Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Anywhere…

Blood coursed from the wound.

Anytime…

The shadows flowed over him, along with the laughter, along with a whispered promise.

Those who are evil must suffer, then die.

Hearthstone pressed cold fingers against the wound and felt warm blood pump from his heart. “Are you demon or angel?” he asked.

The answer came from the shadows.

I am… The Shroud.

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.”