These Violent Times Read online

  Bishop said, “Marshal, this man made the first shotgun for me, and I doctored his child bride, and that’s what there was to that. This is the closest place to mine, and where I ended up the night after my family was taken from me and I was left for dead. In all the stories, that’s the one true thing about ever printed.”

  “I’ve certainly pursued it a few times,” Duffin remarked. “Did you really tell the miss how to operate on your arm, stay awake through it?”

  “I passed out once or twice,” Bishop confessed, growing impatient. “What the hell has that got to do with this?”

  “Because of a dying man killed with your gun,” Duffin said. “Or one like it. Because we got a letter at the fort, were told to come here, and this place was laid out with evidence against you. Indian camps being attacked, and they’re using your inventions to do it . . . little kids describing them exactly. Or as exactly as the language allows—’demons.’ They’ve targeted the Northern tribes and they’re spreading disease with those grenades, made here. There’s a crate out back, and we found notes on how infections can turn into epidemics. Your notes, Doc.”

  Bishop fired back: “You know how many men died of epidemics along the front line, instead of by artillery? Both sides? There were headlines about it for months after Appomattox. Did you bother to read those?”

  Duffin said, “Doc, we’re not ready to accuse you of anything.”

  “I don’t care what you do or don’t do, you’re missing the point by years. Want to stop a sickness, figure out how it works. If he had any of those old notes from me, they were about prevention. My writings when I was healing up. That’s all.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that everything here’s connected to you one way or the other. Every damn last thing. Weren’t you just the one to tell me to look at a bigger map? Well, here it is.”

  “But every name on that map is John Bishop, and I’m telling you that’s wrong.”

  “I hope so,” Duffin said. “Maybe I even believe so, I’m no judge. I’m just the law sent to find you, to get you here, to let you look around, and I wanted to do it.” Duffin leaned against the shattered-belly stove, resting his leg, the bandanna still over his mouth and nose. “I made it clear as I could, you and the miss had something hangin’ around your necks. Well, this is it. Throw a light on that curtain.”

  Duffin grabbed hold of a curtain made from a bedsheet, hung on a length of rope to shield a small pantry.

  Bishop said, “Yeah, White Fox put that up herself.”

  “I figured. Is the old blood yours, or hers? There’s newer along the bottom, I think belongs to the husband.”

  Duffin yanked back the curtain, took a step, holding on to the axle, a hand clamped over his covered mouth. Almost losing balance, he choked back a rush of air thick with rot as they stood before the blacksmith.

  “That’s the bed you recouped in?”

  Bishop shrugged. “A little different then.”

  The blacksmith’s empty sockets were the first thing seen; the torch throwing shadows and cinders into the spaces where the eyes should be. The face was drawn back, wax-paper skin tight to the skull, with a mouth gorged by a mocking, black-swollen tongue.

  The body was lashed to two iron crossbars leaning against the wall behind a metal bed, as if he’d been staked to the ground. Arms and legs were spread wide, and tied to the iron with leather thongs. The flesh of the wrists and ankles had been ripped away by his struggling, leaving only raw bone and flies that had stuck to it and died there.

  “Sending a hell of a message,” Duffin said. “Just like a Cheyenne raiding party’d do it. Or a Cheyenne wife who was sick to death of this scalawag.”

  “It may mean nothing,” Bishop said. “They got a sense of humor.”

  “Maybe,” Duffin agreed. “I’m thinking, though, that whoever did this knows how to point a finger.”

  “At?”

  “Take a look under there.”

  Duffin held the torch as Bishop bent down, reaching under the bed for a burlap sack that had been put into a metal pan, filled with putrid water. Insects crawled.

  Bishop said, “Give me your knife.”

  Duffin gave it a thought, then drew the knife from his hip sheath, handed it to Bishop, who handled it like a scalpel, careful not to touch the burlap or the metal pan. He used the tip to open the top of the sack, slitting it, before looking inside.

  An old man, smiling, was looking up at him from the sack, steeped in liquid decay. Flesh peeling from a skull, and tufts of brittle hair. It was the kind of grotesquery, Bishop thought, the lurid dreadfuls never in all their dirty imagination got right.

  “A pointed finger,” Bishop said, and took Duffin by the arm. “You want to die for all this?”

  * * *

  White Fox was still by her painted, eyes away from the shack until Duffin and Bishop threw aside the leather door, stepped into the sun, and pulled away their bandannas, drinking fresh air. Duffin balanced himself on the scrap-metal cane, planted the torch in the mud, as Bishop charged Duffin’s horse, flipped open his saddlebag, and pulled out the rig.

  Duffin called out, “Hold on, Doc, you don’t need that!”

  “The hell I don’t. You said it yourself, everything in that slaughterhouse points to us, and I’m not going to stand idle while being blamed for the worst crime there is. And you let that rot go on!”

  “We got two murders here,” Duffin said. “And no idea who that old man is.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Bishop protested. “Don’t you see? Those bodies are there to spread infection. Even the flies are dead. That contaminated bloody water? What could breed out of there? And you’ve seen these goddamn glass grenades, loaded with disease, and you let this all pass. You didn’t even move the bodies to clean it up.”

  “There was a risk, but I had to see your reaction, Doc, what you’d do. And White Fox’s, too, when I asked about her husband.”

  “We pass your exam?”

  White Fox had Bishop’s right arm through the harness, tightening, and he was fitting the cup over his right, locking it into place below the elbow.

  “What was it?” she asked. “In there?”

  “Death, laid at my feet.” Bishop’s dark eyes sought her questioning ones. The doctor confirmed, “He was one of them.”

  “How?” she asked. “Experimenting?”

  Bishop shook his head. “This was not self-inflicted.”

  “Good,” White Fox replied.

  Duffin was openly uncertain about what to do next. His expression was resolutely set on “Stop him” but his body was languid with “How?” After a minute of contemplation, Duffin moved from the porch, hobbled around the edge of the open pit. He was in a neutral state now. “Someone’s going to a lot of bother to get you hung, Doctor. Or at least hunted down. Thoughts on that?”

  “Yeah.” Bishop was tight-lacing the bandolier with, “Willing to start an epidemic makes them lower than horseshit.”

  “I mean about naming you—”

  “Not now,” Bishop said. “I’ll face down whoever, or whatever, I have to, but something’s got to be done here. If this is still an active site . . . that bucket gets tossed into a water hole . . . goddamn, you understand what that could mean?”

  Duffin was choosing his words. “I goddamn do.”

  Bishop kicked over the tar barrel, the liquid rolling out spattering the porch, slopping against the wood and old steel. He smashed a window with the double-barrel, reached through the glass, and grabbed two oil lanterns from a pile of stacked junk. Bishop threw both against the porch, shattering them and letting their oil run to the floor, mixing with the tar puddles.

  Bishop said, “Let’s see how it burns. Clean it to the ground.”

  Duffin protested weakly, “We get everything we need in there?”

  “I don’t care,” Bishop said. “This place gets shut down.”

  He picked the last of the torches, a broken ax handle, from the emptying tar barrel, pulli
ng it out of the thick black, and lit it with the torch Duffin left burning. The two flames burst together.

  Duffin limped closer, lay a hand on Bishop’s arm. “Booby traps,” he said. “The man was a master, you said so yourself.”

  “And you saw yourself, he was not subtle. He wanted to kill us; we’d’ve stepped on a charge under a plank, blown up in a doorway. Tripped a wire that lit up a cannon. Fallen in a barbwire net or had one fall on us.”

  Duffin released the arm.

  Bishop looked to the marshal, the rig locked downward, and said, “You’re the law, and this house, those bodies, are an unknown danger to the territory. Any evidence in there—how long will you take to find it versus the risk? And a blaze—any living evidence in there, someone we mighta missed, it’ll flush him out.”

  “What about after?”

  “We hunt, starting here.”

  “After that,” Duffin clarified. “There’ll be a trial, a jury trial, a hanging for someone.” The pronoun was vague but the look pinned the charge on Bishop.

  “I don’t care if it clears or convicts me, this place has to go,” Bishop said. He added, “And how do you know it’ll be a hanging?”

  “Eh?”

  “Military men get a firing squad.”

  The implication was surprising and daunting to the young officer. He stood dumbly trying to mentally expand the scope of this thing, whatever it was.

  “Now, Marshal,” the doctor said. “Do your duty.”

  Duffin regarded Bishop. “Your rules. Help or survive.”

  “This is both. Burn it. I can’t. Makes me look guilty.”

  Duffin hesitated, still. There was too much to contemplate.

  “Dammit.” Bishop did not waste time with further debate. He held the ax handle, its tar burning, and faced White Fox. She took the torch, bringing all of her strength back from her shoulder, and sent it careening through the front door, setting the oil streaks on fire. Bishop dropped the second onto the rest of the spattered oil and pools of tar. Hot orange and yellow sprung up, small bits of flame growing, then spreading across the wood and crawling through the stacks of iron to more wood beneath them.

  Bishop shouldered Duffin away, and the three stood by their horses, the place burning before them. Now, White Fox wouldn’t turn away, as the porch and frame were eaten, piles of metal collapsing into the fire, sending plumes of flames, wild sparks, and thick, oil smoke into the air.

  For this moment, White Fox stood motionless. The heat scorching the air around her, she stayed with eyes fixed, as if making sure it was all truly burning into nothing. She was on the wrong side of him; Bishop wished he had an arm to put around her at that moment.

  Black-powder ammunition, stacked behind the back walls, exploded in the flames, throwing steel and iron pieces that crashed back into the fire, splitting more wood, collapsing more of the house.

  White Fox and Bishop backed away, held their horses, and turned the animals away from the heat and smoke, which rose, arching over them like a hellish rainbow. They were shielding their mouths with fabric when the first gunshot rang from a hilltop behind them, above the smoke. The air was alive with burning noise, and the occasional big drum boom of ordnance, but this was a high-caliber weapon, and its sound was thunder.

  Duffin drew his pistol, looking up, balancing himself and trying to see. Anything. Through the blowing smoke. There was a second muzzle flash. Distant, but a bolt of white in the gray-black.

  During the interim, Bishop had started moving to the edge of the road, facing the burned trees, the rig moving, locking into place, as he extended his arm shoulder height. He aimed, shooting into the smoke just below the second flash, and to the center. A gut shot, if it hit. He waited a moment for any return sound; a man screamed, loud enough to be heard over the roof collapsing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Confederate Sailor

  Just a few minutes earlier, Cavanaugh had been watching as much as he could from the hillside. He had been sitting, legs ahead, on a slope of rock, elbows hugging his sides for support as he adjusted the brass focus ring of the Broadhurst spyglass, clearing his sight line through the burned trees and to the blacksmith’s shack. Then he lowered the metal tube. He’d targeted what he needed to see. Taking a cigarette from a silver case in the coat of his old gray uniform, he lit it, cupping his hands to hide the flame, then propped the spyglass against a hip of his extended legs, right next to a Colt’s Dragoon pistol. Both within instant reach of hands as familiar with both as if they were body parts.

  His back pressed against a cropping of moss-covered rocks, Cavanaugh twisted his marionette body around, bending as if his joints were loose springs and old leather, extending his neck and head and looking over the edge of the small rise. He watched White Fox salve the cuts on the painted’s sides, thinking for a moment he’d wish she was doing the same to him. Not her especially . . . any woman.

  He shook it off, murmuring as he always did, “Son, them thoughts is why you never made the grade. Why you never saved a penny of any nation.”

  He kept the cigarette between his lips, drawing deep, and rubbing his temples with his eyes closed. Thinking about the mission. His orders. Getting it all clear in his head.

  Cavanaugh sat up straight, chest-buttoned his Confederate Navy long coat with the lieutenant’s braids, smoothing the front and pulling at the cuffs to even them, then picked up the telescope. He focused on Bishop and Duffin stepping from the house; small figures tearing away their bandannas, and with their mouths flapping silently.

  Cavanaugh grinned, easy and lopsided.

  Bishop raised his voice from below, the words echoing against the rocks around Cavanaugh’s ears. The puppet-like figure retrieved the spyglass, stood up halfway, hunkered into his bony hips. The spyglass focused on Bishop, now taking the rig from the saddlebags.

  “Ho,” was all the former Confederate officer said, the word a cross between an exhalation and speech. The weapon was as formidable as the magazine drawings depicted.

  Cavanaugh moved forward toward the ledge, crouching, and reached for the Dragoon. He stopped. Still watching through the spyglass. The torches were lit. Watching, hammer on the Dragoon being cocked back. Torches thrown.

  Cavanaugh retracted the glass, letting it drop into one of his coat’s deep pockets. He held the pistol down out by his side, in a near-formal stance, eyes still on the shack below, watching the fire and waiting for its smoke to cover his position.

  Oil and powder exploded in a flash, though the boom came a heartbeat after. He felt the heat.

  The smell of the burning followed quickly, wind-borne, then the choking, rolling black. Cavanaugh had a window of opportunity before it grew too thick. He raised the pistol and fired toward the treetops. A flock of birds broke. He couldn’t really see, so he waited. The tar smoke was a roiling ocean and blocking him from below. He turned away, lungs hot, to catch his breath. Got it, stood, saw a break in the black sea, and shot again, aiming at the shack.

  Just as the shotgun barrels flamed directly at him.

  The echoing crack and the blast of iron pellets struck simultaneously. Cavanaugh howled louder than all the sound around, staggering on independently functioning marionette-legs to the far side of the ledge, then diving down a small grade, tumbling forward. He landed on his feet, though not upright. He used a nearby rock for support getting up. His boots were filling with blood when he limped onto the road. There were trees here, sloping downward, and he literally stumbled from one to the next to the next, hitting an ugly, painful oof before dropping, knees into the dirt and hands up as figures approached. In a moment he found himself before the double-barrel rig and Duffin’s Colt.

  “This is full surrender gentlemen!” he said as if it were a single word. Breath didn’t come easy. The men didn’t move. He spoke again, with effort. “I’ve been shot. I’m giving. Myself up. To my betters.”

  Cavanaugh’s words were gurgled with the mellow residue of a Chesapeake waterfront accent, stress
ed with new pain. Even kneeling and stooped over, he was taller than most, and his head seemed larger than a bison’s; mismatched pieces sewn together, shocks of thick, prematurely gray fur.

  The pie-faced boy came forward cautiously. Too slowly. Cavanaugh fought to keep from twisting and falling to his side.

  One hand up, one hand lowering slowly, the onetime Rebel called, “Look there!”

  Heaved by its polished grip, the Dragoon landed in the mud at Bishop’s feet. Duffin stopped as though waiting for it to discharge on its own.

  “There are . . . there are . . . a handful . . . .44 balls . . . pocket. And . . . a cigarette if... you wouldn’t mind? Already rolled. May I?”

  “Don’t move.” Duffin came forward again.

  Hands back up, waving long, thin arms, Cavanaugh said, “That’s an expensive weapon . . . that you boys . . . know well. I wouldn’t be . . . giving it up . . . if I wasn’t giving up.”

  Cavanaugh fell forward from the effort and loss of blood. He was conscious enough and gentleman enough not to want to lie on his face in the dirt. He twisted his jointed body at the waist to put the weight of his torso on one arm. He was still able to look at the men if he rolled his eyes toward his forehead.

  Bishop put his foot over the pistol, staying in the center of the road with Duffin. Cavanaugh kept his smile, but was watching the inescapable gun barrels facing him, eyes darting between them and White Fox, the war ax angled at her hip. Behind the three, the shack was flames . . . orange, and yellow, and crawling blue. No wood or metal now, just an outline of fire. The smoke still churned overhead, but the air was clear enough down here.

  “This is quite a thing... I’m seeing,” Cavanaugh said, changing his focus, wiping the sweat from his face on the sleeve that wasn’t under him. “It’s like . . . a biblical vision . . . you three. You could make your own army.”

  “I’m a territorial marshal,” Duffin said. “Why did you shoot at us?”

  “Too far . . . to . . . shout.”

  Duffin didn’t believe that, but he let it go. The man was wounded, perhaps mortally; the marshal did not want to come away from this encounter empty-handed. “I want your name and everything about you.”