The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  Alma glances at the bolted door. The room is too small and spare to hide in, but she eyes each corner just the same.

  Someone’s been in here. Someone who took care to cover their tracks but couldn’t replicate the special knot she uses on her luggage. They opened up her case. Saw the mix of women’s and men’s clothes, the twill vests folded onto pink skirts, the stockings under hemmed trousers.

  It must have been Nell. She’d insisted on taking Alma home instead of to the rented lodgings on Water Street. Or maybe Nell and Benson. One to keep Alma confined, the other to visit the boardinghouse with time to snoop. Benson knows her room number. After all, he was meant to come and kill her in it the night the Beckett hit went down. Throat cut all the way to the spine.

  Alma sifts one-handed through the suitcase. Everything is put back neatly enough, but the broken knot tells all. She reties it, slowed by her single hand, slowed by the thought of Nell turning on her, then replaces the bag under the bed. Sulfur flare; lamp-wick crackle. At the desk she pulls out the Pinkerton’s agents’ mail, rips the envelope, clumsy. Clean sheet of paper; inkpot and pen; the Verne book. Working through the cipher. The agents’ letter takes shape. Tension in her neck unknotting as she decodes each new word. This is good news. Who to look for. Where to find them. What to say. Time and space to bargain. Everything can still come together as she wants.

  Lamp flame to the original, blowing floating ash off the desk. Then a thick scribble of ink onto the deciphered copy, making it unreadable before committing it, too, to the fire. And last, the little onionskin telegraph, burning quick and bitter as a strand of hair. Distracted, Alma rubs her arm before she remembers how the muscle’s pulped, hisses an inhale through her nose.

  Now it’s time for Wheeler. This means talking about Driscoll, likely, but her news about Benson should take front burner. She’s got the mole with links to Kopp and Seattle. That’s something right.

  The walk to the office is quick, wind kicking at her back as though to push her along, chilling her shoulder into stiffness. Numb is good. At the back steps Conaway rises from a slump, his eyes and nose red with cold.

  “Camp.” His voice is clotted. He has been crying. “You all right?”

  “Been better.”

  She jogs past him up the stairs, focusing on the bouncing in her shoulder, the sharp pain of it, rather than his melancholy. It hits her, though, once she’s in the blue hall. The knee-high bump in the plaster that nudged her spine as she sat, three days before, with Conaway and Driscoll. Eating pies, laughing about bets they’d placed. She strides toward the dogleg turn. “He’s seventeen,” McManus said, when defending Driscoll in the office. Seventeen, talking about Christmas pudding. Like he’d never even had a girl. His arm over her shoulders; his hoarse laughter in her ear. That blade of guilt at her gut. Stop it, Rosales. You’re old enough to fight, you’re old enough to fall.

  Two raps at the door and Wheeler calls out, “What?” The sound familiar, a constant, a thing to be expected. Boring, maybe. But maybe it’s good to have some things to rely on.

  “Afternoon, boss,” she says inside.

  Wheeler looks up—his face for a moment open, expectant—but he recovers just as quick, sets down his pen, motions her forward. She closes the door. Leans against it.

  “I didn’t look for you so soon,” he says.

  “You know me. Can’t hardly sit still.”

  She walks to his desk. No play, no twisting Camp into Alma and back. The wind, the empty hall, have chilled her into a more solid shape. Wheeler could melt her a notch, but not today: his voice is muted, the fire in the hearth not leaking much heat. He eyes her warily. Does not move to stand.

  “I saw Benson on the street.” She is close to his chair, her voice shaded almost silent. “He’s the mole. He’s the one who outed you to Dom Kopp. The two of them are rerouting our tar to Seattle.”

  Wheeler’s expression recalibrates, the darker fire clearing from his eyes. She has missed the puzzle of reading them. Now they are cold, ice blue, all business.

  “How do you know?” he says, quiet, too.

  “Someone told Benson about me,” she says. “He knew to call me Rosales. He got real touchy when I mentioned Kopp. Said if I asked any more questions about Kopp, or if I didn’t swap out these lading bills for him—”

  She pulls the envelope out from her jacket, drops it onto the desk.

  “—he said he’d tell you, and the whole crew, who Jack Camp really is.”

  Wheeler peels open the envelope, unfolding the papers and sifting through them. Shakes his head.

  “One hundred twenty pounds to Seattle. One hundred twenty! He’s getting bolder,” he says. “Tom was right.”

  “I hear Tom’s been wild,” Alma says, not wanting to dwell on McManus’s hunch being better than hers. Not looking forward to asking McManus for a favor: for his inside information on the loading crews and Benson’s most likely accomplice among them. “After the fight.”

  “After Driscoll.” Wheeler stops shuffling the bills. Lets out a long breath. “They were close.”

  “Did he get Loomis?”

  “He wants to,” Wheeler says. “But he can’t. Not yet. Not while we need Sloan to keep selling our product. I gave Tom very clear instructions on the matter.”

  “So Benson and Kopp are working together. Going after their biggest haul. That’s one problem. Sloan’s another problem. Have you spoken to him, since the fight?”

  “Yes. He claims Loomis had no part with Driscoll. Was just standing nearby.” Wheeler rubs his forehead. A tired gesture he’s not allowed himself before in front of her. “I thought our mole was feeding Sloan. Maybe he’s not. Sloan’s still keen on the next batch, and we must get it to him. It’s King Tye coming in.”

  The King Tye brand will make a muddied trail of opium, so Sloan appears to be selling tar from several refineries—avoiding an inconvenient spotlight on the Wah Hing refinery, which supplies Delphine alone.

  “What did Sloan want at Chain Locker?”

  “He wanted me to ask him to dinner.”

  Alma laughs without smiling.

  “A romantic soul,” she says.

  “He said if we’re doing business, he wants the benefit of that.” Wheeler glares up at her, hand falling away from his face. “The social benefit, as a gentleman invited to my home.”

  “Your home?”

  “I don’t sleep in this office. I have a house on the hill.”

  “Filled with ledgers. Gloomy portraits of your grandfathers.”

  “You’ll have to live in wonder,” he says. “There’s no forthcoming invitation for you.”

  “I’m crushed. Devastated. Désolée.”

  Wheeler waves her away, smirking. She doesn’t move from the notch in his desk. Her fingernail clicks against her belt buckle. She never had a nice place in the city. Preferred the rough dives of the Barbary Coast, their porous shadow alleys good for going unseen. Still, she was welcome at Delphine’s gilded doorway, in the polished halls of the women who used her detective services. Her invitation to Port Townsend’s upper crust seems to have been lost in the mail. That exclusion, that confinement to the gutter, is starting to grate.

  “Are you going to have him over?” she says.

  “No. He’s not popular with the city fathers, on account of his whores.”

  “And you need to be popular with the city fathers.”

  “I am popular with them.” Wheeler finishes the film of whiskey in the glass beside him. “But it’s an … evolving friendship. There’s been a snag with the trust papers.”

  “I thought you’d signed already.”

  “I did. Then Harrison Doyle passed, at last,” Wheeler says. “And his wife stepped up to claim a financial stake. Mayor Brooks is getting cold feet. Now it’s complicated.”

  “Jesus. I’m out for a day and everything goes to hell.”

  “You helped it along.” Wheeler sits back in his chair. “The way Tom told me, you two started that fight
.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “You let Driscoll know that,” Wheeler says. “He’s in a pine box Peterson knocked up, waiting in the warehouse for Tom to get back so we can bury him.”

  “God damn it,” Alma says. “You don’t need to throw it at me like that.”

  She walks to the sideboard, pours a gin, the operation slower than usual with only one hand. She is tired, her arm aching. No heat at Wheeler’s desk. He is as worn down as she’s ever seen him and not bothering to put much of a mask over it. Driscoll might as well be lying on the floor between them. Frightened eyes. Red glass. Alma’s hand is not steady. The stopper clicks hard against the lip of the decanter when she drops it into place.

  “‘For Tom to get back,’” she says, only then catching on that piece of the sentence. “Back from where?”

  “I sent him to Victoria yesterday, to keep him from doing anything stupid.”

  “You sent him to—” Alma shakes her head. Now she can’t grill McManus about the crews. Another delay when there are mere days left to work things out. “He could have been the mole.”

  “He’s not.” Wheeler glares at her. “He’s meeting with Yee at the Wah Hing refinery to work out a new loading system. It will take a few days.”

  “Benson said you were looking for him.”

  “You’ve established Benson’s apt to say anything that suits his purposes.”

  “I thought the same about McManus until this morning,” she says. “I could have been right. Then what—the mole planning a new handoff method with our prime refiner?”

  “Tom is clean.”

  “You never suspected him.”

  “He never gave me cause.”

  “Not even with Seattle? With his married Chinese girl?” Wires of pain in her deltoid as her shoulders tense, so she can’t stand as straight as she wants. Her left hand, held against her chest by the sling, curling into a loose fist. “With his crew doing the ride-along on shipments that went missing? If that’s not cause, you weren’t looking at all.”

  Wheeler gets out of his chair, crosses half the space between them.

  “Because I trust him,” he says, low. “Do you understand what that means?”

  Alma tips back her head to drain her gin. Grunts at the twinge this wrings in her neck. Not two days of being saddled with this injury and she is snapping at the bit, wanting her body back, its easy motion.

  “It means you’ve gotten too close to someone,” she says. “You trust them … you trust them and then they can fuck you. They can make mistakes.”

  She knows this. “Make sure we’re out before you move,” Hannah said. “Don’t get impatient, kid.” Of course Alma didn’t listen. She made a mistake. Blood in Hannah’s shorn gold hair, on the bow of her lip. Alma blinks away this image, slops more gin into her cup. The stopper clips the side of the crystal rim and drops onto the carpet.

  “You make quite a few mistakes for someone with such a horror of them,” Wheeler says.

  Yes, I do, Alma wants to say, but the words would come out too bare. She downs her gin instead.

  Wheeler collects the fallen stopper. Fluid bend and rise. That fighter’s body. Though right now she wants his healthy muscles for her own more than she wants to touch them.

  “You’re happy to point out when I slip up,” she says. “But certain people get off easier. I see how it is. After the fight you try to send me back to my boardinghouse to bleed out and freeze, and McManus gets a free vacation to Victoria.”

  “Do you know how Tom hurt his knee?”

  Wheeler comes to the liquor board, places the stopper, soundless, in its decanter. Folds his arms over his chest. Two feet away but closed off. She is closed off, too, sweating thick and fast as if all the rest and food of yesterday are leaking out of her. Her arm throbbing. Her head.

  “He tried to help me in a fight. Eleven years ago, back in Portland. He’d just come over from Oban with his brother, two lads looking to make a new start.” That wistful flicker in Wheeler’s eyes, then gone. “His brother was glassed, at a saloon near the river. He died. They were young. Driscoll’s age, nearabouts. So if I give him space to calm himself and grieve, you don’t fucking take that out of him.”

  “Fine. Play favorites.”

  She blinks, hard. No one’s watched out for her like that since Hannah. How things could have been different with eleven years of someone to turn to. To trust. There’s Delphine, but she’s always been slipping away, one step ahead. Jasmine perfume. Golden-belled birds chirping.

  “Alma.”

  She is drifting forward, hip sliding over the marble edge of the sideboard, crystal clinking. Blue wall blurred. Wheeler’s hand around her right biceps, mooring her.

  “I think you need to sit still a while longer,” he says, close.

  “There’s no time.” Alma shakes off his hand. “Benson needs trapping. Sloan.”

  She flattens her palm onto the cool marble, takes a wider stance. Once again she must stay standing. Stay composed. But god damn it, she’s tired.

  “You’re going to charge after them when you can barely stand?” he says. “Or maybe fling yourself, fists out, in front of gunfire again. Jesus Christ.”

  “I’ve got to be on the boat tonight.” She forces her eyes to focus on the filthy backs of her knuckles, seamed and stained against the white stone. “Benson’s handing himself to us on a platter. Keep quiet, play scared, and he’ll lead me right to his friends on the crew and in Seattle.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll manage.”

  She turns to Wheeler, sneering, but her face slackens. Nothing taunting in his eyes—they are solemn. Worried, even. The top button of his collar undone, showing a triangle of skin above the loose knot of his tie. “Please, call me Nathaniel,” he’d said at their second dinner. He’d said, “I haven’t heard a lass from home say my name in too many years.” The more she sees of him, the more she thinks she glimpsed him best, and truest, when they first met.

  “Do you want to plug the tar leak or not?” she says.

  Wheeler’s mouth twists into something like a smile.

  “I see why she recommends you,” he says. “And you’re right about Benson. But the night boat is seven hours from now.”

  He nods at her left arm, tucked against her chest, her left jacket sleeve hanging empty.

  “Take the time to rest.”

  It’s not what she wants to do, but it’s what she needs. Her head is a wreck, full of foamy water and splinters, the dull thump of pulse.

  “We’ll have him,” she says. “Soon.”

  And what about Nell? Alma should share this new treachery, but it’s embarrassing. All that swagger and bragging about having Nell, and it was just a trap. Alma doesn’t want Wheeler to see her like that—the fly that buzzed right into the sugar dish. She needs to visit Nell again, privately, and find out what the hell she’s playing at with Benson.

  “There’s an event tomorrow you should be at, if you can,” Wheeler says. “A fund-raiser at the school. For the Seamen’s Bethel—Sarah Powell’s newest charity work, with Judge Hamilton.”

  That explains Alma’s sighting of Delphine and the judge at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. But not how close Hamilton was standing to Delphine. How solicitous he was with her.

  “Are you inviting me to Upper Town after all?” Alma turns toward Wheeler, keeping her hip in contact with the liquor board for balance. “I thought I wasn’t welcome among the gentry.”

  He spins the gold ring on his left hand. Twists so the beveled face is toward his palm, twists so it’s toward his knuckles, twists. Something about this request making him uneasy.

  “Keep an eye on Hamilton, on the mayor, on that idiot Kopp, if he shows up,” Wheeler says. “I want to know what they’re saying. Especially if it’s about the product. Or the railroad trust. Or me.”

  “So this is a personal favor.”

  He stops fiddling with the ring.

  “No. It’s for the good of the organization,�
�� he says. “And it’s a favor to yourself—making sure you’ll have a post to be promoted to.”

  So he doesn’t know about Tacoma. Everyone still has their secrets: the things they’re playing close to the vest.

  “You don’t move up, I don’t move up,” Alma says.

  Deep inhale. Wring of pain in her shoulder as she leaves the sideboard, walks to Wheeler’s desk. She tucks the envelope of lading bills into her vest. Seven hours of sleep better put some life back into her. She can’t fade out just as things are getting interesting.

  “The school’s at Taylor and Clay,” Wheeler says. “Be there at noon. Lots of sailors will come for the free food, I imagine, so no need to spruce up.”

  Alma salutes from the door, then lets her arm sweep down in a motion that takes in her whole body, new clothes already ruined, busted limbs, bruised to hell but standing.

  “See you in class,” she says.

  * * *

  Orion’s hold smells of smoke and rotting straw. Alma breathes deep, her dinner of beef hash not quite settled in her stomach, her left arm shaking. She cut off the sling at the boardinghouse, wanting the limb free while she slept. Now a stabbing pain dogs her deltoid as she watches Lyle creep between the hull and the high-stacked baggage.

  He lifts his hand lantern up to a crate. Taps it with his crowbar.

  “This here’s one,” he says.