The Shotgun Arcana (8 page)

“You do that,” Mutt said. “Then have that information over to the sheriff’s office by noon today, y’hear?”

“Well, I’m here,” Clay said, walking up on the two men.

Clay Turlough always had a weird smell about him, Mutt thought. Chemicals, and something sour, something spoiled and not right. Mutt was amazed that horses loved Clay as much as they did, given his scent. He owned the only livery in Golgotha and was also the town’s resident taxidermist. Clay was skinny, almost cadaverous, dressed in a stained work shirt, suspenders holding up baggy canvas work pants. Tufts of white hair orbited, like sparse clouds, around his liver-spotted pate. His hands and half his vulture-like face were pitted and streaked with scars from a fire he had survived last year. Clay made no attempt to hide his disfigurement; in fact, most times Mutt thought Clay wasn’t even aware of it.

“Mind telling me why you needed me out here, Mutt,” Clay said. “My experiments are at a very crucial…”

Clay trailed off as he regarded the girl’s body and what had been done to it.

“You want me to … untangle her and take her home,” Clay said.

“Yes,” Mutt said. “Clay, you think you can help us figure out what sumbitch did this to her?”

Turlough scratched his head and walked closer to the tangle of guts that stretched out of the victim. He no longer heard Mutt; he was deep in his own mind, now. Seeing the scene in multiple dimensions, formulating, equating.

He touched one of the taut tubes of intestine with his forefinger and traced it back, walking to the wall of the alley fence where it was nailed. It vibrated slightly as he did and gore spattered off into the pool of blood. He examined the nail. Jim looked at Mutt and then back to Clay.

“He’s no carpenter, doesn’t know his way around a hammer,” Clay said. “Wrong kind of nails to use for this wood. He used old A cuts, when B cuts would have been better. He also has half-moon divots in the wood where he missed the nail several times and hit the wood.”

“You said ‘he,’” Jim said.

“Mmhhm,” Clay said, only half listening to Jim. “Men’s shoes, not boots like you and Mutt tromped all over the scene, but a gentleman’s shoe. Size eight and a half, I’d wager. This was a man’s work. A man with a great deal of hatred for the female of the species and very little fear of capture or consequence. He has nothing but contempt for the law, fellas.”

“Wish we had a photographer to catch all this stuff,” Mutt said. “Might be things here that could help us find the sick bastard. I’d like Jon to give it a once-over too.”

Clay seemed to snap out of his fog and shuffled off, muttering about getting something out of the wagon.

“Did you get his scent?” Jim asked. Mutt shook his head.

“Nope, whole place smells of death and crazy,” he said. “I couldn’t pick a man scent out of all that. Can’t pick up much of anything.”

“I trust you will get this cleaned up as quickly as possible,” the Scholar said. “This has been a disruption of the evening’s activities and while I am sympathetic to the cause of justice, I have Mr. Bick’s business to run.”

“Well, ain’t Mr. Bick jist the biggest toad in the puddle,” Mutt said.

The two men continued bantering. Jim shook his head and looked toward the dead girl they were arguing over. For some reason Jim thought about his little sister, Lottie, grinning, laughing. She’d be nine now and Jim wondered if she was safe, if she was even alive. He wondered who Sweet Molly was to someone somewhere—daughter, sister, friend?

A woman, one of the Doves, was kneeling near Sweet Molly’s body. Jim hadn’t even noticed her walk over. She was looking at the shoe print Clay had pointed out. The woman was in her thirties and slender, with brown hair falling down her shoulders. She had a rather ordinary face, not plain but not beautiful either. Her dark eyes were bright and intelligent. Jim saw the woman kneel closer to study the shoe print.

“Ma’am, you need to leave that be,” Jim said, stepping forward.

The woman looked up and saw Jim staring at her and smiled. Her whole face seemed to change and the intelligent look behind her eyes dimmed. She opened her robe and let Jim get a better look at her thin undergarment and stockings. Jim blushed and looked away.

“Ummm, Mutt,” Jim said, patting the deputy on the shoulder.

“Yeah?” Mutt said, pausing from his verbal sparring match with the Scholar. Jim pointed in the woman’s direction. “Oh,” Mutt said. “You want us to get this finished, then you need to keep your girls out of the damn alley, Scholar.”

The giant looked up and gestured to the woman, who was already stepping away from the body and the blood.

“Kitty, inside. Now,” the Scholar said, and the woman rushed to the alley door and darted inside. She gave Jim one last look, and for a second the gleam returned to her eye.

“Who is she?” Jim asked.

Mutt grinned. “Trouble for you, short britches.”

“Her name is Kitty Warren,” the Scholar said. “She’s new.”

Jim started to say something about the woman’s close examination of the print and then decided to bite his tongue in front of Bick’s man.

“I’ll leave you to your business, Deputies,” the Scholar said. “It has been a pleasure to meet you both. I will discuss your request for client information with Mr. Bick today, Deputy Mutt. Good morning.”

“I liked Ladenhiem better,” Mutt said to Jim as the giant walked away. “Even with the spider-things all over him.”

Clay returned a few minutes after the Scholar and the last few onlookers from the Dove had retired inside. It was almost dawn and the alley and the street were blissfully quiet, at least for a little while. He was carrying four large glass jars and several smaller ones balanced on top of them. He also had a large wooden box-like contraption slung over his shoulder on a strap and a large coil of copper wire wrapped over his other shoulder.

“What is all this humbug, Clay?” Mutt asked.

Clay began to set the jars up carefully in different positions around the alleyway. There were strange objects bobbing and floating inside the glass containers. Clay affixed copper wire to a metal post on the lid of each jar. Jim walked over to one as Clay set it up. At first he thought there was a bunch of grapes hanging in the fluid-filled jar. Then he saw what it actually was.

“Are those … eyeballs?” Jim asked, squinting in the predawn.

“Yep, they are, Jim,” Clay said. “Strands of eyeballs, connected by their optic nerves at the back of the eye to a cable of copper electrical wiring running up through the top of the jar and now connected to an external set of wiring.”

Jim looked to Mutt. Mutt shrugged.

“Well, Clay, I have to tell you those are … the … finest … eyeballs all stuck together in a jar like that, that I’ve … ever seen,” Mutt said. “Yessir. What are you going to do with your fine jars of eyeballs, Clay?”

“This here,” Clay said, connecting the last of the jars to the coil of wire, “is my occustereograph.”

“Oh,” Mutt said. “That clears things up.”

“This device is based off another invention of mine, the occuscope,” Clay said, either unaware of or uncaring of the deputy’s mocking tone. “The occustereograph imprints images off the eyes from multiple angles and directions. I then can use my occuscope to merge the images into a truly fully immersive photographic view. It’s based off the work of Professor Wilhelm Kuhne, head of the Department of Physiology at the University of Amsterdam. Herr Professor holds the theory that the eye can hold its final image for some time after death. We’ve corresponded quite a bit over the last few years.”

“Are these human eyes?” Jim asked.

“Ya know, Clay, I can fetch Bertrand Fisher, over at the
Golgotha Scribe
. He takes pictures,” Mutt said. “No need to use up all your fancy eyeballs.”

If Clay heard either of them, he didn’t reply. He connected the copper wire to posts on top of the wooden box. The box had a large hand crank on the side, and it reminded Jim a little of a dynamite detonator. Clay nodded to answer some question in his own head and began to crank the wooden box. As he turned the crank faster and faster, blue sparks snapped from the posts. The thick gel-like fluid in the jars began to glow with a faint blue light. Jim swore he saw one of the eyeballs move, then focus.

The whole process took about ten minutes. Some of the jars began to bubble and smoke, and several of the eyeballs popped from the heat the process produced. The sun was peeking up over the ridge of Rose Hill when Clay finished his work with the device and began to pack up. A few work wagons were beginning to make their way down Bick Street on their appointed rounds. The town was waking up, and they were finished, just in time. Clay carefully gathered up Sweet Molly’s remains with Mutt’s help, even taking samples from the swamp of blood and mud on the alley’s floor. He measured and sketched the boot print and made meticulous notes of every detail of the alleyway.

Jim noticed the tenderness and care Clay used in the process, and part of his concern for Clay’s sanity began to fade. Then Jim recalled when he had first met Clay in the desert, how the old man had studied and pondered over the carcass of a dead coyote. A strange look of peace and something else, something Jim didn’t want to try to understand, had crossed Clay’s face as he watched the animal breathe its last breath. Jim realized that the taxidermist was looking at Molly’s body the same way he had looked at the coyote.

“Jon and I will meet up with you in the next day or so, Clay, so you can tell us what’s what. Square?” Mutt said. Clay grunted in the affirmative. He climbed up on the wagon and drove away without another word. As the wagon bumped and jumped down Bick Street, one of the girls that worked at the Dove came out back with a bucket of water and dumped it on the pool of blood. Jim watched as she repeated the process, until the alley was no longer what it had been a few hours ago, no longer a door to Hell. It was just an alley outside a whorehouse.

“C’mon,” Mutt said, slapping him on the back. “Let’s git that baby goat and git home. Mrs. Proctor should have breakfast waiting.”

In the wagon, Clay Turlough’s mind was a crashing torrent of thought and theory, cause and effect. He was eager to get the female’s remains back to his workshop at the livery. The girl still had good hands, good feet, and some of the organs had not been completely butchered. In fact, the exact ones he needed were still pristine and he had to race against the enemy of time to secure them. He’d slap some data together for Jon Highfather and Mutt to give them a trail to chase, a killer to find. But now his mind was on the grand project and how this female’s death put him maddeningly close to completion of phase one. A few more deaths and everything should be ready.

Whatever this one’s name had been he couldn’t recall at this moment. Jim had said it, but it was lost to Clay; she would join the company of the others in the heavy, still darkness of the cold room, awaiting immortality, of a sort, as a bride awaits her groom.

The Ace of Cups (Reversed)

The night was near its end when Augustus Shultz returned to his little cottage, nestled in the green cradle of Rose Hill. The house had only been finished a few months ago, and it still took Auggie some effort to think of this place as home. Rose Hill was where the well-off folk of Golgotha settled: the Mormon businessmen, whose families had helped found Golgotha over twenty years ago; the mayor; the bankers and those who had struck it rich with silver and wanted to show off their good fortune—they all built fine homes up on Rose Hill.

Auggie was a shopkeeper, a grocer; he was used to living in a cramped little apartment over his general store on Main Street. Before that he, and his late wife, Gerta, had lived in a tiny dwelling back in Germany. This house was exactly what he and Gerta had dreamed of when they were young, but Auggie still felt like a stranger passing through his own door.

The metallic click of the lock seemed very loud in the darkness and silence of the deep night. The moon was retreating behind the hills and the stars were cloaked in clouds tonight. There was a fire burning in the hearth, or at the least the dying remains of one. A simple meal was set out on the old Hepplewhite dinner table he’d found in a shop over in Virginia City. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the table. He caught a whiff of the rose water she used, as he closed the door quietly, and smiled at the memories the scent brought to him.

Gillian Proctor was dozing in Auggie’s comfy high-backed leather Sleepy Hollow armchair, a quilt draped around her. The Widow Proctor, as she had been known until recently, was a striking woman, slender and tall but with a very feminine form. Gillian’s black hair had strands of silver that caught the light of the fire. She normally wore her hair up tight, in a simple, utilitarian chignon bun, but now it fell around her face and down to below her shoulders. The small round wire spectacles Gillian wore were perched on her nose. A book lay open on her lap. Half a glass of wine sat on the floor next to her chair.

Her eyes fluttered open and she smiled at Auggie. Her eyes always reminded him of black opals and the way she looked at him always took his breath away.

Auggie was a big man, broad, heavy and tall. He wore a thick handlebar mustache the color of rust, and the fringe of hair that circled his sun-freckled bald head was the same color. He was strong, strong enough to lift and toss massive two-boll sacks of flour off a wagon, strong enough to lift pork barrels weighing twenty-eight stone. But Gillian Proctor, the way she looked at him, the way she made him feel, made him as weak as a child inside. Auggie stood in awe of how a woman like this could love him. If Gillian knew what he had been about again tonight, he knew she would never look at him that way again.

“Mmm, hello,” Gillian said. “I must have dozed off.”

“Ja,”
Auggie said. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“I made us a spot of supper,” Gillian said. “I suppose we could just call it breakfast. You must be starved.”

“Uh, no,” Auggie said. “I am afraid I am not hungry.”

Gillian closed her book, the FitzGerald translation of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, and pulled aside the quilt and stood. “Is everything all right, Augustus? I got worried.”