Skin Medicine

Dirker licked his lips. “Those people you talk about, Cabe, they’re not exactly high-stepping gentry. Most of ‘em would slit your throat for a ten-dollar gold piece. You got nothing to prove to that bunch.”

Cabe knew he was right, but wasn’t about to admit as much. He finished his coffee. “Can I go now?”

“ No.” Dirker unlocked the property cabinet and gave him back his Starr, knife, and cartridge belt. “You’re gonna take a little walk with me. There’s something I want you to see.”

“ Unless it looks like a bed, I don’t want to see it.”

“ You will, I think.”

“ Why?”

Dirker swallowed down something. “Because your boy is in town. He’s finally struck.”

16

Figuring that he was hungover, trail-weary, and hadn’t had much sleep, Cabe didn’t need to be looking at this. Didn’t need to be seeing the slashed and hacked remains of a whore named Mizzy Modine in all their ghoulish splendor.

He stood there in the doorway, his guts percolating away, bile kicking up the back of his throat. His jaws were locked tight.

Dirker was standing there with him. “Well?” he said. “Any question in your mind that this is your boy?”

Cabe did not answer him, could not answer him. His jaws were still locked-up and his voice had sunk down into some dark, muddy pit. All the rooting around he did down there did not produce it. What he was looking at…Christ, it was the worse yet. The very worst.

“ Excuse me,” he finally said, stepping out into the chill air.

Cabe had seen a lot of death over the years. A lot of blood and flesh mangled up in the worse possible ways. He’d come to the conclusion long ago, that the human being…though possibly God’s finest creation…was also the most disgusting when you opened it up and saw the slimy, drippy things that made it operate.

Cabe had not been physically ill in years looking at a body, but, damn if he wasn’t real close right now. That bile in his throat tasted of cheap whiskey, flat beer, and things far worse. He tried to roll a cigarette, but his fingers were thick and clumsy and maybe the light from the lantern hanging outside Mizzy Modine’s crib just wasn’t enough.

Dirker rolled one for him. Rolled it, stuck it between his lips, struck a match and cupped it against the wind while Cabe puffed it into life.

Dirker said, “It hits you hard the first time you look on it. I been looking on it for hours now…but the shock just won’t go away.”

Cabe nodded, pulling off his cigarette.

Okay, he thought, enough. You went on a good one tonight and you put a man down, but pull yourself together because you have to look at what’s in there. You have to take a good, long look. Dirker wants to know if it’s the Strangler and he expects you to tell him.

Can you do it? Can you?

But Cabe knew he could. Somehow. Some way. Still dragging from his cigarette, he thought about when he took up the trail of the Sin City Strangler. It was in Eureka, Nevada. The fourth victim. The fifth was in Osceola and the sixth in Pinoche. In Pinoche, Cabe got his first good look at the handiwork of the Strangler. The sheriff there was a hardcase named Cyrus Long who carried a sawed-off double barrel shotgun in a sheath at his hip. The stock was plated in iron and it was dented from Long smashing it over the heads of miscreants…or anyone that pissed him off. Long was rumored to have been a Kansas redleg during the war whose obsession, it was said, was hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and skinning them alive. He was a cruel, evil sort and that look in his eyes…like simmering death…even made Cabe bristle. Cabe had been asking questions about the victim and finally Long himself took him to view the body.

Working a plug of chew in his cheek, Long said: Now I’m only gonna do you this favor once, Johnny Reb, hear? You bounty hunters…you come stomping about my town, kicking things up, leaving your bootprints all over my ass…and not a one of you ever had the decency to let me know he’s even here or what for. But you have, Reb, so I’ll do you a good turn back…’cept, you ain’t gonna think it’s so good once we’re done. One thing, though, Reb…yeah, I don’t give a good fucking shit what your name is, Reb…you just listen and shut that cracker mouth for two minutes or I’ll goddamn well do it for you. I had my fill of your peckerwood Southern asses during the War of Rebellion, so shut it and shut it quick, boy. Okay. Now, I don’t mind you bounty hunters coming here and all, just as long as you let me know straight away what you’re dirtying up my town about. Don’t matter if you’re hunting wolves or injuns or men…I wanna know.

He was a real sweetheart, that Long. You just had to love him. Reconstruction had never touched this boy. He was as mean and ornery and intolerant as he’d been during the war. He took Cabe upstairs of a brothel and into a room at the end of the hall. A white sheet was thrown over a form on the bed. There were great red stains on it. Long pulled it off the body and it came away with a sticky sound like tape pulled from a board.