The Crimson Trail

by Eric Red

  Bess shook her head. “No, my deputy is a greenhorn named Nate Sweet I left back in Jackson to man the U.S. Marshal’s office while I came here. Somebody had to mind the store while I was away. Good man, Sweet is, lots of promise.” She looked over to the officer with her. “This here is Marshal Emmett Ford.”

  Joe Noose gave Marshal Ford a long, hard stare—something was familiar about his face, but he couldn’t quite place it. “We met before, Marshal?” Noose asked. “I seem to recall your face.”

  Ford held his gaze respectfully and shook his head, demurring. “No, sir. I don’t rightly recollect so.”

  Noose shrugged. Maybe he was mistaken. He looked a question at Bess. Drew her gaze with him to the silent little boy bundled in coats, sitting staring into the fire. She spoke up. “The boy, we don’t know his name because he won’t talk. Marshal Ford brought the boy to me a few days ago. So I brought him to you. He’s why I come, Joe.”

  His brows furrowing, not following her conversation, Noose went to the stove, where the pot of coffee brewed, filling the room with a warm, toasty aroma. Without asking if they wanted any, Noose poured two cups and handed them to Bess and Ford, both of whom accepted the hot beverages gratefully and sipped. The boy just watched the fire.

  “Sit down, Joe,” Bess asked politely. He did. He was about to hear the story and the reason for her visit. “I’ll let Marshal Ford tell it. Go on, Emmett.”

  The young lawman cleared his throat and spoke plainly. “This boy was the only survivor of the massacre of his entire family near Pinedale. Father, mother, two sisters all cut to pieces and strewn about.”

  “Go on.”

  “They weren’t the first victims of this individual. We think it is one man. Twenty-five people, families, men, women, children, have been butchered by this killer. The ones we know about, anyhow. He has been leaving a trail of bodies from the southern border of Idaho across up into Wyoming and I’ve been hunting him ever since the spring.” The marshal spoke gravely. An intense, personal dedication to catching this killer was plain in his eyes. This was more than a job for Emmett Ford. It was a mission.

  “Good hunting,” Noose said.

  Bess interrupted. “I came to you for a reason, Joe. So did Marshal Ford.”

  “What reason?”

  Ford answered, “You’re the best bounty hunter in the western states, Noose. Everybody knows that. There ain’t a man in the world you can’t track down and apprehend. I haven’t been able to catch this killer on my own. I need your help. And there is a five-thousand-dollar dead-or-alive bounty on this individual.”

  “That’s serious money,” Noose replied, warming his hands by rubbing them together by the fire. “Very serious money. But the thing is, Marshals, I took a job as sheriff here in this town and gave my word I would perform those duties until a replacement is found. Nobody’s arrived to relieve me yet, don’t rightly know when they will. I’d surely like to chase down that bounty, but I have a job.”

  Rising to her feet, Bess’s spurs jingled as she walked to the wall and leaned against it by the stove, fixing Noose in her persuasive gaze from an elevated vantage. “Only you can catch this man, Joe.”

  Noose raised an eyebrow in question, letting her continue. “You don’t know the rest. This killer, he always leaves his signature. One you’ll understand, Joe.” Gesturing to the boy, Bess made the motions with her hands of opening her shirt. “Show him,” she gently but firmly bid the child.

  Swallowing hard, his eyes vacant, the little boy obediently unbuttoned his coat, then opened his ragged cloth shirt to expose his chest.

  When Noose saw what was there, his eyes widened in raw emotion and he rose from his chair to his towering full height, staring unblinkingly at what was on the kid’s naked, chicken-bone chest: The brutal mark of a red-hot branding iron was savagely burned into the child’s very flesh—half-healed and raw was seared a single upside-down letter . . .

  It was the same brand that Joe Noose bore forever on his own chest, a mark burned into him when he was little older than this boy, by the same brand, by the same man. He felt his own long-healed scar burn freshly under his shirt like a phantom pain, feeling again the white-hot agony of long ago. Noose was speechless as he just stared at the poor child looking up at him with hangdog eyes, displaying his disfigurement with shame.

  His knuckles whitening, Noose’s fists clenched at his sides in a murderous cold fury that made the cartilage crackle.

  When his gaze swung back to Bess Sugarland, she held it confidently. “This is a job for you, Joe. Only you can stop this man.”

  Nodding, Joe Noose pulled the sheriff’s badge off his coat and laid it on the desk.

  Noose knew what he had to do. And he wasn’t going to be able to wear the sheriff’s star doing what he was about to do; no proper lawman could. The big bounty hunter currently employed as interim sheriff of Victor, Idaho, said good-bye to the badge. He was not going to be upholding the law when he caught up with the son of a bitch who branded him, because this was personal and when it was personal the only law was the Law of the Gun.

  Lawdog never suited Noose much anyhow.

  He just took the job for his horse but his horse was fine now.

  Noose stretched his muscular six-foot-three frame to his full height and walked to the window, his leather boots and spurs creaking the floorboards until he stopped, looking out with his pale blue eyes distant and lost in thought. The wintery Idaho sunlight filtering into the Victor sheriff’s office showed all the faded bruises and old scars on his handsome granite-block face. His breath condensed in the cold hair in a haze around his face, fogging the glass and clouding and obscuring the view of the town street—a wall that shut off his view as if to tell him his fate was inside the room, which he already knew.

  Joe Noose felt Marshal Bess Sugarland’s eyes on his back. His friend knew to patiently give him his time to think.

  A branding mark the same as his.

  Made by the same man, twenty-one years apart.

  He had a lot of questions.

  “Tell me everything.” Joe Noose turned from the window to face Marshal Emmett Ford, fixing him in a hard unwavering gaze that demanded answers, all the facts.

  Across the room, Ford stood by the small coal stove, having just poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. He met Noose’s gaze without blinking. Despite Noose standing a head taller than Ford and having a hundred pounds of muscle on him, the marshal looked iron fit and was not intimidated. Ford was about Noose’s age, rangy and lanky, a lupine cowboy face weathered by the elements. His intense brown eyes bored back into Noose’s own as he took a sip of coffee and began his tale.

  “I first heard about the branding murders three years ago, where I was posted at the marshal’s office in Laramie,” Ford said in his soft, even voice. “People passing through from the far north states brought talk with them about folks hacked to pieces who always had the mark of a brand in their chest, men and women. No survivors of any of these attacks, just branded bodies. Like somebody was leaving a message. Of course, the marshal’s office got called in to investigate. The assumption was Indians. But that didn’t make sense to me because there were no scalpings. It was the brand that made me know this was the work of a white man. Indians don’t use cattle brands to mark their cows. Nobody at the U.S. Marshal’s office listened to me, though, so I requested special assignment, set out alone, and went to track this murdering SOB down. Been on the bastard’s trail ever since. But I come up short. So I’m coming to you.”

  Noose looked and listened as the wiry male marshal took another sip of coffee. Ford’s face looked familiar somehow. But the man looked like a lot of people, not good- or bad-looking, face and hands suntanned from the outdoors; an honest, plain face. It was his eyes that made him different, the deep wells of a man who had seen things no man should see and live to tell. Noose liked that about him and felt an instant kinship with the marshal for unknown reasons he didn’t quite understand that made no sense. Snapping
his pale-eyed gaze back to Emmett Ford, he saw the Texas marshal was watching him intensely. Noose said: “Go on.”

  Ford reached up to adjust his weathered Stetson and shrugged in a rangy cowboy way. “Through ’85 and ’86 I tracked him through Idaho and Utah, then up into Wyoming. Came across bodies in every state. All of them butchered like steers. All of them branded. This villain he moved like a ghost. Nobody saw him.” The marshal spoke in a lazy twang, but Noose noticed that the drawl seemed to come and go as it did with some men.

  “Where did you find this boy?”

  “Wyoming. In Pinedale. South of Jackson. His entire family was . . . father, mother, sisters. Two sisters, girls, at least I think. Honest, it was hard to tell who was who the condition I found them in. All branded. The boy must have got away during the attack, because I found him hiding in the food cellar, got away during the fight maybe because it was . . . well . . . a mess. He had the brand, but he was alive. I took him with me, had him riding with me, hoping he would start talking, give me some clues about the killer, but fact is, the boy ain’t said a word since the day I found him. I had him on back of my saddle the last month but The Brander’s trail, it went cold. I know he’s out there, still killing, still using a red-hot iron to defile the human remains, but truth was I’d just about given up.”

  Ford’s eyes lit up. “Then I hear about a bounty hunter who could find anyone, anywhere, who could track any man that walked on two legs.” Ford nodded respectfully in Noose’s direction. “I heard about you, sir.”

  Noose just regarded him evenly. Out the corner of his eye, he could see Bess smiling proudly at him. Ford went on.

  “People say Joe Noose is the best bounty hunter in the western territories. Figured I needed help, and if anybody can track the branding killer down it would be you. So I come to find you.”

  “You did.”

  Bess piped up. “Marshal Ford came to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Jackson and found me first, asked about you. Showed me this boy. Showed me, well . . . I knew this was a job for you, Joe.”

  While he had been talking, Emmett had also been watching Noose and Bess exchange cryptic glances, unspoken guarded exchanges about the man they were after during the ride. Finally, Emmett spoke up.

  “You two know something you’re not telling me.” When they didn’t respond, he added, “With due respect, we’re all supposed to be partners on this.”

  The bounty hunter looked a question at the lady marshal and she nodded, so he shrugged. “Bess didn’t tell you, Marshal, because she didn’t feel it was her place to. Not until she spoke to me first. Reason is, me taking this job, it’s personal. You see, it ain’t just because I’m a good man-hunter she come to me to track down this killer you’re after. I’ve had dealings with him, a long time ago.”

  Emmett looked like he’d been slapped. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

  Noose eyed Emmett evenly with a pale-eyed gaze. “I know who he is.”

  “So who is he?”

  “Same man who did this to me.” Noose bit the fingers of his gloves and tugged them off his hands. Then he unbuttoned his coat, then his shirt, exposing his bare torso. Displaying the old scar of the upside-down Q burned into his chest.

  Turning pale, the young marshal gaped at the wound, getting his mental bearings until he put it all together.

  “Get the picture now?” Noose said.

  Emmett nodded. He seemed dazed putting it all together, going through a struggle to maintain his composure.

  The bounty hunter closed his shirt and coat and pulled on his gloves.

  “But . . . when?”

  “Long time ago. Twenty years thereabouts. He was fifty, sixty, mebbe then, puts him seventy to eighty now. Old, but he’s the one we’re after.”

  “Who the hell is he? Who are we looking for?”

  “An old rancher is the one who branded me. He had a mean and twisted sense of justice back then. Reckon he’s gotten a lot crazier in twenty years. But it’s him. Can’t be but one man going around branding people with a Q brand iron. I know who we’re looking for.”

  Emmett nodded. “He has a name of sorts, this killer. Some are calling him The Brander.”

  “It ain’t his real name, but it’ll do until we learn his true one.”

  “It’s your turn. Tell me everything you know,” Emmett said.

  Noose had already told his story to Bess.

  Now he told it to Emmett Ford.

  Ten minutes later, the horrific account of his branding as a thirteen-year-old was finished. The young marshal was a level-headed, reserved man not given to displays of emotions. But Noose thought he saw moisture in his listener’s eyes when he got to the part about the rancher’s sons participating in the hanging and the branding.

  “The old son of a bitch lost whatever wits he had, it looks like. Back then, he hanged my friends but just branded me because to him I was too young to hang. Now he’s murderin’ and brandin’ everybody. What I’m saying is he used to have his own kind of moral code, but now he ain’t playing favorites. From what you’re telling me, his only code is kill ’em all.”

  “You really sure it’s him?” Emmett asked. “The Brander.”

  “Sounds like it, but it’s been a long time and we don’t know nothing for sure.”

  The only thing Noose knew for sure was the fiend was escalating his predations. He slaughtered families of men, women, and children and the corpses were piling up. Only this little boy had survived, and he wasn’t talking. He didn’t have to. All Joe Noose needed to see was the sister branding weal to the one he bore to know who the killer was, who he had to be.

  Marshal Bess was sitting with the little boy on her lap near the warmth of the stove, her eyes moving back and forth between Noose and Ford as they talked. Noose gave her a glance, touched by the tender protective way his friend was holding the child, a warm touch that promised no one would ever harm him again the way he had been harmed. That was Bess to the ground.

  Switching his gaze to the silent little boy, Noose could not tell if Bess’s ministrations had any effect on him, since the kid just stared into the crackling stove fire with a forty-yard stare. The flames danced in his blank eyes, and the pulsing glow of the small fire inside the grate played off his empty features. Noose knew that the little boy was intact on the outside, but inside was gone and not coming back.

  His own branding scar began to itch and burn the way it did when it was telling him something. There but for fortune. This nameless boy could have been Joe, his scar was telling him—he’d just been stronger, or luckier, but for whatever reason was in a position to put down the fiend like a dog and be sure that the man they called The Brander never branded another living human soul.

  So Noose stood across from the small boy, both with the Q brand seared on their flesh beneath their shirts, the adult and child version of the same victim.

  Emmett Ford set down his coffee and walked up to Joe Noose and with his back straight looked him respectfully square in the eye. “Will you help us catch this killer, sir?”

  Noose held Ford’s gaze and shook his hand. “Yes, I will.”

  Jumping out of her chair, Bess swaggered over to the two men, screwing on her hat. “I’m going, too, Joe. Don’t you think I ain’t. This is the three of us.”

  No point in arguing with her.

  Giving her a big cracked grin, Noose just nodded.

  It was decided.

  “Let’s ride.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ERIC RED is a Los Angeles–based novelist, screenwriter, and film director. His films include The Hitcher, Near Dark, Cohen and Tate, Body Parts, and The Last Outlaw. He has written seven novels. The first two of his Joe Noose Western novels, Noose and Hanging Fire, are available now. Red divides his time between California and Wyoming, with his wife and two dogs. Find out more about Eric Red and his books and films on his official website, EricRed.com, on Facebook, OfficialEricRed, and on Twitter, @ericred.