by C. S. Poe
I drew closer still, so he could hear me whisper, “If you so much as look at me from across a bullpen for the rest of your career, I will make you regret having eyes, Bligh.”
He kicked his feet and wheezed.
“Do you understand me?”
He tried to nod. It didn’t work.
“Bligh?”
“Y-yes!”
I twisted my hand farther and Bligh was raised higher up the wall.
The panic in his eyes was unmistakable now.
“It’s Moore,” Plunket hissed from the doorway near the stairs, where she and the other two had moved, leaving her partner to defend himself against me.
“Do not ever call me a sodomite again.” I lowered my hand enough that Bligh’s toes touched the floor.
He coughed, gasped, choked out, “I-I won’t.”
I dropped my hand, and Bligh fell to the floor like a brick wall had collapsed in on itself.
Moore’s distinct tread entered from the hall at my back just then, and a hush fell over the room. “What’s going on?”
Still staring at Bligh, who pressed a hand to his chest as he fought to catch his breath, I said, “Bligh had too much to drink.” Then I walked into the jail as Moore told the remaining agents to clear out.
The now-empty cell that’d housed a sniveling Fishback only a few hours ago was scorched black. The leftover remnants of the manufactured magic were popping in and out of my visual field. There was that same digging and burrowing sensation as in the basement, but second by second, minute by minute, it was dissipating. The problem was still that gaping wound I could feel in the magic atmosphere. And this manufactured spell, finally dissolving, was creating a sort of tangible barrier, resting just below the raw magic like a pollutant.
The narrow hall Moore and I had stood in while interrogating Fishback was littered with broken glass from the window on my right. I tugged my trousers up a bit, took a big step over the mess, spun on a heel, and crouched to examine the window fragments at an angle.
I felt Moore’s magic as he moved to stand in the threshold.
“Bligh was drinking on the clock,” I stated.
“So it would appear.”
“His ineptitude amazes me. Fishback looks like the sort of corned beef dinner I’d cook.”
“Don’t exactly know your way around a kitchen, do you?”
“I prefer restaurants.”
“Bligh will be dealt with for his indiscretion,” Moore concluded. “What’s wrong?”
“I think this window was broken from the inside.” I stood. “This isn’t the correct trajectory for the break to have come from outside. It looks—staged.” I glanced up.
Moore’s expression had sharpened like steel, but despite the control on the surface, there was a raging firestorm of magic just under his skin. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting, Hamilton.”
“I’m suggesting nothing, sir. I’m stating the facts as I see them.” I pointed at the mess on the floor. “This isn’t how broken glass would fall if the window was smashed from the outside. This is like someone collected the pieces off the sill and threw them on the floor.” I directed my attention to the open window, but nearly dropped dead from apoplexy when I was staring at Gunner squatted in the frame. “Gunner!”
“Hamilton.”
“What the hell are you—how did—?”
“You did want to know if a break-in four stories up was plausible, did you not?” Gunner’s gaze cut to Moore. “Your security leaves much to be desired, Director.”
Moore crossed his big arms over his chest. “How’d you do it?”
Gunner raised a single eyebrow. He leaned backward, reached for something out of view, and yanked a chain into the open window. “Steam pneumatic grappling hook.”
“Do you have a permit for that?” Moore countered. His tone indicated he knew Gunner did not and he was merely proving a point by asking.
Gunner said, “I don’t utilize such novelties.”
“You fancy yourself an old-school second-story man?”
Gunner’s mouth twitched, but then he looked at me while saying, “I followed a set of tracks along this side of the building. I lost the trail after a block—snow covered them. But there was a turned-over trash can with this hook inside.”
“So why the broken window?” Moore asked. He stroked his beard. “Insult to injury?”
“If the intruder smashed it before leaving, they’d have undoubtedly stepped on the shards on the sill while climbing back out. But those aren’t cracked, nor are they wet from shoe treads,” I explained before shrugging. “Perhaps Bligh or Plunket broke it after the fact to dissipate the smoke.”
Moore grunted at the suggestion but nodded. “I’ve not had the opportunity to get the full story from either of them yet, but I’ll be certain to get confirmation about the window.”
I glanced at Gunner. He was still watching me. Behind him, it’d appeared the inclement weather had finally come to a stop. “The snowfall’s let up,” I stated, breaking the quiet. “I ought to find Addison while there’s still a chance. Before the fireworks, and the entire city is one big party.”
At that, Gunner shifted in his crouched position. “A sensible plan.” He stood and, still holding the grappling hook’s chain, moved to a ledge on the right, just out of view.
“Wait,” Moore murmured, putting a hand up to keep me where I stood. He glanced at the open window before asking, “Is this real, Gillian?”
A flush broke out across my body, like pinpricks of starlight under my arms, across my chest, up my neck. Moore had never crossed this boundary with names. Not once in a decade of working together, not earlier tonight when he tried to surprise me with a gift, not even during the fiasco at my apartment. I was Special Agent Hamilton and he was Director Moore—always.
“He’s a wanted man,” Moore said to my silence. “A murderer.”
“A vigilante is perhaps more accurate.” I hastened to cut Moore off when he opened his mouth to protest. “Sir, what I said before, about not defending his past, that was the truth. But it’s also true that I would be dead if not for his intervention in Shallow Grave.”
“Transient affections will make you cynical toward true love.”
I smiled, a bit bitterly, brokenly. “I’m already quite cynical, and without Gunner’s help.”
“No. You’re pure-hearted and he doesn’t deserve you.”
“Sir—”
“It can’t last. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“When he’s gone, and he will be, I’ll still be here.”
I shook my head, opened my mouth to speak, but the moment was so beyond my comprehension that I felt I couldn’t recall a single word in the English language. Falling into a sky of a million paper lanterns that turned out to be jellyfish swimming in a night that the sun forgot to awaken seemed to make more sense than this conversation did.
“Think about it,” Moore hastened to add, taking a few steps forward, glass crunching underfoot as he paid it no mind. He reached out, and the tips of his fingers touched my hair as I moved away from him entering my personal space. “I’d move Heaven and Earth to hold you every night.” Then, the danger of our magics be damned, Moore leaned down and made as if he were going to kiss me then and there.
Yours,
Constantine G.
I felt like I’d been punched in the solar plexus. I gasped and blinked back the wet in my eyes. The words were finally there: “Loren, stop.”
Moore froze, midway to my mouth.
“I can’t explain it, just like you won’t understand it. Until Gunner moves on… no.”
“Gillian—”
“I’m so sorry.”
Moore let out a huff of air, like a steam mechanic in need of repair. His shoulders dipped a bit, and then he shifted to one side and pressed his lips lightly against my cheek. The rasp of his beard felt incredible, followed by the minor discomfort of our magics interacting—a nip of electricit
y, the heat of fire. An involuntary shudder went through my body.
He pulled back and straightened to his full height. “Be careful—with Addison.”
“I can handle Addison.”
Moore smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I know you can.”
I considered apologizing again, but an instinct I didn’t entirely understand told me no, that’d make it worse. So I did the only thing I could think of to salvage our relationship and my career—hoisted myself through the open window and climbed into the cold night.
Gunner stood ready at the ledge with the grappling hook. His eyes met mine. He knew. Whether he’d overheard our conversation, or this was simply another one of Gunner’s moments where he deciphered a complex web of actions and emotions from a single muscle twitch in my face, I couldn’t be certain. But really, what did it matter?
He knew.
How infatuated I was.
How desperate.
How preemptively heartbroken.
“My dear?”
But then Gunner said things like that—my dear. His dear. And I could pretend for a bit longer that whatever this was between us, it was beautiful and forever and there was no need to worry about the day I woke and he was gone.
I smiled. “Sorry about that.”
Gunner spared me further embarrassment by not shifting his gaze to the window at my back. He instead held a hand out. “Need a lift?”
I leaned forward, studied the distance to the snow-covered street below, then answered, “I’ll race you.” And leaped off the ledge.
VIII
December 31, 1881
The Third Avenue El train came to a stop at Grand Street, the doors opened with the hiss and release of steam, and Gunner and I were greeted by the boisterous nightlife of a working class’s entertainment district. I’d tried once again to convince Gunner to wait at my apartment, saying that I’d deal with Addison as quickly as possible before returning home, but he’d merely gathered his bearings on the street out front of the field office, pointed east, and asked if we needed to catch the Third or Second Avenue line.
Typical maddening behavior.
Gunner walked across the elevated platform, set his hands on the railing, and peered down at the street below. The train pulled away from Grand, propelled farther downtown toward Canal, and in its wake, the live music from neighboring clubs picked up and competed with one another. A woman was singing on the corner with a group of men catcalling in response, and drunken laughter spilled out of the front doors of saloons.
After a moment of surveying the neighborhood, he stated, “The Bowery has changed since I was last here.” When he looked at me, Gunner had a wry smile on his face. “Are you catching flies, Gillian?”
I snapped my mouth shut.
“I’ve been to New York a time or two,” he explained. “But it’s lost a great deal of its charm. These two-bit street gangsters and the sorry excuse for a metropolitan police force.”
I pulled back the lapels of my coats, unclasped my badge from my waistcoat, and pocketed it. “You said to Moore—at The Buchanan—”
“Yes, the only quality outlaws left in this city tend to be wanted by your office, and Loren Moore has been decent at his job. What are you doing?”
I glanced up. “Oh. I can’t wear my badge around Addison.” I realized there was a suggestion to that statement, blushed furiously, and quickly added, “I very much wish to keep my underground contacts alive and employed, is what I meant.”
“I won’t be upset.”
“About what?”
Gunner’s gaze shifted to something on my left. “These sorts of clubs weren’t open when I was still working the East Coast,” he said by way of answer.
“I’ve—only been a time or two. For a drink, mostly.”
“Companionship.”
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. You really were my—you know. And I’ve not returned since Arizona.”
“I imagine there’s better quality beer to be had elsewhere.”
“I wanted to be noticed,” I mumbled.
Gunner reached into his coat and retrieved his package of Black Jack. Before sticking the gum in his mouth, he said quite simply, “You’re impossible to miss.”
I smiled at my shoes before raising my head. “Thank you.” I motioned for Gunner to follow me to the platform stairs and said, once we reached street-level, “Addison is a performer in the neighborhood. He naturally picks up a great deal of gossip.”
“Naturally.”
“He’ll sell that gossip to me for the right coin or favor.”
“Hm-hm.”
“And being so close to the Five Points, there’s a lot of bluster from the Whyos and their competing gangs.”
“Dancer.”
“What’s that?”
Gunner looked sideways at me. “He’s a dancer, then? At one of these clubs?”
I let out a bark of a laugh before I could restrain myself. “Christ Almighty. No, not that sort of performer.”
The snow on the sidewalk had been stomped down by evening crowds, creating a thick, sloppy slush that mingled with the mounds of frozen trash and steam piping along the curbs. Shops that were closed for the night pockmarked the neighborhood—their dark window fronts all but vanishing from sight under the shadows cast by the El overhead. In contrast, the blues and reds and greens of steam streetlamps competed with the warm tungsten yellow and orange of open saloons and clubs, washing the area in a grimy, manmade color that didn’t exist in nature.
The Bowery had gone from upper-class respectability—the Astor family had invested money in the Bowery Theatre, for God’s sake—to its current state just before the Great Rebellion, and had remained as such. Mulberry Bend was only half a dozen blocks away, so it was honestly only a matter of time before the street gangs infiltrated the neighborhood. The Bowery Boys and Dead Rabbits were long gone, but the Whyos were the city’s new gang headache, and those bastards ruled the Lower East Side with an iron fist. If you didn’t fall into line, they sent the Fishback sort after you.
And despite my badge making me a target, I wouldn’t be bullied into taking it off. Only when I came to the Bowery specifically to sniff out Addison did I remove it. If he were seen talking with a federal agent, he sure as hell wouldn’t be working the area anymore, and I’d lose a very important, if irritating, point of contact. The only other time, of course, was when I’d visited the club in my off time. If one of the men traced me back to the Bureau… blackmailed me… had the upper hand on my tendencies….
I slowed as we approached a club at the corner of Bowery and Broome called Pilly’s. It was ablaze with steam lamps and rowdy as all hell, with a placard outside the front door illustrating two bare-knuckle boxers. A dandy of a young man stood at the open door, calling out the night’s entertainment to gentlemen in passing whose taste perhaps bordered on more, ah, stereotypical masculinity.
I sighed heavily when the pretty man glanced our way, smiled as bright as the lights of the club, and called, “Gentlemen! Don’t let his lean build fool you—Dangerous O’Dea versus Monster McGrath. Tonight only. It’s the fight of the year!”
“A mere few hours before 1882,” I noted.
Dandy pinched his face in disapproval before refocusing his energy on Gunner. “You look like you appreciate a true man’s man, sir. Five cent entrance.”
“A steal,” Gunner said flatly.
“Fighters are available for drinks after the show.” He leaned forward, held a hand to the side of his mouth, and added in a loud, scandalous whisper, “Perhaps more.”
“Who can turn down paying to ice a man’s broken hand.”
Dandy huffed and put his hands on his hips. “Do you two want to watch the fight or not?”
I reached into my trouser pocket and retrieved a dime. I set it in his outstretched hand and led the way inside. The hall smelled like wet wool, warm beer, and sweat. The combination of scents wasn’t exactly pleasant, per se, but it did have a way of s
cratching at an itch deep behind my breastbone. Because, in truth, Pilly’s had been the club I’d warily attended a few times before unfortunately meeting Addison and now visiting for the sole reason of dragging a nugget of intelligence from his smart mouth. I certainly didn’t mind the more artsy establishments that existed on the Bowery, with singing and dancing and costumes, but I was rather susceptible to the whims of a half-naked, well-muscled man trying to impress with a pair of fists that’d seen a thing or two in their lifetime.
I glanced up at Gunner. He was taking in the atmosphere with his usual passive expression. The tables were filled with patrons—a majority of them men, but also a few handsome women in trousers and suits with their prettier partners—clearly looking for unique entertainment, just as I had been, my first time attending Pilly’s. In the center of the room was a stage, elevated about two feet off the floor, with a beast of a man walking its perimeter, flexing his arms and chest and, in general, looking very pleased with himself and the attention he commanded from the audience.
Then the volume of the crowd swelled without warning—an obnoxious combination of cheers and boos—as a second fellow hoisted himself onto the stage. He wasn’t quite as tall as Gunner, but sported the same lithe build—lean muscle, no fat. Where his pale complexion differed was the spattering of freckles, heavy across both shoulders, chest, arms, even his high cheekbones. His fiery red hair shone like a beacon under the lamplight. When he moved, it sometimes looked copper, other times blond. He wore black trousers with braces on his shoulders, but was otherwise bare-chested for the fight.
“Dangerous O’Dea?” Gunner asked, raising his voice enough to be heard over the audience.
“Better known as Addison O’Dea,” I replied before pointing to his opponent, who looked as if he could eat Addison for a midday meal. “I suppose we’ll have to wait until the Monster is done with him.”
Gunner pushed back the folds of his coat in order to tuck his hands into his trouser pockets. “I hope he doesn’t kill your fellow.”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Your contact.”