Deadlands: For a Few Dead Guys More

by Shane Lacy Hensley

  "A warning? Of what?"

  "An impendin' stampede," Parlor said. "They say that if a man on a bull rides up to your camp, get on your horse and head to high ground; the ones who don't wind up flatter than a flapjack, trampled by ten thousand hooves."

  Parlor tossed the dregs of his coffee on the fire and shuffled off to his bedroll. Andy had a few more questions, but he held his tongue; maybe it was better to ask them in the light of day.

  It took Andy a long time to get to sleep. The lowing of the cattle that normally lulled him to dreamland kept him awake; it seemed nervous, on edge.

  Was that hooves he heard approaching?

  PAID IN FULL

  By Hal Mangold It was morning. Damn.

  The sun was warm on my face-hot in fact—and I rolled off my cot to my feet with a guttural noise. I immediately regretted my rash move. The room spun a few time before snapping suddenly into focus.

  My own damn fault for having rooms with so many windows. Usually the sun and I are friends, but this particular morning it stared in my window like an accusing eye. My head throbbed. I felt like every miner working Angelfish Island was hacking away at my gray matter.

  "Never again," I muttered. Staring out the open window into Red Lantern Town's streets, I made myself all those promises I've made so many times before on mornings like this. Never kept a one of them, mind you.

  I put last night back together the best I could. The Waterfront-some cheap dive or other. Shaking my head, I tried to clear the cobwebs. Then I smelled it. Tobacco smoke. Coming from the next room.

  I fumbled for the Colt Frontier .44 I keep in my bureau, and advanced stealthily on the door to my sitting room. Steadying myself-and making sure my vision was in focus-I hauled the door open, and threw my close to 200-pound bulk into a rolling dive into the room, coming up on my feet behind the davenport, gun at the ready!

  "Good morning, Kellerman," said the man sitting in my favorite easy chair, in slightly accented English.

  "Damn it, Tony," I swore, dropping my gun hand to my side. "One of these days you're going to end up with lead poisoning if you keep that up."

  Wong Chau Sang, better known to us everyday rubes as Long Haired Tony, smiled, and puffed on the cigar he held between his neatly manicured fingers. He was a slim Asian man, with vaguely Caucasian features and a pockmarked face.

  His long greasy black hair was slicked back over his head, and his bright brown eyes watched me impassively. Ugly was one of the nicer words I would have used to describe him. He was dressed in dungarees, a white shirt and a brown leather vest. His badge of office was pinned there, as always.

  "You wouldn't shoot the Sheriff of Shan Fan in cold blood now, would you Kellerman?" he said mockingly, a small smile flitting across his face. "Well, not with that gun you wouldn't. I took the precaution of unloading it for you while you were passed ou...I mean while you were sleeping."

  "You're ashing on my favorite chair," I said grumpily, checking the gun out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, empty.

  "Get dressed Kellerman. We're going for a walk."

  "You know I'm not a morning person," I said crossing over to my washstand. I laid my empty gun down, quickly splashed some water into the large metal washbowl there, and washed up while we talked.

  "It's not a request, Kellerman. I need you. You are a witness."

  "A witness? Tony, you should know better than that. I am NEVER a witness. I see nothing, I hear nothing, just like everyone is supposed to in this town. I know how much Big Ears Tam hates witnesses."

  "Ethan Monaghan is dead," Tony said matter-of-factly.

  My skin grew cold. "When?" I stated in an even voice, continuing to wash myself. The fog in my head was clearing, and the throbbing pain in my head was only annoying now, rather than excruciating.

  "This morning. You drank with him last night, yes? One of my men saw you two down on the Waterfront."

  I had to think for a moment. It was starting to fall back into place, as nights like that often do. "Yes. Yes, I did. Ethan rolled into town like he always does, looking for money...something about a faro debt. Anyway, we ended up down on the docks, drinking cheap whiskey with some Russian sailor friends of Ethan's in from up north. The whole group of them, Ethan included, took off around midnight. I came home." A cold ball was forming in my stomach as Tony's words sank in. Ethan was dead. "How did it happen?"

  "That is why you must come. You need to see. His end was not...natural."

  "Murder?" I said, drying my face.

  "Of a sort," Tony stated cryptically. "We don't have much time. The only reason I have even bothered to come here is that I know you and Monaghan were friends. He was a cheap two-bit grifter who would have sold his grandmother to the Sioux if he thought he could make a quick dollar off it. You really should choose your friends more carefully."

  "I didn't choose Ethan as my friend, Tony," I said staring at him intently. "I owed him. There's a big difference."

  "I know," Tony sighed, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. "So get a move on. I can't leave the body where it is much longer, or Tam will have my guts for garters. Corpses are bad for business."

  ***

  Five minutes and a quick shave later we walked down the long flight of stairs from my second floor combination office and apartment onto the bustling streets of Shan Fan's Red Lantern Town. The winds were blowing north today, and the smell of the tanneries and slaughterhouses of Stinktown was in the air. My stomach roiled, and my head pounded bit more, but I held myself steady and followed Tony down the Street of Jade Fortune, toward the waterfront.

  I've always loved the hustle and bustle of this place, ever since I first arrived in the Maze. Sacramento, the City of Lost Angels-as a private detective I've seen them all, but for sheer interest, none of them hold a candle to the melting pot known as Shan Fan. Cowpunchers, miners, sailors, pirates, they all come here eventually. It's a bit like my old stomping grounds in New York City-but without all that troublesome lawfulness. The Hsieh Chia J€n—that means "family of deliverance" in Chinese-are the law here. Like other triads, they tend to play it pretty fast and loose.

  Tony and I worked our way through the early morning crowds, following the street out of Red Lantern Town down through Taeltown, Shan Fan's financial district. Thankfully, Stinktown's odor was fading, but it was more than compensated for by the odor of fish, fresh and otherwise, coming from Prawn Valley The various scents of Shan Fan are sometimes enough to make you want to cut your own nose off.

  We passed wagons and rickshaws, groups of miners heading for the hills for a hard day's prospecting, and groups of rail workers moving out to the new line being built north towards Gomorra and Sacramento. A gaggle of Reverend Grimme's missionaries stood on one street corner, shouting something about the evils of the railroads and the coming "Apocalypse." Standard fare for those nutcases.

  We reached the waterfront in a few minutes and the crowd gathered there made it easy to figure out where Ethan's corpse was. As often as it happens, death is always novel here in Shan Fan. Tony issued a few curt commands in Chinese and his men cleared the people back about 20 feet from the body Ethan was lying right where they had found him. He was on his stomach, head turned off to the side, his bare feet trailing in the water. The look on his face was a mixture of confusion and terror. I had never seen a look quite like it—well, not since Cold Harbor, I thought. I crouched down and frisked him quickly. His gun was missing. "Ethan always went heeled," I mentioned to Tony, and continued searching through his damp clothes. "He's wet. Was he floating when you found him?"

  "No. If you look beneath him, you can see where he pulled himself up on shore. We think it must have happened after two in the morning last night. We found a few ladies of the evening who were plying their trade down here until about then."

  "Odd. Ethan wasn't much for swimming, although he could do it."

  "He must have fallen in off one of the piers and swam down here."

  "So he didn't drown," I said, feeling
his skin. It was cold and clammy to the touch. "What killed him, then? I don't see any bullet holes, wounds or bruises."

  "Look in his mouth, Kellerman," Tony said, a strange expectant smile on his face.

  I bent down and pulled down Ethan's slack jaw, and looked inside. What I saw made my still-queasy stomach do a back-flip. I stood up quickly.

  "Maggots?"

  "Yes," said Tony "I'd roll the body over and show you more, but I'm not sure your delicate constitution could take it." He was loving this.

  "What do you mean."

  "His abdomen has been completely eaten away."

  "So quickly? Tony, that's impossible. He can't have been dead more than a few hours."

  "More than that." Tony looked serious. "The maggots ate him from the inside out. It's what killed him."

  "You're kidding me."

  "You know better than that, Kellerman," Tony said sourly. "I don't kid about death. His tongue is missing as well."

  I scratched the back of my neck. The sun was out again and I was beginning to sweat. "Ever see anything like this before?"

  "No," Tony replied-a bit too quickly for my taste. He was holding something back. I was sure. And that's why I didn't show him the small scrap of animal skin I pulled from Ethan's clenched left hand.

  "Mind if I do a little poking around on my own? I'm between cases right now, and Ethan was a friend, albeit a pain in the ass one," I asked Tony He shrugged. "Makes no difference to me-as long as you remember who the Sheriff is around here. You know how I feel about vigilantism."

  "Unless you're leading the vigilantes, of course."

  "Of course," Tony said with a savage grin.

  ***

  I walked along the Street of Auspicious Omen, looking out over the waters of Shan Fan Bay. The sun was mercifully hiding behind some clouds and the cold waters of the California Maze looked like a flat sheet of blue-gray slate. The seagulls were hovering above the calm surface, occasionally diving down to snatch up some floating bit of flotsam or an unfortunate fish.

  Once I started thinking about it, I wondered what the Hell 1 was doing investigating Ethan's death. Some friend he had been. We'd known each other since we were kids, growing up in the slums of New York City. We both committed petty crimes in the neighborhood, joined the U.S. Army at roughly the same time and, totally by chance, ended up in the same infantry unit. We fought the Rebs side by side, and after what we saw at Cold Harbor, we deserted together. I still have nightmares about what happened there.

  Both of us made our way out West after deserting. When we hit Shan Fan, I had had enough. Long hours on the trail had made me realize what a bastard Ethan really was. Tony was right about him in every respect. Just a two-bit grifter and card sharp, and not a very skilled one at that. I had stayed here. He had moved on, occasionally passing through town to hit me up for money or a place to sleep-or hide out.

  Why did I put up with him? Because once, in a moment of nobility (or weakness, as he would have called it), Ethan Monaghan had taken a bullet meant for me. He saved my life, a fact he never ceased reminding me of. He'd never done anything that unselfish for anyone before or since, and 1 guess I owed him, like he always said.

  Strange how he had to die before I got a chance to truly repay him.

  I scanned the harbor in front of me until I spotted the boat I

  was looking for. The Russians. That was where I'd start.

  ***

  "Dear God, Stanley, careful how you pilot this thing!" I yelled nervously, looking over the edge of the boat into the waters of the bay.

  "Oh just relax, Kellerman," Bill Stanley shouted back from his perch in the stern. "Ol' Emmy Lou here is the most reliable thing afloat in the Maze."

  I looked down at the metal patches and resin-sealed holes that dotted the hull of the craft, and threw Stanley a look that conveyed exactly how crazy I thought he was. He just grinned his snaggle-toothed grin at me, shrugged his bony shoulders and banged on the side of the noisy ghost-rock boiler at the back of the boat.

  "You coulda swam, you know," he yelled, with a twinkle in his eye.

  "Sure, and if I had wings I could have flown out to the Russian's boat." I cast another disparaging look at the blue waters as we chugged across them, and swallowed thickly. "If man had been meant to swim, the Good Lord would have given us scales and fins."

  "Then why the Hell did you ever come to California?" he shouted back.

  To tell you the truth, I've asked myself that question more than once.

  There were quite a few boats anchored in the bay today. Two cargo steamers emblazoned with the emblem of the Greater Maze Rock Miner's Association were being loaded up with ghost rock over by Angelfish Island. No doubt they'd be steaming south to the City of Lost Angels later that day. A few small fishing boats were moored out near Sweat Island, and I counted at least five junks moored in various places around the harbor. "Salvagers," no doubt. That's "pirates" to the man on the street. There was even a U.S. Navy Maze runner, just steaming into port as we crossed the bay that morning, something you don't see too often around these parts.

  And then there was the Russian ship, a clumsy looking steam-cruiser with a metal reinforced prow for breaking through the ice floes of the more northerly regions. It didn't so much float as squat on the cold waters of the bay. The deck was alive with men battening down hatches, securing mizzenmasts, and whatever else one does to get a ship ready to move out.

  As we got closer and closer to the hull of the Russian ship, I started feeling a bit queasy. The ships were bobbing...and moving...and bobbing. I forced my eyes up from the vile waters below us and fixed on the ship deck above. Several of the Russian sailors were looking over the edge at us. Stanley throttled back the engine on the boat to a dull idling chugging and I waved at the faces above me.

  "Hello there," I said, trying not to look as sick as I was feeling. "I'm here to see Captain Petrovich." My only reply was a set of stony stares. None of the faces above me looked familiar, even through the haze of last night. "Just tell him Kellerman wants to see him!"

  "Da," one said curtly. "Vait." With that he disappeared. The rest of the faces above slowly did as well, evidently returning to their duties.

  Stanley rolled us both cigarettes and we smoked as we sat there beside the ship, waiting.

  Suddenly there was a dull thud as a rope ladder hit the side of the boat. The sailor we'd spoken to before gestured for us to climb. He also tossed down a mooring line to Stanley.

  We clambered up onto the deck of the ship and the sailor pointed over to a small table right outside the pilothouse in the stern of the boat. There sat my drinking companion of the previous evening, Grigori Petrovich, pouring over what looked like cargo manifests. Petrovich was a hulk of a man, with a head shaved bald and a bushy black beard. He looked almost comical with a tiny pair of spectacles perched on his nose as he scribbled notes with the stub of a pencil. If I remember correctly, he and his men had delivered a load of timber from Portland, and were anxious to get going back north.

  "Kellerman!" he exclaimed gesturing to a nearby crate for me to sit. "I was not think I would be seeing you again so soon!" The man's grasp of the English language left a lot to be desired.

  I took the proffered seat. "Me neither, Petrovich. I wish I could say it was just a social call, but I'm here on business."

  "You are getting right to, how do you Americans put it, 'the heart of the matter,' eh? A drink perhaps?" The burly Russian picked up the vodka bottle on the table in front of him and offered it to me.

  "Erm...if its all the same to you, I think not. I'm still feeling the effects of last night's festivities. Look, Petrovich, I need to know what happened after you fellows left the saloon last night. What did Monaghan do?"

  "Well, after we leave saloon, he come out here to ship with us. We play cards for a while, drink some more. Late, very late, we take him back to shore and say good night."

  "That's a good story, Grigori."

  "Kellerman..." he
said chidingly, "you are not believing me? Why? We have drunk together. We are brothers now!"

  "No, Petrovich, I am not believing you. Mostly because Ethan's dead."

  Petrovich put down the bottle and stared at me with a confused look on his face. It faded, replaced by a wide grin, and a look of understanding. "Ahhh, You are joking with Grigori, yes? Is a good jest, telling him that Monaghan is dead, but I know. You cannot fool me."

  "No joke, Petrovich."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm saying that a man is dead, and you and your crew are the last people who saw him alive. You understand how bad that looks."

  Petrovich's face went sullen. "And you think I an knowing something about this?"

  I stood up, pushing my chair back. "Yes, I think you know something about it, but if you're not in the mood to talk, that's fine. C'mon Stanley, lets get off this hulk and back on dry land." I walked toward the rope ladder hanging over the side of the boat down to Stanley's tiny skiff. "Oh, and I hope you weren't planning on going anywhere anytime soon," I said looking back over my shoulder at him. "I have friends in this town, and you can expect a visit from the Sheriff's office in an hour or so. Don't worry. Their inspection should only take a couple of days."

  Petrovich's face fell as these word escaped my lips. "Kellerman, you would not do that to Grigori, would you? I have schedule to keep. If I am not returning north soon, my crew and I are not being paid."

  "Then tell me what happened last night."

  "But...I...but..." Petrovich sputtered. His crew was giving him the eye now. They understood enough English to know that their salary was on the line here.

  "Look, Kellerman, your friend, he come out to boat with us last night. He drink too much, he start to get violent. I have none of that on my boat! Nyet! So, my men, they toss him overboard."

  "You threw him overboard?" I said incredulously.

  "We were very much drunk." Petrovich looked a bit sheepish. "We playing cards, nice and friendly. Monaghan loses, so he gets angry. He accuse Viktor of cheating." He nodded at a huge redheaded sailor mending a net. "Then he take swing at Viktor. I tell him that he better be good swimmer, and he and I haul Monaghan up on deck and throw him into water. You should have see him!" The Russian laughed raucously and took a swig from the bottle in front of him. "Look, I know not why you so angry...man was pretty good swimmer, even full of vodka! We see him swim to shore, and we go back to game."