Skin Medicine

“ Nonsense. Maybe your recollections of me are vague, Jack, and rightly so…but mine of you? Hell, sharp as a whip. How I remember you at Pea Ridge! What a fine and striking figure you were!”

“ That’s enough, Cabe.”

Cabe smiled now, fingers brushing the webbing of scars that ran across the bridge of his nose, cut into the cheeks. “Your husband is modest, Madam. I would say that Jackson Dirker was an officer and a gentleman. Fair and sympathetic in all matters.”

Dirker was staring holes through him now.

Cabe was staring right back.

Janice, sensing something was terribly amiss here, just cleared her throat and picked at imaginary lint on her velveteen dress. “If I may be so rude and impertinent, Mr. Cabe…did you, did you get those scars in the war?”

But if she was rude or impertinent, it only made Cabe’s grin widen. His fingers explored the familiar slash-and burn-geography of those old scars. “Yes, I received them in the war. I carry them with a certain amount of honor. Battle wounds. You remember when I got these, Jack?”

Dirker set the newspaper down. “Yes, I do. But, tell me, Cabe, how did you find our brothels? Word has it you spent most of the day there. Did you find our red light district to your liking?”

Whatever Cabe was going to say evaporated on his tongue. Dirker. That wily sonofabitch. “I…um…”

Janice smiled thinly. “Our Mr. Cabe certainly is a saucy one.”

“ Isn’t he, though?” Dirker said, enjoying himself now.

Cabe swallowed and swallowed again. “It was purely business, Madam. The man I’m hunting preys upon prostitutes, so what choice do I have but to befriend them? To know them and the places they work.”

“ The things a man must do to make a living,” she said, shaking her head. “Tsk. Tsk. And all day you spent among them? How tired you must be…after such an exhausting enterprise.”

“ Madam-”

Dirker was smiling now. “You are a most determined man, Cabe. If any man can root out this killer it will be you.”

Now here Dirker thought he was being funny and it made Cabe smile, too. If the man was more like that on a regular basis and not so damnably stiff and formal…he almost would have liked him. Cabe figured he was being baited, so he did what came natural to him: he rose up and bit down. “Yes, Madam, it was tiring, but I kept at it until most men would have been spent with fatigue.”

Janice blushed…blushed, but did not turn away. There was something smoldering behind her eyes and she made sure Cabe saw it.

Dirker raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? Gave them the what-for?”

“ Oh yes.”

“ I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” Janice said, leaving the room.

Cabe figured he’d either offended her…or excited her. In his experience, Southern women could be like that. Excited at what they found most offensive. It was the breeding, that’s what. Antebellum society said a lady had to repress her basal instincts. That such things as lust and desire had no place in the higher scheme of things…but like any beast, the more you starved it the hungrier it became.

And there was hunger in that girl. A barely-concealed need to cast-off her upbringing and get down and dirty.

Dirker said, “Is it going to be this way every time we meet, Cabe?”

Cabe looked away from him. So many things he wanted to say, but to what end? What true end? He’d already violated two rules of his upbringing-that a man did not bring his business or personal affairs to the dinner table and that he did not hash out problems with another man in the presence of a lady. Maybe now was the time…if he wanted a fight, then it was high time to quit beating around the bush.

But he did not want that, not anymore. “No,” he said, surprising even himself, “I would prefer we could put all that aside. I reckon it would be the proper thing to do. At least for the time.”

“ Agreed. But just so you understand, Cabe. What happened at Pea Ridge is not something I am proud of. A day does not go by that I don’t think about it, wish things had been different.”

“ You willing to admit that all we were doing was scavenging some essentials off them dead boys?”

Dirker nodded. “I know that, yes. Maybe I knew it then, too, but I lost my head. What I did was wrong.”

Damn. Now if that didn’t suck the wind right out of a man. Dirker admitting he was wrong. Cabe felt suddenly very loose, boneless. He almost felt embarrassed that he’d even brought it up. “All right, all right. Fair enough. We were all young and hot-headed, I guess.”

“ What did you do after the war, Cabe?”

Cabe told him about his years riding steer and nightherding, being a railroad detective and shotgunner on the bullion stages. How it all led to bounty hunting. “Yourself?”

Dirker sighed. “I stayed in the army. Was sent west to fight Indians.” His eyes narrowed. “I thought what I had seen in the Civil War was bad. But it didn’t prepare me for what I saw out there. The atrocities, the wanton murder of innocents.”