He laughed. “You mean, times when you have to break into your own home while Confederate soldiers search your house for the papers you’ve come to retrieve? I guess you’re prepared for any eventuality.”
“Nice to see you’re catching on, Bradshaw.”
“Well, I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake.” He leafed through some papers, while Jessie pulled down the looking scope. “Tell me why we’re here.”
“I think… I think Hiram lied.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
She sighed. “Look, I didn’t have any reason to not trust him. Pop used to go into the mines all the time—he even had a lab down there for a time. When it collapsed, I had no reason to think Hiram was lying when he said Pop was down there. I had no reason to suspect him when he went to identify the body and told me it was Pop.”
“You didn’t see the body? Not even to say goodbye?”
“The undertaker said there wasn’t a lot to see.” Jessie fought off the residual pain of that awful day. “Hiram said he didn’t look like himself. They showed me the clothes Pop was wearing when he left the house. They gave me his wedding ring, and Pop would never have taken it off. So I believed them. But now… Thinking about it, there were clues. I just didn’t know to look for them.”
She hated admitting it, because she figured he’d point out what a fool she’d been, and she couldn’t fight him on that front.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Though I happen to be one who needs to see the body, and maybe shoot it a couple of times, before I believe a man is dead.” The way the words were spoken, she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not. “What are we looking for?”
“I’m looking for a specific set of papers I saw when I came down here right after Pop’s accident. You’re going to watch our friends upstairs.” She motioned to the scope she’d just pulled down. “Look through there. You should see the front room and the kitchen. Just twist the scope to move it. Try not to be too obvious about it. If the scope moves too much, it might get noticed.”
Luke folded his arms. “This would go faster if you’d just let me look through the papers with you.”
She waved away his words and began digging through the nearest stack. “You don’t know what you’re looking for. When you search through these papers, you’re looking to find something about what my father was working on. Trust me, you won’t have any idea what you’re looking at anyway. There aren’t any schematics you can take back to your scientists in Chicago. Or wherever it is you’re headquartered.”
He turned away and peered through the scope. “It’s Chicago.” He moved the scope around and made a sound that wasn’t quite a groan.
“What?”
“It’s nothing.” He paused. “Incidentally, there’s no record of Hiram ever having lived there. But we did find at least one townhouse in Washington.”
Not wanting to think about Hiram’s lies, she closed her eyes only briefly before focusing on the task at hand. “Hiram’s dead, Bradshaw. Today I’ve found out my father might be alive, a man I thought of as my uncle has been stealing from me for years and was murdered while I cowered in a washroom. I’ve been shot at and fallen off a roof, accused of being a prostitute, found myself half-dressed in a brothel, and been pawed by you. Confederate spies are searching my house. I’ve had a full day. If you’re going to try to make me feel like more of a fool for believing Hiram, you can just keep it to yourself.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel like a fool. I’m trying to tell you the truth. I thought you might like to know where Hiram’s actually been. He’s been living dangerously close to Confederate territory for almost a year.”
She didn’t want to think about what Hiram had been doing, so she ignored Luke’s comment. “You see anything in those optics?”
“Yes.” He didn’t turn from the scope.
“Don’t be mean.” She meant to sound angry, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Have you seen Muha?”
“Yes.”
His tone made it clear he had no plans to offer anything more. He didn’t need to. Poor Muha. Everyone associated with her, with this place, had met their deaths. Her mother. Her brother. Hiram. Up until today, her father.
Up until yesterday, she had counted Luke among that number.
It was too much to take. She felt awfully close to breaking, and damn it, she would not let Luke Bradshaw bear witness to that.
Leafing through the papers, she found what they’d come for. A large envelope, with the Pinkerton Agency’s San Francisco address in the upper left hand corner. Opening it, she found a list of numbers, the name of a bank in Deseret, and a map with an area in Shoshone territory circled. Next to the circle was written the word laboratory.
She shoved the papers into the pocket of her jacket and felt along the bottom of the desk for the latch that would open the locked drawer. When she found it, and the drawer sprang open, she had to suppress the urge to cry.
Her father’s notes were gone. Not that he kept detailed notes anywhere but in his head, and the notes he did keep were so cryptically written no one but those intimately familiar with him would be able to make any sense of it.
But they were gone.
She rocked back on her heels. If her father hadn’t removed them, then the only person who would have had an idea of where to look would be Hiram. And why would he keep bothering her about her father’s papers if he already had them? Why did he need her?
Maybe they didn’t have the notes. Or maybe no one else could decipher them.
“What’d you find?” Luke turned to her.
Someone knocked on the vault door that led to the main house, the sound thundering in her father’s study.
He froze, his hand on his bag, the tension clearly visible in his face.
“Nothing. We can go now.” She shut the drawer. “Don’t worry, they can’t get in here. Can’t hear us either. It’s fine.”
Luke’s eyes narrowed as he watched the vault door. “There’s always a way in. Just depends on how much damage you’re willing to accept.”
She shoved past him and looked into the optics. Three men milled around her sitting room, were joined by a fourth, and then filed out the front door.
“Hey, it looks like they’re leaving, Bradshaw.” Turning, she discovered Luke closing one of the drawers of her father’s desk. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
Liar. She almost told him so.
“Wait. They’re leaving?”
“Yeah, it looked like it.”
He moved her aside and took the optics, watching them for a moment. “Shit. Get down, Jess!”
“What? Why?”
He grabbed her around the waist and flung her to the floor behind her father’s massive desk, and she shrieked in angry protest. He threw himself down on top of her, and she screamed in pain at the pressure on already bruised ribs. Luke shoved her underneath the desk and covered the exposed parts of her body with his, his elbows on either side of her face. His cheek against hers, he covered her free ear with his hand.
His hand on her face, his body on hers. A long buried memory flashed behind her eyelids of what he’d done all those years ago when the city had been shelled. How he’d protected her that day. How he’d stayed and grieved with her—with them—during the horrible time that had come after.
Heat zinged through her and sizzled all the way down to her core, just as it had when she had been a girl of sixteen.
Luke.
It was her last thought before the room exploded in a brutal flash of noise and fire.
Chapter Seven
Jessie didn’t know how long they lay like that, as he covered her body with his and debris rained down around them. Confused and disoriented from light blindness and the ringing in her ears, she hadn’t recovered before Luke dragged her to her feet.
She heard mumbling from far away, and Luke turned her so she faced him fully. He gave her a litt
le shake, shoved his six-shooter into her hands and said something she couldn’t hear and didn’t comprehend. Her fingers curled around the grip, and she tried to focus on his face, the only thing she could really see, his presence the one thing she understood.
For the first time in a long time, she had no plan, and no idea what to do.
She could only hope Luke had one.
Beneath her feet, the floor pitched and rolled.
Dark smoke billowed from a gaping hole where the vault door had once stood. It had been blown off its hinges with such force it had crashed into the opposite wall. Flames engulfed an entire wall, and more smoke poured into the study from another fire in the hallway.
No, no, no.
The hatch couldn’t be opened unless the vault door was closed and locked. It was an adjustment her father had made after Gideon or Jessie had left the vault door open once too often.
No chance of closing it now. The only way out was through the fire and into the main house, where at least four armed men lay in wait.
“We’ve got to go that way!” she yelled to Luke.
He mumbled something back.
“That way!” She motioned up the stairs. “The hatch won’t work!”
His expression bland, he turned her toward him, and she saw, rather than heard, him say, “Shut the fuck up.”
Shocked, she did just that.
Luke shoved in front of her and took a large, black clockwork carbine out of the satchel he had slung across his back. With two tubes on the top and the barrel underneath, the weapon looked like an oddly shaped triple-barreled rifle. He wound a lever on the side of the gun, brought it to the ready position—in close to his body, his eyes looking over the sights—and pushed a numbered dial on the weapon forward with his thumb.
Something about the switch brought to mind Jessie’s own protections. She turned to her father’s desk, crawled underneath, and pulled the lever to fire the gun on her roof. She twisted the lever from left to right, up and down, maneuvering the weapon as she fired blindly into the dark.
Maybe it would discourage the men outside from coming back in.
Luke grabbed her arm and yanked her after him. Toward the stairs. Toward their attackers and their only way out.
With a combination of relief and terror, Jessie realized he had heard her. Relief that he had a plan. Terror to realize his plan meant they’d be running a gauntlet of Confederate soldiers.
He motioned for her to follow him, his expression set and hard. Serious. A man who had one singular intent, would take no prisoners and brook no dissent. He mounted the weapon to his shoulder and crept up the stairs into the main room.
For some reason, Luke’s apparent lack of fear in the face of such danger scared her more than exploding doors, more than the Confederate soldiers lurking in the darkness.
She stuck to his back as he slowly opened the door into the hallway upstairs.
Without removing his hand from the gun, he gestured to the stairs with two fingers, his movements clipped and economical. He silently told Jessie she was not to move until he came back for her. His eyes were so intense she didn’t argue.
She had been with some dangerous men in her time—her grandfather and his warriors the first among them—but she had the distinct impression Luke was the most dangerous man she had ever met.
His disappearance around the corner was quickly followed by two short bursts of the rapid rat-a-tat-tat she associated with her Gatling gun.
Smoke began filling the small stairwell, thick and black as fire consumed the far wall, and with the back of her hand, she wiped sweat from her brow. The pistol Luke had given her hung loosely from her fingers. Her hands were shaking so badly that, even if she had wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to use it.
Thick smoke burned her lungs, and desperate fear built in her chest until she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she peered around the corner, she found Luke dragging the bodies of two men back into her house. In the opposite corner, a dark stain seeped out from underneath a brightly-colored blanket. Muha.
She closed her eyes and fought the urge to lie down beside her and weep.
Luke glanced in her direction. He nodded slowly, stood, took a gun from the hand of one of the men and handed it to her, took his own gun from her and holstered it.
“You all right, Jess?”
No, she was not all right. Two men lay bleeding in her front room, goddammit. Her dog lay dead beneath her mother’s wool blanket. The house was on fire with the two of them inside it.
She may never be all right again.
“Yeah. Never better.”
The corners of Luke’s lips twitched, and his features softened a little. “Good. I need you to hold it together.” He motioned to the bodies on the floor. “Search them for me, will you?”
Jessie stared at him for a moment, carefully avoiding looking at what Luke had dragged in. She’d been pretending they weren’t there. “You want me to go through a dead man’s pockets? And what? Look for loose change?”
Luke huffed a laugh.
She wanted to scream at him for being so calm. Being pursued by Confederate soldiers was not normal. Exploding doors and staying in a house that was on fire was not normal. Killing two men was not normal. This whole goddamn day was not normal, yet here Luke was, acting like he’d asked her to get the paper.
Maybe for him death and danger were normal.
She felt sorry for him if that were true.
She missed the boy he’d been. She hated the man he had become, and what he asked her to do. She hated the way he made her feel.
“Take anything interesting,” he answered finally. As he spoke, he removed cartridges from his belt-loops, inserted them into the tube magazine of the carbine, and began winding the weapon again. “Receipts, identification. Hell, anything that strikes your fancy. I saw four men in the scope, and I can only account for three. I’d like to keep my eyes on the windows and the exits. But if you’d rather be the one holding the gun, you’re welcome to it.” He made the offer lightly, but severity of his expression belied his words.
“Frankly, neither of those options appeals to me.”
“Too bad you have to choose one.”
No sense in arguing now. They were in his world, not hers. She bent to the first body. Her eyes fell to the holes in the man’s chest, the bright stain of blood spreading across his vest, and she gagged.
“Breathe through your mouth, and try to not look at the wound. Don’t think of it as a person. It’s just another thing, like a dress you’d see in a store window.” Luke’s eyes never left the front window. “It will help.”
Jessie gagged again. Gasping, she asked, “How many times you done this?”
His face was an impassive mask. “Enough to know I wouldn’t breathe through my nose if I were you.”
Her eyes watered as she fought the urge to vomit. Opening the dead man’s jacket, she pulled out a pocket watch, some papers, and a fistful of cash. More money than she’d seen in a long, long time.
“Good. We can use that.” Luke studied her for a moment. “It was them or us, Jess. I chose us.”
Tears streaked down her cheeks, her eyes watering from more than simply the sting of smoke. She moved to the other man and went through his pockets, too, ignoring the wounds and the smell. She pretended the man she searched was alive, a sleeping drunk, and the ruby-red stain on his chest was from a broken bottle of port.
Smoke filled her nostrils and her lungs. She turned, saw flames licking the floorboards, and swore.
The boilers would catch fire any minute now, and when they did, her home would go up like fireworks.
“Bradshaw.”
Though he continued to stare at something in the darkness, he gave her a brief nod to acknowledge her.
“The boilers. They’re gonna go. And when they do--”
“Shit.” He turned his head briefly to study the flames. Fire crackled, and something popped. In an instant, Luke was on her, pushing her roughly to th
e floor as the entire back wall became engulfed in flames as though someone had thrown kerosene on it.
When the boilers finally blew in their entirety, this fire now would seem as harmless as a wood fire in the cook stove.
Jessie pushed herself to her knees, and clutched his shoulder. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“There’s at least one other outside. Quite possibly more.”
“We’ll die in here.” Fear rose with the bile in the back of her throat.
“We’re not gonna die. I’ll get us out of here once I figure out where the other operative is.” His voice, like his face, was calm and reasonable. Unperturbed.
Jessie coughed, and it made her ribs hurt. “The boilers are gonna go. I can’t die in a fire.” Memories, ghosts of a past long left forgotten, flooded her, burning beneath her breast. Exhaustion pulled at her hard, and her voice wavered. “I’d rather be shot.”
“I wouldn’t be so worried about getting shot, if I were you,” Luke said. “I’d worry more about what they’re going to do to you once they finally get their hands on you. They have plans beyond your murder. If you die in this gunfight, it’s a happy accident for you and carelessness on their part.”
The tears pouring from her eyes were not just from the sting of smoke, and she coughed again. “Don’t let me die in a fire.”
Abruptly, Luke turned toward her.
She shrieked, terrified he intended to honor her request and do the deed himself.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” he said sourly. He looked back in the direction of the flames. “Guess we’re going to have to go out the front.” He paused for another moment. “Do what I tell you. Do only what I tell you. Don’t try to help me in any way. You worry about you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, the gentleness of that touch shocking in the face of such brutality. “I’ll get you out of here, Jess. You’re not dying tonight.”
His words sounded like a promise, and she believed him. It was the first thing she’d believed in a long time.
“I need you to set off the flash pots outside.” His voice was as calm as a desert lake on a windless winter day.
Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) Page 8
