by Kim Newman
Never hurts to mention the old war record.
‘Under whatever names you take, you will be hunted by Scotland Yard, the most formidable police force in the world...’
Well, formidable in the size of the seats of their blue serge trousers...
‘All hands will be against you.’
I shut up and let them stew.
‘He’s right, Jim. We can’t just kill him.’
‘He drew first,’ Lassiter said.
‘This isn’t Amber Springs.’
I imagined the climate was somewhat more congenial in Amber Springs, wherever that might be. The community’s relative lack of policemen, judges, lawyers, gaolers, court reporters and engravers for the Police Gazette – which in other circumstances would have given it the edge over Streatham in my book – was suddenly not a point in its favour.
Even with my ringing ears, I heard the click. Lassiter cocked his gun.
He walked around the table, so he could at least shoot me to my face. It was still dark, so I couldn’t get much of a look at him.
‘Jim,’ protested Jane-Helen.
There was a flash of fire. For an instant, Lassiter’s fiercely moustached face lit orange.
The table was out from under me, and the noose dragged at my Adam’s apple.
I expected the wave of pain to come in my chest.
Instead, I fell to the floor, with the chandelier, the rope-coil and quite a bit of plaster on top of me. I was choking, but not fatally. Which, under the circumstances, was all I could ask for.
A tutu and a sweetie would not have made me feel more alive.
Lassiter kicked me in the side, the low dog. Then the woman held him back.
That futile boot was encouraging. The fast gun was losing his rag.
Gaslight came up. Hands disentangled me from the brass fixtures and the noose, then brushed plaster out of my hair and off my face.
I looked up, blinking, at a very pink angel.
‘Wuvvwy mans,’ said the glassy-eyed girl, ‘Rache want to keep um.’
VI
Though still tied – indeed, with my ankles bound as well – I was far more comfortable than I had been.
I was propped up on a divan in the parlour of The Laurels. Rache – the former Little Fay – was playing with my hair, chattering about her new pet. She must have been fifteen or sixteen, but acted like a six- or seven-year-old. I remembered to smile as she cooed in my ears. Children can turn suddenly, and I had an idea this child-minded girl could be as deadly as her foster father if prodded into a tantrum.
She introduced me to her doll, Missy Surprise. This was a long-legged, homemade, one-armed ragdoll with most of her yellow wool hair chewed off. She got her name because there was a hiding place in her tummy, where Rache kept her ‘pweciousnesses’ – cigar-tubes full of sweets.
The ‘Laurences’ were still undecided about what to do with me.
It’s all very well being a gunslinger, but skills that serve in the Wild West – or the jungle, come to that – need to be modified in Streatham. At least, that was the case if you were a fair-play fathead like Jim Lassiter.
These were truly good, put-upon people. That made them weak.
Rache kissed my ear, wetly.
‘Stop that, darling,’ said her mother.
Rache stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her brows.
‘Don’t be a silly, Rache.’
‘Rache not a silly,’ she said, knotting little fists. ‘Rache smart, ’oo knows it.’
Jane-Helen melted, and pulled the girl away from me, hugging her.
‘Not so tighty-tight,’ protested Rache.
Lassiter sat across the room, gun in hand, glowering.
Earlier, he had been forced to tell a deputation of concerned neighbours that Rache had dropped a lot of crockery. No one could possibly mistake gunshots for smashing plates, but they’d retreated. Blaming the girl had put her in a sulk for a moment, and inclined her even more to take my part.
This blossoming idiot was heiress to a fabulous gold mine.
‘We could offer him money,’ Jane-Helen said, as if I weren’t in the room.
‘He won’t take money,’ Lassiter said, glumly and – I might add – without consulting me for an opinion.
‘You, sir, Algy...’ began the woman.
‘Arbuthnot,’ I said, ‘Colonel Algernon Arbuthnot, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers...’
A right rabble, that lot. All their war wounds were in the bum, from running away.
‘Hero of Maiwand and Kandahar...’
I’d have claimed Crécy and Waterloo if I thought they’d swallow it.
‘Victoria Cross.’
‘’Toria Ross,’ echoed Rache, delighted.
‘Colonel Arbuthnot, what is your connection with the Danite Band?’
‘Madam, I am a detective. Our agency has been on the tracks of these villains for some months, with regards to their many crimes...’
She looked, hopeful, at Lassiter. She wanted to believe the rot, but he knew better.
‘...when we were alerted to the presence in London of dangerous Danites, well off their usual patch as you’ll agree, we made a connection. Of course, we knew you were here under an alias. We had no reason to bother you, but the movements of incognito Americans – possessed of fabulous riches, but content to live in genteel anonymity – are noticed, you know. If we could find you, so could they. We’ve had men on you round the clock for two weeks...’
That was a mistake. Lassiter stopped listening. Anyone who could hear a cocking pistol through a window and across the road would have noticed if he were being marked.
‘...if I’m not at my post when my replacement arrives, the agency will know something is amiss.’
Jane-Helen looked hard at me. She hadn’t bought it either.
Still, in the short term, my story would be hard to disprove. I had introduced a notion that would snag and grow. That I was to be relieved, that confederates would be arriving soon.
Lassiter’s sensitive ears would be twitching.
Every cat padding over a garden wall or tile falling off an ill-made roof would sound like evidence of a surrounding force to our rider of the purple sage.
‘Algy wants to see Rache ’utterflee dance now,’ announced the girl.
She fluttered dramatically about the room, trailing ribbons, inflating sleeves and lifting skirts. One of her stockings was bagged around her ankle.
‘’Utterflee ’utterfly, meee oh myyy,’ she sang.
Lassiter’s face was dark and heavy. I was quite pleased with myself.
I snuck a peek at the clock on the mantel and made sure I was noticed doing it.
‘’Utterfly ’utterflee, look at meee...’
Lassiter chewed his moustache. Jane-Helen seemed greyer. And I was almost starting to enjoy myself again.
Then the front window smashed in and something black and fizzing burst through the curtains.
I saw a burning fuse.
VII
Lassiter got his boot on the fuse, killing the flame.
‘That’s not dynamite,’ I said, helpfully. ‘It’s a smoke charge. They want you to run out the front door. Into the line of fire.’
I didn’t mention that I’d thought of something similar.
‘Jim, they’re out there,’ Jane said.
‘Asty mans,’ Rache said, peeved by the interruption.
There was a crack. More glass broke behind the curtains. A ragged hole appeared in the velvet. I’d not heard the shot. Another shattering and the curtain whipped with the impact. And again.
‘Untie me and I can help,’ I said.
Lassiter wasn’t sure but Jane fell for it. She did my hands while Rache unpicked the knots at my ankles. I took my Webley from the floor, shaking off the flakes of plaster. Of course, it was empty.
The curtain rail, rope still attached, fell off the wall as another silent fusillade came. Cold wind blew through the ruined window. More panes were shot out.
Bullets ploughed into the floor, rucking the carpet, and the opposite wall. Our sniper had an elevated position.
I waved my gun, to attract Lassiter’s attention.
He dug into his pocket and brought out a handful of bullets, which he poured into my palm. I loaded and closed the revolver. I noticed Lassiter noticing how practiced I was. Algy Arbuthnot, VC, was an old soldier and daring detective so that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
‘Where is the gunman? Top floor of the house on the corner?’
Lassiter shook his head.
‘Tree on the other side of the road?’
Lassiter nodded.
I’d been behind that tree earlier. It had been twilight when Lassiter conked me and was full dark now. No one was about when I took my watching spot; now, there were armed hostiles.
‘How many?’
Lassiter held up four fingers, steadily. Then another three, with a wriggle at the wrist. He knew there were four men – Danites? – out there, and felt there might be another three besides.
I’ve come through scrapes with worse odds. From Moriarty’s background check, I knew Jim Lassiter had too.
‘This might be a moment for one of your famous rockslides,’ I ventured.
Lassiter cracked a near-smile.
‘Yup,’ he said.
As Drebber had mentioned, Lassiter was once chased up a mountain by a mob and precipitated a rocky avalanche to sweep them away. His history was studded with such dime-novel exploits.
Was Drebber out there? And Stangerson? With other guns?
My suspicion was that, weighing up their contract with Moriarty & Co., the Danites decided £205,000 was a mite steep for an evening’s work. They had come to us in the first place not because they were leery of doing their own murdering but because this wasn’t their city and they didn’t have any idea how to track Lassiter and his women to their hole. The Professor had come straight out and announced where they were to be found, to show off how bloody clever he was. No thought as to whether Basher might get caught ’twixt the guns. My only consolation was that Moriarty undoubtedly meant what he said about Higher Law. For breaking the deal, he’d probably exterminate the Danite Band to the last man (their horses and dogs too), then arrange a cholera outbreak in Salt Lake City to scythe through the Latter-day Saints.
I, of course, would still be dead.
Lassiter and I were either side of the window, just peeking out at a sliver of night.
Another shot.
I heard a rattling about from one of the nearby houses. A spill of light lay on the street as a front door opened. In that illumination, I glimpsed a figure in rough work clothes. A pointed red hood covered his entire head, big circles cut out for the eyes, gathered at the neck by a drawstring. Our shy soul froze a moment in the light and stepped back, but Lassiter plugged him anyway, reddening one of his eyeholes. He collapsed like an unstrung puppet.
An irritated, bald man in a quilted dressing gown came out of his house, to make further complaint about the infernal racket. He was surprised to find a masked gunman lying dead over his front gate, obscuring the ‘no hawkers or circulars’ sign. The neighbour looked around, astonished.
‘What the devil...’
Someone shot him. Oops, it might have been me. I was always one to blaze away without too much forethought.
Lassiter looked disapproval at me.
A great many curtains fell from fingers in nearby houses.
The neighbour was only winged, but made a noise about it. The fellows who had accompanied him on his earlier deputation put cotton in their ears and went back to bed.
So my shot had accomplished something.
Lassiter looked out of the window, searching for another target.
From where I was, I could easily shoot him in the stomach and try to hold Drebber to coughing up the agreed fee.
Evidently he could hear the wheels turning in my head.
‘Algy,’ he drawled, gun casually aimed my way, ‘how’d you like to go through the winder and draw their fire?’
‘Not very much.’
‘What I reckoned.’
Another bomb sailed through the window, without meeting any obstruction, and rolled on the carpet, pouring thick, nasty smoke. They’d let the fuse burn down before lobbing this one.
‘Is there a back door?’ I asked.
Lassiter looked at me, pitying.
Upwards of four men could surround a villa, easily.
Jane looked at Lassiter like a pioneer wife who trusts her man to save the last three bullets to keep the women out of the clutches of Injuns. I always wondered why those covered wagon bints didn’t backshoot their pious pas and learn to sew blankets and pop out papooses, but I’m well known for my shaky grasp of morality.
Bullets struck the piano, raising strangulated chords.
‘This is London, England,’ Jane said. ‘We left all this behind. Things like this don’t happen here.’
Lassiter looked at me.
We both knew everywhere was like this, herbaceous border in the back garden and ‘Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird’ sheet music propped on the piano or no. He’d have done better going to ground in the Old Jago or Seven Dials, where life was more obviously like this – those rookeries had well-travelled rat runs and escape routes.
The smoke was getting thick and the carpet was on fire.
I saw an empty bucket lying by the grate. The water had been used earlier to douse the fire. That was my fault.
Lassiter chewed his moustache. That was his ‘tell’, the sign he was about to ‘go off’.
‘I’m goin’ out the front door,’ he said.
‘You’ll be killed for sure,’ Jane pleaded.
‘Yup. Maybe I can take enough of ’em with me so’s you and Little Fay can get away clean. You’re a rich woman, Jane. Buy this man, and men like him, and keep buyin’ them. Ring yourself with guns and detectives. The Danites will run dry afore the gold.’
I peeked into the road again. The groaning neighbour was doubled over on the pavement, but the dead Danite had been dragged off.
Fire was coming from at least two points. Just harrying, not trying to hit anyone.
There was someone on the roof. We could tell by the creaking ceiling.
Lassiter filled his guns. He had two Colts with fancy-dan handles. He ought to have had holsters to draw from, but would have to carry them both. Twelve shots. Maybe seven men. He’d get hit several times, no matter how good he was. I might even be able to put a couple in his spine as he strode manfully down the path of The Laurels and claim it was a fumble-fingered accident.
He was an idiot. If it’d been me, I’d have picked up Jane and tossed her, in a froth of skirts, through the window. She was the one they wanted, heiress to the Withersteen property. At the very least, she’d be a tethered goat to draw the big game into range.
I was cold and clear and clever again. The Professor would have been proud.
‘They can’t afford to kill the women,’ I said. ‘That’s why they didn’t throw dynamite. They want someone alive to inherit, someone they can rob through Mormon marriage.’
Lassiter nodded. He didn’t see how that helped.
‘Stop thinking of Jane and Rache as your family,’ I said. ‘Start thinking of them as hostages.’
If he didn’t take umbrage and shoot me, we might have a chance.
VIII
‘We’re coming out,’ I announced. ‘Hold your fire.’
Rache giggled. I held the baggage round the waist, gun in her ear, and stood in the doorway.
To the girl, it was a game. She had Missy Surprise hugged to her chest.
Lassiter and Jane were more serious, but desperate enough to try.
They had objected that the Danites would never believe their man would harm his beloved wife and daughter. I told them to stop thinking like their upright, moral, tiresome
selves and put themselves in the mind-skins of devious, murderous, greedy blighters. Of course they’d believe it – they’d do the same thing with their own wives or daughters. Unspoken but obvious was that I would too.
Indeed, here I was – ready to spread a pretty little idiot’s brains on the road.
It’d be a shame, but I’ve done worse things.
I took a step out into the garden. No one killed me, so I took another step down the path.
Lassiter and Jane came after me, backwards. The Danite perched on the roof wouldn’t have a shot that didn’t go through the woman.
Hooded men came out of the shadows. Five of them, carrying guns. All their weaponry was kitted out oddly. The barrels were as long again as they ought to be, and swelled into thick, ceramic Swiss-roll shapes. Silencers. I’d heard of the things, but never seen them. Cut down the accuracy, I gathered. The cat couldn’t hear you firing, but you’d probably miss. I’d rather use one of Moriarty’s airguns than a ridiculous contraption like that.
‘Parley,’ I said.
The leader of the band nodded, silly hood-point flopping.
The funny thing was that the hood was useless as disguise. Most masks are. You remember faces first of all, but people are a lot more than their eyes and noses – hands and legs and stomachs and the way they stand or hold a gun or light a cigar.
I was facing Elder Enoch J. Drebber.
I assumed our agreement was voided.
‘You don’t want these lovely ladies harmed,’ I said.
‘I only need one,’ Drebber responded, raising his gun.
At this range, he could plug Rache in the breast and the shot would plough through her and me, killing us both.
‘Rache not like mans,’ she said. ‘Rache poo on you!’
Drebber’s eyes widened in his hood-holes. Rache held up Missy Surprise, and angled the rag-doll, her fingers working the hard metal inside the soft toy.
Lassiter’s second gun went off and Missy Surprise’s head flew apart.
The Danite on Drebber’s right fell dead.
‘You’re next,’ I told Drebber.
I was sure she’d been aiming at him in the first place, but he wasn’t to know that.