Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The next part of the climb was safely hidden from the widow’s walk but exposed to anyone who might step out onto the lawn, so he moved up the wall as quickly and quietly as he could. The quarried stone had been crudely cut, and his shoes dislodged cascades of pebbles, an unavoidable noise, though the street sounds helped to conceal it. Jesse was obliged to freeze in place when one such pebble rang against a pane of greenhouse glass below him. The guard paused, peered into the shadowed garden, and eventually went back to his rounds—no harm done, but it cost time.

  Jesse’s arms and thighs were burning with fatigue by the time he gained the lower end of the sloped roof, but from there he made fast progress: across the shingles to the place where the widow’s walk met the wall, a quick vault over the ironwork railing, then he was behind Candy’s guard, who sensed his presence and began to turn at the same time Jesse put an arm around his throat and tightened it into a choke hold he had learned in his City training.

  Jesse’s father had taught him never to kill an enemy, unless his enemy was the kind of snake that could be rendered harmless no other way. Jesse figured all of Candy’s hatchetmen qualified as snakes. He wrestled to the man to the floor and planted a knee on his back and wrenched the man’s head sideways until something broke. When he was sure the man was dead, he took the guard’s revolver and added it to his own arsenal, consisting of a Glock tucked under his belt, spare clips in one pocket of his pants, and a flash-bang grenade in another—everything he could carry without weighing himself down or leaving Elizabeth defenseless.

  Time was passing. Jesse saw through the windows that the upper turret room was empty. He stepped inside and shut out the night behind him.

  * * *

  Elizabeth checked her watch.

  Fifteen minutes had passed since Jesse had left. Half the time allotted for his scouting expedition. Long enough to plan her next move. She climbed down from the driver’s seat of the carriage and opened the door to the enclosed cab where Mercy and Theo were sitting.

  All she had told them was that the trip to the docks had been delayed and that Jesse needed to “clean up a problem” before they could leave San Francisco. Probably they assumed it was something connected with the riots in Chinatown. She guessed they’d be willing to sit tight while Jesse and Elizabeth tried to secure the hostages, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure of that. Theo was a professional troublemaker, after all. So she climbed into the carriage and locked eyes with him. “Take off your pants,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need something to wear that won’t get in my way, unlike this fucking dress. And I need you and Mercy to stay put and not leave the carriage. So, two birds with one stone. Give me your pants, Theo.”

  Theo blinked and said, “I’m not sure they’ll fit you.”

  Theo was built like a prep-school tennis player, so the remark might have had some warrant. But he bought his clothes locally and they didn’t look especially close-fitting or well tailored. Plus, he was pissing her off. “I’ll risk it.”

  “Look, I promise I won’t—”

  “I’m not negotiating here. This is not a request.”

  For a moment she thought he was going to resist, which might have required physical persuasion, perhaps at Taser-point, but Theo seemed to run that scenario through his mind and realize how well it was likely to go. So Elizabeth ended up with the trousers and Theo ended up in a pair of cotton shorts, huddled in a corner of the carriage and glaring indignantly.

  Elizabeth’s fake dress opened down the side along a single Velcroed seam, so it was relatively easy to wiggle out of it and shuck herself into the pants. Which were, yes, uncomfortably tight across the thighs and a little difficult to button. She put the dress back on over them, as camouflage; she could step out of it easily enough when the time came. “Now give me your hands,” she said.

  Theo looked ready to work himself into a fresh round of outrage. “Why?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  She flex-tied Mercy to Theo at the wrist. She was wagering they wouldn’t leave the coach, given that a woman handcuffed to a man without pants would draw instantaneous attention. Then she checked her watch again. Jesse was due back in less than ten minutes. Still no sign of him.

  * * *

  Jesse moved more confidently now that he was inside the house.

  He managed to navigate the spiral staircase from the upper room of the turret without causing the risers to groan or squeal. The room below was a circular space furnished only with a few small oval windows. The door to the second-floor corridor had been left slightly ajar, admitting a faint wedge of light. He peered through the gap.

  The corridor was vacant. Gaslights blazed in their sconces, their glow reflected in yellow highlights on the brass-and-copper fittings of five bedroom doors and the walnut side table that decorated the landing above the grand staircase. The two doors nearest the landing were Phoebe’s and Aunt Abbie’s bedrooms. All these doors were closed, and everything looked normal enough, except that a vase on the side table had been overturned, spilling water and wilted violets at the base of the brass miniature of the Capitoline Wolf. And he heard the sound of voices from somewhere below. Men’s voices, with the burl of smoke and meanness in them.

  He had to face a stark possibility: that Abbie and Phoebe and Soo Yee and Randal might already be dead. Roscoe Candy had known the murder of Sonny Lau would draw Jesse to the house. He had come here with his men, bullied his way inside, and cowed the occupants. He might then have abused and violated the women or simply killed the hostages outright. It would have been characteristic behavior. On the other hand, Candy might have wanted to keep the captives alive as leverage in case something went wrong. Or—perhaps most likely—Candy might have decided to postpone the brutalization and murder until he could force Jesse to watch.

  Jesse didn’t bother consulting his watch. He guessed his allotted time must be nearly up, but he had hardly learned anything useful yet. And retreating the way he had come would only waste more vital minutes. He needed to do something practical.

  As he was deliberating he heard footsteps ascending the staircase. A man came up to the landing, one of Candy’s henchmen, some ex–placer-miner past his prime, it looked like, with a bandolier of bullets across his chest as if he were playing a Mexican rebel in a music-hall review. The man’s movements were slow and approximate: He might have been drinking. Maybe all these men had been drinking. Jesse hoped so. But if that was the case, they must have brought their own liquor. Aunt Abbie ran a dry household.

  The bandit knocked twice at the door of Phoebe’s room. It opened, and another man peered out.

  “You can go on down and get something to eat,” the bandit said, “but you’d best hurry. The old woman’s larder is none too generous. Any of them giving you trouble?”

  A question that quickened Jesse’s pulse.

  The other man responded with a mumble that sounded like a no. What was happening here, Jesse realized, was a changing of the guard. The hostages, maybe all of them, maybe just some, were alive and were being held in Phoebe’s room.

  Suddenly the bandit gestured down the hall at the turret rooms—at Jesse himself, as it seemed. “Wheeler seen anything from his perch?”

  He was talking about the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler must be the name of the man Jesse had killed. “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Somebody ought to take him a chicken leg.”

  “Wheeler can go hungry for all of me.”

  The guard who had been relieved headed down the stairs for his meal as the bandit stepped into Phoebe’s room and pulled the door shut behind him. Jesse waited until the only sound he could hear was a steady murmur from below. Then he left the turret room and moved down the corridor, just as if it were 1870 and he was sneaking back from some nighttime mischief. When he came to the landing he peered out as far as he dared but saw no one in the entrance hall below. It sounded as if Candy and his men had occupied the f
ront parlor and made it their headquarters.

  He turned back to the side table where Aunt Abbie’s flower vase lay on its side next to the bronze miniature, the one Elizabeth had called “creepy,” the Capitoline Wolf, from a story about Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of Rome, who were supposedly protected and suckled by a she-wolf. It was the suckling the sculpture depicted. Two cherubic infants with their faces upturned to the wolf’s wine-sack-like dugs. Either a very big wolf, Jesse thought, or very small infants. The bronze was heavy. Jesse picked it up by the wolf’s blunt muzzle and raised it over his head. With his right hand he knocked at Phoebe’s door, not quite loudly enough to be heard downstairs.

  The bandit opened the door and put his head out. He began a word that might have been “What,” but the final consonant had not yet emerged before Jesse brought down the Capitoline Wolf on the man’s head. This was followed by gasps from inside the room, but the reaction was fortunately muted. Jesse caught the bandit’s body as it fell and lowered it to the floor, pushing it inside so he could close the door behind him. The Capitoline Wolf was still in his hand, the wolf’s dugs flecked with blood. He was ready to use it a second time if necessary, but the bandit’s head was clearly broken. After a sort of guttural hiccup, the man stopped breathing.

  That was the second of Candy’s men Jesse had put away. He looked up from the body to the hostages. There was no need to count them. Phoebe, Abbie, Soo Yee, and the hired man, Randal. Of these, all were alive except Randal.

  Randal had been shot very neatly through the heart, and at close range, judging by the blood and spent-powder stains on his vest. The three women appeared unhurt, apart from a purpling bruise on Abbie’s cheek. Soo Yee was in a bad way, trembling and clutching at the hem of the comforter where she sat on Phoebe’s bed, but she seemed not to have been physically abused. Phoebe was also obviously frightened, and her scarf had been taken from her, so that her scars stood out against her pale skin like the crenellations of a desert landscape, but her good eye was furiously alert. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  None of them rushed to embrace him, perhaps because of the bloody Capitoline Wolf in his hand, and that was good, because as much as he wanted to stay here, he could not. Not without making a hostage of himself. Nor was it practical to take these women out of the bedroom. There was no plausible way out except down the stairs and through the gauntlet of Candy’s soldiers, which was, as the City people liked to say, “not doable.”

  But he might be able to pick off a few more thugs before initiating a full-blown shootout. So he put the Capitoline Wolf on the floor and nudged it into a corner, pulled the corpse of the bandit to a less conspicuous position behind the bed, put a finger to his lips to emphasize the need for quiet, and asked a single question: “How many?”

  “I think ten men altogether,” Abbie whispered. Phoebe closed her eyes as if counting the assailants in her mind, then nodded in agreement.

  “All right,” Jesse said. “Wait for me.”

  Then he slipped back into the hallway and headed for his hiding place in the turret room. He was halfway there when gunfire broke out downstairs.

  * * *

  The deadline came.

  The deadline passed.

  Five more minutes followed it into oblivion.

  No sign of Jesse.

  Elizabeth was alone. Profoundly alone, existentially alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life: She had no backup, the Mirror was half a continent away, and not even August Kemp could find her unless she radioed him her location. Which she was not prepared to do, at least until this problem was resolved. By her calculation, the City boat that was supposed to carry her and the runners back to Oakland had probably just docked. Within minutes Kemp would get a they’re-not-here call from the foot of Market Street. And several varieties of hell would then break loose.

  Not her problem, not right now. She was about to walk into a firefight. The last time Elizabeth had fired a weapon in earnest was when she had taken out the gunman at Futurity Station. Before that, all her targets had been cardboard silhouettes. The men she was about to go up against had learned their skills differently. They had practiced their marksmanship on warm flesh.

  On the other hand (or so she told herself), they were ignorant criminals armed with knives and antique revolvers. She had the advantage of superior knowledge, superior armaments, and surprise. She might be able to kill at least a few of them before they had time to put up a unified resistance.

  Unfortunately, “killing a few of them” was the only plan she had. If Jesse was still operational, it would help. If not—

  She promised herself she’d retreat if the battle became too one-sided. A memory of Gabriella hung in her mind’s eye, Gabriella when she was still a baby, barely old enough to grab the edge of a chair and haul herself upright, tumbling down on her diaper-padded bottom as often as not—Gabriella, she told the memory, I’ll be home soon. Even if it meant leaving Jesse for dead.

  But until that choice was forced upon her?

  She had work to do.

  She remembered the layout of the house from the night she had spent there. A drill sergeant had once told her she had “excellent tactical memory.” Basically, she was facing a house occupied by an unknown number of lethally dangerous men who were expecting to be attacked. Her sole advantage was that they were not expecting to be attacked by a woman. It made a frontal approach possible.

  She walked up the drive in plain sight, her Velcro dress covering the borrowed trousers, her ludicrous hat on her head, the calico travel bag clutched in both hands like a purse.

  What surprised her was how close she managed to get before anything happened. Had the bad guys failed to post a lookout—were they that confident? Or had Jesse already reduced their numbers? No matter—she was nearly to the front steps when the door opened. Three men stepped onto the veranda, forming a thou-shalt-not-pass scrimmage line in front of her. They were dressed like gamblers, and their body language gave off a smug don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. All were conspicuously armed, though they kept their pistols holstered. The man in the middle said, “What do you want here?”

  Elizabeth widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Is Mrs. Hauser at home? Abigail Hauser?”

  “She’s indisposed just now. What’s your business with Abigail Hauser?”

  “Well, I don’t like to say. But I borrowed money from her last year, a great deal of money—she was very generous—and I’ve come to pay it back.”

  Two of the men seemed to find this declaration fantastically funny, judging by their efforts to keep a straight face, but the one in the middle managed to sustain a somber expression. “Well, Mrs. Hauser can’t be disturbed, but I’ll give her the money if you like. Is it in that bag there?”

  Behind this banter lurked Elizabeth’s memory of what had happened to Sonny Lau and her knowledge that these men had participated in it. The pretense was bound to fail before long. “Yes,” she said, “it’s here,” reaching into the bag. “And there’s a message that goes with it.”

  “All right, then, what’s the message?”

  What the bag contained was a Glock with a full clip. “The message is, Sonny Lau says hello.”

  She had shot the first two men before the third recovered enough presence of mind to reach for his Colt, and his hand failed to make it as far as the grip before he joined his friends. Then Elizabeth was running around the side of the house with the familiar shooting-range ache in her wrist and her heart doing gymnastics in her chest. She had just killed or critically injured three strangers. Two with wounds to the upper torso, not survivable without immediate medical intervention, and one with a head shot, so obviously deadly that nothing short of divine intervention could repair it. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that.

  She had half hoped more of Candy’s henchmen would come boiling out at the sound of gunfire—more easy targets—but that didn’t happen. They were presumably smart enough not make that mistake a second time. And
that gave her a fleeting moment to think about what would happen next.

  The house was set far enough from the street that the gunfire failed to draw attention, the sound probably muted by hedges and walls or lost on passersby distracted by the Chinatown inferno. So she was still on her own. The calico bag was empty (she had dropped it as soon as she took out the gun), but its other contents were concealed on her body under the fake dress. Which she ought to think about losing, for mobility’s sake, now that it had served its purpose as a distraction. Then maybe a flash-bang through the window she was crouching under, which would create enough chaos for her to circle around to the back. And from there—

  She never completed the thought.

  She felt the pressure first, a pricking just under her rib cage. She flinched away reflexively and felt a second pressure, an arm encircling her throat, now tightening like a noose, and where had this come from, how could she not have heard or seen the man approaching? A question that ceased to matter as soon as it occurred to her. “Drop your gun,” a voice said, intimately close to her ear, a male voice, unhurried and unafraid. “Right now.”

  A voice accustomed to being obeyed. Her fingers opened. The Glock thudded into moist earth.

  The pressure under her ribs was the point of a knife. Her head was immobilized but she could see the hand, the hilt, a wedge of steel brighter than the darkness around it. The hand moved slightly; the blade advanced a fraction of an inch. It had already pierced her skin. The pain wasn’t bad. Yet. But she felt a drop of blood trickle down under her layers of clothing. She gasped for breath against the arm that clamped her throat, and the arm tightened.

  The voice (and she was almost certain it belonged to Roscoe Candy) whispered, “You’re the one that was with him, aren’t you? You’re Jesse Cullum’s woman.”