The garrote notwithstanding.
When Waldo had come to, he’d told this nonstop tale of how, seeing the success of the Phantom in bringing down his prey, he thought a garrote a good weapon for himself, and so he’d taken to carrying one at all times. “A hackman can’t be too careful these days, not with the sort running about this city, I can tell you. I’ll tell the judge the same. You’ve gotta believe me! You’ve got the wrong man, and that crazy Alastair Ransom—may he die of his wounds, God—he oughta be brought up on charges for breaking and entering. He spoiled me with Gabby, you know. Spoiled the moment, any chance I may’ve had to please her dear, dear auntie and to impress on Gabrielle my undying love for her! But no—in charges this raging bull, shouting I’m a danger, and making mad accusations. Why, if he does live beyond the bullet that sweet Gabrielle put in him on my behalf, why then he ought to be investigated for being a madman and a maniac, and who’s to say that Ransom himself ain’t the mad Phantom? Much time as he spends prowling the streets; seeing so much of the gutter trash, living among the rats of this city…the man sees shit every day until…until all he sees is to kill, kill, kill! What’s to say he ain’t the Phantom?”
Meanwhile, Philo Keane shouted over his one-time apprentice at Griffin, “It all makes sense now! This creepy little sot here under our noses the whole bloody time! He’s the one set me up, isn’t it true, Drimmer? Didn’t he put the notion of my being the Phantom in your ear? And now he’s shifting it to Alastair! Don’t you see? Don’t you?”
“I know the little rat came at me with this wire in front of witnesses, in front of his little sugar, that daughter of Tewes.”
“Then you have him dead to rights! Congratulations! Now release me the bloody hell out of here!”
“Ransom’s the one figured it out; he’s the mastermind behind the arrest.”
“And Rance, is he shot like Denton said?”
“Wounded ’bout here and here.” He indicated entry and exit wounds on his own body.
“But he’s been spared his life?”
“So far.”
“Thank God! Where is he?”
“Cook County Hospital. It’d be the morgue but for his cane—or so said the midwife who patched him up.”
“Midwife?”
“Tewes’s sister Jane.”
“Sister? Look, how so, his cane?”
“I found the cane splintered by the bullet from a Sharps .44, I’m afraid. Could’ve done a hell of a lot more damage had the bullet not been deflected by the bone handle of Ransom’s cane.”
“The wolf’s-head cane. I give it to him years ago. Carries it everywhere…” mused Philo. “That is a wonder indeed.”
“Surgeon Fenger is working on Rance as we speak, and from accounts I got over the phone, well…only time’ll tell if eternity wants the big man or no.”
“I gotta get over there. You’ve got my word, Drimmer. Release me just until I can be sure Rance is all right, and I promise I’ll return.”
Drimmer’s mind raced with what Kohler might do to him in the event he should honor such a deal without either authority or formal paperwork.
“Com’on, man! What’s there to think about?” pressed Philo.
“This isn’t a Sunday school we’re running here. You think for one moment Kohler’d just let you step outta that cell on a promise you’ll come waltzing back?”
Philo raised both hands to the bars. “Despite all the evil that’s passed through these hands, I am a man of my word.”
“Bedrock honest, heh?” Griffin half joked. He then stared into Philo’s eyes. “One bloody hour, and you’re back, do you understand? No one’s to detain you.”
“Deal and thank you, Griff.”
Griffin signaled the bored turnkey to let the prisoner out. The Bridewell cage door swung wide and Philo made a dramatic exit, sucking in the air of freedom on the other side of the bars.
“Find a phone and call me here at the station every fifteen minutes. I want to know your whereabouts at all times, Keane.”
“Bullshit, you want to know how Alastair is faring under the knife.”
“Dr. Fenger’s the best in the city.”
“The state.”
“Perhaps the country.”
“Touché!”
“Leave out the basement rear, this way. And call in like I said.”
“You’ve my word, and again, thank you.”
“Just don’t make a mess of it, Philo. Don’t make me come searching for you at Muldoon’s or—”
“I’ve not had a drink in forty-eight hours.”
“Then bloody come back here, and I’ll see to it you have your drink, but you cannot go running about the city.”
“As Oscar Wilde says, ‘I can resist everything save temptation.’”
“God, I know I’m going to regret this! Don’t be a sot, man! You could be the best photographer in Chicago, the top of your chosen profession—”
“Art, my friend. It is art.”
“I know nothing about that, but if you applied yourself a sober man set on a goal, what with your talent, and your contracts with Montgomery Ward and all—”
“What contracts? We never had nothing in writing, Trelaine and I.”
“Ohhh…mistake.”
“Besides, they’re not likely to hire a former ‘felon’ even if innocent, not since the papers carried on how I murdered all those women, and their own account executive!”
“Well look, for the moment, we’ve…we’ve got Ransom near dead, so think of someone other than your bloody self, heh?”
“Aye…you’re cut of good cloth after all, Griff. I’ll ne’er forget this kindness.”
Griffin pushed him out the basement door. “Just go and try to be inconspicuous.”
“Yes, yes, of course!” Philo was off, a bounce in his step that Griffin had never seen before, like a man who’d just been satisfied by a woman, but this had to do with freedom. Given a taste of it, would the man be capable of honoring his bargain? Griff doubted it, and in the back of his mind began to plot where he’d have to hide when Kohler learned of this “early release program” instituted by a second-rank inspector. Then it dawned on him how to handle it no matter what. Claim it by order of Inspector Alastair Ransom, his last order before passing out, and quite possibly a man’s dying wish. Pass the bloody buck to a man near death.
The wound sustained by Ransom proved a nasty one. The entry point the size of a silver dollar, and the exit wound a gaping fist-sized explosion of flesh and tissue. If Dr. Christian Fenger couldn’t keep Ransom alive, no one could; if Fenger could save him, it’d be a testament to genius and skill.
Either way, it remained the will of their unknowable God.
How was one to know, Jane wondered as she watched, fascinated, at Fenger’s side in the operating theater, dressed as Dr. James Francis Tewes. What was most excruciating was the interminable waiting—filling Jane with grief and pain. Jane realized how much she’d learned from Alastair, and just how much he meant to her after all.
Perhaps and hopefully, the Almighty had yet to finish with Ransom, Jane thought while watching the surgeon’s scalpel flit over his flesh. But then again, perhaps God was absolutely done molding this man.
Surgeon Fenger’s work was that of an artist. Jane became mesmerized, focusing on the surgery. A voice in her head kept repeating the prayer: Save him, save him for me, Christian.
Another voice in her head answered: Ransom’s fate lies in the hands of his Maker, not Christian. Still, it seemed a tug-o-war between God and surgeon.
In which case, Jane Francis feared that Ransom’s life ended here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel like City for Ransom does not get written in a vacuum so much as a mineshaft. Thanks to an array of authors ahead of me, authors whose fascination with Chicago created a rich vein for a storyteller like myself to mine, City for Ransom, and its Dickensian ala Conan Doyle characterizations, came into being. My first novel, penned while I was a sophom
ore and junior in high school in Chicago, required research if I were to convey the inner workings of the famous Underground Railroad through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old Missouri boy (Daniel & The Wrongway Railway, 1982). Since then, all forty-two novels I’ve seen through to publication have conveyed research, whether police procedurals, suspense, young adult, even horror titles. To create City for Ransom and its sequels (Vengeance for Ransom, Innocence for Ransom, and hopefully more) the author was led to the “Mother Lode” by Mr. Kenan Heise, author, historian, Tribune reporter, and owner of the sadly closed bookstore, the Chicago Book Exchange. Mr. Heise, who gave assistance to my hero, John Jakes, when Jakes needed to dig into Chicago history, told me where to sink my pickaxe for the best titles on Chicago during the years I wished to write about—Detective Alastair Ransom’s gaslight Chicago. The following $300 worth of books are by authors I must acknowledge, most of which were sold to me by Mr. Heise, as most—like all great books—are out of print:
Medicine in Chicago 1850–1950 by Thomas Neville Bonner; Reminiscences of Chicago During the Civil War, Citadel Books, Chicago by Finis Farr; The Gangs of Chicago by Herbert Asbury; Gem of the Prairie by Herbert Asbury; Chicago by Stephen Longstreet; Wicked City by Curt Johnson with R. Craig Sautter; Chicago by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith; Chicago Ragtime by Richard Lindberg, Crime in Chicago by Richard Lindberg; German Chicago by Raymond Lohne; The Chicagoization of America by Kenan Heise; The Journey of Silas P. Bigelow by Kenan Heise; and Perfect Cities—Chicago Utopias by James Gilbert,
Other titles I stumbled on and devoured for my understanding of the city where I grew up include The Pinkertons: The Detective Agency that Made History by James Horan; The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello; Chicago Then and Now by Elizabeth McNulty; Graveyards of Chicago by Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski; Chicago’s Famous Buildings by Franz Schutze and Kevin Harrington; Chicago—A Pictorial History by Herman Kogan and Lloyd Wendt; Elmer McCurdy—The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw by Mark Svenold; Forever Open, Clear and Free by Lois Wille; Central Michigan Avenue by Ellen Christensen; Man and the Beast Within by Benjamin Walker, and America by Alastair Cooke.
However, the book that sparked the initial idea for City for Ransom goes way back to the 80s for me (it’s been percolating for a long time). This title Dean R. Koontz insisted I read: Jurgen Thorwald’s Century of the Detective. Even then Inspector Alastair Ransom was roaming about inside my head looking for a way out while I spent decades with Jessica Coran in my popular Instinct Series and Lucas Stonecoat in my Edge Series.
Thanks also to the wonderful team at Avon/HarperCollins, especially copyeditor and detail-conscious Patrice Silverstein; May Chen, who handled me with grace; and brave young editor Lyssa Keusch, who proved the only person in all the publishing world to see the potential of the rough, early stages of City, and without whom Ransom would never have found his way out of this author’s mineshaft (head), so that now this “gem of the prairie” named Alastair has finally come into the gaslight, proudly riding in a hansom cab, his scrimshaw wolf’s-head cane tapping to the beat of hooves.
About the Author
ROBERT W. WALKER Master of suspense and bone-chilling terror, Robert W. Walker, a graduate of Northwestern University, has penned forty-two novels and has taught language and writing for over twenty-five years. Having grown up in the Windy City and having been born in the shadow of Shiloh Battlefield, near Corinth, Mississippi, Robert has two writing traditions to uphold—the Chicago one and the Southern one—all of which makes him uniquely suited to write City for Ransom and its sequels, which he is currently working on.
Rob has written in many genres, including historical, mystery, YA, and horror under four frightful personalities. Walker saw Final Edge, Grave Instinct, and Absolute Instinct published in 2004. The author lives in Chicago where, between books, he enjoys all that the city has to offer. You’re invited to write Rob at www.RobertWWalker.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Advance Praise for
CITY FOR RANSOM
“Walker’s masterful prose cuts like a garrote, transporting us with panache and style into an historical thriller with teeth. Ransom’s the best new hero in period fiction.”
JA Konrath, author of Whiskey Sour & Bloody Mary
“Walker’s taken on Caleb Carr’s territory, with a superb haunted protagonist with a graveyard on his back. Ransom your soul for this one; it’s that mesmerizing.”
Ken Bruen, Macavity Award Winner for The Killing of the Tinkers
“Gut-wrenchingly suspenseful, luridly atmospheric, and utterly plausible, Walker’s creation is a brilliant mix of Conan Doyle, Erik Larson, and Wes Craven. You’ll be shocked, stunned, beaten to hell, and riveted to the peerless quality of this page-turner.”
Jay Bonansinga, author of Frozen and The Sinking of Eastland
“City is crime noir at its finest.”
David Ellis, Edgar® Winner, author of In the Company of Liars
“City is…deep, surprising…vivid and passionate.”
Barbara D’Amato, author of Death of a Thousand Cats
“Inspector Alastair Ransom’s Chicago is brutal and violent, cloaking mysteries and intrigues in a facade of propriety as spectral and illusory as the grand and gleaming buildings of the vanished ‘White City.’”
Richard Lindberg, author of Chicago by Gaslight: A History of Chicago’s Netherworld, 1880–1920
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CITY FOR RANSOM. Copyright © 2006 by Robert W. Walker. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition NOVEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061979361
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