by Ed Kurtz
She appeared alarmed, and she motioned with her head toward the bar. I pivoted my head a little more to see the two men emerging from the stairwell. They might have been brothers, because they were near-identical in their oiled mustaches, matching square-crowned hats, black cravats, and striped waistcoats. Both men had long frock coats draped over them, but only one was making an obvious attempt to hide the long gun he had underneath his.
At the very least they’d had the forethought to take off their badges, the Pinkerton dumbshits. They still weren’t fooling anybody. The whole populace of the Palace—me, Boon, the waiter girls, the musicians, the bartender, and every rough and rowdy in the place—stiffened up and quieted down at their arrival. Looked like Willocks had told the truth about this much, anyway. Question was: were we found out?
The girl on my lap said, “Best place to hide out is in a room upstairs, if it’s you they want.”
“What makes you think that?” I said.
“You’re here, Johnny Mack. You see any straight fellers here?”
She had a valid point, but it didn’t much help my unease. And when the two Pinks spotted Boon and shared a word between themselves, my unease began its quick transformation into panic.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “maybe you ought to go on up to your room on your own.”
“Ball about to go up?”
“Matter of fact, it might.”
“Good luck, Johnny Mack,” the pretty waiter girl said, and with that she went out like a bird.
The Pinks started their measured pace to the back corner, where Boon sat. She stood up. I went for my knife.
Then the ball went up.
Chapter Thirty-One
Boon’s hands came quickly and gracefully out of her sleeves when the one Pinkerton swept back one side of his frock coat to reveal the sawed-off he had poorly concealed there. He said, “Boonsri Angchuan,” and almost got it all the way right.
“I’m just another China girl,” she said. She wasn’t trying to act the part at all anymore. I got a hold of the hilt in my boot and took the knife out slow.
“How’s about you tell us where your accomplice is and come along like a good girl,” said the other Pink.
Boon half-smiled.
“I never was much good,” she said, slipping her hand into the opening at her hip.
I understood, picked up my feet. Her gown exploded near her right thigh before I reached her. The fabric caught fire and the Pinkerton with the scattergun collapsed in a haze of blood and gunsmoke. Two or three of the sporting girls screamed. Most everybody ran for cover, or at least those who weren’t heeled themselves and raring to join the mayhem.
Flames licked up Boon’s front, eating up the silk as she hurried to expand the tear in its side to rip herself free. The fiddler on the platform withdrew a belly gun, a little Derringer, and fired indiscriminately into the fray. I ducked. The dying detective on the floor blew a hole in the ceiling with the shotgun and expired. The remaining Pinkerton growled like a wolf and charged Boon. I meant to put my sticker in his heart, but she was faster. Her gown came apart and she tossed it up, smoking black, and brought the whole burning mass down on the man’s head.
Reduced to her chemise and knickers, Boon raised up the .44 she’d smuggled in beneath the gown and brought the grip down hard on the crown of the man’s skull, even as his hat and collar ignited from the flames. Her unmentionables blackened and skin red as strawberries, she furrowed her brow and took two steps back as the Pink clawed furiously at the silk burning up his head and neck.
“You yellow cunt,” he sputtered, tearing away gown, hat, and collar. His pomaded hair continued to burn, but he did not seem to notice. Even if he had, it would not have much mattered: Boon fired her Colt, and the bullet slammed right through his forehead and out the back of his skull. Half his brains spattered the bar behind him and the bartender hit the floor. It was the last ugly insult that Pink would ever give, and I couldn’t be too fussed about it.
When at first we heard the whistles, neither of us knew quite what to make of the racket. I had never heard such a noise before, and I winced at the pain of it in my ears. It was so shrill and unpleasant. What few people remained in the musty cellar started to scatter, and in watching them move, Boon’s face lightened and her eyes went wide, and she said, “Police.”
I had never seen a policeman to that point in my life, though I had read about them in newspapers. Eastern cities seemed to be lousy with them, organized militias of uniformed men who went about the streets and alleys, staving in heads with their cudgels and clubs. Some stories made it look like there were all-out wars in faraway places like New York City between the gangs and the police departments, some of their battles bloody enough to rank right up there with the Indian Wars in our neck of the woods. You might see a posse in Texas or Arkansas comprising ten or even fifteen men; in the cities there were dozens on top of dozens of these bell-capped killers, the preponderance of them Irishmen by the sound of it, just looking for skulls to crack and practicing their shooting skills on warm bodies.
I was not eager to meet the men with the whistles.
“Back stairs,” I said, though I hadn’t any idea as to where they led, apart from whatever accommodations the working girls kept up yonder.
Boon nodded once, sharply, and I led the charge for the opposite side of the cellar. Boots stamped like hooves down the stairs behind us, but then also in front of us. They were descending upon us from every direction. Only two others remained besides Boon, myself, and the bartender, and those were the melodeon player and the Chinaman, both of whom flattened themselves against walls on either side of the place as if they believed this to make them invisible. Boon thumbed back the hammer on her Colt and I stood still, stupidly, grasping the hilt of my knife and pivoting my head from side to side.
I would go down slashing, but I was fully confident that I would, in fact, go down.
A chorus of voices shouted over one another, and I found myself listening carefully to determine if they were indeed Irish. I couldn’t tell. The first of them I saw, scrambling down from the back stairs, looked like any other white man I’d ever seen. If there was anything particularly Irish about his countenance, I didn’t know about it.
The policeman wore a blue tunic with a star affixed to his breast, and in his hand was a shiny new single-action revolver. I would have been surprised to learn he had ever fired it. The man was younger than me by a decade at least, and his oily hair poured sweat down his brow and cheeks. He looked scared half to death, and his comrades who quickly followed him into the cellar did not appear much braver or more experienced.
“What is going on here,” said the first policeman. “We have heard there is shooting in this place.”
Boon leveled her .44 at his chest and said, “You have heard correctly.”
One of the other officers let out a squeak and jabbed his gun in the air at the half-immolated corpse of the Pinkerton on the floor. All three of them twitched their noses at the smell of it, which I did not notice.
“This woman is almost naked,” said the one who first noticed the body.
“It is a whorehouse,” said the first man, annoyed.
I said, “She ain’t no whore, you shit-headed pig.”
Boon said, “Shut up, Edward,” and kept her Colt on the “coppers,” as I understood them to be sometimes called.
Neither the melodeon man nor the Chinaman moved, and I was damned if any of the policemen saw them at all. The barman, however, peeked his head up from behind the bar, and the first officer barked at him.
“Out here with your hands up,” he said.
The barman complied, looking for all the world like he was fixing to start crying, when the rest of the squadron poured in from the front stairs. We were fairly surrounded then, and with only Boon’s Colt and a few bullets to face them down. My knife felt like little more than a knitting needle against so much iron. I slid it back into my boot and waited for Boon to make th
e call.
The barrel dropped by inches, and her face fell, too. She was licked, which I reckoned was the first time she ever was. I stood there facing her, worrying not so much about whether these men were going to shoot anyway, nor if I was like to get locked up, but that I might not ever see my friend again. An iron collar ’round my neck in Yuma for a hundred years did not sound worse to me than that.
The man leading the charge from the front stairs stepped close, but carefully, his weapon matching every other amongst the policemen. He wore a trimmed brown mustache and his eyes were small and watery.
“You speakee English?” he said.
Boon smiled.
That was when I knew we weren’t licked, after all, but that the situation was about to get messy.
She said, “I speak with this,” and she jammed the barrel of her .44 into the policeman’s belly before squeezing the trigger and blowing bits of his spine clear out his back.
The copper did not cry out, nor did he fire his gun. He merely took several short steps backward, dropped to his knees, and then fell forward on his face. Looking back, I suspect only seconds passed before the shock wore off and the rest of the policemen got to shooting, but in the moment, it surely felt like many long minutes. Whatever the case, there were now seven or eight living officers crowding both ways out, and every single one of them lunged forward, barrels first, and filled the fetid air with lead and smoke.
Boon and I both dropped to the boards at the same time. She held tight to her gun with one hand and used her other to knock the dead officer’s weapon across the floor to me. I caught it and rolled over onto my back to begin sighting down policemen. I shot one, two, three, just like that, and headshots all. Single-actions were nice that way. No need to bother with the hammer. I did not attempt a fourth shot, because I knew three was pushing my luck and half the coppers still standing aimed down and emptied chambers at the floor. I rolled and rolled some more, scuttled under a table and leaped up, knocking it over on its side and using it for cover while I spent the final two rounds available to me. One entered a fellow’s ear, the other only flew into another man’s thigh. This latter policeman mewled like a heifer birthing a foal, and the wound jetted blood like a geyser.
I hurled the empty gun at him and it struck him right in the mouth. He spit blood and broken teeth and staggered for the stairs. I pulled my knife and searched through the acrid gunsmoke and flailing limbs for Boon.
She had made it to the bar, which served as a considerably better barrier than my table. Bottles and glasses exploded behind her from the volley of bullets sent her way, and not a few punched right through the wood, only missing Boon due to blind firing. It aggrieved me to see such fine spirits go to waste and I wished for another pistol to revenge it all.
Boon had it well in hand. She emptied every chamber into the throng of blue tunics and plug hats, ducked to reload with sure and steady fingers, and popped back up again to resume fire. This method took more time than the first portion of the gunfight, but one by one she took our aggressors down until only two remained on their feet, and these two retreated to the stairwell to shoot around the corner without so much as looking where they shot.
For the time being, the back stairwell was clear. I signaled at Boon, waving my arms at our escape. In so doing, I realized that the Chinese fellow had vanished and the melodeon player was dead. Boon hurried out from the bar, stooping to scoop up a dead policeman’s revolver along the way, which she pressed into my hand when she reached me.
“Obliged,” I said, and together we rushed for the back stairs.
We tromped up, sagging, creaking step by step, from the smelly subterranean Palace to what I suspected to be the cribs for the whores above. And I was right about that, too—the whole back half of the ground story was partitioned into small quarters by dirty sheets strewn from the ceiling, a single cot in each. Most of the girls had lit out, probably at the first shots, though two or three still milled about in search of sufficient clothes for their flight. So, too, were there more of San Francisco’s police department officers, and emerging from their midst, right up the middle of the floor, was a tall, pale man with iron-gray hair, a pointed beard to match, and a dandified striped suit.
The gray man stopped some ten feet away from us and, casting glances at the assembled police, sucked a deep breath in through his nostrils which he pushed back out through his mouth.
Where teeth should have been inside that mouth, the gray man sported instead two rows of gold plates that gleamed in the lantern light.
Boon squeaked like a mouse at sight of the man I reckoned to be Arthur Stanley.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“You people have caused me a lot of trouble tonight,” said the gray man with the golden teeth. He studied me closely, then slowly permitted his dull, gray eyes to turn slightly toward Boon. “I do not allow chinks here except those working for me, but as you will not survive the night, I suppose I will let it pass.”
He grinned broadly, his grotesque mouth of gold making it fair hard to look at.
I said, “That’s him, ain’t it.”
“That’s him,” Boon said.
“Not the one we expected.”
“No.”
“Figure Willocks knew what he was sending us into?”
“Seems like.”
“Well, shit.”
“Used to be,” Stanley said, spreading his arms, “in the old days, you understand, the Vigilance Committee would take you out of here and hang you from the yardarm before sunup. These days we’re a little more civilized here, I’m somewhat sorry to say. Man is a savage animal when you cut to the bone, and I find too much civility sells him too short.”
Tears spilled from Boon’s big brown eyes, but she did not blubber or anything. She was dead still and quiet as a corpse. The Colt stayed in her hand, though she kept it at her side, pointed at the floor. I expected her to take her chance then and there, fire once and make it count, but she did not move. For a minute, no one did. It was eerie and my head swam.
In his clipped, English accent, Stanley said, “Anyway, the rest is up to you, I suppose. How civil you wish this to be, I mean. These men will lose no sleep cutting you down here and now, the both of you, for what you have done in the cellar. However, it needn’t be that way, and you are full within your rights to lay down your arms right here and right now, whereupon you shall be escorted to the county jail to await trial, provided no lynching parties take it upon themselves to break you out and string you up like the trash you both most undoubtedly are.”
I said, “This man uses too many words to get a point across.”
Boon said, “Shut up, will you.”
“What will it be?” Stanley pressed. “My Palace is a shambles and I’m short of time for it.”
“Do you know who we are?” I asked him.
He tilted his gray head and bunched up his pale brow, looking me over again.
“Killers,” he said after a bit. “Assassins come up from Texas. About that business in the Hill Country, I should think.”
“Heard about that,” I said.
“Wadsworth,” Boon said.
“I remember.”
“Not our business.”
“It ain’t,” I agreed. “Do you often have assassins pestering you, Mr. Arthur Stanley?”
“I am old and I though I am not rich, I have made and lost fortunes many times over,” he said. “It is my experience that wealth cannot be accumulated without some men losing something, which leads to all degrees of enmity. I have enemies the world over.”
“How about Connecticut?” I said.
“Or Siam,” said Boon.
The policemen behind and beside Stanley got to fidgeting, bored with all the talk and desiring either action or retirement—but the Englishman his own self turned still paler as the import of our few words found purchase in his brain.
“My God,” he said. “Christ Jesus in Heaven.”
“Do you think he’s got it?�
�� I asked Boon.
She ignored me, her eyes fixed on her father. He stepped forward two paces, stopped again. Narrowed his eyes at her. He shook his head and blinked several times. Then he turned his attention to me.
“I will tell you something, son,” he said. “If you sire enough bastards and mongrels, it is inevitable that some small number of them will come looking for you, and you can be just as certain that one or two has murder on his—or her—mind.” He showed his strange golden plates again, licking them. “Now you tell me, child: might you be the mongrel Pimchan birthed?”
“Pimchan is my mother,” she said, sidestepping the insult. Cleverly, I thought.
“Bully for you,” said Stanley. “But you have no father.”
With that, he rose and dropped his right arm and turned to melt back into the throng of coppers, who were delighted to a man that the moment for talking was over and the time for action was begun. I raised my pilfered pistol, but before I could squeeze off a shot, Boon shouldered me out of the way and I stumbled back into the stairwell, where I promptly tumbled down to the cellar. On the way down, I heard two shots, and when I collided with the floor there came three or four more. Boon cried out, and feet stomped rapidly down after me. The gun had flown from my hand and I scrambled about in search of it, realizing too late how stupid this was for there were several other guns belonging to most every corpse in the cellar from which I could choose. By this time, though, Boon was upon me, hoisting me up and shouting, “Go, go!”
I got to my feet and sprinted for the front stairs, Boon ahead of me and voices shouting behind me. In the last moment before we plunged into the darkness of the front stairwell, I saw that her chemise was spattered red in the back, oozing blood from beneath her shoulder blade. She was shot.
