Michael White's previous novels include the New York Times Notable Book A Brother's Blood as well as The Garden of Martyrs and Soul Catcher, both Connecticut Book of the Year finalists. He is the director of Fairfield University's MFA program in creative writing, and lives in Connecticut.

Soul Catcher

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Cain had been awakened by the frenzied whinnying of a horse below his window in the street. Still half asleep, his head throbbing and barley soaked, he recalled the dream he'd had of the place called Buena Vista. The brave, foolish Mexicans throwing wave upon wave against the left flank of the American line, the slaughter coming so easily it made him sick at heart. Later, when the sheer size of Santa Anna's charge had overrun the American position and captured the wounded left behind, Cain, his leg shattered, lay helplessly among them. He remembered the cries of his comrades as the enemy had gone from soldier to soldier with a bayonet, silencing them with "Recuerde Agua Nueva." After that, as night crept in over the high desert and the stars flashed like sparks from a grindstone, there was the stillness of what he felt had to be the approach of death. And finally, opening his eyes upon the mestiza girl hovering over him, her dark head aglow in morning sunlight, his first thought was that she was some otherworldly creature come to usher him to Hades. Now in bed, staring up at the stained ceiling of his room, the thought of that girl, the silken feel of her skin, the playful glint of her black eyes, caused an ache such as he had not felt for years to rise up in his chest like a wave of seawater slamming into him. He sat up, barely able to catch his breath. Cain, he heard her whisper to him. Cain.

It was then that a loud knock erupted against his door.

"Go away," he called. He figured it was Antoinette, the elderly madam of the house, coming to inform him he'd have to vacate the room for paying customers.

The knock came again, more insistent this time, the side of a large fist hammering the wood in anger.

"The devil take you," Cain called out, looking for something to heave at the noise. "If you don't—"

But suddenly the door flew open and two men burst in. They were both armed, and Cain's thoughts ran immediately to the possibility that he was about to be robbed. One of the two intruders was of considerable size, tall and heavy limbed, thick through the belly, with a bushy beard and small iron-colored eyes like a pig's. He wore farmer's clothing, a floppy brimmed hat and muddied boots, and he brought with him into the room the acrid smell of the barnyard. He carried a Shaffer single-barrel shotgun in one big paw, and while he didn't actually aim the thing at Cain, he kept it at the ready. The other intruder was older and slight of build, a dignified-looking man of the southern planter class, not tall so much as a man whose erect bearing and good breeding gave the impression of size. He was well dressed in a brown riding coat, knee-length boots burnished to a high shine, and black leather gloves. He had the sharp features of a red-tailed hawk and cold, blue-gray eyes that fixed Cain where he lay with an imperious gaze. On his hip, he carried a sidearm, a pearl-handled, small-caliber pocket revolver, a pretty weapon of the sort that riverboat gamblers kept in their coat pockets and women carried in their purses. The two made an unlikely pair of robbers, but you could never tell in this part of the city. Cain glanced around, searching for his own weapon. It lay across the room on the bureau, above which hung a cracked mirror. Damn, he thought.

"What in the hell you think you're doing?" Cain cried.

It was the old man who spoke up. "I've come for money," he said.

Cain laughed at that. "If you've a notion to rob me, mister, you're up a creek without a paddle."

The well-dressed man offered a patronizing smile to this comment. There was, Cain felt, something familiar about that gesture, about his mouth and the haughty way he looked at Cain, though he couldn't place him. Certainly, he'd seen his ilk before.

"I've come only for what you owe me." When Cain furrowed his brow in bewilderment, the man added, "You don't remember me, do you?"

"Should I?"

"Last Saturday night," the man explained, removing his gloves one finger at a time. When his gloves were off, he unconsciously rubbed the palm of his left hand, where a knotted scar snaked across it from little finger to thumb. It was the sort of wound that would have been made had he grabbed hold of a knife blade in self-defense. "At the Morgan Brothers."

Cain still drew a blank. There had been so many such evenings of gambling and drinking of late, that like the others, this one formed a grayish blank in his mind, as if burned away with a branding iron.

"My aces beat your queens," the man offered.

Only then did it come back to Cain how he knew the man. He never forgot a hand, especially a losing one. It had been in one of the back rooms of the Morgan Brothers, a well-known gambling establishment in Richmond. He fumbled around in his thoughts and then the name appeared with the aces: Eberly. A wealthy tobacco planter with a reputation for losing a thousand dollars on a single hand, as if it were so much paper. The card game, attended by mostly wealthy merchants and plantation owners, should have been much too rich for Cain's blood. But he'd been drinking heavily and he felt he could part them from some of their money, and when he'd seen the three ladies turn up in his hand like a rainbow after a string of bad weather, he'd felt lucky, and he wasn't going to let such an opportunity slip through his fingers. So he'd cast reason to the wind and stayed in the hand much longer than sense should have allowed or means . . .