Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

  After a few moments the door opened a crack and Mei-Xing said, “Too late. Come back tomorrow.”

  Jess ignored that and pushed his way inside. The hallway was lit by lanterns that cast a dull red glow. Then Dr. Sun’s voice, low, unhurried, came from an open door to Jess’s right.

  “Good evening, Jess,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I wondered when you’d come. Please, enter my parlor, as the spider said to the fly.”

  Wary of a trap, Jess drew his Colt and walked to the open door.

  “Come in, come in, Jess,” Dr. Sun said. “Old friends like us need not stand on ceremony.”

  The physician wore a dark blue robe embroidered with stars, moons and other celestial objects. His sword lay on a table nearby.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” Jess said. “I want you to sign a confession that you murdered Lillian Burke. That’s just one of your crimes, Doctor, but it’s enough to hang you.”

  “Is that all, Jess? My, you set your sights low.”

  “Will you sign a confession?”

  “Of course not,” Dr. Sun said. “Me hang for killing a slut? I don’t think so. Besides, how can you even prove such a thing?”

  Jess nodded, his face grim. “I can’t. That’s why I will execute you tonight, Doctor, save the hangman a task.”

  Dr. Sun spread his robed arms. “I have no gun, Jess. You are contemplating cold-blooded murder indeed. And for what? I planned to give the woman you mention the world, the entire world. I would have taken her back to China, where she would have been a great lady with a fine house, servants, carriages, expensive clothes, all the things a woman craves. But then, one night after we had a minor quarrel, the slattern became angry and told me she’d slept with many men, one of them a black man. A black man! After that, how could I let her live?”

  Jess said nothing, the Colt steady in his hand.

  “Are you deaf as well as stupid? Answer me. How could I let her live?”

  “You nailed Lillian to a cross,” Jess said. “That was obscene.”

  “Whimsy, dear boy. I had it done in a moment of whimsy, that’s all. It was a moment of self-indulgence that I rather regret now. It was far too theatrical, but no more than she deserved.”

  Dr. Sun poured himself wine from a decanter and stood with the glass in his hand. “Yes, Jess, I tried to have you killed several times, because I thought you might interfere with my plans. But recently I’ve come to appreciate your finer qualities. With you beside me and Wilson Tucker’s gun we can rule this town and grow rich in the process.”

  “Tucker is dead,” Jess said.

  For the first time that night Dr. Sun seemed shaken. “You killed him?”

  “Me and Luke Short. It was a joint effort. I had empty chambers in my gun.”

  “How remiss of you. Well, no matter, we can hire other gunmen. But first we must get rid of Koenig and Short and take over their share of the opium business. Then I will introduce the wonderful new drug. Do you know what dope fiends will pay for their . . . what do they call it? . . . ‘ticket to heaven’? A fortune! We’ll be rich, Jess, you and me.”

  “Did you murder Addie Brennan in her bed to keep her quiet about who really shot her?”

  “Ah, you wish to speak more trivia. No. I’m not that crude, Jess. I hired Norman Arendale for that. He’s a former actor, a murderer of some repute. And you don’t have to worry about Dorothy Mills, the shop girl I bribed.” Dr. Sun smiled. “This will make you laugh. Arendale took the same train as she did. I rather fancy that dear Miss Mills’s dream of fame in the theater came to an abrupt halt somewhere between here and the locomotive’s first wood-and-water stop. We will use the talented Mr. Arendale again, of course, you and I.”

  “Sign the confession, Dr. Sun,” Jess said. “Don’t make me kill you.”

  “You won’t kill me, Jess. I can see in your eyes that you don’t have the belly for it. Stick with me, become rich, travel with me to China if you wish and become a great lord. The life path ahead of you is paved with gold, Jess. And women! Do you know you can buy a beautiful girl in China for the price of a cow?”

  “Sign the confession,” Jess said.

  “Then I was right the first time. You’re an idiot, Jess. You’re worse than the slut Lillian Burke. I have destroyed many people, young and old, in this benighted city and now, alas, I must destroy you.”

  Jess felt the knife plunge into his back between his shoulder blades and at first there was no pain; only moments later did it begin to throb. He felt his knees go weak and for a moment he thought surely he’d fall. Dr. Sun, his sword raised, advanced on him, the glittering blade held high for a killing stroke. Jess shoved his Colt out in front of him and fired. A second report sounded at the same time. Someone else was firing. Dr. Sun staggered back and the sword dropped from his hand.

  “No more, Jess!” he said. “I can give you the whole world.”

  “This is for Lillian Burke and an old lady called Dixie,” Jess said. Pain and shock drove him to his knees, but he worked his gun. He pumped bullet after bullet into Dr. Sun, firing after the man was dead. Reload, Luke had said. Well Dr. Sun had taken six shots to the chest and belly and now he bled out on the floor like a felled hog.

  “He’s done, Jess. Let him be.”

  A hand dropped on Jess’s shoulder. He turned his head and saw Nate Levy, a Remington derringer in his hand. “The girl stabbed you and I done for her.” Then, tears in his eyes, Nate said, “I think you’re gonna die, Jess.”

  “The hell I am,” Jess Casey said before darkness descended on him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Jess Casey woke to sunlight.

  He opened his eyes and saw the radiant face of a beautiful woman staring down at him. “I guess I beat the odds and made it to heaven, huh?” he whispered.

  “No, you didn’t, General Custer, you’re in hell, at least a half acre of it,” Destiny Durand said.

  “Are they going to hang me?” Jess said. “I shot a man, emptied my gun into him.”

  “Hang you? You’re a hero, cowboy. You’re the man who killed Dr. Sun, the Demon Doctor of Doom Street.”

  “There is no Doom Street in the Acre,” Jess said, puzzled.

  “Well, there sure as hell is now,” Destiny said. “Joe D’Arcy, the newspaper editor, got Mayor Stout to name an alley near Sun’s house Doom Street. D’Arcy said he needed it for his front-page headline. Here, let me help you to sit up. You lost a lot of blood.”

  Once Jess was settled, Destiny said, “You’ve been out for three days. Kurt and Luke Short came to visit and Luke said he won’t even think about killing you until you get better.”

  “Nice of him,” Jess said.

  “Luke brought you black grapes but Nate Levy ate them, him being an invalid and all.”

  “Nate shot the girl . . .”

  “Mei-Xing? Yes, I know he shot her. She was the one who stabbed you. Nate just winged her. To save her own neck she spilled her guts about Sun strangling Lillian Burke and all the other people he had murdered.”

  “I went to his house to murder him,” Jess said. “I knew I couldn’t prove anything against him, so I went there to kill him.”

  “A lawman with a knife in his back killing another man coming at him with a sword is hardly murder. In the Acre they call that self-defense. In the Acre they call most killings self-defense.”

  Destiny rose and walked to the hotel room table. In the fashion of the time her bustle was huge and her dress rustled. She brought a basket back to the bed and said, “Cheese, soda crackers and a bottle of wine. Kurt said you’d be hungry when you woke up.”

  “He’s right about that,” Jess said.

  “Then I’ll leave you to eat,” Destiny said. “Do you need a chamber pot?”

  “Ask me that after I drink the wine,” Jess said.

  “By the way, Custer, your doctor was young Dr. Alan Barclay. Kurt says he’s brilliant and an expert on knife wounds.”

  “Then I’ll thank him later,” Jes
s said.

  “You won’t, not when you see his bill,” Destiny said.

  * * *

  Jess had just finished eating when Kurt Koenig stepped into the room. “How are you feeling, Sheriff?” he said.

  “All right, I guess,” Jess said. “I was stabbed in the back.”

  “I know. The little Chinese gal almost done for you.” Koenig laid a paper sack on the table beside the bed. “I brought you some black grapes,” he said. “They’re good for invalids, or so they say.”

  “Where is Luke Short?” Jess said. “He brought me grapes but Nate Levy ate them.”

  “He won’t visit you again. Luke’s hypocrisy only goes so far.”

  “Kurt, don’t reopen the Green Buddha,” Jess said.

  Koenig smiled. “Even on your deathbed you’re still on the job. To set your mind at rest I won’t. I’m tearing it down. Too many ghosts of dead people in there thanks to Sun, one of his more bloody attempts to put me out of business, the scurvy swab. But the good news is that I plan to rebuild and keep the original name.”

  “What will it be?” Jess said, brightening.

  “An opium den, of course. The Green Buddha lives again.”

  “Kurt, I’m warning you, I plan to end the opium trade in Fort Worth, starting with the Acre,” Jess said. “Nothing has changed.”

  “I thought you’d had a bellyful of the peacekeeping business and planned to quit,” Koenig said. “That’s what Nate Levy told me.”

  “That was true, but lying here thinking about it, I plan to stick, make the Acre a decent place for people to live. Until the opium trade is gone that’s not going to happen.”

  “Then we’re destined to butt heads, Jess, because I ain’t about to lose a big chunk of my income and neither is Luke.”

  “Can we agree to be enemies?” Jess said.

  “If that’s the way you want to play it.”

  “My mind is made up on that. I have to take a set against you and Luke,” Jess said. “There’s no other way.”

  “The Acre isn’t big enough for the three of us, huh?”

  “That’s the way the pickle squirts.”

  “You know I want to make you a partner,” Koenig said. “And I mean a full partner in all my businesses, opium and morphine included.”

  “So did Dr. Sun.”

  Koenig smiled. “Then it’s war to the hilt, I guess,” Koenig said. “Once you’re on your feet again, of course. I can’t shoot a gentleman who is lying abed sick as a poisoned pup.”

  “Sorry it has to be this way, Kurt,” Jess said.

  “Don’t be sorry. A man does what his conscience tells him to do. That’s how it works for you and it’s how it works for me. And for Luke Short, come to that. He has a conscience of sorts.”

  Koenig stepped to the door. “One thing you can be sure of, Jess, we won’t stab you in the back. Now shooting you in the belly, well, that’s a whole different matter.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Jess Casey thought something was afoot when Nate Levy insisted that he shave and trim his mustache. His suspicions grew when Nate produced a ditto suit in the loud check the little man favored but Jess certainly did not. Along with this came a plug hat, shirt and tie.

  “I bought the suit from Aaron Goldberg’s used clothing store,” Nate said. “I gave him an idea of your size and he said this fine garment will fit you like a glove.”

  “Hell, Nate, I’m not wearing that,” Jess said. “What’s the big idea?”

  “You’ll wear it today, General,” Destiny Durand said. “And after that you need never wear it again, just your usual rags.”

  “It’s for your own good, boy,” Nate said. “You have to make a good impression. Now let’s get you dressed.”

  “A good impression for who?” Jess said.

  “For whom,” Destiny said. “You’ll find out shortly. Now put on that suit and I’ll turn my back until you get the pants on. I’ve never seen a naked man before.”

  “If I didn’t feel so damned weak . . .” Jess said.

  “Do it, Sheriff, or I will look at you with your pants off,” Destiny said.

  The suit fit where it hit and when Jess tried on the hat it promptly fell down over his eyes. Nate solved that problem by stuffing newspaper into the sweatband and then he stepped back to admire his creation.

  “You look like a young royal prince,” Nate said.

  “You look adorable,” Destiny said, smiling, her joined hands pressed to her cheek.

  “I look like an idiot,” Jess said. “What’s all that noise?” He made to step to the window, but Destiny stopped him. “No, don’t look out there. You’ll spoil the surprise,” she said.

  Jess said, “What kind of surprise. Am I getting my picture made?”

  “Something like that,” Nate said.

  Kurt Koenig opened the door and stuck his head inside. “The adoring populace awaits their hero,” he said.

  “Then let’s go,” Nate said.

  * * *

  The street outside was crowded, the focal point a lanky sorrel horse wearing Jess’s saddle. Mayor Harry Stout, beaming, held the animal’s reins. As soon as the City of Fort Worth Brass Band caught sight of Jess, a clash of cymbals preceded an enthusiastic if ragged rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and the crowd joined in, singing the words.

  The mayor handed the reins of the sorrel to a minion, advanced on Jess and hugged him ferociously, much to the sheriff’s embarrassment. “How good it is to hug a real hero,” he said. “I’m quite beside myself with joy.”

  Stout then launched into a politician’s speech, praising himself for his efforts to raise the necessary funds to buy a fine new horse for the hero Sheriff Jess Casey.

  He said, “I could say, ‘Here stands the killer,’ but nay, I will not. I will say, ‘Here stands the avenging angel who smote down the nefarious Demon Doctor of Doom Street in his vile lair.’”

  This brought a cheer and Patrick Burke the brewer held a great handkerchief to his face and sobbed uncontrollably. People patted Jess on the back, forgetting he’d been stabbed there, and caused him considerable pain.

  After speaking darkly of Chinese demons and the Yellow Peril and the vulnerability of American maidenhood—“As if he’d know,” Destiny whispered—Stout produced a flat, black jewelry box and presented it to Jess with a flourish.

  “Made at great expense to this fair city, I am here today, Sheriff Casey, to present to you this fine badge”—he hesitated, then—“made of gold-plated silver!” Again Stout waited for the cheer that duly followed. “I give it to you as a token of our esteem and admiration, a replacement for the emblem that bears the scars of your valor.”

  As the band struck up a spirited rendition of “Bessie in the Barn,” Jess opened the box and saw a fine sheriff’s badge reclining on a bed of red velvet. He showed the badge to the crowd, which roared its approval. Unfortunately the sorrel, alarmed by the noise, reared and bolted and a posse of small boys was immediately dispatched to fetch it back.

  “Fear not, the errant beast will be returned,” the mayor yelled. Then, in a loud aside, “It seems that horses harbor no honor for heroes.”

  That last drew a cheer and Stout rounded on Jess and said, “Well, my boy, this is your day . . . and mine.”

  “Thank you, Horny Harry,” Jess said.

  And the crowd cheered again.

  J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone

  “Print the Legend”

  William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.

  “I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”

  True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I t
hought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, that planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.

  “They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”

  After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in a postapocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.

  Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy the Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. In that respect, I often find myself saying, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)