“But—”
His warning became clearer. “Lady, it ain’t safe. People around here are always on the lookout for someone like you. Scat. Don’t stop to talk. Not to anybody.”
The conversation ended. Taking his advice, I scat—scatted—tripping over a loose floor board on my way out. He’d given me an unmistakable order. Unnerved by the confrontation, I hurried now, certain the hour time limit I’d set with Lorenzo must be up. The street was curiously empty, but I sensed an air of tension, something like when a crowd of people is standing on the sidelines waiting for a parade of circus elephants to pass. Remember, the way everybody senses unleashed power and always hold their breath?
The only person in sight was a man on the other side of the street. He leaned over a horse trough squirting water into it from a hose. I paused a moment to adjust the pins in my hat before, ignoring the bartender’s advice, I crossed over and approached him.
In profile he appeared a little older than I’d thought at first sight and from a distance. He wore a new pair of dungarees and a pale-gray shirt, oddly clean given these surroundings.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “A word, if you please?”
At the sound of my voice, he straightened and faced me.
I’m sure my heart stopped for a single moment. I know I came within a hair’s breadth of fainting.
The man cocked his head as if in question and smiled. When he spoke, his voice seemed loud in the otherwise silent street. “Sure, and I please.”
Instead of stopping, my heart now raced. The man acted as if he’d never seen me before. Was it possible he didn’t recognize me? Should I carry on as though nothing were wrong. Maybe ... maybe I could just walk away.
Turn around, China, a voice in my head said. Turn around and run.
This was the saloonkeeper’s fault, I thought. He’d frightened me into rushing out and committing a mistake.
I berated myself too, in that brief instant. Detectives ought to be able to see through something as small as a change of clothing or venue. I was a complete idiot and I’d failed in my mission.
My voice came out in a croak. “You know what? It ... It’s all right. I’ll go.” I spun on my heel. Took one step. Just one single step.
His fingers gripped my arm squeezing my flesh to the bone. My right arm. My gun arm.
I froze. Oh, he’d recognized me, all right, this man whom I’d last seen following me outside the hotel earlier this morning.
“Take your hands off me.” My throat was so dry my voice cracked.
“Am I the luckiest sonsabitch you ever heard of or what?” Mirth put a gurgle in his speech as he started dragging me away.
Where to? I had no idea, and had no desire to find out. I jerked against his grip, which only grew more fierce. I twisted, I turned, I cursed.
“Two of you in one day,” he explained, my struggles without effect. “Walked right up to me, both of you, like lambs to the slaughter. Les ain’t goin’ to believe his eyes when I bring you in.” Laughter roared, fitting, I suppose, in such a big man. “And neither will the boss. I oughta get a bonus for this.”
“Let me go!” Mind you, I wasn’t simply marching along with him, a beaten captive. My shoes made gouges in the dirt as I dug in my heels.
I screamed, too, with all the breath I had. He didn’t seem to care. Closed doors remained closed.
He may have had my gun arm immobilized, numbed by his strength, but my left was free. So I fumbled at my hat, plucked out the pin—all nine inches of it—and whirling, jabbed the pin toward his eye with a haymaker swing. My hat went sailing.
But he was too tall, or I was too short. Whichever, I had the satisfaction of opening a long, deep scratch down his face and into his ear. The pin hung, jammed through the cartilage.
Very brief satisfaction because, as though someone had turned out my inner lights, pain hit with blinding force and everything went black.
26
Consciousness returned in fits and starts. One moment nothing, the next a bit of bewildered awareness of the kind that asks, “Who am I? Where am I?” at which point one knows they’re alive. Then finally came the memory of being knocked out by a blow to my head. My poor head.
Men’s voices, muffled as though they were talking with hands in front of their mouths, did a better job of bringing me around. I strained to make out what they were saying. Fear grew that something awful had happened to my aural capabilities. If sound can blur, then this did.
“Murphy, you’re a damned idiot.”
Relief! I heard those words clearly enough.
“What were you thinking?” Anger almost palpable, a man’s clipped voice was giving someone a dressing-down. “You shouldn’t have brought her here. It’s too dangerous. That uncle of hers, Howe, and his partner too, they’re like weevils on cotton. They won’t let this go. They’ll keep on looking for her no matter how deeply they have to bore. Did you even bother to cover your tracks? Did anybody see you?”
Icy hot. That’s how the speaker’s words manifested in my brain. And familiar. I’d heard him speak before.
Then the content registered. They were talking about me. And thanks to my slowly returning faculties, I realized that I was inside a structure and they were outside it.
“Nobody along Front will talk, boss. They know better,” a voice like a foghorn said, easier to hear because he spoke loudly.
“Nobody? Are you certain? Don’t forget she’s a lady of means, not some piece of fluff who’ll never be missed. Pay any one of those rogues enough and he’ll squawk like a chicken,” the first voice said. “Just like Billy Banks threatened to do.”
Oh, he was thoroughly upset, all right, but I had news for him. He wasn’t nearly as upset as I.
The next voice belonged to the man who had captured me. “So? We just bury her deeper, somewhere nobody’ll find her. Right alongside Billy Banks. She’s got it coming, too. Look what she did to my face. Damn near put my eye out.”
My whole body shook. They killed the other jockey? Oh, God, I prayed. Please help me. I don’t want to die.
I didn’t get all this dialogue in one straight flow, but in disjointed fits and starts.Their words seemed to go in and out as I listened. Loud to quiet. Hard to soft. Black to white. The pain alongside my head and around my ear made me want to cry.
I scorned the urge and listened harder.
“... not all,” complained the man who struck me as more refined. He paused. “Did you search her? Tell me you at least found the notebook. Dare I hope we can salvage something out of this fiasco?”
I thought I heard satisfaction when the plug-ugly I’d stabbed with my hat pin, the winker from the streetcar this morning who now wanted to kill me, said, “This it?” Paper rustled.
“Idiot!” The epithet—perhaps his favorite when dealing with subordinates—seemed to explode with anger. “Can you even read? Did you even look at this? Of course it’s not it. What is this? An appointment book. Here’s an entry ... it says ...” His voice fell away, before he said, on a note of wonder, “... Mrs. Branston?”
Branston? Shock roiled through me. Could the man speaking actually be—
One man, the thug who’d knocked me out and who was still trying to defend himself, came back cockier than ever. “I looked, boss,” he said, “but she didn’t even have any money to speak of. Couple of bucks is all I found.”
“What’re we gonna do with them?” The foghorn fellow wanted to know. “The detective’s girl. What about her?”
The boss must’ve been thinking over his options because he didn’t say anything for several seconds. A full minute must’ve ticked past before he came up with fresh orders for his gang.
“Les,” he said, “see if you can find the logger fellow, Porter Anderson. Keep an eye on him, but don’t approach. Just follow him, see where he goes. Murphy, you do the same with the boy you saw with the O’Dell girl. When you get a chance, I need you to search through their things. I’ve got to have that notebook.”
“What if we don’t find it?” Foghorn asked. “Want us to kill them?”
“You’ll take care of them if it becomes necessary. If neither Anderson nor the boy has the notebook, I doubt it can be found. Which means—”
The sound level dropped and I lost out on what he deemed necessary.
“But those girls, boss.” Foghorn wasn’t happy. “They know who me and Murphy are. They open their mouths and even your tame bluecoat can’t save us.”
“I’m aware of the danger. This entry in the Bohannon woman’s book. I’m very much afraid it means she knows or guesses who I am, too.”
Well, I certainly did now. I hadn’t at the time I penciled in the lady’s name.
“So what do you want us to do about them?” my captor, Murphy, asked.
I heard no trace of regret when the boss said, “We’ll have to dispose of them, I suppose. Eventually. But only after we either find the notebook or determine it can’t be found. Not by anybody.”
“How we gonna do it?” Foghorn asked.
Just what I wanted to know. Or maybe I didn’t. Logically, the only thing he could do—which he’d already stated in no uncertain terms—did not bode well for Neva or me. Did I really want to know the details? Their voices faded before the boss got around to answering. Footsteps shuffled as they moved away.
It took me a moment to realize I’d actually heard the movement.
I nearly jumped out of my skin as fingers cold as death touched my hand. My eyes, kept closed on the premise it would hurt too much to open them, flew wide. It didn’t do much good.
Blind! Not only halfway deafened, but blind, too.
“Miss Bohannon?” A little voice whispered. “China, are you awake?”
Much as I rued it, I feared so.
“Neva?” I whispered back. “Is that you? Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.”
Relief swept over me. They hadn’t blinded her. The threat had been a ruse.
I soon discovered I wasn’t actually blind either, even if my vision blurred and my eyes felt sandpapered. The main reason I couldn’t see was because the room where we were held was dark as aces. It had no windows and only a closed, ill-fitting door. Gaps around the door allowed some light to enter, as well as sound, which accounted for what I’d overheard.
I shivered. A cold wind blew through the structure, too, carrying a definite aroma of horses.
“Did you hear?” Neva choked. “They killed Billy. Are they going to kill us?”
“Not if I can help it,” I said, much more stoutly than I felt. “We have to get out of here before they come back. Er ... where are we?”
I tried to sit up, only to discover my hands bound up tight. At least they were in front of me, which is, according to Grat, the best way to be tied. He said one could always escape if his—or in this case, her—hands were in the front.
Neva leaned against my back, propping me until I finally managed an upright position. A mistake, perhaps. My head swooned.
“I don’t know where we are,” Neva said. “Some fancy place on the hill south of town, I think. But not in the house.We’re in a shed at the back of the fancy house’s stable.”
“They didn’t knock you unconscious?”
“No. Blindfolded me, but I soon scraped a peephole.”
“Good for you.” I was proud of her, brave child. She sounded strong, though frightened.
“Miss China,” she said, “can you tell me ... do you know ... if Mr. Anderson is all right? Honest, I didn’t mean for anything to happen to him. Lo ... my friend thought Porter was one of those bad men when he saw him following me. It was dark out, you know. But when I saw who we knocked out, we took him to a doctor. Lo ... my friend did.”
I could see better as my eyes grew accustomed to the light—or lack thereof. I rested my head on my knees. One side, the one with my damaged ear where Murphy had struck me, was sticky with blood. Thank goodness I’d changed out of my second-best skirt.
“Porter has a headache,” I told her, “but he’s all right. Even though he is quite angry with you, he’s looking for you, too.”
Porter and I should compare our aching heads, I thought. Only who could we find to judge which of us hurt the most?
“Oh.” Neva’s voice fell to a small squeak. “I’ve caused so much trouble. I hope Lo ... my friend doesn’t get taken. Or hurt.”
I managed to straighten. “For heaven’s sake, Neva. I know your friend’s name is Lorenzo Bassi. We’re all acquainted with him by now. Probably”—I admit to pinning my hopes on this—“including my uncle and Mr. Doyle. Lorenzo has been helping me look for you. He seems a smart boy. He also knows to get in touch with Porter or Gratton when I don’t show up where we agreed to meet at the appointed time.”
“You talked with Lorenzo?” She seemed quite astonished.
“Indeed I did. And with his grandmother.” I recounted my activities of the morning, finishing up with, “So tell me, Neva, how did these people find you? Where did they find you?”
She gulped down a sob. “I don’t know how they found me, Miss Bohannon ... China, I mean. I think ... I think maybe my mother ... or my granddad told the man, the boss, about Lorenzo. They knew he was here, riding for whoever needs a jockey. He’s doing good, too. They know we’re friends, Lorenzo and me ... and Robbie.”
The disconcerting gulping sob came again at mention of her dead brother, but then her spine stiffened. “The boss. They don’t know I saw him, but I did. He’s the one who paid my granddad to throw the race. He’s the reason Robbie got killed and Mercury lamed.” She took a breath. “My mother, she must’ve guessed I’d go to Lorenzo and told the boss where he was camped. He had one of those awful men keeping a watch.”
Her explanation came with bitter emphasis on the words my mother.
“Anyway, I was hurrying to get back to the hotel before daybreak, but what with getting Porter to the doctor and all, I was late. So I took a shortcut. ”
I nudged her. “The same shortcut I took, I expect, looking for you.”
“Along Front Street? Anyway, this man sneaked up behind and grabbed me, threw something over my head so I couldn’t see, and tied my wrists together.” Her head hung. “My fault. All my fault. I’m sorry, Miss ... China.”
“And so am I. I should have been better prepared. We all should have. I just didn’t think far enough ahead.” As my uncle might jump in and say, not thinking ahead was one of my troubles. I hadn’t thought things out, simply barreling in with a damn-the-consequences attitude. For shame.
I shifted my bottom, an effort both to assuage the self-incrimination and because I was sitting on something hard. My pistol, I realized with delighted shock. How had the thugs missed finding the pistol?
Hah! He hadn’t expected a lady to carry a firearm, more fool him. He’d only checked my purse.
“Neva,” I said, my voice lowering. “Do you still have Mercury’s papers and the other things you took from your mother’s cache?”
“Yes. Those men, they slapped me a little and jerked me around while they shouted out questions, but they didn’t look in my boots. They just kept yelling, ‘Where is it, where is it?’ I didn’t know what they were talking about.” Her face loomed up beside me, dark eyes big with earnestness. “But I do now. They want the little notebook my mother stole. And I know they’re not very smart. ”
I choked out a laugh, even though it made my face and head hurt more than ever. “You can say that again. They didn’t search me, either. Just took my purse. We’re going to get out of this predicament, Neva. Right now.”
“We are?”
Didn’t she believe me?
“You bet we are.”
I found it encouraging the men failed to find the book Neva had hidden so securely. While on the face of things discovering Mercury’s whereabouts appeared their goal, and I’m sure he did play a large part in their scheme, we now knew it was the notebook the boss was really after. I ha
d no idea what it contained, but it must have incriminated him in some way.
Neva might give the book up if she thought it would save our lives. Probably not an act in our best interests. On the other hand, she’d fight for Mercury’s papers to her last breath. And if we were to get ourselves out of this mess, she definitely needed to fight.
“Can you stand up?” I asked her, not at all certain I could.
“I think so.”
She put words to action, promptly pulling my propped knees out straight and tripping over them.
Neva swore. I thought she may have been eavesdropping on Porter.
The thugs, we discovered, had tied our ankles together. They hadn’t crossed our feet when they bound them, more fools they. But they had made hobble-like shackles and tied us to each other.
Even so, on Neva’s second try, with an agility I envied, she eased herself to her feet with barely a bobble.
My turn.
Knees first, then I placed my right foot flat on the ground. Whoever tied us had left barely enough slack in the ropes; an inadvertent error, I had no doubt. Slowly, I forced one leg to bear all my unbalanced weight as I struggled upright. Then I stood swaying, heartbeat drumming in my damaged ear, the edges of my vision black until my equilibrium regained itself. It all would’ve been easier if I’d been wearing trousers, like Neva.
When I had my breath back, I said, “We’ve got to get these ropes off. Quickly, before they return.”
“I’ve been trying,” she said. “But they’re tied awfully tight.”
“We have to do it, Neva. Try harder.”
So we did.
The cord they’d used to bind us was more of the kind used for clotheslines than the rope one used on animals. Unfortunately, this made working our hands free all the harder. The finer diameter meant the knots were drawn tighter, no slippage like one might find in a thick hemp lasso.
Neva, her fingernails bitten down to the quick to start with, got no purchase at all. I fared little better. My nails snapped leaving bloodied stumps. Our wrists remained tied.
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