The Ghost of Apache Creek

Chapter 8

Gun in hand, Sam Pace staggered to the door and stepped outside.

Had he really heard a scream or had he dreamed it? The street was empty, but the scent of decay lingered. It was not the stench of the rotting dead. Surely it was the smell of the decaying coyote he’d killed the night before.

Pace, clutching on to the last shreds of sanity left to him, would not allow himself to think otherwise. He heard the scream again, a sharp, shattering shriek of fear. Hurt and stiff though he was, Pace ran in the direction of the sound.

Moon shadows slanted across the street, a series of light and dark rectangles, one after the other, cast by the false-fronted buildings. The wind rushed past his ears, urging him onward.

Faster. Faster. Faster.

Another scream, followed by a series of hysterical cries for help.

Then he saw them.

A pair of hunting coyotes stepped from shadow into moonlight like gray ghosts. They held their heads low, weight well forward, shoulders hunched, moving slowly, intent on the kill.

Pace saw a woman back out of a black rectangle into a patch of mother-of-pearl light, her gaze fixed on the predators, her face a blur of frightened white in the gloom.

He yelled and fired twice into the air. The coyotes spun on him, then stood for a moment, assessing the odds. Not liking the gunshots and the man running toward them, they scampered into the darkness, trailing alarmed yips behind them.

Pace sprinted toward the woman.

She saw him coming and screamed.

A naked man, more animal than human, charged at her through the malignant night.

The woman turned and ran. But she traveled only a few steps before falling flat on her face. She tried to rise, groaned once, and lay still.

“You fainted,” Pace said, “and I carried you here. You’re in my office.”

He was no longer naked but had thrown on his tattered rags that Beau Harcourt’s men had left lying in the street.

His marshal’s star gleamed on his shirtfront.

The woman looked at him with wide, frightened eyes and fainted again.

Carefully, trying not to irritate the cuts and scratches on his scalp, Pace shaved away his long scalp locks of hair and watched them fall around his feet like black snakes.

He did the same with his beard, shaving close, but he spared his great dragoon mustache, once his only vanity, a Texas Ranger badge of honor that had taken him years to cultivate. This he trimmed and combed into a semblance of its old self.

The result he saw in the mirror did not please him.

His shaved head made him look older than his thirty years, and his blue eyes were glazed, distant, staring back at him like a rabbit hypnotized by a rattlesnake. He was painfully thin, his face tanned to a mahogany color by sun and wind, and he noticed wrinkles where none had existed before.

At least he wouldn’t make the woman faint again.

Or so he hoped.

Pace stepped into the cell where the woman lay on his bed, an iron cot with a straw mattress. Both cot and mattress had seen better days.

She wore a pink gingham dress, stained and torn, and her scuffed shoes showed the wear and tear of hard travel.

Whoever she was, she was pretty, her eyelashes fanning over high cheekbones, a tendril of yellow hair falling across her forehead.

Her body was slim and shapely and she looked to be about seventeen, maybe younger, more girl than woman.

And she had a story to tell—if he could keep her conscious long enough to tell it.

Not by inclination a drinking man, Pace remembered that there was a bottle of Old Crow in his desk drawer that he’d kept for special occasions.

He smiled, revealing teeth that, despite everything, were remarkably clean and white.

If this wasn’t a special occasion, then what was?

He poured a shot of the whiskey into a glass, returned to the cell, and shook the girl awake.

She opened her eyes and Pace said quickly, “For God’s sake, don’t faint.”

To his relief, this time the girl looked at him without too much fear.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“In the marshal’s office.” Pace smiled. “I’m the marshal of the town of Requiem in the Little Colorado River Basin country. But, just so you know and so it won’t come to you as a surprise, like, I’m tetched in the head.”

To Pace’s surprise, the girl rolled up her eyes and fainted again.