by Dennis Yates
Maynard shifted sideways and the bullet whizzed past his head and struck rock. Then suddenly he pitched forward and began clutching at his shoulder and cursing.
Rudy couldn’t believe his good fortune. The bullet had ricochet off the wall and hit Maynard! The injured man continued to lurch toward him and he took aim once again.
“Stop where you are mister or I’m going to put this one right in your heart.”
“It’s over little man,” Maynard hissed through gritted teeth.
Rudy smiled back at him. “Dead or Alive” the poster in town had read. There wasn’t a question now of what he should do. He wasn’t afraid of killing a man if he needed to. He aimed the pistol at Maynard’s chest when the rope around his ankle suddenly jerked him off his feet and sent him flying onto his back. He struck his head on a rock and cried out. The rope began to pull him away, and he tried to find a place to anchor his hands but the rock was too slippery. Skidding fast across the mud, he headed for the mouth of the cave.
“Sam! Phil! Stop pulling the fucking rope!” he screamed.
He popped out of the cave like a champagne cork and was knocked out when his head struck a tree trunk.
****
When Rudy came to again he lay still for a long time. He tried to remember where he was. He’d had the strangest experience. He’d felt his mind soaring away from his body, and when he got as high as the mountain tops he’d willed it to come back. Something tickled his nose, and when he opened his eyes he saw thousands of downy snowflakes descending toward him. As he watched the snowflakes, he noticed they also had bits of red in them, like blood.
He sat up and turned to look at the large dead spruce leaning out over the mouth of the cave as if it were the skeleton of some mythical beast. On two separate limbs he saw Phil and Sam. At first he thought they were just fooling around and he almost cussed at them until he saw the reason they floated in the air like they did. His posse had been skewered through by the dead tree’s branches… As the wind blew down the mountain, their corpses bobbed in the air like meat about to be roasted over a fire. Blood strayed from their mouths and down over the jutting ends of the branches and mingled with the falling snow.
Rudy bit his lip and looked away. He tried to stand, but his legs felt broken. He heard a movement behind him and slid around to see what it was. Maynard stepped outside the cave and stood below the tree for a long time, catching the snow on his tongue. Rudy struggled to say something and only choked. Maynard turned his head and smiled. He lifted Rudy’s pistol and waved it.
“Thanks for the piece, boy.”
“Give that back,” Rudy mumbled. “It belongs to my Daddy.”
Maynard ignored him and began to walk away, the shoulder were he’d been winged by Rudy’s shot stiffening at an odd angle. From what Rudy could tell, the man was hurt pretty bad. It would be difficult for someone in Maynard’s shape to get far in this weather. He only wished he could alert others about what was happening.
They’ll see his blood on the snow and track him down. He doesn’t have a chance in hell…
He watched as Maynard stopped several yards away and turned to laugh at him. That’s when Rudy noticed the dark shapes drop the rope attached to his ankle and move toward him. The snow seemed to melt as they floated forward. Rudy was confused. Had another posse come for his rescue? Why weren’t they shouting at Maynard, or filling him with bullets?
Rudy couldn’t make out their faces beneath the brims of their hats. They reminded him of the long-bearded prospectors he’d seen pass through town. Half-starved men dressed in rags. Except these two smelled strongly of death.
“Who are you?” Rudy asked.
They seemed not to hear him. They slowly lifted Rudy in the air and carried him toward the tree where his dead friends stared down at him.
“Stop! What do you want? Can’t you see that Maynard is getting away?”
He tried to squirm free from their grasp but it was of no use. The more he struggled, the deeper their long yellow nails sank into his flesh.
Rudy soon spotted the branch they’d readied for him and began to scream.
After they were finished, the two figures picked up their satchels of stolen gold and followed Maynard’s footprints in the deepening snow.
CHAPTER 21
It wasn’t until the following morning that the bounty hunters managed to chase Maynard up into one of the mountain glaciers. Sheriff Longhorn had been close enough by to join the small party of men. They had Maynard backed up next to a crevasse in the sloping field of ice.
By afternoon they’d managed to once again exhaust Maynard’s ammo supply, yet they knew this was the least of their worries. They’d seen the trail of mutilated bodies Maynard had left behind. No ordinary man could have done what they’d witnessed, unless he was the very devil himself.
The stories they’d heard from the few survivors no longer sounded like the talk of men who’d lost their minds. Nearly everyone who’d gotten close to Maynard saw his twin demons, in a variety of forms.
Surrounded by several men with their rifles trained on Maynard, Longhorn shouted at the killer to give himself up. Moving together as one, the men stepped closer until they could see Maynard’s face.
“Give your self up,” shouted Longhorn. “There’s no way out this time.”
Maynard spoke to the two pale men standing next to him. They were unarmed and loaded down with heavy satchels and burlap sacks of gold. Longhorn couldn’t understand how the rail-thin men could possibly have the strength to carry all that weight. The longer he watched the more he became convinced that something wasn’t right. Then Hicks said their necks were slit and handed him a glass and he’d almost dropped it after he looked.
They weren’t ordinary men, that’s for sure. Unless you think a dead man that moves is something ordinary…
After the two corpses tossed the gold next to Maynard’s feet, they turned and charged Longhorn and the others. It took more rounds than the bounty hunters had expected to bring them down and even then they continued to crawl toward them across the snow until their heads had been blown off their necks.
Maynard had watched silently. Then he dumped the horde into the dark fissure behind him and grinned as the bounty hunters scowled in disbelief.
“You cannot kill me,” he shouted. He backed up to the lip of the crevasse with a loaded saddlebag slung over his shoulder, opened his arms wide and fell backwards into the crevasse.
Those who witnessed his fall claimed to have seen shadows rise from the slain men rush to join their master.
A search was conducted afterwards, but neither Maynard nor the gold was ever found. Satisfied the devil must have fallen all the way back to hell, Longhorn and the others returned home to bury their dead.
A peace settled over Wrath Butte for the next several years. Longhorn retired and was replaced by Sheriff Underwood. For Underwood, the relative peace of Wrath Butte didn’t completely unravel again until after Jared Horn began selling his carving pictures. Had the elders in town been aware that Horn was spending time up in the glacier, they might have warned others of the danger.
CHAPTER 22
Although he sometimes freaked even himself out by what he was capable of doing, Walker Marsh was having a hell of a good time. Riding the razor’s edge was the way he always preferred it, and it had been such a long time since he’d experienced the thrill, even with strings attached. As a soldier in Vietnam, he’d had the opportunity to develop a particular taste for things he could only experience with great difficulty back home. The jungle, however, had afforded him much greater cover, until the day when Marsh’s commanding officer discovered what he was doing, leaving Marsh with no choice but to kill the man while he slept.
Unlike his fellow vets, Marsh never had any dreams to pursue when he stepped off the plane in San Francisco on a sunny afternoon and was greeted by a crowd who spat and screamed at him for killing babies. By the mid-seventies he took overseas mercenary work until mental health p
roblems began to interfere with future job prospects. He’d never imagined the day when the shadowy people who hired mercenaries would suddenly become so picky. Afterwards, he found himself taking on the driving and bodyguard duties for a network of very wealthy and paranoid men, and it was during this time in Walker’s life that he wisely chose to shed his mercenary identity like an old skin. Replacing the military jargon that had flowed off his tongue naturally for so many years, he tried his best to sound like the loyal servant his employers expected. The severe mood swings had lessened, and what fear people still had of him actually worked in his favor. Walker lasted at the job for almost seven years, until he discovered one day that his employers were planning to make him take the rap for a double murder one of them had committed during a drunken rage at a hotel in Miami, forcing him to run with nothing more than five hundred dollars cash and the clothes on his back.
With a limited number of places to go, he returned to Wrath Butte. He’d been smart not to tell his employers where he was from, knowing all too well that he might pay for the mistake later. He found what work he could, which usually consisted of kissing tourist ass to some degree or another. For years Walker had lived in a shabby apartment above Wrath Butte Drug and Liquor, where he’d spend hours sitting next to the blinds watching people come and go on the street below unless he was pulling a miserable janitorial shift up at the ski lodge.
He felt like an old wolf who’d been locked up at the pound, counting the days before his adoption period was over, listening for the people who would eventually come to give him his permanent sleep shot.
And then his life shifted into another direction. With adoption papers in hand, Fate had intervened, springing him loose from a prison of inertia.
****
When he inherited the Horn homestead from his aunt, Marsh was not exactly overjoyed. In fact he would have burned it to the ground if there’d been any money in it, for the place was about as worthless as the hardscrabble ground it stood upon. If it were closer to town it might have been considered an eyesore, but you had to drive several miles up an unpleasant washboard road to get to it. The only thing the property had going for it was its privacy, for there wasn’t a single home within miles.
During the years before Marsh took possession of the house, teenagers frequently used it for drinking parties. One summer a cheerleader’s half nude body was found hanging from the giant cottonwood tree that slouched next to it, and despite the efforts of the local police, the mystery surrounding her death was never solved. To further add to Wrath Butte’s tragic news, a teenage boy who’d attended the party the same night later committed suicide.
Bending under pressure from the local authorities, Marsh’s aunt had the house boarded up and put in a barbed wire fence to keep people out. She placed the house up for sale, but received no offers. It stood untouched for almost a decade longer before it fell into Walker’s hands.
Depressed one day after being fired from yet another dead-end job, Walker cashed his final paycheck and bought a bottle of Old Crow and a brand new sledgehammer before driving out to his inheritance. It was a scorching hot afternoon, and by the time he’d finished half the bottle of whiskey he was stripped down to his underwear and running through the house, smashing walls and cursing at the world for screwing him over once more.
“How long are you going to make me pay?” He screamed at the indifferent blue sky through a shattered window. He was certain his thirty years of bad luck were due to his transgressions in Vietnam.
The last thing Walker Marsh expected to happen was to have the floor give way below him...
A few hours later, he came to again and found himself sprawled out beside the skeletal remains of Sheriff Underwood. Marsh had broken his back.
For the next two days before his rescue, Marsh watched the cyclic rise and fall of the sun through the mesh of cracks running between the floorboards and the bare slats of the roof above. On the first night a smoky figure rose from another pile of bones from across the room, bones that had apparently washed under the house long ago. The figure eventually settled down next to him. It didn’t scare him to keep the company of a ghost, for there were plenty of dead boys from his old Nam unit who would pay him visits, including his commanding officer, as well as scores of Vietnamese villagers who’d been unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Walker couldn’t touch the ghost down here like he still sometimes could with the women he’d raped and murdered. Perhaps their memories were imprinted in his flesh somehow and that’s what made the difference. After awhile he began to wonder if the thing down in the hole with him was even a ghost at all.
When he awoke in the hospital, it felt as if he was sharing his skull with a new tenant. The way the man spoke reminded Marsh of the westerns he watched on television. His name was Jared Horn, and he promised Marsh protection, as well as a fortune in gold if he chose to cooperate.
Choice, Marsh had thought bitterly on many occasions. When someone tells you they want you to make one, you better damn hope they aren’t sharing skull-space with you.
****
Lately Horn had been quiet and let Marsh get on with his work. Putting together a team wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. Within a month he was joined by four men he’d met over the years, men who were much like him in having at one time developed a thirst for violence that had gone unquenched for some time. Stick was the only one he hadn’t known before. He’d found him standing next to a freeway on-ramp holding a pathetic cardboard sign saying he’d work for food.
From the reports he was getting from the other guys, Stick was looking more like a liability than an asset to the team. He’d already been caught twice trying to escape from the farm and had been beaten severely. Unfortunately for the highway panhandler, he’d seen too much to be simply released back to his life on the highway. No, Stick was scheduled to disappear in a shallow desert grave, once Marsh decided he no longer had a use for him.
Tonight things were finally set to come together. Mr. Crain’s next confrontation was already arranged. Same as last time, Marsh’s boys would keep him informed on how things were going and take care of any loose ends, if necessary. Marsh hoped for a cleaner resolution than the night before. Until then, it was just him and Stick who were left watching the trailers.
Crain was a lucky man, Marsh thought. His wife was a fine-looking piece of tail, one yummy mommy. Marsh sat back in his chair and poured another generous helping of Old Crow. After he downed the glass, he parted the dirty curtains and stared out at the remaining two trailers. His mind flashed on the one they’d removed at sunrise. He remembered how the trailer’s chrome roof sparkled for several minutes while it zigzagged down on its long journey to the black-green bottom of a water-filled rock quarry.
He wondered which trailer would be gone in the next dawn to come…
CHAPTER 23
Before Robert left his house, he called Will’s answering machine and read off Nolan’s driver’s license number.
“Here’s the bone you’ve been asking for. I don’t know for sure, but I think he’s connected somehow to the crackheads that attacked me...”
If anything were to happen to him tonight, at least Will would have something to give to the police. And although it seemed highly unlikely, there might still be enough time for them to find Peggy and Connor.
Nolan’s death was all over the local news but so far the authorities hadn’t released his name to the press. They hadn’t had any luck notifying his family because they were still looking for them.
Nugget insisted on riding with Robert in the truck. Before he’d even had a chance to stop her, she dove into the cab and refused to listen to his commands for her to get out. When he tried grabbing her by the collar she growled and stared up at him defiantly. He’d never seen her do that before.
“Okay girl, you win,” he said letting go, “But you have to stay inside and wait. There’s no way I’m going to let you come with me.”
It was a bad i
dea to leave her in the truck, he realized. What if he didn’t make it back? He decided to leave another voicemail with Will and tell him where to find the truck. At least when Will got off his shift later tonight he’d hear it.
If you’re still alive you’re going to have to tell him everything. You owe him that much…
He glanced over at Nugget. She was calmly licking a paw.
“I’m glad you wanted to come, Nug. You’re all I’ve got right now.”
He patted her head and started the truck.
After he stopped at the Shell and filled the tank, he got onto the westbound freeway. He was on his way to his next appointment with a stranger. This time it would be at a tunnel, located in an area people had no good reason to visit.
****
Railroad tracks ran next to the gray river before entering Portland. Drivers on the road above never saw the tracks through the thick woods. Only those who happened to be stopped at a red light with their windows rolled down would hear the trains when they moved past. Robert knew of the tracks only because he and Will had once been salmon fishing on the river. A train had emerged from behind the trees and thundered briefly beside the slag-heaped shore, startling away any fish they may have had hopes of catching.
It was treacherous hiking through the choking undergrowth, and once Robert almost went over the edge of a cliff when his foot slipped on a moss-covered log. For a while he could hear Nugget barking back in the truck. He made several switchbacks on a narrow deer trail before finally reaching the bottom.
He couldn’t believe he was going through with this.
But what choice did he have?
****
The mouth of the tunnel was completely black. Robert stared at it while a man in a ski mask frisked him for weapons. He imagined that on the other side the same thing was happening to a stranger who was also probably staring into the tunnel entrance, wondering if he too was going in there to die.
