by Lyle Brandt
“Sounds good,” Ryder admitted. “But you’re wasting time on me.”
“And why is that?”
“I’m finished hunting men. I’m looking for a line of work where folks aren’t out to kill me all the time.”
“You’re not a coward, Mr. Ryder. I can see that, plain as day.”
“Then let’s just say I’m tired of carrying a badge.”
“Is that your final word, sir?”
“So it is.”
“In that case, I apologize for taking up your time.” Wood reached inside his coat, pulled out a printed business card, and handed it to Ryder. “Take this, if you don’t mind. Just in case.”
The card went into Ryder’s pocket, unexamined. “Good luck with your Secret Service,” Ryder said. “I reckon that you’ll need it.”
“I’ll take that, with thanks, and hope to hear from you.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Ryder, as he turned back toward the Yankee Doodle and the sweet goal of oblivion.
*
You want to go again?” the redhead asked, rolling against him so that one of her soft breasts nuzzled his ribs.
“Give me a minute,” Ryder said. “That last one wore me out.”
“Take all the time you need,” she told him, wearing a seductive smile and nothing else. “You’re paid up for the night.”
“Good thing I planned ahead.”
“I like a man who knows his mind,” she said. Her fingers teased him underneath the sheet that pooled around his waist.
Ryder was drunk, no doubt about it, though the whiskey hadn’t managed to erase the memory of his dismissal. Dolly, as she called herself, had done a better job distracting him, but in between their bouts of tussling—two, so far, and he was hoping for a third if he could manage it somehow—the anger still came back at him, setting his teeth on edge. The offer of another law enforcement job did nothing to defuse his sense of being sacrificed to please a copperhead whose preference, if truth be told, would have been Grant surrendering to Lee, and not the other way around.
Instead of locking up the traitors, mealy-mouthed appeasers catered to them, offering forgiveness when they should have felt an iron boot on their necks. Ryder had lost a childhood friend to Rebel guns at Chickamauga, and another in a firestorm at the Battle of the Wilderness. For what? So that the politicians who had voted for secession could be welcomed back to Congress as if not a drop of blood had spilled over the past four years?
And what about the slave states that had sided with the Union out of cowardice, as Ryder saw it? They had harbored spies and saboteurs and cutthroats posing as “irregulars” to cast their crimes as acts of war. He thought of Lawrence, Kansas, sacked and burned by Quantrill’s butchers, well over a hundred innocent civilians slaughtered in the ruins. Why forgive, much less forget?
“I think we’re getting somewhere,” Dolly murmured, and he felt that she was right. Her nimble fingers brought him back to here and now, from battlegrounds he’d never personally seen.
Ryder had planned to join the Union Army after Shiloh, back in April ’62, but Marshal Lamon had reminded all his deputies that they were vital to the war effort at home, hunting the enemies who lurked in Washington and everywhere across the country, from Manhattan with its draft riots to Arizona Territory, where Confederates vied with Apaches under war chief Mangas Coloradas to harass and murder loyal settlers. Ryder had agreed to stay in harness with the U.S. Marshals Service, maybe saved his life that way, but now he had nothing to show for it beyond a sense of being crumpled up and thrown away.
“That’s it,” purred Dolly, as she climbed on top of him. “I’ll just … okay, now … there it is.”
She settled on him, squirmed a little, getting comfy. Ryder raised his hips to meet her, and she placed a hand flat on his lower stomach to restrain him.
“No, you don’t! Let me take care of you.”
Whore talk, he realized, but what else did he ever get in Washington? At least with Dolly, there was a reward for being used. And at the moment, Ryder didn’t mind a bit. In fact …
She clenched him somehow, rose a little, made him catch his breath. “I don’t know whether I can wait,” he said.
Dolly relaxed, quit moving. Asked him out of nowhere, “How’d you get a name like Gideon?”
“Some kind of angel,” Ryder said, thankful for the distraction. “Never thought it fit, myself.”
“I woulda guessed a devil,” Dolly said, starting to roll her hips again. “Oh, yeah. Like that,” she purred. “Just stay right there. Don’t move a muscle till I tell you.”
Ryder bit his lip, resisting the impulse to help her out. She obviously knew what she was doing, had already proved as much to his complete, exhausted satisfaction, and he didn’t plan to spoil the moment. To distract himself a little, Ryder turned his head to glimpse his pocket watch, propped open on the nightstand to his left. He saw that it was ten thirteen, then Dolly gripped his chin with one hand, turned his face back up toward her, and bent to let her nipples graze his lips.
Why not?
“Okay, that’s good. Now move, damn you! Like that. Oh, Jesus, fill me up!”
He aimed to please, still trying not to tip over the edge too soon. Outside, through Dolly’s open window, voices reached them from the street. Men shouting back and forth, a woman’s laughter, children giggling as they ran pell-mell along the sidewalk, celebrating the indefinite suspension of their normal bedtime. No one seemed to give a damn for rules in Washington tonight, and if they heard Dolly cry out in satisfaction from her upstairs crib, nobody cared.
Ryder collapsed into the featherbed beneath him, spent, with Dolly draped across him, barely conscious of her weight but feeling every dewy inch of skin that pressed against him. He was on the verge of drifting off when something changed about the voices rising from outside. From celebration sliding downhill into weariness, a note of panic spiked the tones coming to Ryder’s ear. A woman’s tipsy cackling spiraled up into a kind of squeal. A man passing below the open window started cursing vehemently, raging.
“Dear God, no!” somebody shouted, from perhaps a block away.
As someone else cried out, “They’ve shot the president!”
Ryder was instantly awake; he rolled Dolly’s slender form away from him and bolted out of bed. Naked, he leaned out of her window, saw a stout man reeling past, his face florid by lamplight, streaked with tears. Ryder called down to him, “Hey, you! Yes, you! What’s happening?”
“Some bastard’s shot the president,” the heavy man sobbed out. “He may be dying.”
Ryder clutched the windowsill to keep the room from tilting under him and pitching him headlong into the street. “A shooting at the White House?”
“No, during the play. Ford’s Theatre.”
“What is it?” Dolly asked him, lolling on the bed, still half asleep.
“The president,” said Ryder, as he scrambled to retrieve his scattered clothes.
“Well, what about him?”
“He’s been shot.”
“The hell you say!”
By then, he had his pants on and had stepped into his boots. Grappling with his shirt, he heard one of the seams rip and ignored it. Pistol. Jacket. Hat.
Dolly’s voice reached out to catch him at the door. “You come back any time, now, hear?”
“I hear,” he called over his shoulder, racing to the nearby stairs and pounding down them, toward the street.
2
Ford’s Theatre was located on Tenth Street, four long blocks from where Ryder emerged onto the sidewalk. He started running west on E Street, weaving in and out past people in his way, jostling a few who lurched into his path, deaf to their protests as he passed. The word was out already, women weeping—and a few men, too—while others walked around with stunned expressions on their faces, shock and alcohol colliding in their brains. Ryder was out of patience by the time he’d covered two blocks, close to lashing out at human roadblocks as he closed the dista
nce.
Lincoln, shot!
The fear of such a thing had been a constant from the first days of the war. The District of Columbia was more or less a southern city, geographically and in its attitudes, although it was the Union capital. It lay next door to Virginia, where Richmond served as the Confederate seat of government until one week before Appomattox—barely a hundred miles from Washington, but worlds apart in terms of politics.
Or was it? Congress had waited a year past Fort Sumter to ban slavery inside the District itself, when President Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act in April 1862. Under that law, more than three thousand slaves had been freed, while their owners received three hundred dollars per head for their lost property. Newly freed bondsmen were encouraged to leave the country by a standing offer of one hundred dollars each for those who emigrated to Haiti or Liberia. How many actually left was anybody’s guess.
And now, the worst had happened. Lincoln had been shot, but was he dead?
Ryder stopped short outside Ford’s Theatre, facing a crowd of several thousand Washingtonians. Taking a chance, he climbed a streetlamp’s cast-iron pole and hung onto the crossbar set below the square glass lantern, placed there to support a lamplighter’s ladder. Clutching the bar, legs wrapped around the fluted pole, he hung there, face warmed by the lamp, watching to see what happened next.
It took some time. Ryder’s muscles were trembling and burning by the time a group of solemn men emerged from the theater, passing through white arches from the entryway. Behind them came five soldiers in full uniform, supporting the familiar form of Lincoln in their arms. Familiar, yes, but also different, face slack and pale, hair matted on one side by blood, and stains of crimson on his open shirt collar.
A head shot, then. Ryder could feel his stomach clench and twist.
More soldiers spilled out of Ford’s Theatre—where were they, when the shooting happened?—and ran past the party carrying the president. Two of them started pushing through the crowd, while a young civilian dressed for a night on the town followed them and called out to the throng, voice straining with emotion.
“People! Listen, please, for God’s sake! I am Dr. Albert King. The president is gravely injured. Everyone stand back and let us move him to a place where he can find the proper care!”
Slowly, moaning like a wounded animal, the crowd drew back and split apart, forming a path for the procession to pass through. Two other grim civilians, possibly physicians, fell in line with Dr. King and led the soldiers carrying the president past ranks of stricken faces. Mary Lincoln, almost childlike in her stature, walked behind the soldiers carrying her husband, looking dazed.
And going where? They didn’t seem to have the first idea. Their party turned first toward the nearby Star Saloon, then seemed to reconsider, veering off across Tenth Street. A man with a lantern in hand emerged from the Peterson boardinghouse, a three-story redbrick structure directly opposite Ford’s, and called out to the burdened bluecoats, “Bring him in here! Bring him in here!”
Dr. King picked up his pace, the soldiers trying to do likewise without jostling their commander in chief. They reached the sidewalk, climbed a curving flight of concrete steps to reach the open entry to the boardinghouse, then disappeared inside. The tall door slammed behind them with a sound uncomfortably like a gunshot.
Ryder let his legs unwind, slid down the lamppost, and dropped the last three feet. He almost tumbled, trembling legs protesting, then regained his balance and followed the crowd’s flow across the street toward Peterson’s. His mind was racing, trying to decide what he should do. Stay there and wait for news? Go home and wait to read about it in the Daily Morning Chronicle? Was leaving a betrayal of the president, somehow, although Lincoln would never hear of it and didn’t even know Ryder existed? He’d been ousted from the Marshals Service, owed the government no duty whatsoever, yet the thought of leaving still felt like desertion.
Ryder looked back across Tenth Street toward the Star Saloon, a two-story building next door to the looming bulk of Ford’s Theatre. He knew the owner, Peter Taltavull, from visits to the barroom in his former professional capacity and as a private patron. They were cordial, although not close friends; Taltavull was an ex-marine who’d played a French horn in the Marine Corps band for twenty-odd years before retiring to serve thirsty Washington residents. A counterfeiting case had taken Ryder to the Star, about a year ago, but Taltavull had not been involved.
A drink or three would suit him well, right now, but others obviously had the same idea. The crowd outside of Peterson’s was growing by the minute, but was also losing people from its fringes to the Star Saloon. Ryder decided that he’d rather have fresh air, if he was standing in a crush of bodies, than to squeeze himself inside a barroom rank with sweat and stale tobacco smoke.
Call it a vigil, then, and he would stick until young Dr. King or one of his associates came out with an announcement. Ryder’s fleeting glimpse of Lincoln had not been encouraging. Head wounds were always serious, and penetration of the skull meant probing into Lincoln’s brain if King or someone else wanted to get the bullet out. If it had fragmented while piercing bone, he guessed the president must be as good as dead.
Goddamn it!
Ward Hill Lamon had been guarding Lincoln for the past four years, and chose this day, of all days, to leave Washington? Ryder had felt contempt for Lamon after he was fired, that morning; now, it blossomed into full-blown rage. Surely, he must have left someone in charge to keep the president from harm, but whoever inherited the job had clearly failed.
That was a name Ryder would like to ferret out and pay the worthless slug a visit. Not the best idea he’d ever had, perhaps, but at the moment it felt right. It wasn’t murder that he had in mind, but something in the nature of a thrashing that would leave its mark and teach the sluggard that a failure in responsibility had consequences.
As for Lincoln’s would-be killer, it was on the street already that he had escaped from Ford’s. An actor, it was said, one John Wilkes Booth. Soldiers and members of the Metropolitan Police Department had fanned out in search of him, while drunken lynch mobs did the same. No matter which side caught him, Ryder wouldn’t bet a nickel on his chances of survival through the night.
*
A half hour into the vigil, two familiar figures arrived by carriage outside the Peterson house. Ryder recognized them instantly as Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, and Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. Both bearded and grim-faced like biblical prophets, surrounded by more boys in blue, the pair vanished into the rooming house, leaving half their armed retinue on guard outside.
Was Lincoln still alive, inside there? If not, as Ryder understood it, power would devolve upon Vice President Andrew Johnson, former military governor of occupied Tennessee, picked as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 to demonstrate the president’s belief that Rebel states were still part of the Union, whether they liked it or not. His ascension to office would rile the Republican Congress, but tawdry politics seemed insignificant tonight, with Lincoln lying on his deathbed only yards away.
A ripple started at the far edge of the crowd assembled outside Peterson’s, anger and sorrow, spreading word of some new outrage. Ryder heard a name amidst the muttering and cursing.
“Seward! Seward!”
Ryder grabbed a fellow passing by and asked, “What’s happened?”
“Secretary Seward was attacked at home,” the stranger answered, almost breathless. “Cut to pieces, what they’re saying. May be dead already, with his family.”
Ryder released him, watched him disappear into the crowd. William Henry Seward, Secretary of State and next in line for the presidency after Johnson, had been thrown from a carriage nine days earlier, suffering a concussion, broken jaw, and fractured arm. He’d been laid up at home on Madison Place, facing Lafayette Park. Word of the new attack told Ryder that the Lincoln shooting hadn’t been some solitary madman’s work, but rather part of a conspiracy.
The list
of suspects would be endless. Anyone who lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, for starters, then add all the copperheads who’d called themselves “Peace Democrats,” while scheming to support the South and slavery. And truth be told, there were some people in the president’s own party who would have to fake grief at his passing. Rumor had it that Edwin Stanton was one of them, often at odds with Lincoln over the handling of ex-Confederates and terms for readmission of their states into the Union.
Ryder had begun to reconsider visiting the Star Saloon when someone jostled him in passing, bawling out, “Goddamn King Abraham, and Seward, too!” The loudmouth’s passage caused an eddy in the crowd, others recoiling from his bulk and roaring voice. A few quick strides brought Ryder up behind him, clutching at his shoulder, turning him around, breath redolent of alcohol.
“I didn’t catch that, friend,” he told the grinning drunk.
“I said, goddamn King Abraham and Sew—”
The first punch broke his nose, a satisfying crunch, and Ryder just had time to strike once more, before the squaller dropped unconscious to the pavement. Several bystanders cheered, one slapping Ryder on the back, but most of them retreated from him as he turned back toward the rooming house where Lincoln was sequestered, dead or dying.
As the night wore on, with no word out of Peterson’s, more news arrived by word of mouth from other parts of Washington. Search parties hunting John Wilkes Booth had so far failed to locate him. Now there were fears he might have slipped the net, escaping into Maryland or possibly Virginia. Either way, there’d be no dearth of Rebels happy to conceal him and assist in his escape. The hunt was widening, a full-scale military operation now, but no one could predict success with any certainty.
The good news had to do with William Seward. Although stabbed repeatedly by a demented stranger—who had also gravely injured two of Seward’s sons, his butler, and a messenger who had arrived coincidentally while the attack was under way—the secretary was expected to survive and to resume his duties, once he had recovered fully. As for the would-be assassin, unidentified as yet, he’d managed to escape on foot, armed with a dagger and a pistol that had failed him by misfiring during the assault.
