“This is your solution? Leave me chained outside a saloon?” She shook her head. “Aren’t saloons known for their rough element?”
“I thought you could take care of yourself.”
“Not chained up, I can’t!” She licked her lips. “Leave me the gun.”
I laughed.
“Oh, you think a girl can’t shoot?”
“That isn’t it at all.” I mentally tallied all the females who had shot at me. It was a robust list, to say the least. Most were business-related, but a few had been personal. I had that effect on women.
“Mr. Schist, you can’t.”
“Lean this way so I can see you through the window.”
“That window? It’s filthy! You wouldn’t see an elephant through that window.”
She was still complaining when I entered the saloon. Since Juniper Junction was out of Liutt’s control, the saloon was a cheerful cesspool of vice. A geezer in red stripes was pumping a concertina and grinning toothlessly as men gave him pennies. A number of pornographic scenes decorated the walls, though this wasn’t a bawdy house. Saloons have to have tawdry wallpaper to keep the wives out. Bartenders could hardly turn a profit if angry shrews kept storming in to drag off their husbands.
The place was loaded with travelers who couldn’t get a room or just plain preferred to spend their time in Juniper inebriated. There were factory men as well. I could tell them by their beards. Some were patchy or peach fuzz, but they all had beards. What’s more, they were well-trimmed, as if the entire damn factory visited the same barber.
There was a flipboard behind the bar. Half of it was for trains. The other half was for beverage prices. As I watched, the price of alcohol shot up as if this was a stock exchange instead of a bar.
“There a guy named Foster here?” I asked the man behind the bar. He wore a fashionable mustache, so I knew he wasn’t a company man.
“Just missed him.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Buncha traveling salesmen came in an hour ago. They pooled their money so he’d take ’em back to Pittsburgh despite the hour.”
I started to the door but stopped. “They left yet? You think he’d squeeze in two more?”
The bartender shook his head. “There was a lot of guys. I think some were gonna ride up top with the bags.”
I went back up to the bar and ordered a grossly overpriced whiskey. It was cheap stuff but it did the job. When I was done, the vapors burned my lungs. I closed my eyes, trying not to think about the shit I was breathing or the girl under my protection.
A familiar voice snapped me out of my tranquility.
“You.”
I opened my eyes and looked around.
A soft-looking fellow in a conductor’s uniform was glaring at me. He’d been sitting in the back of the saloon when he spotted me. He stood up and pointed at me. This wasn’t just any conductor. It was the same bastard I’d garnished in New York. From the look on his face, he was still miffed about the redecorating job Phoebe had done to his train.
“Hi, there.” I put the empty tumbler down and paid the barkeep. “Good evening, gents.” I made for the door.
The conductor stumbled after me. “Where you going?” He stopped, looked at the workers around him, and grinned. “He’s a detective.”
I froze.
He gave the room a bleary nod. “That man is a private eye. He told me so when he got on in New York.”
I slowly turned. It felt as if I had suddenly sprouted a pair of nice round dugs. Every eye in the place was on me. I opened the door and stepped outside quickly.
No one followed, but I drew the sixer anyway. I was going to tell Phoebe about the new batch of trouble when I saw she had vanished. The lead drain pipe was gone. I touched the broken plaster on the wall and tried to imagine how that little pixie could’ve pried it loose.
Chapter Four
Before I could reason out her disappearance, I heard a muffled cry. It was a sound I was familiar with—that feeble noise a girl makes when she tries to shout through a goon’s hand. I turned to the darkened alley just as it came.
A large object swung out of the darkness at my head. I ducked and suppressed the instinct to fire my gun. I wasn’t sure where Phoebe was.
My attacker stepped out of the shadows, a brawny scrag holding the lost drain pipe. He was a thick-browed man in a stylish flannel waistcoat and black leather gloves. He was clearly the pragmatic sort, since he’d removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves so he wouldn’t break a sweat while he killed me.
I was determined to make him perspire though. I backpedaled and he came at me, swinging the pipe like John Henry going at a railway spike. I fired the sixer when he was clear of the alley, but the jerky retreat wrecked my aim. The bullet went high. The next swing of his pipe took the gun clean out of my hand.
My fingers were throbbing, but I couldn’t let pain slow me. He had thirty pounds and six inches on me at least. I didn’t have much of a choice—it was close-in or let him pound my skull to bits with his pipe. I rushed in for a bear hug, smiting his face with my forehead.
Now it was his turn to drop his weapon and backpedal. He tried to get some room between us, but I was on him like a tick, bashing his face with my skull, keeping my hands locked on his upper arms.
Then out of nowhere I caught a vicious blow from behind—too vicious to be a bare hand—and released him. The big thug had confederates.
The pain was incredible. It felt as if the knuckle-duster had jellied my kidney.
As I sank to my knees I turned and looked at the assailant with the brass knuckles. It was the pint-sized rat from the train depot. The one I had poisoned. He grinned as recognition dawned on my face.
These weren’t muggers. They were Stanny’s scrags.
“Stop her!” someone shouted.
Phoebe. They were holding Phoebe but she got loose when I head-butted their man’s face. This development was good—I might get a beating, but if Phoebe was as self-reliant as she claimed, she might get away while we were fighting.
One of the scrags bolted past me. I had enough guff left to catch his leg and send him face-first into the mud.
The big guy recovered from the rough treatment I’d given his nose. He staggered up and gave my face a nasty jab of his knee. The world spun—red and gray and gold—before I felt the cold, sickening rush of mud in my ear canal.
I waited for them to knock my teeth in. That was what scrags did to you when you were down.
But the kicks never came.
There was a gunshot. Someone screamed. I was fairly certain it wasn’t me.
I tried to get up. Filth clung to my cheek, my hair, my mustache. I shook my spinning head and looked around.
My assailants—there were three of them now—were standing around me, hesitant. The big one had the pipe again.
“She’s just a tart,” one of them said.
“My ear!” another one howled.
“Get her!”
They moved. They weren’t coming at me, though. They were moving toward someone else, someone standing to my left.
Another gunshot cracked. Was that my .22?
The big guy dropped the pipe and shook his great head. Droplets hit my face. When I touched my cheek, I saw they were blood.
“I’ve still got four shots. That’s one more than I need.”
The men froze. It took me a moment to recognize the voice.
The big man was howling. Both his
ear lobes had been blown off with a precision I hadn’t seen since the war.
Phoebe stood in the wan light of the saloon, smoking sixer in hand.
She had knocked both his ear lobes off. One could be luck. But two lost ear lobes left no doubt as to the skill of the gunman, or, in this case, the gunwoman.
“Get away from him,” she ordered.
The men backed away, except the big guy. He knelt in the mud looking at his blood-covered palms in an excellent imitation of Lady Macbeth.
“Take that ox with you,” Phoebe said.
“If you thought it was bad before,” one of them snarled, “you can’t imagine the shit you’ve got coming now.” Another helped the big guy to his feet.
“After this, I bet Stanny comes for you hisself,” the little runt said. “You ever been fucked by a knife, little miss?”
The .22 barked and the man screamed in pain. One of his ear lobes had been replaced by a red dripping mess.
“Now I only got three cartridges left. I can’t waste any more on warning shots. That means the next one goes in your shriveled little hearts.”
The goons didn’t have to be asked twice. By the time I stood up, we were alone.
“So knocking ears off is a warning shot?” I asked. “Darke County must be...” I stopped.
The muzzle of the revolver was shaking so badly that Phoebe would’ve missed the profile of an ironclad, much less a charging thug.
“Never shot anybody before,” she whispered. Somehow, through the shock, an instinctual sense of firearm safety took hold. She carefully eased the hammer down and gave me the gun butt-first.
“Those weren’t choirboys,” I said, spitting mud.
“I’m not sure I could have—”
I shook my head. “Keep your voice down. They might still be around.” I looked at the revolver. My ears were ringing. “Maybe I should let you keep it.”
She shook her head in horror and I wondered if she was really the shooter or if it had been some doppelganger.
A less charitable man might have reminded her of all the times she’d told me she could take care of herself. Exhaustion and pain made a gentleman of me, though. I took the leash off her wrist.
“You’re letting me go?”
“I think you know how your bread’s buttered.”
I started back toward Liuttsburg, not even looking to see if she followed. My eyes swept the streets, searching for Stanny’s men. They’d gone to ground, but I could feel them waiting and watching, like vipers.
She ran to catch up, proving that she did, in fact, know who held the bread knife.
If the walk to Juniper Junction had been bad, the walk back to Liuttsburg was hell. Half my body was drenched, and the river-fire did nothing to warm the winter air. I was also lightheaded, as if I’d run miles. It didn’t make sense. The tussle with the goons hadn’t even lasted two minutes.
The hotel clerk pretended not to notice the coat of filth on my left side as we made our way through the lobby. Maybe it was the gun I was holding.
Once we were in the room, I barricaded the door with the chair and loaded fresh cartridges into the sixer. I offered it to Phoebe.
For an instant, she stared as if it were a rattler, but the expression passed in the blink of an eye. She thrust her jaw out defiantly and took the weapon. Her adrenaline must’ve passed, because the barrel was steady.
She took up a position by the window and looked politely away as I stripped off my filthy shirt and waistcoat. “So you trust me now?” she asked the wall.
“I think you’ve got a better grasp of the situation.”
She flicked her eyes to my bare chest when she thought I wasn’t looking. I pretended not to notice.
The water was cold on my flesh. Goose pimples spotted my arms.
“So you’re trusting me,” she said at last. “Because you think I’m scared.”
“I know you’re scared,” I corrected. “Because I’m scared, too.”
She didn’t have a riposte for that.
I scrubbed in silence till my skin was raw.
“No steamcoach?”
“No coach, period. I’d take a donkey cart at this point, if one were available.” I finished washing and went to my carpetbag for a fresh shirt.
“How’d they get here, if the rail’s closed?”
I’d been asking myself the same question. None of the answers were good. “They got here fast. Too fast. They must’ve booked a dirigible to Pittsburgh and then hired a steamcoach from there to chase the train. When they saw that the Akronite had stopped, they waited for us at the Junction.”
“Wouldn’t that be, um, expensive?”
I didn’t answer. The thought was even less appetizing than the mud in my mouth. Sending three scrags on a cloud-ride was ten times the cost of a ticket to New York. This wasn’t about recouping the lost investment—this was about something else. Stanislaus was no longer looking at his monetary balance sheet. His eyes were on his reputation’s balance sheet. There was a big negative in one column. That negative was me, and he was looking to fix it. He might even know my name by now.
Suddenly, the unionists and ironclad didn’t seem so bad.
“You ever shoot a man, Mr. Schist? I mean—not just winged him, but shot him dead?”
“Yeah.” It’s hard to sum up a man’s regrets in a single word, but I think I did it.
Propriety was forgotten. She turned and looked at me, my shirt half unbuttoned. “You weren’t exaggerating about Mr. Stanislaus, were you?”
“I wish I were.” I cleared my throat. “And it’s just ‘Stanislaus.’ That man’s no mister.”
She looked back out the window while I attached my collar.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” I asked her, hoping to distract us both a little.
“Small game. Times are lean in Darke County. Most folks gotta hunt—no matter what season—just to keep their kids from starving.”
“Times are lean everywhere. At least you hicks have squirrels to throw in the pot.” I thought of the skinny tenement kids, pale and desperate. When a factory worker was laid off, he couldn’t grab a gun and shoot rabbits for the stew pot. Even rats were tough to catch, given the Magnocracy’s policy on arming proles.
Her jaw went out again in defiance. “Were you surprised a woman could shoot?”
“Not really.”
“I think all women should carry a gun.”
It was an unpleasant thought, to say the least. If all women carried guns, I would’ve been riddled with bullets ages ago.
Phoebe didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. “A woman should be able to defend herself against the likes of them. Every lady should carry a revolver, I think. Or a derringer, for the unassuming.”
“The handles could have floral prints to match their handbags.”
“I’m not kidding.”
I chuckled. “You might be on to something.” I had to admit—men like Stanislaus would have a harder time beating their tarts if the women carried iron. I looked around. “You can have the bed. I’ll use the chair.”
I leaned my legs across the door as I had on the train. Phoebe pretended not to notice or else decided it was as much a precaution against people coming in as going out. She rolled her sheets around her into a cocoon and was soon fast asleep. That is a gift of the young and innocent.
Being old and wicked, sleep would not come. My side was in agony. No matter how I sat, the nasty blow to my kidney
hurt.
I got up and looked at myself in the glass. Everything was red and dreamlike. When my vision finally focused, I saw my face was ashen and my eyes had sunk back in their sockets.
Phoebe screamed when I woke her. She must’ve thought I’d come to take advantage of her. I was holding my shirt up, after all, exposing myself.
It was her opinion I wanted, not her knobby white legs. “How does it look?” I pointed at the bruise.
“Heavens to Betsy, Mr. Schist.” She pulled the covers up to her chin and gave the purple splotch a wide-eyed examination. “You should see a doctor.”
I lowered my shirt and collapsed on the bed with my back to her. It felt as if I were lying on caltrops instead of a mattress. The pain brought tears to my eyes.
“Mr. Schist?”
I was aware of her leaving. I tried to protest, but she ignored me. When I glanced at the splintering bedside table, I saw with relief that the revolver was gone. At least she was armed. If I died now, she might be able to defend herself. At least, I hoped she could.
The clerk returned with her, examined me briefly, and left.
Phoebe took some greenbacks out of my coat and sat down across from me. “This should be enough for a physician, right?”
“Get a receipt...” I grunted.
I drifted out of consciousness until something stung my noise. When I opened my eyes, the room came sharply into focus—too sharply. The weak red witch-light from the window had been driven away by a familiar orange glow. I cringed at the light. A powerful kerosene lamp sat by the bedside.
“They should call them ‘miracle salts’ instead.” The doctor smiled. “How do you feel, Mr. Schist?” He was a lean fellow with a close-cut black beard and strange attire.
“Awake. Painfully so.”
His shirt-jacket had a built-in collar. The utility of it attracted me immediately. I hated attaching my collar every morning. The rest of the design wasn’t quite as appealing. It had no buttons that I could see, and the collar was so high it touched his jaw. A queer silver line ran up the left side of his ribs. After a moment of study, I recognized it as a Howe-Closer, a way to fasten clothing. Verhalen had talked about them once, but his attention had leaped to another idea before he could order any.
Vacant Graves Page 5