His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  “You killed four men.”

  “They tried to kill you,” the strange woman countered.

  I readjusted my grip on the shotgun. “And then you gave yourself up to me, so this is just the next step in the process.”

  A haze of misunderstanding clouded her face. “I wished to show you that I meant no harm. You would call it a courtesy.”

  Cicero snorted, sipping whiskey in liberal gulps. He leaned over to look out the window, squinting at the street. “A remarkable display of discretion. Faust, heads up: the curious eyes are starting to gather.”

  And they always did, sooner than later. Sometimes it was the cleanup that became the hardest part: the organization, the fixing, putting everything right before too many questions arose. “You exploded like a stick of dynamite out there. I’m growing used to handling volatile quantities, whether it’s folks with drunken vendettas or women with gold in their veins. If you don’t want this to get any messier—” and I sure as hell didn’t, “—then the best place for you is inside, pride be damned.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  She tightened her fist around one of the bars. I locked up, but kept my finger ready. Cicero touched his holster. Whatever she was, we were nothing. She could make us nothing. I said, “You already wrestled one chance from me to perform my duties. I won’t let it happen twice. I’d prefer it not happen twice. Whatever your claim to fame, I’m asking you to be human in as many regards as you can manage. Give me a chance to do my work my way, because you’ve not even been here a damned half-hour and I’m already cleaning up.”

  Whether it was the lamplight shifting or my own perceptions playing games, her whole temperature changed: the gold of her skin softened, a crackle of brightness flared in her eyes. Her tension, her strength, it all rolled out of her and she picked her way into the cell like a beleaguered child.

  She found the bed, sat down, and like the arm on an unwound watch, she went still.

  Cicero’s hand grazed my shoulder. “Where’s she from,” he asked.

  “Hell if I know. Just showed up, no ceremony, no warning, just...was. Miss Garland found her.” I avoided the falling part.

  “Right,” Cicero said. “But I mean, where’s she from,” as if asking the question a second time would somehow change the answer. Because hell, I didn’t know; I didn’t really care to know, except that this peculiar woman, this so-called Herald, had just played mud-pits in the guts of four men out in the middle of town.

  “You got that drink?” I asked.

  “Thought you’d never ask.” He put a smooth glass in my hand.

  The whiskey tasted like old rust. I put my forehead on the cool bars of the cell. “I need to know if you’ll do it again, what you did to those men.”

  “If such men require it,” Nycendera said, not looking at me.

  I didn’t know what questions to ask or if there even were. I could have gotten more progress shoving a thumb up my ass. A shadow crossed the front window. Cicero took a preparatory swig and muttered, “Oh, lookie. Here comes the Fuck Patrol.”

  Right on cue.

  Just as I turned, the door flew open, admitting one of the most unpleasant men I’d ever had the misfortune of seeing. A strange mixture of fragile-thin and burlap-sack thick, he looked like a bag of curdled milk wearing a pair of tiny spectacles. His thick hands, purple and flaky, clutched in modesty to a sleeprobe. He rattled, “There you are,” with an edge of accusation.

  A smaller figure, leaner and stronger and silent, entered just behind the huge man and leaned against the wall next to the door.

  “Mayor,” I greeted the living sack of cream. “Whiskey?”

  “Stuff your whiskey straight up your ass,” said Mayor Morgan Kallum, his words inflating his cheeks with rage. “Be a great night indeed if I could sit back and drink whiskey to my heart’s content, but I happen to think that with four dead bodies laying out in the street, there’s more important things to be done.”

  “One of them’s sort of slumped, actually,” I corrected him. “That means there’s three laying and one sort of sitting.”

  “So I hired a marshal and a comedian at the same time,” said Kallum.

  “And an actor,” I said, motioning to Cicero. “Shakespearean.”

  “Word from the saloon says that you hauled away a woman who did the killing."

  I pointed with my half-filled glass at the figure lounging behind the bars.

  He frowned. “What in God’s name is that?”

  “Definitely not a dead body,” Cicero said.

  The mayor snapped the glass of pale whiskey out of Cicero’s hand. He threw it down onto the floor, shattering glass and spraying whiskey across the floor like bad art. “You mind shutting your mouth for a minute, you degenerate shit? I don’t remember you giving permission to hire this clown, Faust.”

  “Didn’t think I needed your permission,” I said.

  “You did.”

  “Noted for future reference,” I said. On any normal day, Kallum annoyed like a swollen pimple. No matter what he wanted to call himself, Mayor Morgan Kallum wasn’t a real mayor. He was just a lucky monopolist who happened to have cash at hand and managed to turn Blackpeak from a dingy little mining town into a dingy little mining town with some whores in it.

  Still staring at her, he said, “You need to go to Undertaker Ivanmore and move those corpses out of the street so they don’t start smelling to high hell. Already got a crowd gathered, like they’re going to pop up and do some kind of talent show.”

  “They ain’t starting anymore trouble, ain’t pissing in the troughs,” I said.

  “Corpses,” Kallum repeated.

  “Cicero,” I said. “The Mayor wants me to tell you that he wants you to go to Ivanmore and move those corpses out of the street so they don’t start smelling to high hell.”

  The actor threw his hands up. “I didn’t make the damn things. Why should I need to have them cleaned up?”

  Kallum said, “Get out.”

  Cicero squared his ox-like shoulders. “This is horseshit.” He pushed past Kallum and stormed out of the office, leaving me alone with the mayor.

  When Cicero was gone, I took my hat off my head, tossed it on the desk, and crossed my arms. "You said it yourself when you hired me on, Mayor. This is my town to supervise as needed, so long as I keep the shit from flying too much."

  "The shit’s flying, Faust. Things you're doing are making this town uneasy. You killed off one of the Gregdon boys over a dispute he was having with a drunk. You let an untried convict accompany you on a clean-up mission at the Fulton barn where you thought you could make some difference." The beady balls of his eyes narrowed into bulging slits. "Innocent boy got burned to death because you miscalculated. Now this."

  Something sparked in me, like a thumbnail to a match. My right hand clenched around the whiskey glass. My left went to my Colt.

  The mayor’s man reached for the revolver tucked in a tight cross-draw holster in front of his belly.

  Kallum raised a hand. "I'm talking to the marshal," he said. The small fellow nodded and sunk back against the wall. "Touched a nerve? Mistakes do that, Faust. They make you act a fool when somebody calls you on them. When you misjudge, families like the Fultons have nothing but a few smoldering wood-ashes to stuff in an urn.”

  A boy hanging from the rafters of the Fulton farm, kicking his feet like a rag doll.

  My mouth full of fire and ash.

  Sorry, kid.

  I gnawed on the inside of my cheek until I thought my teeth had pierced the skin. “They came for me, Kallum. Not just for fun, either. Ready to slice me apart, raging drunk and mighty pissed.”

  “Do you blame them? You going to go up there and do their job, Marshal? You going to fix that up too? I don't mind you needing to break some skulls if it keeps this place running, but if men keep dying, who am I going to have buying whores and drinks? Corpses don't fuck, Faust. Corpses don't make me money.”

  I took my hand away fro
m the Colt. It was easy to go for the pistol sometimes. Sometimes too easy. A hot surge of anger rose up in me as I flicked my eyes toward Kallum’s hired fellow.

  Find words. Diffuse the situation. Better choice. “She took care of them too fast for me to do a thing about it," I said.

  "She fast enough to dodge bullets?"

  "Maybe," I said.

  "You fast enough to dodge bullets?"

  "Fast enough to catch them," I said. "Just maybe not with my hands."

  Kallum drifted closer toward the bars of the cell and looked in. A living trophy in a skin-tight suit of gold and jewel that she couldn’t peel away, she turned her chin, stared at Kallum, stared through him…

  He stepped back until his ass struck the desk.

  Without looking away from her, he said, "Give me your keys, Faust."

  “What is this about?” I asked.

  “I want you to take a day or two and reassess yourself. You find what edges of yours you need to tie up, and you tie them up tight enough so they never come apart. I can’t have sloppy work in this town. You’ve pissed off enough people that there’s no other option but for your work to be shoddy.”

  His friend hitched a ride on a floorplank and came closer, drumming his fingers on his gun-handle.

  Muscle. So that’s what this was. Made sense now.

  “Give me your keys,” said Kallum, “then I want you to take your shit, find a room at the saloon, and piss off for a few days. You and your Shakespearean darling can buy a hooker and take turns for all I care. Just get out of my sight.”

  If I wasn’t his marshal anymore, then what kept me from laying him out? I slammed the keys into his upturned hand. “What’s your plan with her?”

  Only men with money to burn manage to look at others like novelties. Kallum rapped his knuckles against the bars. She didn’t startle. She didn’t look.

  “I’ll do as is done with all rabid beasts.”

  “How you intend on doing that?’

  “Trial. Judge Fairchild’s still around after your Partridge fiasco.” He smiled. “Two days from now, I’ll gather the court in the town hall and let Blackpeak all see this too-fast-for-Faust piece of work before we hang her strange ass.”

  He went for the door, but stopped with his hand around the handle. He stared into the woodgrain for a few long seconds.

  “I want you to bring yourself down a notch or two, Faust. I want you to know what the price of pride is. Killing doesn't bother me except when it’s out on the streets. I don’t want some young gun who thinks he knows the world like the back of his hand getting a hard-on every time he gets the chance to determine right from wrong. This is my town, Elias Faust. I have the final word.”

  Kallum held out the ring of my keys to his compatriot, who took them up and latched them to his gunbelt. Kallum pushed his way out of my office, each board creaking and bowing beneath the weight of his puffy ankles. When he vanished, I closed the door and lit a cigarette.

  Through the gray smoke I looked at the man still standing beside the door. He looked back at me. He stepped into the light of the oil lamps. There were wisps of black hair on the bottom of his chin. He couldn't have been more than maybe nineteen or twenty.

  "You got a name or something?" I said.

  One of his sharp eyebrows raised. He made a wriggling motion with his fingers at the bottle.

  "No name, no whiskey," I told him.

  His upper lip curled. "César."

  When he caught the bottle, he just popped it open and took a few quick swigs out of the neck. Trained drinker, I supposed, or just a hard-ass kid trying to put on a good act. He ambled toward the cell. He knocked the bottle against the bars. This time the Herald stirred. César rubbed his stubble like an oracle does a crystal ball. “She’s a strange one,” he said, then raised his voice: “You hear me, Goldilocks? You a strange one, showing up out of the blue.”

  “Same could be said for you,” I said.

  “Señor Kallum pays good money. Better than Díaz and the Army. Little tasks, fat wallet.” The Mexican pressed his face against the rusted bars. “Plenty of dealing with the strange. Unlike gringos like you, first instinct isn’t pew pew. Patience,” he said. “You want something dead, you do it smart. Where she come from?”

  “Found her wandering on her own. Wait, does Kallum know something?”

  “He knows a thing or two. Sometimes more.” He smacked his heel against the bar, rattling the iron. Her bald head rasped against the bed as she turned to leer at him.

  “He barely spent ten seconds looking her over, and he thinks she deserves to die?”

  “Barely spent ten seconds looking at what was done outside. Knows enough after that.”

  “So why don’t you just shoot her now?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Why didn’t you shoot her then, amigo?” When I didn’t immediately respond, César snapped me a thumbs up. “Remarkable! Intuition. You got it too. A miracle, ah? Sense enough to know you when you do it one way, sense enough to know when you do it another. You didn’t act quick, so he’s gotta.”

  She hadn’t come seeking trouble. Regardless, even if she had just been defending herself, she was going to get hanged anyway, and probably sooner and harder when they discovered there was something else.

  Then again, looking at her told anyone all they needed to know.

  Nobody would need to miss lunch the day of the trial, at least.

  “Place is all yours, Emperor,” I said. I grabbed up the tin of my hand-rolled smokes and some matches.

  The Herald Nycendera did not look at me as I left.

  By the time I got halfway up the street toward the Crooked Cocoon Saloon, the bodies had already been moved away and rake-lines ran snaking paths through the gravel.

  For everything I’d lose by the time this situation was over, the Herald had landed herself in the most expensive mud-puddle imaginable: in a few days, she’d have lost her life, and nobody’d bat a goddamn eye about it.

  20

  Without my office, I was a transient. I had options, but they weren’t much to speak of. With a few bits you could lodge in a room at the Crooked Cocoon. When you did, you slept upstairs where the beds smelled like sweat and smoke and booze, where threadbare sheets were crusted with the musty odors of old sex and sour feet. Say you were hankering for some pleasure, there were bound to be some freelancers of every persuasion.

  That wasn’t for me. Least not tonight. So to Lady De Santos’s I went.

  Aremeda’s common room was packed. The rugs had been cleaned since the last time I came. The candles in the glass on the walls gave a warm feeling to the halls. Her ladies could almost have been confused for proper belles if it weren’t for the stains on their dresses and the stink of their armpits. Classier than the Crooked Cocoon and more expensive. High maintenance, fake accents. If saloon girls were the whores-devores, then Horseshoe women were the main course.

  “Rumor has it that whenever there’s blood, you’re somewhere not far behind,” Aremeda told me as she found the key to a room. “I’m not going to have much business if this doesn’t relent. There’s only a few hundred people in this pesky town, my friend. If bodies keep dropping around you, this town’s fixing to go under in just two years’ time. You looking for company tonight?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nabby’s available,” she reasoned, looking at her books. “And Phillipa.”

  “Nabby’d ride me to oblivion and back if I let her,” I said.

  “That’s why I call her the Troubles-Killer,” she said. “Or Salted Earth.”

  “Ha.”

  “Got others who can coddle you if you want it, maybe give you some soft love. Pet you ‘til you purr. Come on, my boy, don’t wallow. It’s goddamn sad. Cornelia’s free.”

  “I think I’d rather not.”

  “Not even Nathaniel?”

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  I forsook indulgence. Instead I drank. You ask me how much I drank, I wouldn’t really be abl
e to tell you. It just seemed like a good idea at the time, because alcohol has a habit of convincing you that it’s the best way to alleviate a problem. Sometime in the night, whiskey might as well have been water.

  Night slashed by me in a blur. There was an argument at some point with someone – God knows who – and I sang something off-key and I spat at somebody in the street and pissed some silly patterns into the dirt near the Horseshoe hitching-post, and I thought of the Herald until her face was a drunken blur in my head and a parade of corpses and the sockets of Keswick Everett’s eyes…and whole fields full of those black, leaning figures and their shoe-leather tongues…

  …and that boy – Joshua, HORSE himself – staring at me, just about to burn—

  Mouthful of bile, and I swayed and

  (I don’t need no goddamn friends.)

  couldn’t hardly shake myself dry without stumbling into the—

  (…how do I fix this. How do I set it right-side up?)

  And everything went black and I fell with a head that wouldn’t stop spinning

  (You don’t make any sense.)

  into a throne of cold, stone-hard pillows, clutching a silver ball.

  The next morning my mouth tasted like an ashtray. The bed was an ocean of sweat under me. I thumbed a film of half-dried saliva off my cheek. “Jesus Christ,” said Cicero from a chair in the corner, a cigarette in his hand and The Collected Works of Shakespeare opened in his lap. “Looks like you spent a good part of the night wrestling with two dogs in heat.”

  I sat up and cradled my head in my hand.

  “Two big dogs,” he said, then howled at the ceiling.

  I staggered to the chair next to him. There was coffee. The smell of biscuits and gravy filtered up through the floorboards of the tiny room just big enough for the two beds and the morning table we sat at. “We’re out of a job,” I told Cicero when the first cup lubricated my voice enough to speak.

  “Assumed as much when I saw that César asshole spinning your keys around his finger outside your office this morning. You know, there really ought to be a rule against it.”

  “Against taking a man’s job out from under him?”