Skin Medicine

Cabe was listening to a tall, lean fellow named Henry Freeman who claimed to be a Texas Ranger and had the tin star to prove it. He wore a duck-canvas duster and a stiff-brimmed Stetson. Both spotless and gleaming. His face was gaunt, his eyes just as dead and flat as shoe buttons. Despite being a Texas Ranger, as he claimed, he did not have a Texas accent. Though, of course, the Rangers probably had folks from everywhere in their ranks by that point. But the way he talked…wasn’t like a Southerner or a Yankee. An odd, even tone without inflection.

Cabe drank him in along with the whiskey and warm beer, didn’t particularly care for his flavor, but what he had to say…that was something else.

“ Way I got it figured, Cabe, is this,” Freeman said, studying his own dour reflection in the cracked bar mirror. “Our friend…this Sin City Strangler, as they like to call him…he’s smart. He’s not your average criminal. I’m of a mind that he’s of superior intelligence. That this is all some sort of game with him, you know, sort of catch-me-if-you-can. There’s a lot of money riding on his head and he gets a kick out of that.”

Cabe took a swallow of beer. “What makes you think he’s so damn smart?”

Freeman, who made a habit of never looking at who he was talking to, said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“ Well, maybe you ought to spell it out for a dumb Arkansas farm boy like me.”

Freeman smiled thinly. “He jumps from mining town to mining town, a fish…no, a shark…that swims in the sea of the population. Mysterious, unknown, unstoppable, just another face in an ocean of them. And mining towns, I don’t need to remind you, are not like the small towns you and I sewed our oats in-people come and people go. By the hundreds. Now how can you hope to track a fellow like that?”

Cabe thought it over, arched an eyebrow. “Same way you bring a mountain cat down what’s been eating your stock…you lay low, you wait, you take your time. Sooner or later, this sumbitch will show his hand. His ego’s too big and his head’s too full of shit not to. And when he shows, then you bag the cocksucker.”

Freeman looked offended somehow. “You simplify things, friend. Simplify and over-simplify, I think.”

“ I’m a simple sort,” Cabe told him. “I’m hungry, I eat. I’m tired, I sleep. I’m thirsty, I drink. I see some sadistic ass-knocker out killing women, I piss lead into him and collect my money.”

Freeman claimed to be on the Strangler’s trail, too. But unlike Cabe who’d picked up the scent in Nevada, Freeman said he’d been scouting the killer since West Texas. Said the Strangler started his killings down in Mexico, continued through Texas and then made his next stop in California, then onto Nevada…and, just possibly, Whisper Lake.

It all bothered Cabe somewhat.

When he hunted a man-and he’d hunted dozens and dozens, everything from cattle rustlers to bank robbers-he made it a religion to find out everything and anything he could about his target. He listened to facts, rumors, suppositions. Read anything that was printed. Corresponded with lawmen and jailers and common folk alike. He followed every thread. He believed in being prepared. Yet…Freeman claimed the Strangler had been busy down Mexico way and carved-up a few in Texas before California. Cabe, in all his researches, had never heard a spot about the killer before San Francisco.

Now how could that be?

Cabe pulled out his Bull Durham and rolled himself a cigarette, thought it over. Kept thinking it over as he stared at the huge rattlesnake skin draped above the bar mirror. In the morning, he was going to wire a few lawmen he knew in Texas, see what fruit it bore.

The air in the saloon was smoky, dirty and oily as the bodies that breathed it. The walls were decorated with the pelts of black bear, fox, and mule deer, stretched and tacked. Jutting in-between were the mounted heads of elk, bighorn sheep, and wolf. A stuffed Gila Monster, mouth open, was squeezed amongst bottles of liquor.

Two burly men were arm-wrestling at a table ringed by men. Money exchanged hands and bets were called and oaths sworn and it got so loud over there, you couldn’t even hear the two wrestlers straining and grunting and puffing.

Ten feet away, a group of trappers and hunters were passing a whore back and forth, spinning her around and kissing her. She was drunk and each time she whirled, they tore another article of clothing off of her. Her breasts were free and bouncing and a little trapper in a marten cap kept trying to nip them. As Cabe watched-not really surprised, but certainly amused-she finally fell onto a stack of smelly, salted antelope hides. Then the men took their turns with her.

No one seemed to notice the fornicating.

You spent enough time in places like this, Cabe knew, you stopped paying attention to such things.

“ You know what, Texas?” he said to Freeman. “I almost get the impression that you respect the Strangler, that you think he’s some slick, upstanding sumbitch playing his gentlemen’s game and not some sick, twisted-up crazy.”