The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  “Jesus,” the first man says.

  The other takes his hands from his pockets—empty—and leans over the box, his gaze darting between the fingers and Alma’s face. The white-blond hair at the crown of his head is thinning. He has the mottled coloring of a heavy drinker: veiny nose; eyes like hard-boiled eggs, yellow tingeing to blue at the centers, dull, bulbous. He doesn’t look scared, but he knows who the fingers belong to, sure enough. She would bet on it.

  “The rest of him is still intact,” she tells the blond man, which is true, though the rest of him is also two days dead. “And to keep him that way, I’ll need to see Sloan.”

  He tongues his tobacco, exchanges a wordless glance with his companion. Then he nods. Alma pushes the lid back on the box.

  “Follow me,” he says.

  Up the stairs, him leading; the creaking of wood; a flimsy, overused building. At the top landing they pass a party of sailors heading down, decked out in their shore rig, crisp whites and blues. The second floor is tighter, a walled maze. More rooms filled with beds, half of them occupied despite the hour. Several closed doors. She notes each bend and turn—red cloth caught in a hinge to mark a left; the narrow hall that leads to a glazed window, a dead end. Then they duck under a black velvet curtain into a dim room crammed with tables, stools stacked bottoms-up atop them so they resemble dead beetles, legs crooked into the air. A coatrack is bare save for a gray workman’s jacket. Lamplight wavers in a little recessed alcove at the back of the room. Slow shadows on the wall. Wood scraping; a cough.

  “Someone to see you,” the man beside Alma calls.

  Cramps in her stomach; a hot bristle of nerves. This is the riskiest part. Not walking deep into hostile territory. Not opening the box to show Pike’s digits once more. Not what will follow if Sloan balks at her tar deal. This moment: when Sloan will see her, and perhaps see her too well. See how, layered in paint, and paste jewels, and green silk, she came into this room once before, three days ago.

  Sloan steps out of the alcove, wiping his hands on a folded cloth. A tall man, slender, with dark blond hair. Thick brows set at a plaintive angle. He is dressed neatly in fitted trousers and a shirt cut from white cotton. Fresh blood is spotted on his cuffs.

  After her quick once-over, Alma keeps her eyes locked on his. Waiting for a flicker of suspicion, or recognition. She tethers her breathing to her knife, solid at her ribs, and her gun, solid at her side. If things go sour, she can stick the man beside her, race back through the maze of hallways and be out on the street in thirty seconds.

  “Who are you?” Sloan, now a few feet away, pauses beside the last of the tables. The cloth in his hands is smeared red.

  Still focused on him, Alma reaches her hearing back toward the alcove, listening for breathing, dripping, any sign more people are back there than she thought. Nothing but the man beside her, wheezing slightly; the rustling of cloth as Sloan wipes at his thumb.

  “My name’s Camp,” she says. “I’m here with a business proposal.”

  “A business proposal?” Sloan says.

  His eyes narrow; he scans her face more closely. Breathe, even, knife, gun. Don’t blink.

  “You new in town, Camp?”

  Alma doesn’t flinch. The question seems innocuous enough. Stick to the plan.

  “Something like new,” she says. “I handle affairs for people you’d like to work with. And they’ve decided they’d like to work with you.”

  She takes the box from under her arm, slow, and holds it out to him. His attention shifts away from her face. He pries off the lid. Those mournful long brows twitch up, but the flat calm in his eyes is not disturbed. He shakes the box, dislodging the digits and soiled cotton. The index finger tumbles stiffly to the floor. At the bottom of the box is a half-pound can of opium. Its white paper label splotched with blood.

  “You want a cut of the trade?” Alma says. “Talk to me.”

  Sloan takes the opium out and sets the box on a table, dropping his dirty handkerchief inside. He runs a nail along the seam between can and lid, peels off the paper. His eyes close as he sniffs the resin.

  “What are the terms?” he says.

  She’s most of the way there. He’s not looking at her, or the fingers, or the cotton—he’s examining the can, turning it over in his hands, his eyes tracking over the Chinese characters.

  “No more attacks on our property. Men or goods,” she says. “No more of your rats in our storehouses, or blackmailing attempts. Same goes for us. In short, civility. In exchange you’ll be linked into the pipeline. You’ll buy some off us, at a discount, to sell as you like. I’ll handle your supply.”

  Sloan smiles. He looks disarmingly sweet, a boyish wrinkle to his nose, a softness to his eyes. She’s seen this smile before—it doesn’t mean he’s feeling favorable toward the partnership. But at least he doesn’t seem particularly fixed on her. Maybe this plan will actually work.

  He leans against the table edge. Sets the opium can at his hip.

  “To tell the truth, I was hoping McManus would make this visit.” Sloan folds his arms, his eyes catching on the blood flecked on his shirtsleeves. “Damn.”

  “Cold salt water,” Alma says, nodding at the stains.

  “I’d like to dredge McManus through cold salt water, but you’ll serve.”

  Sloan doesn’t move when he says this, but the man at Alma’s side stiffens to attention. She has her gun out and on Sloan, putting three steps between her and the blond man so he can’t lunge for the weapon, but Sloan is still leaning there, lazy, like a cat. Shit. She jumped too soon. And once guns are out, there’s usually only one way to go. Down.

  “Now, that’s no way to take a deal,” she says.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t taking the deal.” Sloan unfolds himself from the table. Waves, languid, toward her pistol. “Put that away, and I’ll send Loomis out. If he’s making you nervous.”

  She could play it that way: skittish, uncertain, the disgruntled middleman dropped into a bad situation in which he must bear bloody gifts. It will only help her gain Sloan’s confidence if she’s a little soured on Wheeler. But that can’t come right away. Sloan’s first impression has to be of a solid organization—a safe bet to go in on. She has to be solid.

  “I came here to talk to you,” she says, gun still out. “So just the two of us suits me fine.”

  Sloan nods at Loomis, who backs away into the curtain until it swallows him whole. Alma waits until the black velvet is swinging, vacant, then angles herself so she can see Sloan and the empty doorway. She slides her pistol back in its holster. The alcove hovers in her line of sight, too, a flickering pocket of shadow over Sloan’s shoulder. Someone’s in there. She is certain.

  “Do you want a cut or not?” she says.

  Sloan pulls the stool he’s standing next to off the table, then flips another. He sits and motions for Alma to do the same. She approaches the table slowly. The seats are made high—her feet don’t touch the floor, a feeling she dislikes, while Sloan’s long legs let him sit comfortably. She compromises by half sitting on the stool, her weight planted on the leg still tethered to the ground.

  “Is Pike dead?” Sloan says, once they’re both sitting down, the table’s rough pine boards between them.

  “Does it matter?”

  He shrugs.

  “Right,” Alma says. “He’d have been part of the bargain, but it was suspected you wouldn’t trade much for him.”

  “I find your use of pronouns—or, rather, lack thereof—interesting.” Sloan steeples his fingers on the table. He wears no rings. Compared to Wheeler, he’s not flash at all, save his neatly laundered clothing. When he speaks next, his voice drops into a stage whisper. “Are we not going to name him? Your company man?”

  “You’re dealing with me,” she says. “And you know who I’m working for. So let’s agree we have a mutual understanding.”

  “I want that starch-collared son of a bitch to admit what he’s up to.” Sloan picks up the opium can a
nd pounds it on the table. “Lording it over the waterfront like his hands are clean as the Mother Mary’s.”

  “I’m not in the naming business,” Alma says. “I’m in the tar business. If you can get better product somewhere else, then do it. End of story.”

  Sloan drops the lead-seamed can. Then she hears it: a scuffling sound in the alcove. A ragged inhalation. She tilts her head toward the sound, eyes hard on Sloan. A jet of worry that he has one of his girls in there, one of the painted women he keeps in rooms over the foundry, mad with Spanish fly and drink. That her blood is on his cuffs. And atop the clench of dread, an overlay of memory: Sullivan’s Alley, Chinatown, pale arms waving out of barred windows, some scabbed from caning, some from scratched insect bites; a girl, not eleven, painted red at the lips and staring. The side of the underworld she could never stomach. The one side for which she could not shake off her conscience, the young detective’s voice saying, “Do something, for God’s sake, do something.”

  “You said we were alone,” Alma says, tamping down this rush of thought.

  “Well. We were until he woke up.”

  Sloan slides off his stool, miming surprise—eyes wide, eyebrows high. At the alcove he stops, sighs. Alma is finding depth in her lungs again.

  “My dear fellow,” he says, into the recessed space. “You’re a mess.”

  Alma watches the edge of the wall, where the alcove opens into the main room. There is movement in the lamplight; a grunt; boots scraping. Labored breathing. Then a hand slaps against the wall, at the brightest part of the alcove’s lip. The fingers leave a red smear.

  A man totters into view, and the sheer amount of blood on him makes Alma grimace. His shirt is intact but dark stains cascade down from his left shoulder and ribs, the cotton sticking to his thin chest, his hollow bowl of a stomach. Damp spatters at his groin. He shies away from Sloan. Flinches badly when he sees Alma. She does not recognize him as one of Wheeler’s men. He has blunt features; black hair and olive coloring that’s only a shade darker than her own; a triangle of freckles on the bridge of his nose.

  “Your jacket’s over there.” Sloan points to the coatrack. “Put it on so you don’t scare my lodgers.”

  The man picks his way toward them, his steps uncertain, occasionally bumping into tables and setting stacked stools rattling. He’s got so much blood on his shirt it’s a wonder he can stand at all. He stinks of stale piss. Just past their table, he stumbles on Pike’s severed finger. He claps his red hand to his mouth. His eyes are wide and white and glassy.

  “Do watch your step,” Sloan says. “You’re in no state to take a fall. Loomis is waiting outside; he’ll sort you out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A hoarse whisper, nervous eyes, hands clumsy as he pulls down the coat and works it on over his gory shoulder, almost whimpering. Then he edges under the curtain and is gone.

  “Was his collar too starched?” Alma says, as Sloan returns to the table.

  “I needed him to tell me some things,” he says. “So he did, and I took notes. Then he slept it off.”

  “Charming.”

  “Consider your own welcome, Camp. I’ve been pretty hospitable, seeing as you’ve pulled a gun on me and brought me a box of body parts. I don’t want that to happen again—I don’t want you to end up like him.”

  The threat in Sloan’s words is completely absent in his tone, in the faint smile lighting over his face. She’s fixed his angle. Whether it’s an act or unfeigned, Sloan is presenting himself as a breaker. He has something to prove: toughness, stature, situation. That’s where his priorities lie. He’s not the kind of man she would go with if she were feeling out new middlemen in San Francisco. But as long as he can leave the posturing aside and move the product, that’s all she needs to suit Delphine’s purposes.

  “Your concern for me is touching,” Alma says.

  “I hope so. You’re my new partner,” Sloan says. “What grade of tar am I buying?”

  Perhaps because trotting out the butchered fellow didn’t shake her up, or perhaps because they are getting into details, Sloan’s demeanor is shifting. His eyes are more focused, but his hands go loose, tapping the brass can, then the tabletop.

  “Aged permit Patna, Wah Hing brand,” Alma says. “Sourced through Hong Kong and refined in Victoria with a guaranteed morphine content of five percent or less. Your buyers will be satisfied.”

  He picks at the peeling paper on the can, twice, before leaving it alone. He’s not as careful with his tells, with his body, as Wheeler: his fidgeting is not for show. This deal is better than the one he’s been trying for—rather than blackmail money, or uncontested use of Quincy Wharf, he’s getting hooked directly into an opium pipeline.

  “What about the price.”

  “Near tax-free,” Alma says. “Five dollars a can versus ten. Sell it as you like—inland, to Portland and points beyond. Or in town. The profit’s better in Portland, best in San Francisco, but then there’s the trouble of getting it there.”

  “I’ve had luck with girls,” he says. “They waltz onto steamers with the stuff sewn into their hems or tucked into their suitcases. But one girl can only carry so much, and I need mine here, working. Maybe if I hired a few more…”

  “You ought to knock it off with that small-fry nonsense. If you get caught messing around, we won’t help you.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure, Camp?” Sloan grins, that friendly, amused grin, as if they were discussing baseball or a summer picnic.

  “I don’t have one,” Alma says. “It’s what makes me a good contact. I’m on time and the product’s as expected.”

  “Boring but useful?”

  “Think of me that way,” she says. “And add short-tempered. You miss a handoff and our deal is done.”

  Sloan stands up, holds out a hand.

  “Tell me where and when,” he says. “I want in.”

  Alma stands, too, only then realizing how stiff the leg she has been leaning on has become. How tense she’s held her body in the long minutes after the injured man left.

  “Have a pair of men ready to collect a crate on Union Wharf, Monday.” She shakes his hand, his skin warm, chapped with calluses. “That’s the seventeenth. At nine thirty in the evening, on the water side of Hoop and Barrow.”

  “They’ll be there,” he says.

  “So will I. With thirty pounds of tar—we’ll see how you do with that,” she says. “Bring three hundred dollars. In United States Notes.”

  She walks to the curtained doorway, the hot surge of accomplishment tinged by misgiving that it was too easy, that Sloan was too willing to put the murders and moles and missing fingers in the past. But he is standing by the table, smiling, bobbling the opium can from palm to palm.

  “That’s a sample from your product. It’ll make an even thirty.” She lifts the curtain and sees the hallway, empty, dim, two lefts and a right to get back to the staircase and get the hell out of there. “It’s a good smoke.”

  “Oh, I plan to test it,” he says.

  She ducks under the velvet. In the hall her ears are on high alert, her fingertips tingling, each dust mote and afternoon shadow pulling at her eyes. By the time she thumps down the stairs into the lobby—crowded now with sailors at the bar, a man singing at the piano—her skin is prickling with energy. She walked into Sloan’s boardinghouse with Pike’s fingers and came out with a deal. As long as he’s true to his word and has his men ready on Union Wharf, the plan is set in motion. And she’s likely won her bet with Wheeler. Back in an hour, for more, as she promised.

  13

  JANUARY 25, 1887

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL REED

  WHEREUPON THE FOLLOWING PROCEEDINGS WERE HAD IN THE JEFFERSON COUNTY JAIL, PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON TERRITORY, ON JANUARY 25, 1887.

  LAWMEN PRESENT: CITY MARSHAL GEORGE FORRESTER, OFFICER WAYLAN HUGHES

  TRANSCRIPTION: EDWARD EDMONDS, ASSISTANT DEPUTY COLLECTOR, U.S. CUSTOMHOUSE

  OFFICER HUGHE
S: Where were you when Sloan knifed you? At the cannery?

  MR REED: No. His men took me to his boardinghouse.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: That’s right in the middle of the waterfront. Somebody must have heard you screaming.

  MR REED: If they did, they didn’t come help.

  OFFICER HUGHES: What did he want from you?

  MR REED: He wanted to know why I was hanging around his property. Who sent me. He kept asking if I was working with the police, if Sugar was working with the police. There were other names, too … too many for me to remember, I didn’t know any of them. I just wanted that damn thing out of my shoulder. Are you working for that railroad man, then? he kept asking. I told him I didn’t know any railroad man. I told him about Sugar, everything I knew about her, and swore that was all. But he kept at it … my arm, my side, and … God help me.

  OFFICER HUGHES: All right. All right.

  MR REED: God help me.

  OFFICER HUGHES: You just take a minute.

  MR REED: (inaudible)

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: What?

  MR REED: You’ve got to … You’ve got to keep him away from me.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: We don’t have to do anything, son.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Look, Sam, if you keep talking, if you’re cooperative, we’ll keep an eye on you.

  MR REED: An eye on me? He’ll kill me.

  OFFICER HUGHES: He can’t hurt you once he’s jailed.

  MR REED: He’ll kill me. Oh, Christ.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Get back to the incident. What else did Sloan say?

  MR REED: I … I don’t know.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I think you do.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Have some more whiskey, Sam.

  MR REED: He said … he said, welcome to his crew. He said, hadn’t I wanted to work with him, the way I was nosing about … well, I’d get my wish. He told me not to try and run, or tell anyone. And he said I wouldn’t be seeing Sugar anymore.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Did he mean because he was going to kill her?

  MR REED: I don’t know. I took it as I wasn’t supposed to finish her job. But I was starting to black out by then. I don’t know if he was talking, or if it was me saying things.