The Best Bad Things

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The Best Bad Things Page 36

by Katrina Carrasco


  “You know it’s because Loomis killed one of ours.”

  “No, no.” Sloan stands, so much taller than Alma, and behind her in the hall his two crimps are staying close, boots shuffling, metallic clicks as one shakes bullets from his pistol cylinder, reloads. “No spinning this. I was there.”

  He walks over to McManus. The wheezing quickens.

  “You two,” Sloan says. “You started it. Making trouble. Loomis didn’t do a thing—he just wanted another gin. It must have been a dockworker with the bottle. Or a mill hand. Those lumber boys love a brawl.”

  “We’re getting your product,” Alma says. “I know you want it. Sixty pounds, best-quality King Tye. Give him to me, and I’ll have it for you as scheduled, tomorrow night.”

  Damn it. She shouldn’t have to be begging to sell him tar.

  “I don’t want to wait,” Sloan says. “And I want it for free. This shipment and the next month’s. To compensate for my loss.”

  She’d promise him sixty pounds free, sure. Six hundred, to get her and McManus out of here. But Sloan can’t have the tar until tomorrow. It’s got to be tomorrow, or their plan for Kopp doesn’t work. Once Kopp is dead, everything hinges on the timing of the tar handoff to Sloan. The setup for the Pinkerton’s agents. The setup for the internal mole that will plug the leak. All these pieces have to fit into place so that Wheeler’s name is clear, Sloan takes the fall for everything, and Alma is positioned to feed the police the alibi of a lifetime.

  If she trades McManus for the tar tonight, it will destroy the entire scheme.

  “No,” she says.

  Sloan raises his eyebrows. Picks up one boot and sets it, light, on McManus’s hard-bent leg, where the kneecap ought to be. McManus twitches.

  “I don’t have it yet,” she says. “Just wait one day, why’s that a problem?”

  “Because I want it tonight,” Sloan says. “And now I want the next three months free. Poor, dead Loomis.”

  “I don’t have it yet.”

  Sloan’s boot grinds down. McManus screams, a high animal sound muffled by the rag. Alma clenches, loosens, clenches her left hand. Waits for it to stop but it doesn’t.

  “Three months free, and tomorrow,” she says, loud, over the shrieking.

  “All right.” Sloan takes his boot off McManus. “I appreciate that you’re willing to bargain.”

  He comes toward her, all neat-tucked shirt and crisp trousers. Pleasant smile. That boyish twinkle in his eyes. Maybe she read him wrong, those first few times. He’s not playing a breaker. He is one. Or it’s something else she’s seen before: a man playing a part so long, holding it so tight against him, that he’s not playing anymore. The mask melded onto his face.

  “Since we’ve started negotiations,” he says, looking down at her, “let me lay out the butcher’s bill.”

  He waves at McManus, who is slumped forward and heaving, wet darkening his gag, sweat running down his temples.

  “This one, he’s been a scourge upon me for years,” Sloan says. “Shot the kneecaps out of three of my boys. Nearly broke the skull of the last one—he’ll never walk proper again, and now he’s slow, to boot. I assume he prepared your delivery of Pike’s fingers, as well as dispatched Pike himself. Add Loomis to that tally and it is a bloody one.”

  “You’re a pimp and a kidnapper,” she says. “I don’t buy that you were expecting a genteel tea party on the waterfront.”

  “Of course not. Only a little less carnage.”

  “He won’t be much threat after this.”

  She nods at McManus, drooping so heavily he might have passed out. His chained elbows stretched taut behind him. Sloan keeps his eyes on her. He is two feet away, a distracted squint in his eyes, a tilt to his jaw.

  “Oh, I’m sure of that,” he says. “I’ve changed my request. Three months free and the delivery tomorrow, and you walk. If you want him to come with you, you bring back that delivery tonight.”

  “I don’t have it. What fucking part of that do you not understand?”

  Coldness in her gut. Sloan still peering at her, making her skin itch. The realization McManus can’t be saved. He’s already a dead man. It’s just a question of how long Sloan will keep him breathing before making him stop.

  “You remind me of a woman I met recently,” Sloan says. “Something in your eyes.”

  Fist clench, so tight her shoulder spikes with pain. In the hall behind her the two men are talking, quiet. The scraping flare of a match.

  “Are you trying to insult me?” she says, making her face as hard as she can, her voice, her shoulders. Her body slick with sweat. This is a bad spot like she’s never seen. All exits blocked, guns everywhere, blood-scented air, and McManus shaking, making broken sounds, at the edge of her vision. The back of her throat burns.

  “No,” Sloan says. “It’s just that the resemblance is striking.”

  “I’m walking,” she says. Fighting to stay steady when every part of her throbs with the urge to escape. Get out.

  “And the tar?”

  She shouldn’t look at McManus but she does. He is watching her, chest bellowing, dark hair spackled to his forehead. He knows she has it. He knows the night boat came in two days ago as scheduled, and anything they were set to trade with Sloan is waiting, boxed up and ready, in the Madison warehouse. Fifty yards away on the next wharf. McManus knows it, and while she looks at him, his face changes, the light dimming in his eyes. He knows she’s not coming back.

  “Tomorrow,” she says.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Alma’s in the hall, shouldering past the two crimps, when the screaming starts again, louder, wilder. Through the brick wall. Through the warren of crates, and her throat stings with bile. Still walking. She vomits outside the cannery door. Steaming clumps on the bricks. Wet, cold night air sharp in her mouth. Still walking. She wipes her chin on her sleeve and forces her legs faster, jogging toward the lights of Water Street.

  Up one block, over, up another, over. At the corner of Washington and Taylor she stops, breathing ragged. Hunkers down beside a wide pile of planks. Her arm aching. Her head.

  She had to. She had to. McManus was on the scales opposite Delphine’s entire operation. She made the best choice for the business. But his eyes on hers, the light in them fading.

  “Fuck.”

  She tilts her chin back, sucking in deep breaths. A thin shadow jabs into the star-flecked sky. A building crane. This is the corner where the crane’s load fell; where the horses startled and trampled Harrison Doyle. Delphine arranged it, somehow. But not flawlessly. Doyle’s widow is wrinkling the neat array of Delphine’s promises to Wheeler. The railroad trust, uncertain. With Wheeler worried about Judge Hamilton, the treasurer position seems uncertain, too. And now McManus is being cracked open. All the things a body can feel. Too much. She thinks of him in the alley, Mary’s soft hand on his body, giving him pleasure, slow. Sloan won’t make it fast.

  Focus.

  She can’t tell Wheeler. He needs to stay on top of Edmonds and Benson. They need to follow through with the plan.

  Her pulse settles. No one has come tearing past in pursuit. She spits into the mud, sickly tang still on her breath. Waits another minute, two, her legs going stiff with crouching. When she’s sure the street is quiet—no movement other than the flickering of lamps in the house across the road—she stands. Blinks hard. Walks the last block to Nell’s.

  Just to be safe, she goes around to the back, into the narrow alley. Pounds with the side of her fist. A light flares in the window opposite and she stops. There are footsteps inside.

  “Who is it?”

  “Camp,” she says, quiet.

  Nell opens the door, her derringer glinting in one fist.

  “Why’d you come to this side?”

  Alma pushes past, in a hurry to get into the house. Nell is in her dressing gown, its silk wrapped over her fine corset. The pale heave of her breasts pressed high and plump by the shelved boning, deeply shadowed in the l
ight of a single wall candle.

  “I need to wash my face,” Alma says, on her way to the kitchen. She ladles water from the cistern into a coffee cup. Pulls open the door to the courtyard and clumps down the steps. Wood creak. Splashes in the dirt as she rinses her mouth, spits; rinses; and again. She dumps the rest of the water over her face. A shock of cold, dripping from her shorn hair, the good feeling of clean.

  “Come back in, it’s freezing,” Nell says from the door.

  Alma sheds her bile-streaked jacket as she climbs the stairs. She closes the courtyard door. Drops the jacket and crowds into Nell, pressing her against the kitchen wall. Their mouths connected. Nell’s breasts warm under her hands.

  “Are you drunk?” Nell draws back. “You smell like you bathed in gin.”

  “Honey, just kiss me.” Wanting that body connection, that quick pulse, while they are alive and whole and hungry. “And don’t go outside tonight.”

  “Your hands are like ice.” Nell takes Alma’s fingers from her chest, folds them in her own. “Jack, I’ve got to go to work. I’m due at The Captain’s in half an hour.”

  “That’s ages away.”

  Alma lifts her chin, licks at Nell’s lower lip until she opens her mouth. Tight tangle of her fingers in Alma’s hair. Alma’s thumb tracing the seam where the corset edge presses into one heavy breast.

  “Come to bed,” Alma says.

  They bumble down the hall, Nell shouldering off her robe, Alma shedding clothes in between mouthfuls of warm breath, warm skin. Vest, shirt, boot, and boot. A haze of heat by the door as they pass the brazier, its filigreed light on Nell’s dangling corset laces. At the bed Alma pushes Nell onto her back, pushes her ankles wide.

  “Show me,” Alma says, and undoes her belt, her other hand on Nell’s thigh, fingers dimpling the flesh.

  After, Alma stands up, knees twinging. She wipes her face on her discarded trousers. Smoky wool rough on her lips. In the bed Nell is pink and languid, shifting over for Alma to lie beside her, their skins scented with creamy musk. Soft nap of cotton sheets pulling at the small hairs on Alma’s arms, her legs. All the things a body can feel. She closes her eyes. Nuzzles her face against Nell’s breasts.

  “Jack. Are you all right?”

  “Better now,” Alma says.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you today.” Nell’s hand tracing lines along the back of Alma’s neck, so soft it aches.

  “You getting greedy for my company?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I like that.” Alma curls down, moving her mouth from Nell’s breasts to the warm softness of her belly. She looks up along the other woman’s body, one ear at Nell’s navel, which stirs with the long wavelike churn of breathing.

  “Did you go to the fund-raiser yesterday?” Nell says. “I wish I’d been invited. I heard the food was nice.”

  “I did. The food was all right. No strawberry tarts, though.”

  “Oh! Damn.”

  “Now, ma’am,” Alma says, thinking of the long food tables, the marshal picking at the last pastries. “That’s no kind of language for a lady like you.”

  Nell laughs, her stomach rippling under Alma’s cheek.

  “Sometimes you sound just like a cowboy,” she says. “Plenty of men out of the New Mexico Territory talked like that in the lumber camps. All chatter about branding and cay-yotes.”

  “I can keep you guessing all night, honey,” Alma says, still patterning her sentences after the marshal’s Southwestern drawl. Something she heard plenty of in Yuma, that shithole.

  “Who else can you do?”

  “Tell me a name,” Alma says.

  “Nathaniel.”

  “Now this is too bloody easy, you’re making it no trouble at all.”

  “That’s just like him!” Nell’s eyes are bright with amusement. She hitches herself up, closer to sitting. Alma follows along, keeping her head in Nell’s lap.

  “Davy Benson,” Nell says.

  Nothing flinching about it, nothing about his name changing her delight in their game. She’s not helping Benson steal from the business, no way. Alma still doesn’t know how he found her out.

  “This one’s a bit harder, ma’am.” Alma clears her throat. “Aw, tarnation, you’ll pardon my mistakes, I hope.”

  Nell laughs, a throaty chuckle that moves her body against Alma’s.

  “Another.”

  “Don’t go The Captain’s,” Alma says, and she has switched to an accent that feels bare, in this moment; the words bare, too. “Quédate conmigo. We can listen to the wind.”

  “Why, you sound like one of those Chilean sailors,” Nell says, still taking Alma’s words as play. “They come in sometimes on the packet ships, always wearing calico scarves.”

  To Alma’s ear the Chilean accent is miles away from what she just used, but it’s doubtful Nell knows a thing about Californios and Norteños and the countless other dialects and regions that can color spoken English.

  “My father’s Mexican,” Alma says.

  “You don’t look it.” Nell pushes Alma’s bangs off her forehead, searches her face.

  “I look just like him,” she says, sharp. Old wounds itching. Old pride, protectiveness. As Camp, she does look like her father. Or she would, if she combed her hair properly. Put on a suit. Softened her eyes, her smile.

  But Nell doesn’t mean to insult. Her voice is kind. Her fingertips, soft as feathers, draw little circles near Alma’s ear.

  “My mother’s people came from Scotland,” Alma says. “They migrated to Kentucky, of all places, and then Los Angeles. When she married my father, her parents disowned her.”

  Nell’s smile slips. She bites her lower lip. Her thighs shift, warm and supple under the back of Alma’s neck.

  “But my parents died,” Alma says. “My mother at the start of the war, so I barely knew her, and my father after. An uncle took me in. My mother’s brother. And he never let me forget what he thought of my father. Or my father’s blood.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “I don’t much remember my mother,” she says. “But my father … After every Sunday mass, he would pick a bougainvillea off the vine outside the church and tuck it in my hair. And he loved oranges. He would squeeze orange juice on everything, every damn piece of food that came onto his plate.”

  A line of wet trickles down Alma’s cheek. Nell thumbs it away, and Alma reaches up to catch her hand, kiss her fingers, the knob of her wrist. Anything to stop her own mouth. She is talking too much. You’re going fucking soft, Rosales.

  “Time to get to work.” Alma sits up. “You’ll be late.”

  Nell watches from the bed as Alma steps into her trousers. Her left hand only a little slow on the buttons. Alma won’t meet her eyes and goes into the hall to collect her other clothes. When she comes back into the bedroom, Nell is wearing her chemise, hands busy behind her back as she tightens her corset.

  “Honey, Wheeler and I need a favor,” Alma says, pulling on her boots.

  “Oh, really.” Laced tight, Nell sits at her dressing table, turns up the lamp. “And you think I’ll say yes?”

  She winks at Alma in the mirror.

  “He says you know the city marshal.”

  “He’s one of my gentleman friends,” Nell says. “At The Captain’s most every time I am. He ought to be there tonight.”

  “We need his help,” Alma says. “And we need you to be the one to ask for it. He’ll be sure to remember all the money Mr. Wheeler donated in the past, and Mr. Wheeler hasn’t forgotten the marshal’s fondness for Kentucky bourbon—there’s a crate ready for him, as a gift.”

  “This must be some help.”

  “A man’s going to be brought in to the jail on Tuesday.” Alma buttons up her shirt. “Accused of murder. And he, in his defense, is going to accuse Barnaby Sloan of all sorts of mischief—smuggling, torture, killings. The marshal needs to make sure nothing too rough happens to this man, and that the conversation stays on Sloan as much as possible. If Wheeler�
�s name is brought up, it should not be entertained for long.”

  “What are you up to?” Nell twists to face her, holding a bottle of perfume in one hand and its slender glass dipper in the other.

  “Something big.” Alma grins. “There’s more. You got it so far?”

  Nell nods.

  “There’s also going to be a man from the customhouse who wants to sit in on the interview, take notes. The marshal needs to let him.”

  “No roughhousing, keep it on Sloan, customhouse man.”

  “Yeah. And once the alibi’s given, the marshal lets the man walk free and goes for Sloan,” Alma says, over the clink of her belt buckle. “Last thing: Wheeler’s guard Fulton is going to show up at the jail, and he needs to be left alone with Sloan in a cell, before they let Sloan talk. That’s a lot. Do you have it? Can you get the marshal on board?”

  “I’ve got it. And if you offer George Forrester a whole crate of bourbon, he’ll let you do most anything.” Nell powders her throat. “I’ll make sure to lead with that particular incentive.”

  “All right, honey. Go get our lawman.”

  “Yes, sir.” Nell knuckles her forehead in a salute, then tips her face back and taps drops of belladonna into her eyes.

  “Come by the offices tomorrow night,” Alma says. “To let us know how it went. And bring an extra dress. Nothing too fancy.”

  No sense in asking Nell to give up one of her best outfits when the dress is going right into the bay.

  “Will I see you tomorrow?”

  “Not until the offices.” Alma shrugs on her jacket, leans down to kiss Nell’s bare shoulder. “Be safe.”

  Alma lets herself out the back door, chill wind chasing Nell’s warmth from her skin. Darkness crowds in, and worry. McManus’s howls. Is he still screaming? Will his disappearance distract Wheeler? Or worse, will his corpse turn up on Wheeler’s back steps, just when every part of this perfect plan is fitting into place? Sloan won’t break McManus’s body just for the sport of it. He’ll want to show Wheeler what he’s done. Maybe even tell Wheeler that Camp wouldn’t make a deal to save McManus. Just to drive the knife in deeper.

 

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