The driver uncorked another torrent of vulgarities.
“Hold on, Aldo,” the shotgun man said. He leaned toward Diana, his scattergun resting on his lap. “How much for how long?”
“Four dollars for ten minutes.”
Once again, Mt. Aldo erupted with expletives.
“Look, lady,” the shotgun man said, “they need this beer at the Bella Union now or, trust me, we wouldn’t be out here at all. We don’t have time for charity cases.”
“Ten dollars for five minutes,” Diana said.
There was no cussing this time. The haggling had begun.
As had the skulking. While the lady distracted the beer men, my brother and I crept up alongside the wagon, Gustav on the driver’s side, I on the other. I was mere steps from the shotgun guard’s back when he whipped around to glare at a gaggle of guffawing passersby that had slowed to take in the show.
“What are you laughing at?” he snapped.
“At the big son of a bitch trying to steal your wagon!” a hoodlum in the crowd crowed. And he pointed right at me.
And he was calling me an SOB?
I lunged and grabbed the barrel of the guard’s scattergun before he could turn around. But the beer man, alerted, had tightened his grip. I couldn’t pry the shotgun away.
The guard and I wound up playing tug of war, me trying to wrench the scattergun out of his hands, him trying to work both barrels up even with my face.
“Heeeyaaah!” someone hollered, and I heard the reins snap.
The wagon lurched forward, and the guard vaulted upward, launched into the air as his seat jerked out from under him. He flew over my head, landing on his back with a grunting thud—and with the shotgun still in his hands.
“Otto, hurry! Get in!” Diana called back from the buckboard as it rumbled up the street. Old Red was hunched over beside her, clutching the reins.
I sprinted after the wagon. It hadn’t worked up to much of a lick yet, and after a few long strides I was able to grab hold of the side and vault up into the bed.
“Y’all get the gun off the driver?” I was about to ask when the pop of a single shot offered the answer.
I felt something warm and wet down run down my ankle.
“Sweet Jesus!” I cried. “I been—”
But I hadn’t. When I looked down, I saw that it wasn’t blood soaking my foot. It was beer.
“You alright back there, Brother?”
There was another pop, and one of the other kegs sprung a leak.
I peeked back at the street.
“I’m fine,” I said. “But you might wanna ask again in a second or two.”
Aldo was little more than thirty feet behind us, giving chase at an awkward side-turned lope, a smoking Colt at the end of his outstretched hand. In addition to the occasional potshot, he was firing off obscenities Gatling-gun fast.
The guard was on his feet now, too, and he scampered after us, shotgun up. He couldn’t fire with Aldo still in front of him—not without peppering his pal with buckshot. But the second the two men drew even, he’d let loose.
“Can’t you get them nags goin’ any faster?”
“Not with all that dead weight back there!” Gustav hollered.
“Hey, who you callin’—?”
Pop.
The barrel next to my head sprung a leak, and beer gushed down onto my shoulder and chest, quickly drenching me. I wriggled around to escape the cascade, ending up pressed against the back gate of the wagon bed. It felt loose, and I noticed it was held in place only by a three-inch peg on a short length of twine. The little bolt danced around in its hole, every bounce over the cobblestones threatening to pop it out altogether.
Well, isn’t that just dandy? I thought. If I’m not shot in the next minute, I’m gonna roll off the back of this buckboard like a . . .
Hel-lo, as my brother likes to say.
I pushed myself up onto my knees and pulled the peg all the way out.
The back gate dropped open.
“Don’t do it, asshole!” Aldo screeched. “Don’t you dare do it!”
I dared anyway: I rolled out the barrels.
The first took a bullet from Aldo’s Peacemaker as I pushed it out. The little spout of beer that poured forth was nothing compared to the geyser when it hit the street.
The barrel disappeared in an explosion of wooden planks and foam.
The second keg actually survived its drop to the cobblestones, and it bore down on Aldo and his buddy fast, a giant skittle ball about to take out a pair of pins. As the beer men threw themselves from its path, I shouted the magic words that would ensure their pursuit was over.
“Free beer! Free beer! Free beer!”
Cheering rowdies rushed into the street, only to be mowed down by the barrels that didn’t bust when they hit. By the time the last keg had been shoved out, Aldo and the shotgun man had disappeared into the waves of hooligans and beer like the Pharaoh’s army being swallowed by the Red Sea.
With the wagon’s load lightened so, we were able to tear over to the waterfront in mere minutes. Of course, mere minutes were all we had, and after abandoning our chariot on East Street, we took the last stretch at a sprint. There was just enough light from the streetlamps out front to espy the time on the Ferry House’s squat clock tower: five till nine.
The usually bustling building was nearly deserted, and we came racing up to the ticket windows inside just as the last clerk was closing up for the night. We all started jabbering at him at once.
“Hold on!”
“Don’t go!”
“Hey! Wait!”
The clerk’s sleepy, half-lidded eyes didn’t open a hair wider.
“Closed,” he said, and he snapped down his window shade.
“This is an emergency!” Old Red shouted. “Matter of life and death!”
The shade stayed drawn.
“We’re detectives!” I tried. “We think you got a killer on the Oakland ferry!”
The shade stayed drawn.
“Four dollars for three tickets,” Diana said.
The shade went up.
The ride to Oakland costs seventy-five cents.
“You see any Chinamen tonight?” Gustav asked as the clerk handed over our tickets.
“I see Chinamen every night,” the clerk said, and once again he vanished behind the black cloth of his window shade.
Diana pointed at an oversized clock hanging from the east wall.
“Gentlemen.”
“Well, of all the goddamned luck,” Old Red spit, while I opted for the blunter but no-less appropriate “Shit!”
It was five after nine. The tower clock was slow.
Another dash took us around to the building’s back doors. Then we were outside again, the cutting breeze off the bay giving me chills as it blew over my beer-soaked clothes.
But my blood suddenly running cold the way it did—that had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the sight of our ferry that did that.
There were no ropes or gangplank to link it to the pier any longer. Just a stripe of foamy water churned up by the turning of the paddlewheel.
The ferry was already a hundred yards out.
We’d missed the boat.
36
MANDARIN STANDOFF
Or, Old Red Goes to the Edge—and We Wind Up in the Middle of a Mess
I waited for the explosion. It was going to be big, I knew. Blow-out-your-eardrums loud.
Gustav took in a deep breath . . . and I fought the urge to put my fingers in my ears.
But then he let the breath go, and there was no scream of rage, no glass-shattering obscenities. He didn’t throw down his hat, stomp his feet or look for something to break. Why, he didn’t even try to take it out on me. He just walked to the edge of the pier as the boat to Oakland chugged off into the darkness of the night.
It almost looked like he was going to follow the ferry, try to walk across the waters after it. Or just drop off the pier like he was walking t
he plank.
I hustled up next to him. Diana did the same on the other side.
Old Red stopped one step from plummeting into the bay. It would’ve been a long fall: twenty feet down to water as cold and black as oblivion.
“We can still check for Hawaii-bound ships,” Diana said softly. “Maybe we were wrong about—”
“No,” Old Red said.
“We could head back to Chinatown,” I suggested. “Try to find—”
“No.”
Diana leaned forward to look my brother in the face, putting herself out over the void in a way that made me sweat even as I shivered in the frigid night air.
“You’re not giving up, are you?”
Gustav refused to meet her gaze. But it wasn’t out of shyness anymore. It was more like she was a mirror he couldn’t stand looking into.
“It ain’t a matter of givin’ up. We just plain failed,” he said. “Failed the doc. Failed the gal.”
“You don’t know that, Brother. Could be Hok Gup’s still stashed away someplace. A prisoner. So many folks after her, who’s to say where she ended up?”
Old Red shook his head. “If she’s on that boat, she needs our help. And if she’s still back there”—he jerked his head to the west, toward Chinatown—“she’s beyond our help.”
“So,” Diana said, “you are giving up.”
Gustav finally looked over at her. “Miss, you can dig in your spurs much as you want, but it don’t change facts. We . . . have . . . failed.”
Then he looked away again, back out at the ferry as it dwindled to a hazy blob of light that shimmered in the gloom like a lonely star. The lady stayed there beside him, following his gaze, and I did the same. It seemed like the first time we’d actually stood still together all day, just the three of us, with nowhere to run to and nothing to run from. Woebegone and weary though I was, I kind of liked it.
Nearby, a buoy bell clanged in time to the lapping of the water against the pillars of the pier. Further out, a boat horn blew mournfully, sounding remarkably like the lowing of herd-cattle bedded for the night. Below us, something stirred in the brine—a big fish or sea lion. Maybe even a shark.
And then another sound blew in on the wind off the water.
Voices. Angry voices.
Gustav and Diana’s heads turned at the exact moment mine did, like we were three ponies in the same bridle.
The pier stretched out into the bay another seventy-five feet, at least, and there were crates and coils of thick rope and what looked like a shack further down, to our right. That’s where the voices were coming from: the very end of the pier. The very end of San Francisco and California and the United States, too, if you angled yourself right. It may as well have been the end of everything. One more step dropped you into the abyss. It was as far as you could walk without drowning.
And somebody was out there—a few somebodies who didn’t care much for each other, from the sound of things. I didn’t recognize words or even voices so much as tones: a man barking orders, a woman wheedling, another man jeering, and all of them speaking over each other, as if they were competing to be heard.
Old Red, Diana, and I moved toward the sound, walking slowly, wordlessly. Our pace picked up once we were close enough to make out actual words. Not that we understood half of them.
They were Chinese.
“Stop gibbering that monkey talk!” a man snapped. “English only when I’m around!”
It had to be the Coolietown Crusader himself—Sgt. Cathal Mahoney.
“Oh, Charlie just say, ‘Look at fan kwei son of bitch. He still think badge is crown.’ ”
It sure sounded like Scientific.
So that gave us three names on the guest list. The rest we filled in when we peeked around the corner of the shed near the end of the pier. A big, red-tinted lantern hung out over the water from a post, and by its crimson light we could see Mahoney squared off against Scientific and Chinatown Charlie—and Madam Fong and Big Queue, to boot.
The latter held a familiar-looking gun in one massive hand: Doc Chan’s derringer. It was easy to see how the hatchet man had come to have it. All you had to do was look where he was pointing it—or, to be more precise, look at who he was pointing it at.
Facing the others, their backs to the bay, were two Chinamen in dark business suits and bowlers. One was tallish, sunken-eyed, pale, with the saggy-prune look of a man who’d recently lost more weight than was good for him. Fat Choy, I had little doubt. His left hand was wrapped around his right wrist, seemingly nursing a fresh sprain—like the kind you get when a bigger man twists a gun from your grip.
The other fellow was the highbinder’s opposite in every respect—short, bespectacled, dark-skinned, bulky, with cheeks as round and smooth as a pair of peaches. His neck and hands were surprisingly slender, though, giving the man an altogether feminine air that made a lot more sense once I realized he was, indeed, altogether feminine.
He was a she. We’d found the Black Dove at last.
I stared at her hard, studying her, searching beneath the eyeglasses and bowler and bulging men’s clothes for the great beauty men had killed for. I couldn’t see it. The Black Dove looked more like the Overstuffed Turkey, and all I found in her face was fear.
She was cowering half-behind Fat Choy, peering around at Mahoney and the others with the same look of bewildered desperation a treed coon gives the baying bloodhounds below it. Fat Choy was keeping his left elbow jutted out over her chest, but it was impossible to say if he was trying to protect her or fixing to knock her backwards off the dock.
Madam Fong turned toward the girl and said something in Chinese, her voice as smooth and cool as fresh-churned butter.
“I said English, dammit!”
The madam looked over at Mahoney—as did Big Queue beside her. She smiled. The hatchet man scowled.
“I just told her not to worry, that’s all. If she comes home, everything will be OK. We can fix whatever needs fixing.”
“Hok Gup has no ‘home’ with you,” Scientific said.
“She still belongs to the Kwong Ducks.”
“Not anymore, she doesn’t,” Charlie said. “You sold her.”
Madam Fong flicked a sneer at Charlie, her smile disappearing for the one second she bothered looking at him.
“Show me a receipt.”
Then she looked back at Scientific, her smile returning. She obviously considered the man an equal—or at least a worthy adversary.
“What claim do you have on the girl?”
“She belong to Gee Woo Chan. He owe Little Pete.” Scientific shrugged. “Now I collect.”
“Shut up, the both of you,” Mahoney spat. “I’m the law here. She’s coming with me.”
Scientific held his hands out toward Hok Gup and Fat Choy, palms up. “Why you not take, then? Why stand here for this talk talk talk?”
“Like I told you when I first got here,” Mahoney said, “before I do anything with those two, I want the rest of you to clear the hell out.”
“Why? So you do what you want to him?” Scientific jerked his head at Fat Choy—then ran a hand lightly over his stomach, which was no doubt bruised grapeskin-purple from the punts Mahoney had put to him earlier. “Or because you afraid we don’t let you leave?”
Mahoney looked as though he’d upchuck if he could actually believe his own ears.
“Afraid that you won’t let me leave?”
Scientific nodded, smirking like he’d just told the pope the one about the priest, the monk, and the nun with the naughty habit.
“Very foolish, you come here alone. Or . . . you have reason?”
Mahoney’s face glowed as red as the lantern overhead, and he snarled out the Curse of Curses. (I’ve heard said curse a million times but have never seen it written anywhere but outhouse walls, so I won’t besmear these pages with it now.)
“The girl’s coming with me,” he went on, and he slipped a hand inside his jacket.
“Stop him.”
I charged out of the shadows and slapped a bear hug around Mahoney from behind before he could draw his iron from its shoulder-holster.
“Surprise,” I whispered in his ear.
Mahoney knew just what to do, I’ll give him that. He tried to elbow my ribs and stomp my toes and bring his heel up into my balls. I just squeezed him tighter.
“I’ll let you go if you promise to play nice,” I said to him.
He dropped his head forward—another classic tactic, given the circumstances. Before he could throw his head back, smashing my nose with his thick skull, I lifted him off his feet and threw him down to the planks onto his tailbone.
He instinctively grabbed his ass and wailed. Which was all the opportunity I needed to bend down and relieve him of his equalizer.
“Oh, ho!” I crowed, enjoying the heft of Mahoney’s stubby Colt Lightning. “I been waitin’ all day to get my hands on a—”
Quick as that, my hand wasn’t on anything. A blur, a jabbing, stabbing pain to my wrist, and the gun was gone.
“You clodhopper shithead!” Mahoney hollered up at me. “You’ve screwed us all!”
Scientific had the cop’s Colt.
I saw now why the little boo how doy had goaded Mahoney so. He’d planned on doing to the detective what he’d just done to me, though probably a hell of a lot rougher. I’d spoiled his fun—and his chance to win back some mien tzu.
He glared at me like I’d just stepped on his marbles.
“Sorry,” I said with a shrug. I looked over at his lackey. “Hey, Charlie. Miss me?”
“Not particularly.” Charlie’s gaze strayed to my left—to Gustav and Diana, who’d followed me out into the open. “You should’ve given up when you had the chance.”
Old Red threw Diana a rueful, sidelong glance.
“I tried,” he said.
That’s when Fat Choy started blathering in high-pitched Chinese. I turned to find the hoppie pointing at us with a long, skeletal finger—and Big Queue pointing at us with Chan’s gun.
“Fat Choy wants to know who you are,” Charlie said, translating for us out of force of habit, perhaps.
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