Skin Medicine

He wore a knee-length overcoat, the cuffs and collar trimmed in fur. Atop his head was a round buffalo fur cap. His face was narrow, angular, the mustache riding beneath the sharp nose trimmed immaculately. He was a handsome man and his pale blue eyes simmered with authority and bearing. There was a badge pinned to his breast. It read: SHERIFF BEAVER COUNTY UTAH.

The hellbilly was staring at him, but so was Cabe.

Cabe was speechless. Something hot and wet had spilled inside of him and it made him shake, made him angry, made him boil inside. But he said nothing, not yet.

“ Orv,” the sheriff said in a flat tone. “Give me your gun. You don’t and I swear to God I’ll kill you where you stand.”

The sheriff hadn’t even opened his coat to show his guns…if he even had any. But those eyes…Cabe remembered those eyes…they were merciless. And when they looked at you and into you, your insides melted like butter on a stove lid.

The hellbilly looked to Cabe almost desperately. His head shook slightly from side to side.

The sheriff walked over. “The gun,” he said. “Right now.”

Old Orv looked fit to shit himself, except by the stink, he probably already had. His fingers tightened on that big life-eating 1851 Colt. His knuckles were strained white as pearl buttons. He looked from Cabe to Carny, cast a glance at the miners. He looked oddly helpless.

The sheriff unbuttoned his coat, made damn sure the hellbilly saw how slowly and calmly he did it. And made sure he got a good look at the butt of the short-barreled. 45 Peacemaker waiting in the hip scabbard.

He held his left hand out. “The gun,” he said and those words were sharp enough to cut steel.

Old Orv made to hand the gun over…then maybe the tension of the moment or just plain machismo got to him, because he started to bring it back, his eyes gone ebon and savage. But the sheriff was too quick, too sure. He took hold of the hellbilly’s wrist with his right hand, gave it a nasty twist, and that big revolver dropped into his left. He took it by the barrel and, with no more thought than swatting a fly, smashed old Orv across the face five, six times with the butt until he sank to his knees. Orv clasped his bleeding face with those soiled fingers, moaning and gobbling.

A big man wearing a tin star on his Fish slicker came through the door, looked at the ‘billy, then at the sheriff.

“ Lock this trash up,” the sheriff said. Then he turned to Cabe. “Sir, if you would please, leather that pistol.”

Cabe found himself doing so without even thinking. That voice, those eyes…they were almost hypnotic somehow. But then he came to himself as the deputy hauled the hellbilly non-too gently out the door. That cocky, crooked grin opened up in his face. “Well, well, well, Jackson Dirker,” he said. “As I live and breathe.”

The sheriff raised an eyebrow, showed no sign of recognition. “Do I know you, sir?”

Cabe smiled and that smile burned with hate. “You should.” He touched the old scars running from one cheek, across the bridge of his nose, and to the next cheek. “These marks I bear…”

“ What about them?”

“ You gave ‘em to me,” Cabe said.

2

The Beaver County Sheriff’s Office.

A dirty single-story brick edifice stuck in-between the county courthouse and a mine broker’s office, looking straight out at the town square and the taverns lined-up beyond like prostitutes offering an easy time.

Cabe stood outside in the blowing, wet wind, his boots caked with mud like wet cement.

He wasn’t sure what he was feeling just then, but it wasn’t good. Part of him wanted to kick though the door and gun down that arrogant sonofabitch of a county sheriff. But that wouldn’t do and he knew it. That was not how things were done in real life. He had thought of Jackson Dirker for years, playing out revenge fantasies in his mind for the time when they met up again-if ever-and now it all fell to his feet. Like the shed skin of a snake, these fantasies were simply dead.

He came through the door and saw the big deputy sipping from a tin cup of coffee. He was a large man, heavy in the middle, but broad in the shoulders and powerful-looking. He wore no gun. He hadn’t at the saloon either. Cabe figured he was like old “Bear River” Tom Smith down in Abilene years back, enforcing law and order with his bare fists.

“ What can I do for you?” he asked. “I’m Henry Wilcox, deputy.”

“ Tyler Cabe. I have business with Sheriff Dirker. He about?”

“ In the back,” Wilcox said. “I’ll get him.”

Cabe found a straight-backed chair and pulled it up to what he assumed was Dirker’s desk-a big oaken antique outfit, papers and the like organized very neatly. Yeah, that would be Dirker. Officious, stern, militaristic.

Sure as shit.

Cabe had been in lawmen’s offices in dozens and dozens of towns, if not hundreds. Some were nothing more than tumbledown shacks with shackles bolted to concrete blocks to hold prisoners. Planks set over barrels for desks. But not here. Not in a rich mining county. The job of county sheriff would be a very lucrative one.