by P. N. Elrod
What was making me sick was remembering the feel of Chaven’s death, not the sound, though that must have been loud enough when the Webley I’d turned on him went off and shot out the artery in his throat. I remembered his hot blood bursting forth, striking me, coating me, the weightless, screaming instant as we both fell into the water and the sudden hellish silence that followed when freezing death closed over my head.
“Jack?”
I huffed out something that was meant to be a laugh but failed. “I guess so,” I said, lying. I looked down at my clothes, but the lake must have washed them clean. Too bad it couldn’t have done as much with my memory. Turning someone alive into someone dead, even scum like Chaven, made for a black ache inside that no doctor could ever fix. This nightmare would be living with me for a while yet.
“Then what?” asked Coldfield, wanting me back on the subject.
“Then I jumped ship and swam for my life.”
“You outta your mind, kid.”
“I didn’t have a lot of choice. There was another guy there, Deiter, he was all ready to ace me. Between him and the lake I figured I had a better chance in the water.” That was a total falsehood. Deiter had been too shit scared to even think of shooting, and my ending up in the drink had been a mix of accident and bad luck. Never mind the cold, that’s the least of it; because of my supernatural condition free-flowing water and I just don’t mix. It’s bigger than me and infinitely stronger. If I’d not been able to vanish and float up over the surface soon after going under, it would have been fatal. And that’s vanish, not turn into a mist. Another handy talent of mine, but exhausting.
“Deiter, you said?”
“That’s what they called him. One of Kyler’s boys. His job was to bump off Gordy so Kyler could take over his part of the town, then cut a deal with the New York bosses. With Gordy’s rackets in hand he could up their take by five percent and keep the rest. Of course, that was before he got dead. Chaven’s not here to pick up the reins, and now I don’t know what they’re going to do.”
“Holy shit.” He glanced at Escott, who was shaking his head. “This town’s gonna blow wide open once word gets out. Without Kyler to take over Paco’s territory—”
“Hey, don’t forget Angela,” I added.
“What can she do? There ain’t a wiseguy in the town who’d let himself be bossed by a woman.”
“She’s more of a girl, but don’t underestimate her. She’s using her father as a front man, that’s why she wanted him back so bad.” Well, to be fair to Angela, she wanted Frank Paco back because he was her father, period, but she still had more ambition than Napoleon and twice the nerve.
“You think she’ll be able to take over?”
“I’d make book on it. She’s smart, moves fast, and if things work her way she’ll have the whole operation’s coded account books sometime tomorrow. She sweet-talked little Opal into working for her.”
“What?”
“She traded Opal back to Chaven to get Paco out, but Opal’s not staying long.”
“My God,” said Escott, his tone full of admiration rather than dismay. “Between the two of them they could have the city in hand by the end of next week.”
I was going to say he was probably overstating things on that point, but shut up. Opal, Kyler’s former accountant, was the best soldier in Angela’s small army. Never mind all the gun-packing goons, brute force was nothing compared to a balanced ledger sheet showing all the profits, and Opal could do numbers the way the rest of the world breathes—without even thinking about it.
“Let’s continue to assume that despite these distractions Miss Paco is still in a murderous frame of mind toward us,” said Escott after a minute.
“Toward you,” I put in. “She thinks I’m dead, courtesy of Chaven.”
“Unless Deiter talks with her.”
“He might think I’m dead, too. A swim at this time of year . . . ”
“Yes, yes. And we know for certain that it was an obvious trap Shoe and I were driving into.”
“Told you so,” Coldfield muttered. “If Fleming hadn’t been weaving on the road like a New Year’s drunk we’d be in the lake by now, too.”
“Angela will still have a hit out on you, Charles,” I said. “She thinks you’re a loose end.”
“So I am.”
“You’re pretty cool about it.”
“Part of the job,” he said with a shrug of his eyebrows. “Right, I’ve not shown up for my meeting with her, she’ll assume I’m onto her game and expect me to go to ground or to the police, or both, which means she will likely also drop from sight for a bit until things settle. All we need to do is discover where she might go.”
“Good luck,” said Coldfield with a snort. “What do you do when you find her?”
Escott looked at me. One eyebrow twitched a question.
I sighed. “I’ll think of something.”
OUR drive finally ended somewhere in the middle of Chicago’s Bronze Belt, and I was wondering if this was such a good idea. If Coldfield wanted to keep a low profile he was doing it with the wrong people what with our white skins—well, Escott’s was gone fairly gray by now. I hoped he wasn’t buying trouble for himself taking us in.
The entry to sanctuary was in a trash can-lined alley between some drab structures that must have been built right after the O’Learys’ cow changed all the real-estate values. Coldfield stopped, cut the engine, and got out, telling us to wait. As he went up a couple steps to the rear of an old brick building I checked my watch, but the water had screwed the works. Damn. I wanted to know how long until dawn. He came back a minute later, opened the passenger side, and tried to help Escott out.
“I’m fine,” Escott insisted. “Just let me take it slow.” But the wind was cruel, and I still had his coat. He hissed when the cold hit him and started to double over against it, then hissed again as his ribs protested.
“Slow is the only way you can take it, you fool.”
“Hah,” agreed Escott, and allowed himself to be steadied on the steps. The screen door popped open to receive him. By then I’d climbed out and shut up the car. The shift from slouching comfortably in the warmth to standing tall in the winter air took me by surprise. Something unpleasant suddenly burbled deep in my belly. I hurriedly staggered to one side, stopping short at a frozen puddle, and threw up.
Nasty, but mercifully brief. I’d swallowed some of the lake and my inside works hate that kind of thing. Pain lanced behind my eyes as I spat out the last of it and wondered how far we were from the Stockyards. I needed a drink. The right kind of drink.
“Fleming?” Coldfield waited at the door for me, peering at what to him would be thick shadows.
I raised a feeble wave. “Coming.”
“That bad stomach of yours?” he asked when I joined him.
“Yeah.” It was as good a story as any to explain peculiarities in my behavior.
“Ulcers?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
We pressed ahead and the screen banged behind me. I shut the inner door and was buffeted by a wall of moist warmth, bright light, and the smell of fish and grease. We were in a kitchen, a pretty big one: three stoves with oversized cooking pots on them were going at full steam and made the air like August again. Some kind of eatery, then, that was either still open from the night before or getting ready for breakfast, or maybe it just never closed. Several black people wearing stained white aprons were gathered by one of the stoves, their watchful faces displaying a variety of expressions ranging from alarm to annoyance.
“Sal,” said Coldfield, addressing one of the men, “I need you to—”
“The hell you do!”
This came not from Sal, but from a slim black woman in her thirties who suddenly burst in on us like a cavalry charge. She wore a sober, dark blue dress and a no-nonsense, God-help-you expression as she halted in the front of the group, hands on her hips and disgruntlement in every line of her well-shaped body. She treated
the whole room to a piercing once-over, then came forward to stand nose to nose with Coldfield. She wasn’t nearly his match in height, but made up for it with force of temper.
“Clarence, just what the hell do you think you’re doing here?” she snapped.
Clarence? I thought. I caught Escott’s eye. He made a small, hasty cutting motion with one hand.
Coldfield offered her a winning smile, holding his palms up. “Just bringing you a couple of strays. It’s only for a day or so until we—”
“You know I don’t want anything to do with your crap—no offense,” she said in an aside to Escott. Brows high, he pursed his lips and gave a minute shake of his head. “You damn well know I run a clean place here and I’m not about to—”
“Please, Tru, this is serious. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t.”
She crossed her arms and glared. “Uh-huh. I’m sure you’ll have a good sob story all ready for me.”
“And you know you’ll do what I ask if I ask nice enough, so how’bout we pretend you’ve heard it all and I go straight to the please-prettyplease-with-sugar-on-top part?”
My eyes were ready to pop. This was Shoe Coldfield?
Tru saw and slapped his arm. “Oh, stop embarrassing yourself in front of the bum. No offense,” she added, nodding at me.
“None taken,” I whispered.
“He’s no bum, he’s just had a hard time tonight, and Charles, too. You remember Charles Escott, don’t you?”
She rounded on him. “I remember, but he’s sure changed. Is that really you under those bruises?”
“Indeed it is, Miss Coldfield. I do apologize for not being in a more presentable state, but as your brother was about to say, this is a rather serious occasion and—”
“It’s you all right. Still using ten words when one will do, huh? Well, don’t stop, I like that English accent. Come on and sit by the stove. Sal, got any stew ready? Okay, then pour him a cup and get it into him.” Sal, a very large man, topping even Coldfield’s size by a few inches, instantly stepped forward to carry out this order. “Now, who are you?” She looked at me again. I’d heard a little about her from Escott, and by a roundabout way she’d once sent a case in our direction. Don’t know what I expected her to be like, but whatever it was fell short of the reality.
“My name’s Fleming, I work with Charles—”
Coldfield interrupted. “Tru, this can wait, the man took a dive in the lake and he’s half froze to death.”
Her dark eyes flashed fire on him. “You and your—your whatever the hell it is! I don’t want to know.”
“But—”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll take care of them, but you get out of my way until I stop being mad at you for it.”
“How about I go get Doc Clarson?”
Her brows came down and she scowled first at me, then Escott, giving us each a thorough looking over. “Let the poor man get his rest, I can manage these two. They don’t seem ready to die just yet.”
“But Charles has broken ribs—”
“Only cracked,” put in Escott helpfully.
“Shut up, Charles—and Fleming’s probably got frostbite by now.”
“No I don’t,” I put in, also helpfully.
“Shut up, Fleming—”
“Clarence!” Her eyes narrowed and she jerked a thumb in the direction she wanted him to go. “Out of the way.”
“But, Tru—”
“You run everything else, I run this place, I call the shots. Those are the rules. Move.”
Coldfield put a lid on it and, throwing a quick glare at each of us, found an unused corner and hunched there, shoving his hands in his coat pockets. I had the strong feeling Escott and I would owe him big time for this favor.
Escott, now seated on a stool by one of the stoves and hugging a mug of hot stew to his chest, apparently decided he was at the Vanderbilt mansion for a debutante ball. He cleared his throat. “Please allow me to make proper introductions: Miss Trudence Coldfield, this is Mr. Jack Fleming, my friend and business associate. Jack, Miss Coldfield.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said humbly.
She rounded on me again, along with another piercing look. She wasn’t beautiful in the Hollywood way, but her manner alone was the kind to stop traffic. Maybe not Hollywood beauty, but they didn’t know everything. Fine bones, fine smooth skin, really good legs from what I could see of them—she had all the right equipment and then some. Like her brother, she projected an arresting sense of power and energy, but hers was more overt and in motion. Her eyes—well, they were the kind that could look right into you, and when they did you better make sure everything inside was up to snuff or she’d know the reason why. That’s how she struck me, anyway, after only ten seconds of her hard scrutiny. What she made of me I couldn’t tell.
“Likewise,” she said. “Now what happened to you?”
“Fell in the lake. I only need to dry out and warm up. But Charles is the one to—”
She raised one hand. “I’ll deal with it, Mr. Fleming. You just come along.” She moved past me, motioning toward a door. I followed her through a hall, up some narrow stairs to another hall. The sagging wood floors creaked, but were polished and the paint on the walls was fresh.
“What is this place?” I asked.
She glanced back at me. “Miss Tru’s,” she answered, as though that was explanation enough.
“What do you do here?”
“Help people who need it.”
“Like a soup kitchen?”
“More’n that. Here.” She opened the door to a frighteningly clean bath, went straight to the huge, claw-footed tub and twisted the hot-water tap. “Get your clothes off an’ we’ll dry ’em. You want some stew, something hot to drink?”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
She frowned at me. “All right, I’m going to be rude and ask you—you got any problems being in a colored place?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I didn’t think so since Clarence brought you, but I had to be sure. Now strip.” She went to a cabinet and rummaged in it. I hesitated and she noticed right away. “Don’t be bashful, I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen more naked bodies than most army doctors. You’re not going to surprise me.”
“A nurse?” I asked in a prompting tone. I slowly shrugged out of Escott’s overcoat and took my time on the rest. Nurse or not, she was still female, very female, and I was reluctant to bare all.
“I got a hospital job, sometimes help Doc Clarson and a few others, and I run this place. I don’t know what Clarence was thinking bringing you here; I’m just trusting that he had a good reason.”
“You don’t like his work?”
“His rackets,” she corrected with a sniff. “Says he only provides what people want to have, but I know better. You and Charles will have to leave as soon as you can. Sorry I can’t be more gracious, but I won’t have Clarence bringing me his broken toys to fix all the time. Next thing I know, this place becomes just another flop for the riffraff, and the people who really need help will be too afraid to come in for it.”
“You think your brother’s riffraff?”
“Yes, and he should be ashamed of himself. Aren’t you out of that wet stuff yet?”
“I’m waiting on the tub water.”
She gathered up an armful of bandaging and other medical junk and went to the door. “Men,” she said, shaking her head. Her heels made a determined clacking sound in the hall and on the stairs. I carefully eased the door shut and breathed a sigh of relief.
The water was almost too hot. I loved it, stepping gingerly in before the tub had quite filled up. The taps were full on, and I wallowed in the rushing heat. When it was deep enough I held my nose and submerged, scrubbing my hair with my free hand. This was so much better than that damned lake. After a minute or so I noticed a change in the light above and surfaced, shaking water from my ears. Shoe Coldfield had come in.
“How’s Charles?” I asked, pretending t
o puff for breath.
“He’s getting his chest taped up right now. Would you believe it, she got him to shut up and sit still.”
“I can believe it. She seems quite a gal.”
“That she is.” He started picking up my discarded clothes. “She’s got a half-dozen others to do this, but I’m the one she sends up. Her idea of atonement for me.”
“She said she helps out people, what’s the whole story?”
“That’s pretty much it—but she’s choosy about who she helps. None of my gang, that’s for sure. Women ’n kids come here a lot. She feeds ’em, gets ’em work if she can, or they work here to help pay for themselves. Remember Cal with the shoeshine box? He’s one of her projects.”
“Who pays for it?”
“She does, with her being a nurse, and people donate, help out.”
“You donate, too?”
“She won’t take my money. Says it’s dirty. She’s strict about that.”
He left and I resolved to try making a donation myself. This bath was certainly worth a fortune to me. I lolled in the heat, stretched this way and that, moaned and groaned with it. In a little wire rack hanging from the tub I found a mirror and a safety razor. The mirror was of no use to me, but I soaped my face good and had my first shave in I don’t know how many nights. Maybe I’d look a lot less like a bum to Miss Coldfield.
Figuring it’d take some time to dry my stuff out, I lay back, prepared for a reasonably long soak. When the water cooled, I let some run out the drain, then topped it off with more hot. Escott had a similar tub, but his water heater wasn’t nearly this good. The only thing I needed now was some fresh blood and a bolt-hole to sleep the day away. And some of my home earth. Without it with me I wouldn’t get much rest; my body would completely conk out, but my uncontrolled mind would keep running frantically on, usually with a series of bad dreams. Waking up after one of those rides left me more tired than when I turned in. I didn’t understand why, but had to respect it, so I always tried to have a bit of my earth with me.
My belt was gone. It was the kind with a hidden pocket for money, only mine was stuffed with some good old Cincinnati soil. Probably Cincinnati mud after my dunking, but I could live with it if there was enough left. I wasn’t too worried if it was cleaned out, though, since I had more caches of earth hidden around the city, one up in Escott’s attic, one in the attic of the house next to us—they didn’t know about that—one at my girlfriend’s place. . . .