Night of the Wolves by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online

Jim Green, mortician and photographer, at your service. We’re mighty glad to have you.”
    “Thank you,” Cody told him. “Anyone seen the sheriff yet?”
    “Him and the deputy went off just about an hour or so ago—there was talk of some cattle rustling out at Calico Jack’s. That would be John Snow’s trading post,” Ace clarified.
    John Snow-on-Leaf, now known simply as John Snow, was part white, part Mexican, part Apache and all entrepreneur, Alex thought. He and his current wife and twenty of his children—a brood whose color went from sable to snow—managed the trading post where the tribes and white folk alike came and went.
    Cody nodded, glancing at Brendan Vincent. “All right, anybody sees the sheriff, tell him I’d like to meet him come the morning. Now, let’s deal with the dead.”
    He reached down and grabbed the dead man under his armpits as Brendan went for the man’s ankles.
    “Lead on, Mr. Green,” Brendan said.
    “Right this way,” Jim said.
    The crowd broke apart and began to disperse, everyone looking uneasily at the sky, as if they were desperate to be off the streets before dark.
    Alex stood there, watching the townspeople and frowning.
    Strange—no, bizarre—the way people were behaving.
    As if he sensed she was still standing there, Cody paused and turned back. “Go home, Miss Gordon. Please.”
    Then he started walking away again, the weight of the dead man suspended between him and Brendan Vincent. Either one of them might have thrown the body over a shoulder and carried it easily.
    They didn’t seem to want to touch the blood.
    Spooked by the intensity of his insistence that she go home, but too stubborn to just run away without knowing what was going on, she decided to pretend to obey his directive. She walked away and stepped up on the sidewalk, then paused and looked around.
    No one was left on the street. It was as if the town were deserted. When she saw Fox and Vincent follow Green into his place of business, she stepped back off the sidewalk and walked swiftly and as silently as she could in their wake.
    The door to Jim Green’s photography studio and mortuary was closed by the time she got there, but the curtains were still open at the windows, and kerosene lamps were lit within.
    The front room held the photography studio; the mortuary was in the rear. Someone had neglected to shut the door between the two, so she stood to one side of the big front window and peered in.
    The men had carried the body through to the back and placed it on a long oak slab—a rudimentary embalming table. Green’s instruments were laid out on a small cart nearby. Since the war, she knew, the art of embalming was in demand.
    There were a lot of dead boys making the long journey home.
    She continued to stare through the window, carefully trying to shield herself from the men within.
    They were examining the body and talking, but she could only catch snatches of the conversation.
    “I don’t think so. I really don’t think so,” she heard Cody say.
    “We have to think about safety,” Jim said.
    “He’s right, Cody—better safe than sorry,” Vincent added.
    Cody studied the corpse, turning it, touching the throat and studying it, as if he might find a pulse.
    Doctor? Educated at Harvard? A farm boy could see there was a massive shotgun hole in the man’s chest.
    “Better safe than sorry,” Cody agreed.
    Jim Green handed him a long knife with an edge so sharp it glittered like diamonds in the lamplight.
    Cody took the knife.
    She nearly gasped aloud as she saw him position himself—then sever the corpse’s jugular.
    She clamped a hand over her mouth and leaned against the wall, stunned. Then she turned back to the window again, thinking that her eyes must have deceived her.
    Now only Jim Green was standing over the corpse. Or rather, the pieces of the corpse.
    There wasn’t all that much blood, but then, the man hadalready bled out all over the street; a shotgun blast could do