OCCULT Detectives Volume 1

by Joel Jenkins

  “So, justice that is not blind,” said Crow as he considered the wide-open eye on the reverse side of the medallion.

  “Could have something to do with the Committee of Vigilance.” Rockwell viewed the dead body. “Though why they’d be coming after me, I can’t say.”

  Crow was aware of the Committee of Vigilance. “Don’t they operate mostly inside of San Francisco?”

  Rockwell scratched at his magnificently bearded chin. “That’s what I thought, and mostly against those Sydney Ducks which keep setting fire to the city. Most of the judges and politicians are too crooked to do anything about them; leastwise when they are getting paid to look the other way.”

  “I understood that the Committee was in the habit of dragging the accused before a jury and holding court before deciding what to do with the accused. They just started taking shots at you … without giving you a chance to surrender yourself.”

  “Maybe this fellow was acting on his own initiative.”

  “One way to find out,” said Crow. “I killed a second man behind your tavern.”

  Rockwell’s sharp blue eyes focused on Crow. “I catch your drift.”

  In short order they stood over the dead man behind the tavern and Rockwell pulled open his shirt to reveal a similar brass medallion hanging about his neck. “It seems the Committee of Vigilance has something against me. I figure that gives me two options.”

  “And which option makes the most sense?” asked Crow.

  “To turn tail and run,” said Rockwell. “But then again, I’ve never had much common sense. I think I’ll ride into San Francisco and find out just what the Committee of Vigilance has against me and see if I can’t straighten it out.”

  “And if they won’t listen?”

  Rockwell patted his revolver, which he had holstered at his belt. “I can be very persuasive, Crow. Very persuasive.”

  “I’ll ride with you,” said Crow. “It seems to me that an extra gun might provide an additional amount of persuasion and the ride will give me some time to consider best how to handle Samuel Brannan and the kurdaitcha that has taken over his body.”

  “Eh, so now you’re sure that it’s a kurdaitcha?” questioned Rockwell.

  “I’m only sure of one thing: that when it comes to beings of the outer darkness one can never be sure.”

  6

  Crow and Rockwell paused their horses amidst the clustered tents of the Chicano harlots and migrant gold hunters atop Telegraph Hill and looked down at the San Francisco sprawl—rom the dangerous streets of Sydney Town to Nob Hill, where recently rebuilt structures of brick and wood were going up. The harbor was strewn with ships abandoned by their crews in the delirium of gold fever, and a number of these had been scuttled and salvaged for wood which was used to build some of the lean-tos and shanties that dotted the city.

  Crow’s face was hard and grim as a cool wind whipped off the waters and gusted up the hill, billowing the canvas of the tents and pushing back his dark hair.

  “Something wrong?” asked Rockwell, noting the Indian’s expression.

  “I’ve lost the rifleman’s trail,” replied the Indian.

  Rockwell leaned on the horn of his saddle. “So have I. Too much traffic through these here parts, and the ground here’s too hard, but I reckon if we continued down the hill a bit we’ll pick up his trail.”

  Crow gently nudged his horse forward and it proceeded down the winding trail. He stopped suddenly, when he saw a pinto tethered to a pole just beyond a cluster of four tents, which formed just a few stars of the constellation of tents which covered the hillside.

  Rockwell, likewise, did not fail to see the pinto. “That horse looks mighty familiar, Crow.”

  “You think it might have a sock on its left rear leg?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.” Rockwell slipped off his horse and tethered it to a pole driven into the earth alongside the path.

  Crow, likewise, tethered this horse to the same pole. Then each took a different path toward the pinto, Rockwell threading through a series of tents at the upward slope of the hill, while Crow approached on the path that the horse had used, for now he could again clearly see the prints of its shoes. Just by seeing the prints of the horseshoes Crow could see that this was the horse they had followed from Murderer’s Bar, because the front right shoe had a nick which was visible in the print. So confirming that the left rear leg of the pinto wore a white sock was merely a formality. This was the horse of one of the men who had killed Elvin.

  As they threaded through the other tents, avoiding the staked lines, a few of the occupants, having heard the sound of the tethered horses, emerged from their tents. “I’m open for business, boys!” called a buxom woman with dusky skin and a cascade of black hair.

  Her sister in trade, with rouged cheeks and dark eyes, called from the flap of another tent. “Over here. I can make you a bargain!”

  Crow glanced back and when she saw his face she clapped a hand over her mouth and staggered back into her tent. At first, Crow thought it might be because of his garb she had expected a white man or a Mexican, but instead she had seen the face of an Indian. But then the other harlot began to cry out.

  “It is the el mago pistolero!” She, too, retreated into the imaginary safety of her tent.

  Rockwell halted in front of the tent next to the tethered pinto. “The magic pistolero? It seems you’ve gained quite a reputation for yourself.”

  “No worse a reputation than yourself,” said Crow, for he had heard the name of Porter Rockwell uttered, and often accompanied by a curse word, far and wide. “Part of the problem is I was involved in a gunfight with some immortals on this very hill.”

  “Resurrected beings?” asked Rockwell.

  “Not in the sense of the great and final resurrection,” said Crow. “These were evil folks imbued with unnatural vitality and life.”

  “And where are they now?”

  “Mostly dead,” said Crow, and as Rockwell moved around the perimeter of the tent he ducked to the side and shook the flap of the tent. Immediately, a volley of gunfire punched three holes through the tent flap. It was as Crow had feared: the hawking cries of the Chileno harlots had alerted their quarry and ruined any chance they had at taking him unawares.

  Crow didn’t dare return fire into the tent, without clearly seeing his target, for fear that he might hit an innocent occupant. He fired a couple of bullets into the air, to keep the gunman’s attention, even while he moved behind the pinto, who let out a bray of fear. Apparently, the gunman inside the tent didn’t share the same fear about hitting innocents outside and he fired in the direction of Crow’s gunshots, putting three bullets into the flank of his horse, who let out a scream, jerked loose the pole to which he was tethered and lurched through the forest of tents, knocking down six of them before giving a heaving convulsion and falling down dead.

  Rockwell used this diversion and slit an opening in the opposite wall of the tent with his Bowie knife, and slipped inside. The gunman, who had a bandaged poultice on his scalp where a bullet had creased him, was facing away from Rockwell and emptying the spent shell casings from his pistol. A Chileno woman with wavy hair and a low-cut dress fashioned from burlap sat on the floor, face to her knees and arms wrapped around her head, so she didn’t see as Rockwell slipped up behind the gunman and put a knife to his throat.

  “Drop the pistol or I’ll bleed your jugular.”

  The gunman let his pistol fall to the dirt floor and the woman peered through the tangle of her arms and fingers. She slowly began to scuttle backward toward the slit in the tent.

  She gave out a gasp and changed her direction when she saw Crow step through the same cut through which she was hoping to escape.

  Rockwell offered her a side-eyed glance. “You stay put, Darling. Keep nice and quiet and be cooperative-like and you won’t get hurt.”

  She nodded and Rockwell spun the gunman onto a crate, the slats buckling beneath his posterior as his weight came down o
n it. He saw a pistol in Rockwell’s other hand and peered down the recesses of the dark barrel that was pointed between his eyes.

  “I would like to know,” said Rockwell, “why I can’t even sit down in my own tavern and enjoy a drink without having some penny-ante gunman try to shoot me down.”

  “I…I didn’t mean nothing by it,” said the gunman. “It…It warn’t personal.”

  “I beg to differ,” said Rockwell. “I take it very personal when my bartender takes a bullet, meant for me, in the chest, because the person firing the rifle doesn’t have the guts to get close enough to do the job right.”

  The gunman opened his mouth to defend himself, but he couldn’t seem to find any words that would do the trick.

  “Why did you come gunning for me?” asked Rockwell.

  “You’re famous,” stuttered the gunman. “I’d make a name for myself if I managed to shoot you down!”

  “Yes, you would,” admitted Rockwell, “and then some wet-behind-the-ears puke would come gunning for you and try to shoot you in the back.”

  Crow hadn’t said anything to this point, but now he flipped the brass medallion he had retrieved from one of the dead men, so that it dropped between the gunman’s feet. “If you have any desire to live, tell us the truth. What does this symbol mean?”

  “It’s a symbol that means a person belongs to the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance,” said the gunman from his perch upon the broken crate. “We hunt down criminals and bring them to justice. I was told you was the worst of the worst, Porter Rockwell.”

  “And yet I’ve had the forbearance to keep from killing you, as yet,” replied Rockwell. “Just who was it that told you I was a criminal that was so bad you needed to kill me outright instead of dragging me to trial?”

  “Why, it was Sam Brannan,” said the gunman. “He said that you was wanted for the killing of Governor Boggs of Missouri!”

  Rockwell’s face tightened and his voice was exasperated. “I didn’t kill Governor Boggs. He’s still alive to this day which should prove to anyone with half a brain that I wasn’t the one who took the shot at him!”

  The gunman’s face took on a perplexed expression. “Governor Boggs is still alive?”

  “Yes, may his soul rot in hell.”

  Crow glanced out the slit in the tent. “ I wasn’t aware that Samuel Brannan was behind the Vigilance Committee.”

  Now, it didn’t take much coaxing to draw words out of the gunman. His lips moved freely. “He is one of the founders and asked me to join a secret society within the committee that would go against criminals that not even the rest of the Vigilance Committee would dare touch!”

  Crow’s face was impassive. “So, Brannan told you that Porter Rockwell was such a bad man that he needed to be killed outright ...”

  “I…I didn’t mean nothing by it. It…It warn’t personal.”

  “That’s what he said,” agreed the gunman, “and he impressed upon us how dangerous a man Rockwell was to face.”

  “What other secret killings have you done for Brannan?” asked Rockwell.

  “Men who was threatening to kill him,” said the gunman. “A man doesn’t get to be rich, powerful and influential like Brannan without jealous people wanting to take what’s his.”

  Rockwell snorted. “Or attracting people that will do anything, including murder, to ride on your coat-tails. Brannan got rich by taking what wasn’t rightfully his and treading on any in his way.”

  “Is Governor Boggs really still alive?” asked the gunman.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Rockwell. “Now get up and give me your hands. I’m going to take you in for the murder of Elvin Woods.”

  The gunman was perspiring profusely. The Vigilance Committee was at odds with the corrupt San Francisco officials and they would gladly make an example of a member of the Vigilance Committee with a swift trial and a hanging. “I wasn’t the one that fired the bullet that killed your bartender! It was Mortimer that fired that shot!”

  Rockwell jerked the gunman to his feet and began binding his hands, while Crow kept a gun trained upon him. “I’ll let you argue your case to a jury. Best of luck with that.”

  Crow frowned as he felt a darkness descend upon his mind. He glanced outside the tent again, and saw some of the local denizens of Telegraph Hill had gathered on the winding path and were gesturing in the direction of the demolished tents and the dead Pinto that lay amidst the wreckage of one of them. Still, they had not mustered the courage to approach the source of the gunfire.

  A cursing Chileno harlot and a half-dressed customer were dragging themselves from the wreckage of her ruined tent, but none of this might have caused the troubling pall that had fallen upon Crow’s soul. There was some devilish force at work, but he could not locate the source or cause of the psychic disturbance that he felt. “We need to pony up. There’s trouble coming.”

  “How many men?” asked Rockwell as he cinched the bonds tight around the gunman’s wrists.

  “Not that kind of trouble,” said Crow.

  Rockwell’s brow furrowed. “Then what kind of trouble are we talking, Crow?”

  “Big evil.” Even as Crow said the words a dark mist descended and the earth began to tremble. Outside, the gathered inhabitants of Telegraph Hill cried out in terror and scattered to the imagined safety of their canvas and animal skin tents and ramshackle huts.

  “It’s just a trembler,” said Rockwell. “They have them all the time on the coast. The ground’s unsteady here.”

  Crow could feel icy fingers clawing at his soul. “It’s more than a trembler, Porter.”

  A wicked grin grew on the gunman’s face and with the split heel of his boot he stepped on top of the wide-eyed talisman of the Committee of Vigilance which was still on the dirt floor of the tent. “Sam Brannan swore that nothing would be able to harm us. He said that She would protect her templar knights—her sacred defenders!”

  “There is nothing sacred about her.” Crow widened his stance so that the shaking earth did not pitch him to the ground.

  Rockwell reeled backward and fell on his posterior, and the Chileno harlot began to crawl beneath the back wall of the tent, but when she saw the swirling mists of darkness that descended, blotting out the noonday sun, she gave out a horrified cry and dared not leave the tent. Amidst this, only the bound gunman seemed unshaken by the congealing darkness and the heaving earth. He stood straight, unaffected and unfazed by the turmoil.

  The walls of the tent began to rattle. The earth groaned and the thickening fog returned a moaning cry that chilled the blood in Crow’s veins. The Chileno’s limbs shook and she let out a piercing scream as the darkness reached out and tore the tent away, leaving only the quivering framework and poles, and exposing the four occupants to the chill tendrils of creeping mist which began to close in upon them.

  A frost began to form on Crow’s flesh and he could see ice crawling across the barrel of Rockwell’s drawn gun barrel and forming in his beard. The pitch fingers of mist began to entwine with the Chileno woman’s raven dark hair, turning the locks into a filigree of icicles. She batted frantically at the clutching fingers, but succeeded only in breaking off frozen strands of her own hair, and they scattered across the frozen ground in sparkling shards.

  Only the gunman was unaffected. No grasping fog touched him and no chill touched his flesh or garments. “She takes care of her own! She will crush her enemies! She will rise again!”

  The bitter cold began to seep into Crow’s limbs, numbing his nerves so that he could scarcely feel his own fingers or toes. The cold was growing in such intensity that Crow knew it would be just moments before he was unable to even lift his own feet. So, with the last movements that he could muster from his crepitated limbs he hurled himself at the unaffected gunman who appeared to be immune to the supernatural forces that were assailing them.

  The gunman’s laugh was cut short as Crow smashed into him, the layer of frost that had been forming on the Indian’s hat and clot
hing leaping free as he struck. The gunman was knocked off his feet and went rolling outside the perimeter where the tent had once stood. The cold was unbearable and, lying on the ground, Crow saw the wide-eyed talisman of the Committee of Vigilance sitting on the chill ground, untouched by the frost that was forming on every stool, belonging, or item of cast-off clothing that belonged to the Chileno harlot.

  Rockwell attempted to run from the freeze, thinking that perhaps if he could make it to the trail, gravity and momentum might carry him down the hill, out of the pervasive influence of the dark fog which had descended upon them, and into the natural heat of the day. He took three strides before his numbed legs took a misstep and he fell hard upon his shoulders, casting a spray of broken ice from his duster.

  The scared exhalations of the Chileno plumed into the air, the moisture in her breath turning to frost and falling to the ground. And now that the gunman no longer stood at the center of the tent, his arms grew heavy with hanging icicles and the poultice on his scalp became a cap of ice. Crow reached out toward the untouched talisman, using every bit of will he could dredge from the bottom of his soul to push his fingers forward, so that they crawled toward the shining emblem. Finally the tip of his forefinger touched the emblem and warmth surged through him, chasing away the frigid pall that threatened to overcome him.

  With some feeling and strength returning to his limbs, he clutched the talisman in his hands and rolled to his right, coming up alongside of Rockwell and pressing the brass coin against the Mormon’s flesh. Immediately the ice that covered Rockwell’s duster and hat began to melt away and mighty coughs racked his body.

  Crow had come to Rockwell’s rescue none too soon, for when he cast his eyes back to the Chileno, he found that she was frozen into place. No flesh could be seen and her body was as if carved from a solid block of ice with the greatest of detail, so that every strand of hair and every pore of her skin had been painstakingly reproduced from life. No breath trickled from between those icy lips, no breath heaved her bosom, and no spark of life remained within her.