Comanche. Brett Riley

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      Also by Brett Riley

      The Subtle Dance of Impulse and Light

      IMBRIFEX BOOKS

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      COMANCHE: A Novel

      Copyright ©2020 by Brett Riley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

      This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      IMBRIFEX® is registered trademark of Flattop Productions, Inc.

      ISBN: 9781945501364

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Riley, Brett, 1970- author.

      Title: Comanche / Brett Riley.

      Description: First edition. | Las Vegas, NV : Imbrifex Books, 2020. | Summary: “In 1887 near the tiny Texas town of Comanche, a posse finally ends the murderous career of The Piney Woods Kid in a hail of bullets. Still in the grip of blood-lust, the vigilantes hack the Kid’s corpse to bits in the dead house behind the train depot. The people of Comanche rejoice. Justice has been done. A long bloody chapter in the town’s history is over. The year is now 2016. Comanche police are stymied by a double murder at the train depot. Witnesses swear the killer was dressed like an old-time gunslinger. Rumors fly that it’s the ghost of The Piney Woods Kid, back to wreak revenge on the descendants of the vigilantes who killed him. Help arrives in the form of a team of investigators from New Orleans. Shunned by the local community and haunted by their own pasts, they’re nonetheless determined to unravel the mystery. They follow the evidence and soon find themselves in the crosshairs of the killer”-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019036660 (print) | LCCN 2019036661 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945501364 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781945501371 (epub)

      Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Western stories.

      Classification: LCC PS3618.I532724 C66 2020 (print) | LCC PS3618.I532724 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036660

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036661

      Jacket designed by Jason Heuer

      Book Designed by Sue Campbell Book Design

      Author photo: Benjamin Hager

      Typeset in ITCBerkley Oldstyle

      Printed in the United States of America

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      First Edition: September, 2020

      Disclaimer

      Comanche, Texas, is a real place. The streets and many landmarks in this book are real. There is an actual Comanche Depot building. It has been renovated and now serves as the chamber of commerce. Because it would be devastating to his story, the author has ignored that fact. He has also ignored the near impossibility of getting a cellphone signal in the town of Comanche.

      The people and events depicted in this book are entirely fictional. The author has also significantly altered the geography of and around the depot grounds for dramatic expediency. He wanted to make that known in case any local readers thought he was trying to represent the exact layout of town and spectacularly failing.

      This book is for Kalene, Shauna, John, Brendan,

      Maya, Nova, and all our fur babies.

      Thanks for putting up with me.

      And to Pedro, who always made a trip to Comanche interesting.

      Chapter One

      July 23, 1887—Comanche, Texas

      P.D. Thornapple did not own a watch, but he believed it was roughly 2 a.m. when he saw the Piney Woods Kid lurking near the Comanche Depot. That sight would have alarmed P.D. any time. The Kid had earned his reputation as one of the bloodiest outlaws in central Texas by gunning down two sheriffs, a U.S. Marshal, a Texas Ranger, and enough private citizens to fill a boneyard. When you saw the Kid coming, you ducked behind the nearest building, and if you could not run—if, say, he showed up where you worked, where you stood the best chance of getting a little respect and enough cash for whores and whiskey—you kept your eyes on the floor and your mouth shut, and you prayed he would leave. But now P.D. Thornapple almost fainted because, in the early morning of July 23, the Piney Woods Kid had been dead for a week.

      On the fifteenth, P.D. had been thinking about the way shit rolled downhill and how he always seemed to be standing at the bottom, stuck with the most sickening, degrading duties—sweeping up after the cattlemen with cow shit stuck to their boots, washing out vomit when drunks staggered over from the Half Dollar Saloon and mistook the depot for a privy, mopping up their piss after they passed out and soiled themselves, sometimes right on the platform. When randy young couples tried to do their business behind the dead house, P.D. chased them off. And when the Piney Woods Kid and Sheriff Demetrius McCorkle fought across the depot grounds two years ago, who had to scrub away all the blood from the woman the Kid took hostage, from the deputy he gut-shot, from the three men he executed at close range, from the Kid himself? Who had picked up a misshapen mass of tissue that turned out to be the end of McCorkle’s nose? P.D. wanted to quit, but begging his asshole brother for a job seemed worse than dealing with blood and shit.

      So P.D. endured everything, even the dead house itself. A squat building ten yards from the depot, it looked new and downright inviting in the daylight, but at night it turned the color of old bones bleaching in the desert, its very presence pricking the base of his spine. Why didn’t the railroad just paint the goddam thing or burn it down?

      But a raw eyesore worked just fine for the bosses, and the corpses did not care one way or the other. P.D. had been forced to load bodies into the dead house, to transport them onto waiting trains, to guard the building as if it held treasure instead of cold, stiff flesh. He checked the lock on its door twice every shift. Constant exposure should have rendered the place familiar, even banal, yet he had never shaken the feeling that something was inherently wrong with the whole idea of a dead house: a way station for cadavers, a hotel for stiffs. If only one of the day-shift men would quit or die so he could take their spot and never have to look at that building in the dark again.

      P.D. had never been that lucky, though. He sat in the depot just after dark on the fifteenth when McCorkle’s runner, Deputy Rudy Johnstone, brought news that their posse had killed the Kid. It was the biggest event in Comanche County history, even bigger than when that son of a bitch John Wesley Hardin murdered Charles Webb back in ’74. Sheriff McCorkle and his riders trapped the Kid and his old Comanche companero in an empty cabin beside Broken Bow Creek late that afternoon. The outlaws and the posse shot at each other for fifteen minutes or so, until McCorkle got sick of waiting and set fire to the place. The Kid and the Indian escaped out the back, making it a hundred yards up the creek before McCorkle’s men rode them down. According to Johnstone, the outlaw’s torso looked like an old woman’s pincushion, and the Indian’s face had been shot clean away.

      They could have let the Kid rot where he fell. They could have planted