Read Online William W. Johnstone by Massacre Mountain - Free Book Online

days. It was dark and mean as I made my way through the slumbering town to the sheriff’s office. Burtell was there, feet up, half asleep. He was startled when I walked in.
    “We have a body, no name, no one from here,” I said.
    “How’d that happen?”
    “I found it walking the town. Where were you? Why weren’t you out?”
    “Outhouse,” he said. “When a man has a bad bowel, he sits for hours in the outhouse. I spend half my life in an outhouse.”
    “I’m going to bed,” I said. “You get out there, to Last Chance, and help Maxwell. I’ll put what I know into the log.”
    He nodded, and headed into the deep dark night. I got a pencil ready, and did my best to get them words down, one letter at a time, like I learnt in sixth grade. “Unknown man kilt.” That’s all it took. I put my shotgun back on the rack and went to my room, hoping for some shut-eye.

C HAPTER E IGHT
     
    I woke up sick as a puking cat. I didn’t know what time it was. The sun tossed light into Belle’s boardinghouse. My body smelled. My mouth was fuzzy and dry. I was fevered. I don’t know how I got so sick, but what did it matter. I’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of people at the opera house, and maybe the sickness rubbed off on me.
    I didn’t want to get up but there was stuff to do. I had some crimes to solve, including a murder of someone unknown. I started to get up, and fell back. Getting up was a bad idea. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t been drinking and wasn’t hung over. I got to testing each part of myself. My head hurt, tongue was fuzzy, neck and shoulders hurt, but lungs pumped away all right. My gut was nauseous, my bowels threatened disaster, and my legs ached.
    My most immediate task was to get down the stairs to the outhouse in back. Either that or face disaster. The way I was feeling, it was like climbing the highest peak in Wyoming. I didn’t have any choice, so I forced myself up, steadied myself against the dizzies, and managed to pull on some pants one leg at a time. Then I stumbled down the wooden stairs, got to the two-holer, used up half a Monkey Ward catalog cleaning up, and staggered through the yard back to the boardinghouse.
    Belle spotted me and blocked my passage.
    “You look like a throat-slit hog,” she said.
    “Feel worse than that,” I said.
    “You ain’t going to the office, are you?”
    “I couldn’t get past the first block. Belle, I need you to go tell them I’m sick.”
    “I’ll tell them, but first I’m going to get you back in your bunk and get some tea up there.”
    “My ma used to say tea cures anything. All you got to do is down it. Send me some red-eye.”
    Instead, she was pushing and shoving me, and with each step I felt a great force hauling me upward. It took some doing, but old Belle finally got me laid out like a slab of meat, and got some tea into me. Don’t ever drink tea. It’s the awfullest stuff and I think some mad genius invented it to torment the world.
    “I’ll get Doc Harrison,” she said.
    “No, don’t! I can’t afford it. And he’ll yank my tonsils out without asking.”
    “I’ll get him anyway. And I’ll stop at your office and tell them you’re dying and need last rites.”
    “You’re real kind, Belle.”
    I sank lower into the corn-shuck mattress, which crackled under me. If I had to be sick, I might as well be plenty sick, so I sort of lay there turning lavender, staring at the fly-specked ceiling while snakes burrowed through my gut.
    “Tell Rusty and De Graff to find out who the body is. Start with that man rooming with Mrs. Gildersleeve, who owns the show. Or just send one of my men over here, and I’ll tell them.”
    “Whatever,” she said. She vanished, and appeared with a white enameled thunder mug.
    “You lose anything from any north or south exit in your carcass, you lose it in here. If you lose it on the floor, it’ll drip through the planks and wreck my parlor. I’m expecting guests.”
    “Gotcha, Belle,” I