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"Good place to dump a dead body," was the first thing Doc said when he looked into the abyss.
I'd expected that, for that was nearly my first thought as well. "Not as convenient as it could be for that purpose, Doc. Unless the living body was lured up here and then made dead."
"That's how I'd do it," my friend drawled around his cigar.
Riker's Butte is no place you go for a picnic with the family. It's the first of a range of mountains that rise out of red Texas soil a few miles out of Bakerstown. Some of that range look like regular mountains, but Riker's sticks straight up in the air looking like some Greek god started to build a palace and stopped at half a pillar.
On the backside of the butte, facing away from the town, the slope dives straight down and then some – not just into a cañon or arroyo but a pit fifty feet across with smaller mountains on its other sides. Yell straight down that hole and you'll get old waiting for your echo to come back. That's where Doc and I stood, at the lip of Puerta del Diablo (the Devil's Door). We'd heard of this place – everyone in Bakerstown knew about it, of course – but this was the first time we'd come to see it ourselves.
Like Doc, I had no doubt that this site had witnessed murders for a long, long time, since before the Comanche and Kiowa had this place to themselves. If I'd come here looking for anything about a missing person I was on a fool's errand. Luckily I am rarely a fool.
"Good place to toss a living body too." I stared down a hole that went dark very quickly. "Saves you the trouble of shooting or stabbing them." Hardly a bottomless pit nor a hole straight through to China, but that bottom was far, far down and hard enough to do the job.
"Not a cattle catcher, though." Doc looked up at the looming walls of Riker and its sister mountains, nearly barren of any tempting vegetation. "Windibank's lying to cash in on the insurance, or covering up for whoever took his cows." Doc's handlebar mustache curled at one end in his coyote-grin. "He didn't reckon on you coming to see the place for yourself, did he?"
I agreed with Doc's deduction. What longhorn would want to hike partway up the butte, clamber through a crevasse, travel downward, only for a mouthful of the same brush and cholla it could get on the plains without all the work? The rocky scree around the Puerta's lip didn't hold hoofprints nor footprints, but there were no cowpies present either.
"Or he's selling or trading cattle to someone he oughtn't." That was a long list – starting with the local Comanche acquiring redress for all the buffalo killed by whites, leading right up to any number of robber gangs provisioning their hideouts. "Could be blackmail, or protection – give them a few cows so they don't take them all."
"Makes sense he don't trust a goddamn lawman much around here." Doc grinned again. "He don't know us, Sheriff Lock."
"Reckon it's time we changed that, Doc." I looked at the sun's position. "When we get back and I've had a bath and a whiskey in that order."
We made our way back up and through the crevasse to where our grateful horses waited for our descent to the level plains toward Bakerstown.
My bath and whiskey had to be postponed, however. No sooner had Doc and I stabled our horses at the livery and crossed the street to the sheriff's office that doubled as our home, when Mayor Strade ran toward us, calling. "Boys! Sheriff, Doc. I heard it from Gustav, from a couple of his girls. There's a pack of bandits heading here from Dynamo – they're not a day's ride away. Sounds like their gang boss is that Irish bastard you two ran into a while back, the one you told me about."
It was high summer, easily over 100 Fahrenheit, but my blood turned to ice water.
Doc bared his teeth; his eyes glittered. "James Moriarty."