The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  Daniel Lowry was the perfect mark: well-liked in San Francisco but a little crooked, often seen taking kickbacks at the central police station. He agreed to pitch her proposal to William Pinkerton—on the condition she help him fence a few stolen necklaces. “This is the last time,” she told him, “I want to go straight.” He got approval from Pinkerton for her assistance, received his dossier. Everything was going to plan until he informed Alma he’d be taking a young heiress with him instead. “It’s just the adventure that will coax her away from her father,” Lowry told Alma in his rented rooms. He said: “She’ll learn the cipher easy enough, it’s simple stuff.” Alma let him finish his drink while she flipped through her options. Then she launched herself at him, gun out.

  “You weren’t here just to audit me,” Wheeler says.

  She comes around the side of the desk. Onto that patch of carpet two feet from him. He doesn’t look pleased but his hands aren’t ready for the gun anymore, either; one holds his whiskey, and he brings the other up to rub the back of his neck. The hard curve of his triceps taut against his shirtsleeve.

  “That was part of it,” Alma says. “She told me about the missing product, too, so I could be on the lookout. Happily, the business was waterproof under investigation. Except I think I found your weak spot.”

  He gives her the smallest twitch of a grin.

  “The agents coming are the ones we’re getting Sloan on the hook for,” she says. “I met with them in Tacoma this morning. They’re set to arrive on Wednesday. So we have to have Sloan, and Kopp, and Benson—and all the thorns in our sides—ready for them to hang. Just like she ordered.”

  “I suppose you have an elaborate plan to effect this.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “That is absolutely not true.” He steps forward, collects the decanter. Doesn’t step back. “I don’t know a thing about you, as you’ve just demonstrated.”

  “You know I like to fight.” She lets her eyes drop to his belt, crawl back up his body. “You know I like to fuck.”

  His mouth open. He sets his whiskey on the desk. Loosens his tie. Alma grins. Brings her gin to her lips, and her left hand spasms—too much movement, too much strain on her deltoid. The glass cracks to the floor. Liquor cold all down the front of her shirt and vest. She has to laugh, when she was going for flirtatious and ended up looking like a fool.

  “This god damn hand,” she says, stooping to collect the two halves of the glass. “Barely nicked by that bullet and it’s causing me a world of hurt.”

  “Alma—”

  “Camp.” She glares up at him. “Don’t make a habit of using that other name. It’s wrong.”

  “Camp.” His voice different for the different name, something staccato, more businesslike, in his pronunciation. “What’s your plan?”

  “Oh, it’s good. It’ll get everyone where we need them. Kopp is going to disappear with the railroad’s money. Sloan is going to be arrested for murder and tar smuggling. A little mess of mine”—she means Lowry, but sees no need to tell Wheeler his name—“is going to be tidied. And Alma Rosales, disgraced Pinkerton’s agent, is going to end up dead.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very good plan for you,” Wheeler says, his head cocked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Alma says, grinning. “I always come out on top. But we’ll need help getting everything into place.”

  She carries the glass pieces to the sideboard.

  “Help from Nell,” she says. “From your new friend Edmonds, and Delphine’s friend the marshal. But I haven’t worked out how to get Benson, or his partners in Seattle. They’re loose ends.”

  “Don’t use that name for her,” Wheeler corrects, then pauses. “How do you know she’s friendly with the marshal?”

  “Didn’t you see them at the fund-raiser?” Alma says. “Him and Hamilton falling all over her, along with that Tacoma swell. I used to earn my bread by following stray husbands. I’d say all three of those men are having impure thoughts where she’s concerned.”

  “The Tacoma man—Jim Pettygrove?”

  “That was his name, yes.” She wipes her hands on her trousers.

  “Pettygrove has a wife.” Wheeler has gone withdrawn again, the interest she was teasing out of him tucked away. He looks worried.

  “And Hamilton’s wouldn’t stand up in a strong breeze,” Alma says. “Maybe they’re looking for new ones.”

  “Maybe.” Wheeler sits down at his desk. Thumbs through a ledger.

  “Have you been pipped at the post?”

  “What?” he says, distracted, pages still flipping under his fingers.

  “Did Delphine promise to marry you? Is that your promotion? She’s richer than God, it would be something.”

  “I could never marry her,” he says. “It would cause too much of a scandal. She promised she’d get Harrison Doyle out of my way. Clearing my claim for a spot on the railroad trust. She promised me that. And I’m to be Hamilton’s candidate for city treasurer, when he runs for mayor in the spring. He’s served before, and Brooks is not planning to run. He’ll be reelected.”

  It’s so boring. A railroad trust and a thankless job. The treasurer. But then, it suits him. It suits him perfectly. He’ll be in city government, helping the business. He’ll be respectable.

  “You’ll have a sterling reputation,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t move up, I don’t move up.” She pours a replacement drink. Sets it on the edge of his desk and drags her chair close. “Here’s my plan. Help me make it work.”

  * * *

  Hustling down Water Street toward Nell’s house, the rain paused but the mud ankle-deep and sucking, slowing her steps. Past the National Bank, the butcher’s, the coffeehouse where Driscoll ran to get their steaming cups. Damn that kid. So full of life and then dropped by a bottle, Jesus. She’s shaking her head over him, sick with it, with guilt, when two men step out of some nowhere shadow and flank her, take her arms, and nudge a gun into the small of her back, against her spine.

  “What the fuck?” she says.

  “Quiet,” one tells her, gripping her arm just below her stitches so the raw skin is wrenched.

  She doesn’t know his voice. She doesn’t know either of their faces.

  They steer her the wrong way, back toward Quincy, then toward the water, and when she sees where they’re going, there are two options—twist free to run and risk a crippling shot, or let herself be taken in to see what comes next. It might be another bullet. Or worse. What will she do? For a heartbeat more she is undecided, staring into the chaos on either side of the line, riding the parallel tracks before life bends off in different directions. Then she lets out a breath, drops her head. Lets them lead her into Sloan’s cannery.

  29

  JANUARY 12, 1887

  Eleven Days Earlier

  “Mr. Sloan will see you now.” The phrasing strangely at odds with the man’s rough face, his ashy greatcoat.

  “He did make me wait,” Alma says, raising an eyebrow.

  She stands from her chair with a thick rustle of skirts. Extra petticoats under the rich green silk trap the heat of her legs, her pelvis, so within all the gaudy wrappings she is sweating. There’s an itch at the side of her left thigh she can’t scratch. But she looks as fine as she ever has—curled russet wig bouncing at the edges of her eyes, French chalk cloying on her cheeks, carmine bitter on her mouth—and as she follows Sloan’s man through the drowsy afternoon parlor, the sailors draped over couches or playing desultory games of cards all stop, blink, gape, as her boots press squeaks out of the boardinghouse floor.

  Up a narrow stair, Sloan’s man too close behind her. A tepid stench pulses from his body. Her skirts quiver as he brushes against them with each step. The brocade reticule looped over her wrist is heavy with her knife, her brass knuckles, but the close quarters make her jumpy. The big man herding her with his body makes her jumpy. This boardinghouse is built like a rattrap, and she’s seen Sl
oan’s women when they, twitching, venture out. He does not treat them well.

  “End of that hall,” the man says.

  In the space after he speaks, the air at the back of her head shifts; there is a distinct sniff. He is leaning over her. Smelling her powdered neck.

  “You’ve been very helpful,” she says coolly, not looking back at him.

  “Pike!” he hollers, near her ear.

  Alma flinches. A man steps out of a room down the hall. Something metal is in his fist—a blade. Alma dips her hand into her purse, taking hold of her own knife.

  “You’re wanted downstairs,” the man, still too close behind her, says.

  “Five minutes,” Pike says, and goes back into his room.

  Deep breath. Shoulders up. Start walking. The walls are pocked with narrow doorways. Closed; closed; open, a man dozing in a low cot, a bare-breasted woman curled beside him; open, the man called Pike, shaving in a tin mirror. Afternoon sun slants hard on the metal disk. She recognizes Pike from the warehouse on Madison Wharf—his left arm and hand are runneled with burn scars. Closed. Open, another sleeping man, spent opium pipe on the floor beside him. Jackpot.

  Sloan’s making this too easy for her. Pipes out in full view. His bawdy house on display. Alma’s only seen twenty-four hours of his organization, and he’s the picture of waterfront vice: crimps, girls, knockout drops. Tar. He’s the man she needs to know. The man she’ll replace. Delphine must be tired of working with such a low fellow, but maybe Sloan’s all she could find out here in the sticks.

  At the end of the hall a door is just open, leaking daylight. Alma pushes inside. The space is crowded with tables and stools. A man sits near the door, working his way through a spread of lunch: rye bread, cheese, pickles, salt fish. The room smells of his food—pungent oil, brine—and stale liquor.

  “You asked for me?” he says.

  So this is Sloan. He’s younger than she expected, in his late twenties only. Lean. Long fingers, graceful hands, busy as he saws away at the cheese rind. A faint curl in his blond hair. Trimmed sideburns trending to auburn at his jawline. Thick brows. Cheekbones set high.

  She can appreciate him, but he does not seem piqued by her. His eyes barely trace over her powdered face, her winking paste jewelry. He does not stand or move to shrug on his jacket. He continues to trim cheese slices and lay them on a heel of bread, taking sips from a beer mug and dabbing foam from his mustache with a calico cloth. Ill-mannered. But he is also beautiful. Delphine likes beauty. And if Sloan is Delphine’s deputy, he may be testing her—playacting, as Alma is, but to some other purpose.

  “I intended to discuss a financial opportunity,” she says. “But I can see this is a bad time.”

  “You’ve already interrupted my lunch,” he says. “Go on and tell me why.”

  “I just arrived in town.”

  Alma saunters along the perimeter of the room. She stops in front of a glazed window, winter sunlight a bare warmth on the back of her neck. If he won’t give her any advantage, she’ll take those she can—use shadows to make her face hard to see, so he will have difficulty gauging how his insults land.

  “I’m looking to set up shop on Water Street,” she says. “If we’re going to be neighbors, I thought we might arrange an understanding. Take it one step further and share interest in my enterprise.”

  Sloan takes a bite of his bread and cheese.

  “I don’t work with women,” he says around the food.

  “I hear you work with quite a few women, actually.”

  “They work for me,” he says. “That’s the key difference.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you’re not interested in profit, Mr. Sloan.”

  Alma scents something here—something more than wharf gossip about Sloan offering tar on his bill of goods. His flat refusal to work with women seems like a good cover for Delphine’s pulling of his strings; no one would expect her to be his boss, with his attitude toward the gentler sex. Now, the women working for him; Delphine would not like that. The only way to find out more is to get Sloan talking. But he is sucking clean a fish bone. Draining the last of his beer.

  “I’ve got a boatload of young ladies en route from San Francisco,” Alma says. “And if you don’t want to be my partner, I’m afraid I’ll have to consider you a competitor.”

  “A boatload, huh?” This heavy with sarcasm. “Listen, missus…”

  “It’s miss,” Alma says. “Miss Sugar Calhoun.”

  “All right, Miss Calhoun.” He wipes his hands, stands slow, so the legs of his chair drag over the floor. “I don’t like competition. Choose someone else as your friendly neighbor—otherwise your girls might find themselves in some trouble.”

  He drops the calico cloth. Walks over to her at the window, so the light picks out the warm brown of his eyes, the red strands in his mustache. He is taller than her by too much; she does not like to be looked down on.

  “You might find yourself in some trouble,” he says. “Some would say you came looking for it, walking into my house dressed like that.”

  It’s no good if she hurts him, it’s no good if she loses her temper. But it is hard to not grip the loop of her little purse, heavy with weaponry, and slam it against the side of his skull. He steps a notch closer. Under the salt-fish stink, under the beery sourness on his breath: the hothouse scent of opium smoke.

  “Well”—she doesn’t flinch away from his crowding—“this has been a most disappointing afternoon. Not what I’d been expecting at all.”

  “What were you expecting?”

  “Interest.” She lifts her chin. “When I asked around to see who would be a good contact for this type of business, I was told to visit you.”

  “Told by whom?”

  His leg is pressing into the front of her skirts. The shifts in the silk echo through the petticoats to her skin, the small hairs there, so he seems even closer. She smirks up at him, eyes narrowing, mouth closed, and he grabs her by the throat. Slams her head into the windowpane. The pins twisted into her wig jab the back of her skull.

  “Told by whom?”

  “A man at the French Hotel,” Alma says, choosing the hotel closest to Sloan’s boardinghouse, the clapboard-fronted lodgings just across the road. Blood collects heavy in her face, heavy at her jawline. “I can’t recall his name.”

  Don’t strike out even though it’s hard to breathe. Not when he’s got tar on him. When he’s the best lead you’ve got. Her vision starts to pulse. Sloan’s fingers will leave marks.

  “Try,” he says.

  “I can’t—it might be Jules?” Grasping at the first name that comes to mind, from her code book, because no one told her about Sloan. She found him herself. The thin reediness in her voice alarms her; if Sloan does not let go in the next few seconds, she will have to fight. “Or Julius. Short, thin. Dark hair. No good at faro.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Jules.”

  Sloan loosens the vise of his fingers and Alma brings her own hand to her throat. Her skin fever-hot to the touch. Not much exaggeration called for as she blinks, catches at breath.

  “I don’t want to see you again,” he says, stepping out of the window’s light to the table. He wipes his hand with the calico cloth. “I hope you take that as the warning it’s intended to be.”

  “I understand,” she says, still leaning against the wall. Letting him think she’s frightened. Her heart is thudding for other reasons. Sloan’s deep into more than one dirty business, and she would bet his tar is no different. But she’ll have to come at him another way. If he won’t play with a lady, he might be inclined to deal with Jack Camp.

  “You’re a brute.” She keeps her hand at her throat, where the powder has likely smudged off, a little tear in her disguise.

  “No, Miss Calhoun.” Sloan sits again, slices another wafer of cheese. “That was me being a lamb. Come back again and you’ll find a lion.”

  It is hard to hold down her grin. She’ll be back that night. With teeth of her ow
n to bare. Already her plan is taking shape. The filthy hands. The stained work shirt. If he likes blood and beatings and throttled necks, she’ll give him a show—walk right up to one of his boys at that Madison warehouse and knuckle him into a pulp. Then offer to take his spot. You need good fighters, Mr. Sloan. You need lions.

  “I won’t trouble you again,” she says, and stalks out into the hall.

  30

  JANUARY 23, 1887

  Inside, the cannery is a boxy space. High ceilings. Reek of piss and blood and moldy straw. Cut in two by a brick wall at its center. The stench of broken bodies everywhere, but there’s just rusted canning-line machinery and empty crates, stacked tall, dim lamplight slitting through their boards. The men lead her around a corner and through an iron door, to the other side of the brick wall. Here a warren, more like Sloan’s boardinghouse. One of the rooms lit by a single candle. Sloan sits inside, on a chair against the wall, wearing a gray vest. His shirtsleeves rolled up despite the chill. His hands empty.

  “Camp,” he says.

  “Don’t try nothing,” the man with the gun at her back says.

  She is nudged into the room. There is a twitch of movement to her left, at the door-side wall.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she says, voice tight.

  It’s McManus. Mouth bound with a rag. Elbows behind him, chained to a bar set into the brick. Eyes wide on hers. No blood on him but his bad leg is twisted under him at a sharp angle. Nothing the knee joint could withstand. She follows the low thread of sound in the room and it’s coming from him, a patchy whine riding each of his inhales.

  “What is this?” she says. “What the fuck is this?”

  “I thought we had a deal,” Sloan says, not looking at McManus, not rising out of his languid slump. “‘Civility’? I believe that’s how you put it.”

  “And that was broken how?”

  “When this one got trigger-happy and murdered my man Loomis,” Sloan says. “He didn’t even try to hide it. I’m shocked you didn’t hear. He fed him a bullet right in front of Chain Locker.”