The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

TOMBSTONE MOON

Black entered the cemetery shack and tossed the severed ear onto the desk, between a can of Brown Derby beer and a salami sandwich that was missing a bite.

The desert wind whipped through the open doorway, salting the warped floorboards with gritty sand. Black was already sick of the desert — sick of the earthy smell, sick of the unyielding heat, sick of the sand in his boots.

He closed the door, but that didn’t help much. The shack’s only window was open a fraction of an inch, and the steady wind whistled through its corroded metal lips. The sound was unsettling. Black leaned on the latch, but the window was rusted in place and wouldn’t budge.

Black sighed. Only open a fraction of an inch, but a fraction of an inch was enough to mess with his senses.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it. Black rubbed a clean circle on the grimy glass. His ’73 Toyota Corolla sat about twenty feet from the shack. The engine ticked and pinged, trying to cool without much success. Rust spots on the hood and trunk shone like pools of dark rum in the light of the setting sun.

A week’s parking at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas had cost twenty-five bucks, and that little fact irritated Black. He doubted he could sell the damned car for twenty-five bucks. But the Toy was inconspicuous, and that was the important thing.

Black scanned the desert. There wasn’t much to see besides his car. Whistler’s limo was nowhere in sight. Neither was the prospector’s Ford pickup — Black had hidden it in an arroyo on the other side of the old state road. Only the cemetery lay before him, a borderless expanse dotted with tombstones that had been sandblasted blank over a period of forty years.

Anonymous graves, forgotten by a town that had folded when the interstate opened. Black thought about that. If your grave went untended, if your sacred piece of ground was forgotten — or worse, desecrated — was there a chance that something evil might get its hands on your soul even though you’d been laid to rest in a proper Christian cemetery?

Black wondered if it made a difference. He supposed that every grave was forgotten sooner or later. He toyed with the severed ear, flipping it from between the beer and the sandwich. He’d never thought about graveyards, or tombstones, or Christian burial before in his life. He’d never thought about heaven or hell, either. He knew that such worries could get in the way of a man in his business, and he’d always felt fortunate to consider them a waste of his time.

Before today.

Even now, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to start thinking about those things. He’d never felt comfortable tackling life’s little intangibles.

He looked at the sandwich and his stomach growled.

The prospector wasn’t coming back for it.

The salami was greasy and good. Black ate the meat and threw away the bread, because the latter was salted with sand. He chased salami with warm Brown Derby beer and tossed the empty can over his shoulder. It bounced off of a filthy duffle-bag and rolled to a stop against the rusty blade of the prospector’s shovel.

Black wanted to sort through the old-timer’s duffle, but he didn’t want Whistler to come barging in while he was at it. Instead, he pulled up a chair and rested his feet on top of the desk.

Soon it was dark. Black lit a few candles and watched faint shadows dance on a map of the cemetery that was mounted next to the door. The map was dotted with black pins, except for one spot in the right-hand corner where a white pin stood out, as stark and unexpected as a corpse at a family reunion.

Black grinned, thinking I Bury the Living. He’d seen that movie late one night in a cheap hotel room in Denver. It starred Richard Boone, and that was the only reason that Black had stayed awake for it, because more than a few clients had told him that he resembled the young Richard Boone. He did, kind of— they were both all ruined around the eyes, and they both had noses that were of equal thickness from skull to tip, like carelessly fitted hunks of pipe.

Anyway, the movie was about a guy who thought that he was murdering people by sticking black pins in a map that marked presold cemetery plots. Boone was pretty good in it, worrying that he was some kind of psychic monster or something. It wasn’t Have Gun, Will Travel, but it was okay, until the ending.

Because the ending was a cheat — it turned out that Boone wasn’t a monster, after all. He hadn’t killed anyone. The deaths were only a cheap coincidence, nothing to do with God or the Devil. And while Black had certainly never believed in anything supernatural — or much of anything at all, for that matter — he thought that in the movies there should always be something spooky, something unknown or unknowable —

The wind whistled through the window’s corroded lips.

A dirty yellow halo bloomed on the glass.

Bright light seeped beneath the bottom rail of the door.

The glow of headlights.

Whistler’s limo.

Black reached behind him and straightened the knife that was tucked under his belt, then covered the weapon with his shirttail.

The cold steel felt good against the small of his back.

Black stepped to the window and watched a tall man ease out of a black Cadillac limousine. Even in the flat, uncritical light of the full moon, Black didn’t like the look of Diabolos Whistler, Junior. He didn’t like the man’s accountant eyes, and he didn’t like his spotless snakeskin boots, and he didn’t like the silver-and-turquoise studs that sheathed his collar like a couple of gigantic arrowheads.

Whistler came through the doorway, his distressed-leather duster wind-wrapped around his ankles, and stood poised in the center of the room like a shootist ready to slap leather.

“You’ve come to the wrong place,” Black said.

“Huh?”

“You want to go west on the interstate. Stop when you hit the water.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive, to be precise. Looks like that’s where you belong, in that getup.”

“Okay. You’ve had your little joke.”

Black grinned. “Close the door, Tex.”

Whistler did, his nose wrinkling. “God, it stinks in here… We could have done this in Vegas, you know.”

“Too many tourists,” Black said. “Besides, I didn’t much notice the stink. Maybe because I stink too. Last shower I had was at the hotel, before I climbed aboard a taxi with four sweaty tourists. Then I had a two hour wait at the Baja airport. If you’ve ever been there this time of year you know it’s like a sauna. I flew out on Airo Mexico, which is like flying in a school bus. They fed me a lousy lunch and didn’t even have any coffee. I got mad and tossed the plastic cup on the floor, and the smart-assed stewardess got all huffy — told me that I was breaking up a matched set. Then came Vegas where I had to pay twenty-five bucks to get my Toy -”

“Okay. Okay.” Whistler dabbed his sweaty brow with a silk handkerchief that was supposed to look like a cowboy’s bandana but didn’t.

Black said, “I just wanted you to know that things haven’t been going according to expectations today.”

“Like I said: okay. Let’s drop it.”

Black shrugged.

“Well, did you do it?”

“Of course I did.” Black pointed at the ear. “Let’s do business, Junior.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Okay. No need to get testy.” Black looked away, at the map. God, he hated this guy. He didn’t care if Whistler had made the cover of Newsweek. That wasn’t anything to him. After all, hadn’t Newsweek put Max Headroom on the cover once? Hadn’t they run that silly story, IS GOD DEAD?

Maybe Time had done that one. Black thought about it but couldn’t remember, and he decided that it didn’t much matter.

Junior took a ziplock bag and a pair of tweezers out of his coat pocket and made a big production of bagging the ear. “We’ll run tests on this, you know. My lab people have Father’s complete medical records, and we’ll know if you’re trying to pull anything.”

“I fulfilled our contract,” Black said simply. “I brought the ear to prove that, per your instructions. It was a fairly easy job, except that it took me a week to find your father. He was staying in a beachfront condo at the tip of Baja, all alone, unless you want to count those mummies that were stacked in the bedroom closet. Anyway, I did him and buried his body at the end of a road that no cop will ever bother with. If you want to know the details, he went pretty easy. I came up from behind and stabbed him just above the first vertebra. He gasped a little bit. Then he started mewling… sounded more like a newborn babe than an eighty-five-year-old master of occult sciences. It didn’t last more than a second or two, but — ”

“That’s enough.”

“No, it’s not. It might be for you, but it’s not for me. If you want me to shut up about it, pay me.” Black grinned. “That’ll shut me up.”

“Come out to the limo.”

“No. That thing looks like a hearse.” Black pretended to scratch his back; his fingers closed on the hilt of the knife. “You put the money in my Toy. I trust you, Junior.”

“Have it your way, Mr. Black.” Whistler left the shack.

Black closed his eyes and used his ears, listening through the wind. He believed you could learn a lot by listening, especially if you knew what to listen for. He heard a car door opening. He was sure that it was a door, not the trunk, and that made him happy; Whistler was the kind of guy who would hide a gun in the trunk if he had one.

The door closed easily, smoothly. Junior was nice and relaxed. Then Black heard a long creak as Whistler opened the door of the Toy.

An instant later he heard a rusty slam.

Black chuckled. “Temper, temper.”

Black was surprised when Whistler returned to the shack.

“I’ve been thinking,” Whistler began. “I could use a man like you on a permanent basis. I’m sure you can appreciate that mine is an organization on the move. With my father out of the way and me at the helm, we’ll be more than just another cult. We’ll be an accepted religion.” He slapped a magazine down on the desk. “Just take a look.”

Newsweek. Black glanced at Junior’s picture above the blurb that read, THE NEW HEDONISM.

Black slid the magazine toward Whistler. “Look, I’m not much of a joiner. You bought me once. You can buy me again, should the need arise. I only work when I need the money.” He smiled. “Besides, I want to see how things develop. I wouldn’t want to make too many commitments with the end of the world so close at hand.”

Whistler laughed.

Black said, “You don’t believe any of it, do you?”

“What?”

“All that stuff your old man preached. All that stuff about a new satanic age coming on the heels of his death. Satan rising from the ruin of Diabolos Whistler’s corpse like Jesus born of Mary. The end of the Christian era and the beginning of — ”

“You’ve been doing your homework, Mr. Black.”

“Hanging around airports, you have plenty of time to read. You run into all sorts of interesting folks selling all sorts of interesting pamphlets.”

“Very funny.” Whistler snatched up the magazine and shoved it into his coat pocket. “Look, this is a job to me. Some people put on suits and ties and run corporations. They tell their stockholders what the chumps want to hear. I put on a black leather jacket and run a religion.”

“But you don’t pay taxes.”

“Come, come, Mr. Black. Neither do the corporations.”

“But your father — ”

Whistler cut him off with a sigh. “My father didn’t have much business sense. He was wasting our money, frittering it away on archaeological expeditions and medieval manuscripts without the slightest concern for the bottom line. Our operation was poised upon the brink of a sinkhole called debt, and my father was determined to shove us over the edge.”

“And now he won’t have the chance.”

“Now he’ll be my ace in the hole. People love a good mystery. They still talk about Ambrose Bierce disappearing into the Mexican desert, don’t they? They even speculate about Jim Morrison… ”

Black yawned. “Morrison died choking on his own vomit in a bathtub in Paris. Your old man died with six inches of steel jammed through his neck.”

Whistler’s breaths came short and hard through flared nostrils. Finally, he said, “You think about my offer. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

“Right. Rodeo Drive.”

“Wrong, Mr. Black. You watch for me on the financial page.”

Whistler left the shack. Black let him go, wondering how long the kid would last. He thought about how nice it would be to milk Junior for some extra green, but he doubted that either of them would be around long enough for that. As it was, Black felt lucky to be paid for this job.

Black closed his eyes. “You go find a lab and play with your ear,” he said. ‘You see if you still think it’s important in a day or two.”

A car door slammed. A sound you could recognize if you knew what to listen for: an angry man hurrying on a treadmill to nowhere.

Headlight beams washed over the grimy window.

Black opened the desk drawer and stared down at a lump of leathery red flesh that came to a twisted point.

When Black severed Whistler Senior’s ear out on that Baja backroad, it looked like any other human ear. But when he arrived at the cemetery shack and removed the ear from the false bottom of his suitcase, he realized what it had become.

The prospector returned to the shack at almost the same moment, thirsty for Brown Derby beer and surprised as hell to see a rusty rice-rocket parked in front of his current digs. Black slipped the ear into the drawer just as the old-timer stepped through the doorway with a big, “Howdy, stranger.” Then he listened to the prospector’s story, the old one about milking silver from an abandoned mine up in the mountains.

Mine, hell. One look at the prospector’s flimsy shovel told Black what kind of mining this guy was doing. He’d heard about scavengers who hit abandoned cemeteries, but he’d never run into one. He’d never been eager to mix with that kind of man.

Funny, doing what he did for a living and feeling like that.

So Black let the prospector gab and drink Brown Derby beer. After a while, Black told the old guy that he had an ice chest fall of Anchor Steam out in the Toy’s trunk. Said that he was bringing it in from San Francisco for a buddy, but what the hell. The prospector went for it with a nod and a wrinkled grin — Black imagined that it was the same grin the old guy wore when he hit pay dirt.

In the heat, in the blowing sand, Black stabbed the prospector just above the first vertebra and watched him crumple like a puppet shorn of strings.

When the old guy stopped bleeding, Black severed his left ear.

Black rolled the prospector’s body out of the Toy’s trunk. He returned to the shack to get the duffle and the shovel. Old man Whistler’s ear lay in the drawer. It had sprouted a hedge of tiny white spikes that were as thin as cactus thorns but as hard as teeth.

Black pulled the last white pin out of the cemetery map. Found a black pin in the desk. Stabbed it through Whistler’s ear and pinned the ear to the spot where the white pin had been.

Outside, the moon crested the ash-colored mountains like an enormous tombstone. Black took off his shirt and let the evening breeze caress his sweaty back. His sweat smelled like beer. He dragged the prospector’s skinny corpse through the graveyard. The dead man’s heels dug little ditches in the sand.

Black found the empty plot and was kind of surprised that it wasn’t marked with a big white pin. He started to dig. He felt a little better. The wind had dried his sweat, and the desert air smelled good. Dry and clean, like the sky. The baked-earth smell that had bothered him in the heat of the day was long gone.

He went down about two feet before the sand started to sift back into the hole. He rolled the prospector’s body into the grave, upended the duffle and poured diamond rings and gold teeth and silver crosses over the corpse, and covered it up.

The cool wind smoothed the mounded sand. Black tossed the empty duffle to the wind and watched it tumble past a row of blank tombstones. He thought about the ear pinned to the map in the cemetery shack, and he thought about the body that he had buried on that Baja backroad, remembered burying that body without a second thought. He wondered what it looked like right now, that body.

Black stared at the moon. Maybe he should make a marker for the prospector’s grave. Maybe he ought to dig the registration slip out of the old-timer’s truck and pin it to a cross so the skinny old guy wouldn’t go unknown. Maybe… He shook his head. That was the flip side all right, but he didn’t have any proof that it really existed.

What he had was the ear.

What he figured he didn’t have was a whole lot of time.

Black hesitated, then planted the shovel at the head of the grave.

The wind picked up, howling like something evil, something young and strong. Blasts of sand worried the anonymous tombstones. Black imagined the sound of hoofbeats — cloven hoofs racing sharp and fast over a stretch of blacktop somewhere south of the border.

He hurried to his car, wondering if he’d hear that sound.

Wondering if he knew what to listen for.

(For Tia Travis)