Moira.
Despite the ambush, despite the body below and the moaning man nearby, I sat on the bed and put my face in my hands.
Someone had been tailing me from the station. If they figured out I was on the other side of town when this happened, they might deduce who had murdered their men, which meant I wouldn’t have to worry about my marriage after all, because both of us might soon be dead.
“Quiet!” I shouted through the door at the moans. “I’m trying to think!”
The moaning became more hushed, either because he was embarrassed to die like that or because his strength was draining.
I got up and turned to the bed. A memory flashed into my mind unbidden. Moira had been sleeping here, naked, just a few nights before, hoping I would come home and find her.
Shaking my head, I took the bed in my hands and upended it. I dropped to my knees and tore the loose floorboards to reveal a slick steel case. Throwing open the lid, I took out the pieces and assembled the ace for my sleeve.
It was a shotgun with a specially-designed butt. There were springs inside that softened the recoil and redirected the energy to eject a round. It had a great black revolver-like cylinder which held five rounds. It used the kinetic power of each shot to rotate the chambers and line up the next round for firing.
It was a terrifying weapon, a relatively short, easy-to-handle shotgun that could throw five nasty clouds of shot before being reloaded. It was strictly illegal, of course, since the Magnocracy couldn’t risk a weapon like this falling into the hands of a union troublemaker or a socialist. Not even the police were permitted to carry such weapons—though the high-end private police like the Pinkertons could, which is how I knew which palm to grease to get one.
A bandolier carried shells in cheap paper cartridges. I took off my overcoat, put the shells over one shoulder and put the coat back on. I hoisted the heavy repeater and tucked it under the coat.
Any thorough scrutiny would reveal my armament, but that couldn’t be helped. Hopefully, this would deter an inquiry rather than encourage one. The bulls weren’t paid enough to seize shotguns from a madman, after all.
I had a little emergency cash hid away, since I’ve always been the sort to burn bridges. I didn’t bother with the bag I came to pack; Moira’s slaughter changed the equation. My nest egg and Bridget’s payment would be enough. I did, however, put on my best pair of boots as well as every ring, watch and medallion I owned.
After retrieving the valise, I walked up the alley toward the street with my artillery under one arm. I was keenly aware of my surroundings—the massacre had heightened my senses—so I was ready when the next Pinkerton made her move.
Her confederates had probably missed some kind of check-in, so she was undoubtedly on high alert. I knew she was there because I could hear a boiler idling. Flour came in drays, not by steamcab.
I hugged the wall and peeked out in time to hear a low mechanical cranking. My soldier’s instincts threw me to the pavement.
The cranking turned into a roar. Glass and brick cascaded onto the sidewalk around me. The attractive Pinkerton I’d admired on the omnibus was now trying to kill me and doing a bang-up job. No one ever accused me of having a lukewarm effect on women.
The miniature Gatling spat bullets in a cloud at my head, but her aim was high. In her defense, she had to turn the crank and direct the gun herself. Even though it was the small personal model, it helped if you had someone else to crank it for you.
I took a knee and squeezed off a shot without bothering to aim.
The cabby’s brown top hat vanished from his head. I couldn’t see his eyes because he was wearing goggles, but I can only image they were wide as saucers. He vaulted over the side and hugged the pavement.
Some folks imitated him, though many just stood around agog.
The assassin swung the crankgun low for another strafe.
I took a bead and fired again, this time rewarded by a scream. The puffy black saffron on her shoulder vanished and her strafe went wide. Though I couldn’t see any blood, her inability to use her right arm told me I had winged her.
She let go of the crankgun so it clattered to the ground, and drew a revolver with her left hand.
I could have lauded her dedication, but unfortunately it was more important I stop her from shooting. The next blast of my repeater was no graze. The angry cloud of pellets hit her squarely in the bosom, knocking her back into the shade of the hansom as though she’d been kicked by an ox.
I trotted forward cautiously, then kept the shotgun leveled as I checked for life. There was none. Her brown eyes stared vacantly at the sky.
It was the second dead woman I’d seen that day and, one could argue, the fourth corpse I had been the cause of. The memory of Moira, corpselike in bed, came unbidden.
No one tried to stop me from leaving the scene. Can’t say I blame them. I only hope that they explained to the authorities that I had returned fire, not started it.
I charged erratically from alley to alley, the dead woman’s eyeballs etched in my mind, only soon they were Moira’s eyeballs.
She’d been near death in one of New York’s periodic cholera outbreaks. She caught it and I didn’t, probably because my time fighting Johnny Reb had made me tough in more ways than one. Most soldiers die from sickness, not bullets, so it’s probable my body had learned a trick or two for disease, just like my mind learned to duck a Gatling.
So it was up to me to care for poor Moira, thin and wasted as she was. I made her drink water till she choked—pitchers and pitchers of the stuff. At first, I put honey or lemon in it for flavor, even a bit of wine, but by the end I was just pumping it, boiling it, and when it cooled, pouring it down her gullet. I did this for days, not sleeping or eating, but going back and forth, back and forth, from well to stove to bed.
She fought me, screamed at me, and eventually, thanked me, even when it made her vomit. And vomit she did, pitchers and pitchers of the stuff. It was thin and clear, only slightly viscous. I wiped it off her chin and kissed her nose as if she were a pretty doll and not a corpse.
Her sunken eyes followed me. “You love me,” she whispered through cracked lips.
“It’s not like I don’t tell you,” I reminded her.
“Now I know,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
I looked at her face, surrounded by a halo of dark brittle hair, and wondered what she meant. She was at her weakest then, the weakest I’d ever seen her. But she was beautiful, like how the frail voice of an old woman can be more beautiful than a trained opera singer, or a run-down tenement you grew up in can look nicer than a mansion.
A familiar face would have helped right now, but Moira’s place was out. If they knew about my office, you can bet they knew about the place we shared. I needed somewhere else to go.
Verhalen would have been helpful explaining some of the technical stuff in the valise, plus the Pinkertons didn’t know we were friends. It wasn’t like there was a certificate someplace for them to look up.
I had forgotten, of course, that someone knew we were friends. It just wasn’t one of Cabot’s people.
Less than a block away from Verhalla, he caught me. I had stuck to the winding alleyways and side streets rather than taking an omnibus, but he had planned for that, hiding behind several cracked wooden crates that some stevedores had dumped.
Out of the shadows he lunged. I caught a sight of brass flashing in the darkness and assumed it was a pair of knuckledusters coming at my face. If only it were.
I tore my cannon up defensively but the fist caught it square in the barrel, snapping the damn thing in two. Paper cartridges rained out of the cracked chamber. A cold explosion of fear radiated through me—this guy really had me in a twist. I backpedaled fast and drew my truncheon.
The attacker kept advancing in a cold, deliberate
pace. I swung the truncheon, but he turned his arm and parried the attack with his elbow. A normal man would have broken his arm doing that. This wasn’t an ordinary man, though.
My trusty ashwood baton splintered.
I backpedaled, staring in horror at my broken truncheon. There was only one guy I knew who had an elbow like brass.
“O’Shea.”
“You stupid bastard,” he snarled. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“Do you know what they were doing, O’Shea?”
“Do I care?” he roared, throwing a spring-loaded uppercut at my jaw.
I dodged it and kept retreating. The valise was still in my left hand. I didn’t dare let it go or use it as a weapon, so I fumbled through my pockets for the pistol.
“Carelli is dead. Favorola is dead. When they catch me, I’m dead…”
Each time he said dead, he threw another vicious punch.
“I can help you with that last one,” I spat, drawing the derringer.
His mechano-hand struck like a great bronze adder, catching my hand—including the gun—in his viselike grip.
We locked eyes and he gave me an angry grin just before he squeezed. I tried not to scream but failed. I could feel the delicate bones of my hand breaking in his metallic grasp.
“Who…is…Favorola?” I gasped in agony, dropping to one knee.
“The bookie you got iced,” he snarled, delivering a straight-on blow of his real fist to my nose.
I stumbled backward, a spray of hot blood running down my face, but I never hit the ground. His brass hand still held me up, twisting my arm painfully.
“Jesus, O’Shea. They knew what they were getting into.”
“No,” he corrected me. “They did not. That bastard Cabot never told them what the hell he was using them for, why he needed good bean-counters.”
I was gritting my teeth so hard my temples ached. “If you sup with the devil,” I grunted, “bring a long spoon.”
He released my hand so I collapsed on the pavement. The .38 clattered out of reach. “Is that what you want your last words to be? Pithy shite your Gran used to say?”
“Shouldn’t you be killing them that’s responsible?” I practically begged. I let go of the valise so I could cradle my injured hand. I made no movement to get up.
“You can’t hurt a Magnate. The only people who can hurt Magnates are other Magnates.”
I curled into a fetal position and hugged myself, digging my good hand into my coat.
He shook his head. “You’ve led a merry chase, Donovan. Riding halfway outta the city and then turning back…that was clever. Too bad I knew about Verhalen.” He opened and closed his clockwork digits appreciably. “And I hate to take you out so close to a mutual friend. Seems disrespectful. But I wanted to make sure I did the honors, not some coldblooded Pinkerton.” He gripped my collar with his flesh-hand and pulled me to my feet. “It should be someone who knows you, someone who hates you…”
“Then it should be Moira,” I said, slamming my left fist into his chin and pulling the trigger on my second derringer.
There was a dull boom and a spray of blood. The mechano-fist rocketed toward my face, but when O’Shea’s grip loosened, I slid down enough that it winged my head. I could feel a trickle of hot blood where it abraded a line of skin off.
I extricated myself from his body and looked down. I was holding Bridget’s .22 point-blank into his chin when I pulled the trigger. The dead man’s jaw had a black burn on it. When I looked at my hand, I grimaced. There was a crescent-shaped powder burn between my thumb and forefinger.
O’Shea hadn’t come off so lucky. The little bullet had burst through his mouth and into his brain, ending his life instantly.
It was a perverse scene. We weren’t supposed to kill each other. We were supposed to kill Johnny Reb and the limeys. We were supposed to take Richmond and Toronto. Instead we were in a filthy alley, scrabbling like rats for the robber barons to watch.
The goddamn robber barons. It felt like losing the war all over again, every day they were in charge.
O’Shea had been right about one thing—it was bad form to fight so close to Verhalla. The gunshot had been muffled, but the body would certainly draw attention if anyone saw it. There was no way I could ask Verhalen to help me hide it—O’Shea had been a friend. It would have been the height of bad taste to make him choose between us, even if one were dead. So I had to run and leave the poor bastard behind the crates there, another toe-tag for Potter’s Field.
What a goddamn waste.
That part of the docks is mostly storage, so there wasn’t anyone watching when I hit the street. It might be days before someone found him…hopefully long enough that any connection to me would be intangible.
An idea came to me. It was the dead man who gave it to me. The only people who hurt Magnates are other Magnates. As it happened, I had an indirect channel to a Magnate, possibly the most powerful one there was. Problem was, would he listen to me? Could I even see him?
I left the .22 where I dropped it and picked up the valise. I was an unarmed, weakened foe, ready to be plucked by the first enemy to find me. I limped back in the same manner I’d come, through back alleys and side streets, wondering at each turn when the hammer was going to fall.
Chapter Eleven
It had been years since I’d haunted the old parish. Long enough that I drew up in front of the place and stared hard, not sure I wanted to enter. Its stained-glass windows stared orphanlike from within the ashen gloom of its soot-covered walls. God and I weren’t on good terms, not since I’d gone off to war and started reading philosophy. Truth was, I always figured the Old Man was on the outs. Garibaldi had taken Rome from Il Papa when he unified Italy and was yet unstruck by lightning or plague.
But just as a proud son limps home when he fails, I stumbled back into that holy place. I can only imagine that God smirked when He saw that. Or maybe not. I don’t know if deities smirk…but it seems like they should. The type who would create this world sure as hell would.
There were quiet people praying for sick loved ones or that Big Break that will get them out of the tenements. Either way, they were poor and they were Irish, which meant they weren’t going to tell anyone I was there, especially not in the state I was in. I still had enough credit with the micks for that much.
I eased onto a pew and watched Father Dempsey come quickly toward me, cassock billowing. He didn’t bother to sit down. Instead, he hovered over me, examining my wounds in the weak light of the stained glass.
“By the Saints, Donovan! What happened to you?”
“Ran into an old friend. Literally.” I grimaced. “I need to see Maggie. Don’t she usually come by after work?”
“Her shift isn’t over for hours,” he said. “But I can take care of you until then. Come now, let’s to the rectory.”
“I’m comfortable here,” I told him. “I’d rather not take my ease until the job is done. I need to see Maggie.”
“But your wounds!” He was insistent.
That insistence made me reexamine him. “What’s in the rectory?” I asked him sharply.
It was perhaps a testament to what a good priest he was that he couldn’t lie. Instead, he hesitated.
“Padre!”
“Moira. Moira is in the rectory.”
Moira.
My heart started pounding faster than when O’Shea pummeled me.
“She’s in trouble, Donovan. You need to see her.”
“I can’t. The job needs to get done.” Then I’m gone, I added silently in my head.
Father Dempsey seemed to read as much on my face. “It was you who brought this upon her, Donovan. You must see to her.”
“I’ll see to her,” I assured him, thinking of the money in my pocket.
There was enough to get her on a boat back to Eire. After that, she was her family’s problem. I leaned back in the pew, adjusted the valise and closed my eyes. “I’ll see to her,” I repeated. “After the job is done. I don’t need any distractions. This is big, Padre.”
The priest didn’t need to be reminded. He knew that already. Moira had no doubt told him about the two men who’d come after me. He saw the state I was in, saw the way I clutched the valise so closely. More importantly, he knew me for a serious-minded fellow. Though I wasn’t the sort to pray, he appreciated the man I was. At least, I think he did, because he didn’t bring Moira out to make a scene in front of all the old ladies with their candles and rosaries and tears.
So I waited. It was late afternoon when Maggie came into the building, dark shawl over her head like a nun, and made for a confessional booth. What that girl had to confess, I have no idea. Maybe she had a sinful thought while dusting off one of those Greek statues in the mansion she worked.
“Maggie!” I whispered, jumping up.
She saw me and turned to leave.
“No, wait!” Despite my injuries, I vaulted over a pew and caught her with my good hand. “You’ve got to help me, coz. It’s a matter of life and death.”
Her dark eyes bored through me, which plainly said that she hadn’t forgotten what I’d said to her that morning. But she listened. Her glare softened with each word, and she gave a horrified squeak whenever I got to a part with a corpse or a beating.
“The poor thing,” she whispered. I wasn’t sure if she meant Bridget or Moira. I only knew she didn’t mean me.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Thing is, I can’t take this to the papers. They’re shills for the robber barons. I guess I could go to a radical rag, but who would believe them? So I got this idea…what if I go to a Magnate? What if I go to one of their own? There were some important people on the dirigibles that burned up. It’s one thing to kill poor scum like us, but it’s another to kill upper-class folk. What’s more, even the most bloodthirsty robber baron doesn’t stage crashes to line his pockets.”
Cruel Numbers Page 12
