Skin Medicine

Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.

Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.

Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right…there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.

But he wasn’t about to give up.

He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.

But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.

2

Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors…but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”

Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.

“ Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”

Dirker did not disagree with that.

They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.

Dirker was studying what was on the door.

A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.

Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I’m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”

Dirker had already figured that.

At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone…or something…had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.

Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him…the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.

A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies-Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade-made it up to Sunrise.

Henry Wilcox-a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts-took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.