that the bread was hard enough to break a brass monkey’s teeth and—Being one who did not accept criticism gracefully, she interrupted the inner voice: I scraped the fur off that cheese. And even if the sliced bread was a little stale, you can’t expect a dirt-poor widow woman to give her last slice of fresh bread to a man who hasn’t used a toothbrush since that Goober-pea farmer from Georgia was president.

  Blissfully unaware of Daisy’s internal dialogue, the hungry man rubbed his stomach. “Alas, I have long since digested that delectable delicacy.” Dixon assumed a saintly expression he had recently seen on a stained glass window at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Durango, where he had also tapped the Rector’s Emergency Discretionary Fund for bus fare to Topeka so that he might attend his dear old mother’s funeral (while Dear Old Mother was on a Caribbean cruise with her latest husband.) “I would be grateful for some broken soda crackers. Or a shriveled-up apple core.”

  Moon cracked three brown-shell eggs on the edge of the skillet, smiled appreciatively at the man’s line of talk. It was always a pleasure to witness a highly skilled professional going about his work.

  Daisy was not about to leave the subject of the white vagrant’s last visit. “And after I fed you that sandwich, what did you do?” Like a well-rehearsed attorney, the prosecutor-persecutor answered her own question. “You thanked me by stealing a brand-new ax from my pile of piñon wood!”

  The beggar—who was short of everything but pride—stiffened his back and lied: “I did no such thing.”

  Her nostrils flared dangerously. “Don’t tell me that, you snake-eyed sneak-thief—I was watching you from that window.” To identify the physical evidence which supported her accusation, the witness for the prosecution pointed to indicate the aforesaid window.

  Little wheels turned in his head, tiny ratchets clicked and clacked, and so on and so forth. Figuratively, of course. “I might have absentmindedly picked up your ax.” Dixon’s highly plastic features effortlessly assumed the injured expression of one who—though painfully wounded by a malicious and false accusation—would not take offense. “But even if I did—all I ever intended was to borrow it for a few hours.”

  The hard-faced woman had a ready answer for that. “Then why didn’t you bring it back?”

  Having fended off many serious allegations over the years, Dixon did not miss a beat. “It is my faulty memory.” He leaned forward, fixed his feisty accuser with an earnest gaze. “Ever since I was struck north of Clarksville, Tennessee, by that speeding L&N freight-train that was pulling eighteen box cars and a green caboose, I can hardly remember anything—even my name.” He paused for a moment, evidently involved in an intense mental effort to recall what the initials Y. D. stood for, only to be defeated by the arduous task. “But be assured that as soon as I return to my modest encampment, I shall search for your—uh—dear me, you see—it has slipped away from me already.” A cherubic smile. “Tell me again—what it was tha
t is missing—a hammer from your tool shed?”

  The old tea-kettle was approaching a boil; she hissed at him: “You took my new ax—and it was on my wood pile!”

  Dixon stared at the neat stack of split piñon. “Hmmm.” He nodded as if the light was beginning to dawn. “An ax, you say. Well, if I should find such an implement among my meager belongings, I shall bring it to you directly.”

  “Well, I won’t hold my breath.” Daisy exhaled. “And there’s another thing.” Inhaled. “You’ve got no right to be squatting on the Southern Ute reservation.” She pointed at her house. “My nephew’s inside, and he’s a tribal policeman and—”

  “Is that a fact?” Dixon’s poor memory had made a remarkable recovery. “I was under the impression that Mr. Moon had retired from the Ute police department several years ago, to manage his cattle ranch.”

  “Charlie is a tribal investigator, and if I just snap my fingers”—She displayed a finger and thumb, all cocked to snap—“he’ll trot out here and arrest you right on the spot and—”

  “You called?”

  Following Dixon’s gaze, Daisy turned to see her nephew’s lanky form in the doorway. Moon had brought with him a platter of scrambled eggs and pork sausage. These victuals were tastefully accompanied by a pair of oven-hot biscuits.

  Yadkin Dixon fixed a hopeful gaze on the food. “It is good to see you, sir. I have continued to follow your career for some time now—and if I may say so, I am to be counted among your many admirers.”

  Moon chuckled at the blatant flattery, offered the plate to his ardent fan.

  The gift was gratefully accepted by the famished man.

  Daisy shook her head, turned to mutter misgivings to her overly generous relative: “Now that good-for-nothing bum’ll be back every day, begging food, stealing anything that ain’t nailed down.” Knowing her words were wasted, she elbowed him aside, huffed and grumbled her way back into the kitchen.