Smugglers' Gold

by Lyle Brandt

  “Some of that’s correct,” Ryder replied.

  “I guess you’re tickled that he threw me out. I tried to tell him you were rotten, but he still blames me.”

  “You feel like getting even with him?” Ryder asked.

  “The hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I need corroborating evidence to prosecute him. Play your cards right, we can probably convince a local judge those boys you killed back there went down in self-defense.”

  “I knew it! You’re a goddamned copper!”

  “Secret Service,” Ryder said, correcting him. “I guess it’s all the same to you.”

  “I shoulda stayed behind and killed you when I had the chance.”

  “Should have but didn’t. Now it’s on the other foot. One chance to save yourself from stretching rope.”

  “See you in Hell first.” Otto sneered.

  Instead of reaching for the knife, he whipped a hand behind his back and came out with a small revolver, cocking it before he had a chance to aim. He got no further with it, then, as Ryder shot him in the chest and slammed him over to the concrete floor, twitching his last before the echo of the shot had died away.

  *

  First thing, Ryder doubled back to check the street outside for passersby who might have heard the gunshot. He found no one, which was reassuring to a point but obviously did not mean that he was in the clear. He felt time slipping through his fingers now, as he considered how to stage the scene.

  His first impulse, immediately banished, was to summon the police, identify himself, and tell them what had happened. Understanding how things seemed to work in Galveston, however, he projected what might happen if he got hold of the wrong police, maybe wound up in jail on murder charges, while the coppers ran to Bryan Marley with a warning. Even if the lawmen took his story and credentials at face value, there was no reason for Ryder to believe that they would help him round up Marley’s gang.

  No. He would stake his hopes on the Revenue Cutter from Corpus Christi, make sending that telegram his next priority. But in the meantime, Ryder needed to arrange the shooting scene, to place the full responsibility on Otto Seitz.

  Otto had made it easy for him, to a point. The knife he’d used to slit the throats of Marley’s guards lay on the concrete floor beside his corpse. He’d wiped the blade after the killings, but that was a problem easily resolved. If either of the murdered lookouts had a pistol on him, Ryder thought his plan should work.

  Unless somebody caught him in the midst of fixing it.

  Ryder strode to the warehouse door and closed it, then had a look at Otto’s body, making sure the bullet from his Colt Army had not come out the smuggler’s back. With that confirmed, he left no blood trail dragging Seitz along the aisle where he had died, back toward the bodies of the former comrades he had slaughtered. One more trip to fetch the Bowie knife, and he was ready for the final bit of playacting.

  It was a grisly job, but Ryder got it done. After discovering that both of Marley’s warehouse guards were armed with Colts—a Walker .44 and an older .36-caliber Paterson—he chose the corpse whose weapon matched his own revolver’s caliber and left the other one alone. He hauled the body he’d selected six or seven feet off from the other one, and didn’t mind the bloody drag marks this time, thinking they could be interpreted as evidence of struggling. From what he’d seen of the police in Galveston so far, he thought them likely to accept the easiest, most obvious solution they could find to any incident.

  Next, Ryder had to fire the dead man’s Colt Walker, a risky business, since a second shot might bring police before he’d slipped away. Taking the pistol from the dead man’s belt, Ryder went back to check the street again, saw no one passing by, and ran back to the far end of the warehouse, where he fired the gun point-blank into a bale of ganja. He would be surprised—make that amazed—if any Galveston patrolman found that slug, or even spied the small hole in the burlap sacking.

  Jogging back to dead man’s land, he finished setting up the scene. The Colt Walker, one chamber fired, he pressed into the murdered watchman’s limp right hand. Next, Ryder wiped the Bowie’s heavy blade across the lookout’s gaping throat, before he placed it into Otto’s hand and pressed his still-warm fingers to create a fist of sorts. The worst bit was arranging Seitz and his dead victim in a grappling pose, the Colt Walker wedged in between them where it might have slipped after a fatal shot was fired in self-defense.

  Ryder stepped back and studied the tableau he had created. It would not deceive an expert, diligent detective, but he counted on the local coppers being lazy and slipshod. They’d want to close the case as simply as they could—and if they doubted his arrangement of the corpses, what was their alternative solution? Ryder checked to verify that nothing of himself remained for the police to find. Once Otto and the others were identified, any suspicions that still lingered would be aimed at Bryan Marley and his crew.

  It was the best that he could do for now, in any case, and now was all that mattered. Getting out, away from there, before another pair of watchmen showed up to relieve the ones Otto had slain, or someone else showed up to ruin everything.

  One final check along the street, in both directions, and he fled, leaving the warehouse door as he had found it on arrival, open to the world.

  Whoever turned up next was in for a surprise.

  *

  Stede Pickering was halfway back to Awful Annie’s when it hit him. He stopped dead in the middle of the street, his crewmen piling up behind him, jostling one another. “Damn and blast!” the captain swore.

  “Whatsa matter?” someone asked him.

  “That lubber on the dock,” said Pickering. “When he described the fella comin’ off the Banshee. Who’d that sound like? Anybody?”

  “Anybody, sure,” one of his dimwit crewmen answered, shrugging.

  “Damn it! Think of someone who we’ve seen just recently.” When that failed to produce a glimmer anywhere among them, Pickering added, “Someone who might bear us a grudge.”

  “Old Seitz was steamin’ after Marley kicked him out,” one of them said.

  “Not him. He doesn’t look a damn thing like the man who was described,” said Pickering.

  Blank faces all around him.

  “Christ all Friday!” he exclaimed. “Are all your brains so soused you can’t remember yesterday?” Still nothing, so he spelled it out for them. “It sounds like George Revere.”

  “Him from the island?” one of them inquired.

  “That don’t make sense,” another said. “We left him, din’t we?”

  “Left him, sure,” said Pickering. “We didn’t kill him, though.”

  “That can’t be right,” a balding pirate groused. “It’s more’n two hunnerd miles of open water, comin’ back.”

  “Longer than that, if he went overland somehow,” a scar-faced sailor added.

  “Lotsa guys look purty much the same,” a one-eyed buccaneer allowed.

  “That’s true enough,” said Pickering. “But who among ’em has a grudge against the Banshee and her crew?”

  That stumped them for a moment, then a skinny redhead said, “Awright, but how would he get back here?”

  “Doesn’t matter how he done it,” Pickering replied. “The question’s whether Marley knew about it and they’s in this deal together.”

  “What deal?” asked the cyclops.

  “Burnin’ up our ship, you idjit!”

  “Why’n hell would Marley go along with that?” the redhead challenged. “He’s been our best customer, these past two years.”

  “But he was het up when he heard we left Revere on Timbalier, weren’t he?” Pickering reminded them. “Kept sayin’ how the boy had saved his neck, not once, but twice.”

  “So, this Revere comes back somehow,” said One-eye, “and he talks to Marley somehow, while we’s all together at the whorehouse?”

  “Why not?” Pickering replied. “The hard part’s gettin’ back, but once he’s here, wha
t’s stoppin’ him? Was any of you watchin’ who came in and out?”

  The redhead sniggered. “Only once I got upstairs.”

  “Shut up! If I’m right,” Pickering continued, “Marley either knows Revere is back in town and burnt the Banshee, or he oughta know. We need to find out which it is, and quick.”

  “We goin’ back there, then?” asked Scarface.

  “Goddamn right, we are,” said Pickering. “But first, we have to make another little stop.”

  “For what?” one of his crewmen asked.

  “If you could think straight for a second, you’d remember that our guns, most of ’em, went up with the clipper. I ain’t bustin’ in on Marley and his bunch,” said Pickering, “unless we’re all well armed.”

  “You know someplace in town to get more shootin’ irons?” asked One-eye.

  “This is Texas,” Pickering replied. “Guns ain’t the problem. What we need is cash to buy ’em with, so ever’body turn your pockets out and show me what you got.”

  It didn’t come to much, after the hours spent in revelry at Awful Annie’s. Truth be told, they were well short of what he thought they’d need to supplement the knives and few pistols his men had brought ashore from the Banshee. Pickering knew a man who dealt in guns and had a shop nearby, but if he quibbled over price … well, that would be his problem this time, wouldn’t it.

  Nothing would stand between Stede Pickering and his revenge. Not money, not the local coppers, and for damn sure not a lousy bunch of cowards whose idea of fighting was to sneak around behind a captain’s back and burn his ship.

  Someone would pay for that insult. In blood.

  *

  From the warehouse, Ryder made his cautious way back to the Western Union office and dispatched a telegram to Corpus Christi. Requesting help forced Ryder to identify himself, and since he’d gone that far, he played his other hole card at the same time, mentioning Director Wood by name. As a precaution, he stood waiting while the telegram was sent and the acknowledgment came back. Whatever happened after that—say, if the clerk ran off to warn somebody from the Marley gang—at least he’d done his best.

  And any way he looked at it, the pot was coming to a boil in Galveston.

  From Western Union, Ryder made a quick but cautious circuit of the waterfront, watching for any members of the Banshee’s crew and spotting none. He buttonholed a passing stevedore and asked if anybody from the clipper’s crew had come to view the wreckage yet, receiving a description of a man who had to be Stede Pickering, arriving on the scene with something like a dozen men, then storming off again.

  Where to?

  The dock worker could only shrug at that, but Ryder knew from conversations he had overheard that Pickering and company had no lodgings in Galveston. When they delivered cargo to the port, they spent their idle time ashore in the pursuit of booze and women, then slept off the binge aboard their vessel. When they had a vessel.

  Now, where would they go? Back to the cribs at Awful Annie’s? Or would the disaster that had overtaken them persuade the buccaneers that they had best find someplace else to stay, while they considered their next move?

  Ryder could not begin to list all of the brothels, bars, and cheap hotels in Galveston. The only starting place that he could think of for a search was Awful Annie’s, with the danger it presented if he should be spotted there by anyone from Marley’s gang or Pickering’s. It would be helpful, once his reinforcements had arrived, if he could find all of the miscreants together in one place, but that posed problems, too.

  He didn’t know how many men would be aboard the USRC Martin Van Buren when it arrived, or how they would be armed. Pitting that crew against two fighting gangs, perhaps three dozen men in all, could spark a battle that was bound to draw police—but to assist which side? The best thing he could do, Ryder supposed, was make his cautious way to Annie’s place, try to discover who was there, and hope that all of them were drinking heavily enough to put them out of action when the time came.

  Nine long hours, at a minimum.

  More than enough time, Ryder thought, for any drunk to sleep it off and have his wits about him when the law arrived.

  Unless he found some way to thin their numbers in the meantime.

  Nothing had occurred to him as he set off for Awful Annie’s, moving through the gray light of an early dusk. He calculated that the cutter couldn’t possibly arrive before the clock struck three A.M., and that would be if nothing slowed it down. He would devise some kind of plan before the night ran out and hope he didn’t wind up paying for the effort with his life.

  Ryder had left his Henry rifle at the boardinghouse, thinking that it would make him too conspicuous, walking around the city’s streets. Now he regretted that decision, but did not think he could spare the time to go back for the long gun. If the Banshee’s crew had made for Awful Annie’s and persuaded Marley’s men to seek new quarters overnight, for safety’s sake, he ran the risk of losing them entirely while he went back to his room.

  He would make do with what he had, the Colt Army with two spare cylinders. Beyond that, if it came down to a fight with melee weapons, Ryder had his switchblade, but he knew it wouldn’t do much good against a mob of cutthroats.

  Neither would his badge, unless he somehow managed to get help from the police.

  Not likely, he decided, judging that the coppers would most likely let a battle run its course before they waded in to risk their own lives.

  Mopping up was always easier than taking sides.

  *

  Pickering’s gun dealer, as he’d expected, wasn’t keen on parting with his merchandise on credit. Neither was he in the mood to offer discounts, nor to rent his guns out for the evening, accepting promises that they would be returned. Pickering soon grew tired of arguing about it, drew his pepperbox revolver, and demanded satisfaction on the spot. That worked, all right, but got him thinking about coppers, so he had one of his men escort the dealer to his shop’s back room and slit his gullet.

  Dead men tell no tales.

  The shop was well stocked, and since most of their old arsenal had gone down with the Banshee, Pickering gave his men free rein to arm themselves. Those lacking pistols had their choice of Colts—Dragoons, as well as 1851 and 1861 Navy models—along with the the Remington Model 1858, the Smith & Wesson Model 1, and the double-action Starr revolver. Pickering himself collected a LeMat .36-caliber with a nine-round cylinder and a separate 16-gauge smoothbore barrel for buckshot.

  Most of his crewmen also went for long guns, including a mix of Spencer repeaters, Springfield’s Model 1861, and Enfield’s Pattern 1853. Again, Pickering claimed what he regarded as the best piece for himself: a shortened carbine version of the Colt revolving rifle, chambered in .44 caliber with a five-shot cylinder.

  “Don’t stint on ammunition, either,” he advised them, as they rummaged over shelves, one man detailed to guard the door. “No tellin’ when we’ll have another chance to shop for cartridges and powder.”

  Some of them, by then, were grabbing sabers from a rack behind the counter, slicing at the air with them and growling until Pickering commanded them to sober up and act like men preparing for a fight, instead of children on a holiday.

  In terms of arms and numbers, Pickering imagined they should do all right against the Marley gang. What troubled him was going up against his adversaries on their home ground, where a natural advantage lay with the defenders. Yet another disadvantage would be laying siege to Awful Annie’s, where the enemy had cover and his men would be compelled to risk their skins on open streets. Darkness would help a bit, in that regard, and also the advantage of surprise, if he could keep it. Still, storming a building was a chancy proposition, on a par with boarding hostile ships at sea.

  Except, of course, the building would be stationary. Neither it nor any of its occupants could sail away.

  But, like a ship, it could be set on fire.

  “We’ll take those lanterns, while we’re at it,” Picker
ing directed, pointing toward another shelf. “Just leave ’em dark for now. I’ll tell you when to light ’em up.”

  Some of his men saw what he had in mind, smiling and moving to collect the six or seven lanterns, checking to make sure their reservoirs were amply filled with kerosene. Pickering had them leave the shop in twos and threes, with intervals of time between them to avoid attracting undue notice on the street. They would seem strange and savage as it was, armed to the teeth with swords, pistols, and rifles, but he didn’t want them looking like an army on the march, making their way to Awful Annie’s.

  Most of all, he didn’t want to get police involved until their work was done, or nearly so.

  And after that … well, what the hell. Those uniforms they wore weren’t bulletproof.

  Pickering was the last man out, locking the door behind him to forestall discovery of the arms dealer’s corpse. After tonight, Pickering would have burned his bridges here in Galveston and wasn’t sure exactly how he’d make his way to some more friendly port. Perhaps he and his men—those who survived the night—could steal a small ship from the waterfront and sail away. If not, they’d have to travel overland, avoiding lawmen till they reached someplace where they weren’t recognized and bargains could be struck.

  And if it all went wrong, if this night proved to be the only time that he had left, at least Stede Pickering could use it striking back at someone who’d betrayed him. He could teach a lesson that would be remembered, after he was gone.

  Truth be told, he’d rather be a living legend, but nobody lived forever. Better to die fighting than lie down and waste away.

  With that in mind, he reckoned Galveston would be as good a place as any for a grand rip-roaring end.

  17

  On his way to Awful Annie’s, keeping to the alleyways and shadows, Ryder heard a grumbling, growling sound approaching from the east. Accompanied by noise of tramping feet, he recognized it as the echo of an angry crowd in motion, and paused in an alley’s mouth beyond the reach of lamplight while he watched and waited for the mob to come within his line of sight.