Nightwalker

The windows facing the street were a dusty, grimy gray. The counter remained, and the bars that had separated the tellers from the customers were still in place. A locked gate separated the outer area from the inner workings, but it was low, and Dillon easily leaped over it. There were drawers at all the tellers’ stations, but whatever adding machines they might have used were long gone. In a back office he came across a desk with a broken swivel chair. Opening one of the drawers, Dillon found a dead scorpion and a pile of rat droppings.



There was a safe in the back, but the iron door was open, the lock was broken, and the safe itself was completely empty.



In short, there was nothing in the bank to tie Tanner Green to the place.



Next he checked the doctor’s office. The examining room still held a table but nothing else, and the windows were mostly devoid of panes. The wallpaper had once been rose patterned, but the design was almost impossible to discern anymore. Several old photographs were hanging at skewed angles in the entryway. There was one that seemed to be of the doctor, standing unsmilingly next to his equally unsmiling wife.



After checking out the lower level, which held the doctor’s office, the examining room and a small waiting room, Dillon carefully climbed the stairs, testing each step before he placed his weight on it, and found only empty rooms where the doctor and his wife had once lived.



Next on his side of the street was the pharmacy, and he found it oddly appealing. Ornate Victorian grillwork framed the counter, and behind it, there was an old blown-glass candy dispenser, although the dead insects in it broke the old-time illusion. Still, if you ignored the insects, it was a pretty piece. Dillon imagined that, long ago, useless tonics as well as prescriptions for laudanum, had once been handed across this counter from seller to buyer. Upstairs—where he decided he probably shouldn’t have ventured, given the rather spongy state of the floor—he found nothing, just as he had at the doctor’s house. No furniture, no photos, nothing. Just three empty rooms.



He moved on. There were four more buildings to explore before he reached the saloon. One had been the general store, and another appeared to have been a dentist’s office. A reclining leather chair—mostly eaten away by worm rot or other tiny predators—was surprisingly suggestive of the modern-day dental equivalent.



The third building had been the undertaker’s parlor. Once Dillon’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that, unlike what he’d seen elsewhere, many of the artifacts of the time still remained. There was an outer office, and right behind it, a large room that was still filled with cheap coffins. They were mostly just plain wooden boxes. One was leaning up against the wall, and closer inspection revealed that it was stained in a number of places with what might have been blood. Dillon wondered if it had been used to display the unsavory characters who had been apprehended and shot for their crimes, a graphic warning to everyone else to behave.



The last building, right next to the saloon, was the newspaper office. The faded but still legible sign informed him that, at one time, the Indigo Independent had been quartered there.



At first glance, there was nothing left in the front room but broken desks, swivel chairs and—Dillon discovered, after gingerly inspecting a mass in one corner—a torn canvas hat, the type a harried typesetter might have worn.



He was pretty sure that the rotting machinery in back had once been a printing press, and up the stairs, he came across nothing other than two offices. One desk yielded several sheets of yellowed paper, but when he went to touch them, they fell into dust. He made a mental note to get to a local library and see if any past issues of the Indigo Independent had been preserved in any form.



He looked out a window and saw Ringo coming from the sheriff’s office across the street, and went downstairs and stepped outside to meet him.



“Anything?” he called to Ringo.



“Nope. How about you?”



“Nope. Let’s go check out the saloon,” Dillon said.



Dillon entered ahead of Ringo, and there was something eerie in the clinking of Ringo’s spurs behind him.



“The poker table is still here, and the chairs,” Ringo said. “Look, pieces of the broken chair are still piled up by the wall. Hell, they left the old piano, too. Can you believe it?”



Dillon narrowed his eyes, trying to imagine what had taken place here a century and a half ago.



The bar still stretched across one long wall. There were several tables, and then, against the wall, the old piano. At the far end of the room there was a small stage.



A staircase led to the second story, where a balcony lined most of the second floor, the wooden railing leaning precariously, the handsome carved posts broken in places, completely gone in others. Once, he thought, saloon girls had plied their trade in those rooms up the stairs, decked out in their frilliest—and sexiest—attire as they stared down at the clientele, trying to find the least repulsive cowhand or miner.



Or the one with the most money.



He returned his gaze to the poker table, where Ringo was standing and gazing down ruefully.



“My cards sucked,” the ghost said. “That day, the real competition was all between John Wolf and that fool from the East. Mark Davison, that was his name.”



There were no longer cards on the table, only a thick layer of Nevada sand and the dust of time.



“Tell me about that day,” Dillon said. “I’ve heard the stories, but you were there, and I need to know details.”



“I hadn’t been out here all that long,” Ringo said, taking a seat. “Milly was singing. She wasn’t great, but she was all right. All-right singer, good barmaid, lousy whore. But with the pickings around here, beggars couldn’t be choosers.”



“Ringo, I need you to tell me what happened, not rate people like they were contestants on American Idol,” Dillon said.



“Sorry,” Ringo said, leaning back in the old chair until it rested on two rickety legs. “Although I have to say that George Turner, the mixed-blood who played the piano, was damn good. Ahead of his time. He should have been born today. He’d have been rich and famous.”



“That’s good to hear,” Dillon said dryly. “Now tell me what happened.”



“I can’t tell you the whole thing. I died, remember? I wasn’t afraid of dying. I’d been in the war. I’d seen people die bad. It was just bad in general, in those days, especially in the South. That’s why so many of us came West. That’s the thing with war…they teach you to use a gun and tell you to kill. Then it’s all over, and what the hell do you know but how to use a gun? That’s why Varny took control so easy. Folks were used to the fellow with the biggest gun controlling the situation, you know?” He noticed Dillon’s impatient look and said, “All right, all right, I’m getting to it. Let’s see…I got here first. I think Grant Percy, the so-called sheriff—though he was really just Varny’s lapdog—came in when I was at the bar, and then that Mark Davison. He was a real wannabe, as you call it these days. He’d thrown his lot in with Varny, but I think Varny knew he was a useless shit. Anyway, then your great-great-grandpa comes in. It was like he was geared up from the minute he got here. You know, you remind me of him a lot. Same eyes. And you could see in his eyes that there was something besides cards on his mind, but he could hold his peace real good. He had patience.



“So we all start playing—George is at the piano, Milly is singing, the bartender is dishing out the whiskey. We’re here—I’m in the same chair I’m taking up now, so to speak. We’re all kind of angled, cuz in this town, no man worth his salt ever turned his back on the door. The last hand came down to Davison and Wolf, and the sheriff and I were kind of just waiting to get back into it. Then Varny showed up. Here’s the thing. Wolf intended to see Varny. But I don’t think he was expecting him so soon. John Wolf had a real poker face, and still, cool as he was, I could tell Varny took him by surprise that day.



“Wolf’s clan didn’t live far from here. I’m thinking they were coming in that evening, maybe, so he wouldn’t be taking on Varny and his thugs alone. Who the hell knows now? Anyway, Varny shows up, and he and Wolf get into a thing over the gold. You know. The gold everyone thought was just outside town somewhere. They started arguing over who owned the land. Then the gunfire started. I took out a couple of Varny’s hired guns, but not before one of them got me. I remember dying. I was hit hard and fast, and I was thinking, hell no, I’m too young to die, this can’t be happening. I remember all the guns. All the blood. I was already dying, maybe even already dead, when they dragged the girl in. Mariah.”



“My great-great…however many greats, grandmother.”



“Yes. I don’t know if I really saw her then, or if I’ve just heard the story so many times that I think I did. You know how it is. We hear things often enough and they turn into memories. Did I really see her as I was dying? I don’t know. But I do know that John Wolf would have died a thousand times over to save her. And that there was something he needed to tell her. I’ve had a long time to think about it, and I think it must have had to do with the gold everyone thought was here. That’s what they were fighting over. Land. Gold. Wolf had made sure this was Paiute land, but no one ever found the gold. So we all pretty much died over nothing.”



“All the poker players died that day, right?” Dillon said after giving Ringo a moment for reflection.



“Dead as doornails,” Ringo agreed. “Along with Varny and a bunch of his henchmen. Mariah lived, though. Of course, you already know that. She was pregnant, and that’s why you’re here now. And that’s the end of the story.”



Dillon stared at him. “Except that it’s not—because a twenty-first century man whispered the name of the place right before he died.”



Ringo looked toward the door. “It was just like it is now. See the way the sky is turning all bloodred and gold? I remember thinking, before Varny walked in and everything went to hell, that this town might be a stinking disaster of sand and sagebrush, but when you looked out at a sunset like that, it made everything around you all beautiful. And then the shooting started and the blood was real, and pretty soon all I saw was darkness. Not even the fires of hell,” Ringo said.