Blood Storm

by Bill Brooks

  “It would be Alice,” she said. “Alice is the one who accompanied him on a picnic, I believe.”

  “Where might I find this Alice?” Miguel was eager, his hands opening and closing in anticipation that he’d finally gotten a break in his search.

  “She and the others . . . the girls I had working for me until the killings . . . are all staying at Gertrude Franz’s boarding house.”

  “Where does this Gertrude Franz live?” Torres wanted to know.

  Liddy told him it was at the other end of the gulch, between Harris’s Tent Manufactory and the Black Hills Brewery. “I can take you there, introduce you to her,” Liddy volunteered.

  “Not necessary,” Miguel said in his usual loner fashion. “I can find her, this Alice . . .”

  “Fournier,” Liddy said. “Her name is Alice Fournier.”

  Miguel nodded. “Thanks,” he said. Then, twisting the door handle, he turned halfway back to Cole. “Another thing, John Henry. Charley may be a back-shooter, but he’s got plenty of drunken miners arming themselves, ready to get a little revenge. They’re all bored and drunk, and that’s the worst sort to deal with. You want my opinion, I don’t think you’re any match for that crowd.”

  “Thanks, Miguel.”

  “For what?”

  “The vote of confidence.”

  He didn’t smile. He just closed the door behind him.

  Liddy asked Cole what was going on and he told her about the ambush the day before, about how it was Winston Stevens’s men he’d shot. He told her about what Miguel Torres had told him about the town council appointing Charley Coffey constable.

  “I think you should leave,” she said. “Ride out and don’t come back. They’re going to kill you, John Henry.”

  He told her the rest of what Miguel had told him, the rumor about a hanging party for Johnny’s killer. She swallowed hard.

  “They wouldn’t hang Rose,” she said.

  “It’s not Rose they think did it,” Cole said. “They’re saying it was me. But if they get wind that it was Rose, who knows what they might do, especially if they’re drunk and need to taste a little blood.” She struggled with that. “You and Jazzy Sue and Rose,” he said, “need to leave here tonight, find some place safe to stay for a few days until I can straighten this out.”

  “How will you do that?” she asked.

  “Hell, Liddy, I don’t know how.”

  “The old man,” she said. “We can go to the old man’s cabin.”

  “What old man?”

  “Toole, he runs the livery stable.”

  Cole was skeptical. “He’s a boozer,” he said. “A gossip, to boot.”

  “No. He owes me,” she insisted.

  “Owes you?”

  “I put him on the tab once when he was broke . . . with one of my girls. He wept like a child. He came here and wept, he was so grateful. I can trust him. He has a cabin up in the hills.”

  Cole had her draw him a map of the cabin’s location and stayed with her the rest of that day until the sun went down. Then he walked her down the back way to the old man’s livery.

  The Indian squaw was gone, the fire in the wood stove now a smolder of embers. They found him inside, in one of the stalls, sleeping on his back. The barn was warm and sweet with the scent of horse and hay.

  Cole shook him awake. He came up, swinging feebly, cursing, trying to grab Cole, trying to shake himself out of whatever nightmare he’d been having.

  “Whoa,” Cole said. “Slow down, dad.”

  Liddy held a bull’s-eye lantern so the old man could see them.

  “What you want?” he rasped.

  Liddy bent closer until he recognized her. “Toole, I need a favor.”

  He looked at her and some of the tightness went out of his leathery face. “Liddy . . . ?”

  “Take it easy,” she said.

  Then he looked at Cole again, then back to her. “What kinda favor?” he asked.

  “Two,” she said. “Actually, I need two favors.”

  He shuffled in the straw.

  “First, I need to use your cabin up in the hills,” she said. “Is it still there, Toole?”

  He nodded.

  “The other thing is, I need you to keep this a secret, that I want to use the cabin. Can you do that, Toole? Can you keep it just between us?”

  “Wall, I guess I could.”

  “No guess,” Cole told him. “Either you can or can’t.”

  He looked disappointed that Cole was there. “Yeah, sure I can,” he said finally.

  “Good,” Liddy said.

  “God damn . . .” the old man muttered, and lay back. “What day is it, anyhow?”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Liddy said. “Only it’s night, not day.”

  “Oh!” he gasped. “I’ve lost some more of my life somewheres. Oh!”

  In seconds he was snoring again.

  Cole saddled three of the old man’s horses and put Liddy on one. He rode another and led the third back to her place. It was cold and snowing again, and no one was out on the streets that time of night because of the weather.

  Jazzy Sue said she didn’t know much about riding horses. Rose said she did and that she would help Jazzy Sue by taking hold of her reins for her and leading the pinto mare. Rose told Jazzy Sue that all she had to do was hold on to the saddle horn.

  “Stay up at the cabin until I come for you,” Cole told Liddy.

  “And if you don’t come?” she asked.

  “If I don’t, you’re smart enough to know what to do. Just don’t come back to Deadwood. Keep on going.”

  “Maybe when this is over . . .” she started to say.

  Cole cut her off from the thought: “We’ll talk about it when I get up to the cabin.”

  He slapped her horse on the rump, and waited there on the street until they disappeared into the blackness and the swirling snow.

  He thought of his odds, standing there alone on a cold, dark night in a town full of men that wanted to see him dead—hanged, shot, or otherwise. He thought of the odds and how he might change them. There were few options, but there was one. The only man he knew in town who might have an interest in whether or not Leo Loop and Winston Stevens were involved in the murders of Liddy’s girls was the man who’d come for the reward money Liddy had offered in the territorial newspapers—Kip Caine. Like old man Toole had told him that first day he’d talked with him, Kip Caine was a killing son-of-a-bitch. Right now, that’s what John Henry Cole could use on his side—a killing son-of-a-bitch.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  That night in his search for Kip Caine, Cole kept to the shadows of Deadwood. Several times he passed the open doors of saloons where the talk was running high about the killings of Johnny Logan and the two cowboys, Tolbert and Fork. If Cole knew anything at all about Kip Caine, he knew he was in a saloon, a whorehouse, or an opium den. There were enough of all three in Deadwood. It was just a matter of finding out what his pleasure was that night: whiskey, women, or dope.

  The first place he checked was the Number Ten. The crowd there was small, the place as somber as a wake. He slipped in the back door, stayed along the wall, out of the glare of light, scanned the room, saw Kip wasn’t among the patrons, and slipped back out again. Then he did the same thing at the Black Hills Brewery and the Queen of Clubs and the General Custer. Kip wasn’t in any of those places. Cole thought: How hard can it be to find someone in a town three blocks long? Finally he came to the Lucky Strike, Leo Loop’s pleasure palace. He checked the loads in both of his pistols before going in the back door.

  The place was crowded, mostly along the bar, where Charley Coffey was still holding court. They were drunk and they were loud, with Charley doing most of the talking. Charley was decked out in a long cowhide coat and that Montana Peak hat he wore with the four creases in it, his jug ears holding it up. Only now the peak hat was tilted back on his head and his face was flushed from drinking all day and he was barking threats and bragging how he was goin
g to kill John Henry Cole personally. He thought: Yeah, Charley, here I am. All you got to do is look over to the back wall, if you want me that bad. He scouted the rest of the place to see if Kip Caine was among those being mesmerized by Charley’s tough talk. He wasn’t. They were brave enough with the red liquor burning in their blood and carrying those long-barreled pistols down inside the waistbands of their pants. He thought: If I stepped out of the shadows and yelled real loud, half of them would shoot their peckers off. Sitting at a table listening to Charley boast were Leo Loop and Winston Stevens. They were sharing a bottle of expensive brandy, the stuff they keep for heroes and rich men, the stuff they keep hidden behind the bar. Cole saw Charley wasn’t drinking any of it, the expensive brandy. Leo had a cigar clamped between his pudgy fingers and Winston Stevens wore a gray wool suit that wasn’t made anywhere closer than St. Louis. They exchanged conversation now and then, their eyes darting toward Charley and his lynching party. Then Leo said something and Stevens smiled and nodded his head. Charley shouted something and the men hooted and slapped him on the back and waved their hats in the air. Cole thought that he’d seen enough to convince him that his decision to find Kip Caine was the right one in spite of the misgivings he had. Cole gave the crowd around Charley one last glance before departing the same way he’d come in, slipping out the back. The air was very cold and chilled the sweat that had collected inside his collar and along his ribs.

  He started knocking on the doors of the bagnios and crib joints. He interrupted a lot of four-bit romancing but still didn’t find Kip Caine. That left only one place for him to be: the underground opium dens. He made his way to that strange little section of Deadwood by taking to the back streets and alleyways. At first glance, the Chinese section was a small collection of shacks and tents. Most of the businesses were restaurants and laundries. But there was another business that went on in Chinatown, too. Opium.

  He asked around and got a lot of inscrutable stares for his troubles. Finally he found one old fellow whose skin was the color of candle wax. He told him what he was looking for. At first, the old Chinaman said he didn’t understand, asked Cole if he wanted to smoke some opium, or wanted to buy some opium pills. Cole explained it to him again, until he understood that he was looking for a white man and described Kip as best he could. The old Chinaman led him to an opening that led underground. He followed him down a flight of wooden steps that descended into what appeared to be a mine shaft. At the bottom of the stairs, there were several small rooms cut out of the rock and earth. The rooms went off in several different directions and there were lanterns lighting the way.

  “Maybe the man you look for in there,” the old Chinaman said. “You want, you can go lookee.” He gave the old Chinaman a silver coin for his trouble, took one of the lamps, and started going from room to room.

  The air in the underground apartments was cool, damp, but not unpleasant, unless one counted the sweet, heavy sent of the opium that was being smoked. Each of the earthen rooms had two or three cots, and on each cot a figure reclined, hidden mostly by the shadows, but visible enough to see. Cole approached each cot and held the lantern close in order to see the face of the person. Two or three were white women, probably prostitutes, their eyes half closed, their jaws slack, mouths open enough to show their teeth—like the dead, only not dead. Most were Chinese men and women, each one in a dream world that only he or she could know. The Army surgeon who had taken the Rebel lead out of Cole’s back had given him laudanum so he wouldn’t scream and fight the pain. Cole knew, looking into the eyes of these people, what they were feeling. He’d felt the same thing, and he knew how easy it was, once you were there, not to want to come back again.

  When he found Kip, he had that peaceful smile on his face most of them had, like a man who’d seen something too beautiful to describe, like the face of God. His eyes were glazed, and, when Cole brought the lantern in close, they shrank, then jerked away from the light. They tried to hide themselves under his hooded eyelids, like night creatures scampering from the sun.

  “Kip Caine,” Cole said in a harsh whisper. He touched his shoulder.

  The eyes crept out, like the way a turtle’s head will come out of its shell after being scared—slowly, ready to hide again at the first challenging shadow. Cole spoke his name again in the same harsh whisper.

  Caine lifted his head. “Whaa . . . ?” he muttered, his voice floating from somewhere down in the cavern of his being, the eyes edging more toward the center of their sockets.

  Cole grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and pulled him up. That startled him, and he squeezed his eyes closed and his hands fluttered like wild birds trying to knock Cole away. “Come on,” Cole said, pulling Kip Caine to his feet.

  “No, no!” Caine hissed.

  “Come on, god damn it!”

  Cole pulled him outside, out into the cold. Kip stumbled, his limbs loose, unwilling or unable to stand. Cole half dragged, half carried him to a water trough. He stomped through the sheet of ice that had skimmed over the top. The ice shattered like cheap glass, much the same way the window at the café had shattered when King Fisher fired his pistols through it.

  He pushed Caine’s head through the jagged hole, held it under for half a minute, jerked it out again in a rooster spray of icy water. Caine coughed and sputtered and cursed. Cole had made sure to reach inside his coat and take out the gun he was carrying as he held him under the water. It was a .36-caliber Whitney Navy revolver, long and crooked as the hind leg of a dog. Caine’s hands struggled for it. Cole shook him hard.

  “Listen, Kip!”

  “What? What the hell do you want?” Caine coughed, the wet hair hanging in his eyes.

  “I want to make you a wealthy man,” Cole said. “Two thousand dollars wealthy. That’s why you came here, isn’t it, to become wealthy, collect that reward money?”

  Kip Caine shivered against the cold, his fingers pushing the hair out of his eyes, trying to get Cole to release his grip on him, but the opium had sucked all the strength out of him, had swallowed him whole. “What the hell you talkin’ about?” he cried in full anguish.

  Cole let him shake free of his grip. Kip rubbed his face with both hands, trying to rub away the freezing pain. “Je-Jesus!” he stammered at how cold the water felt, how it shocked him to have his head plunged into a trough like that. “You nuts or somethin’?”

  Cole checked the street to make sure no one had been aroused by the ruckus of his pulling Kip out of the opium den and putting his head into the water. It was quiet—so far. He pulled Kip to his feet. Caine didn’t like that, but Cole did it anyway.

  “Take your damn hands off me!” Caine moaned. He didn’t have any fight in him, much as he wanted to, the dope had cut his strings.

  “We need to talk, and this isn’t the place I want to do it,” Cole said, pulling him along by his coat collar.

  Kip slapped at Cole’s hands, but Cole pulled him anyway—into the nearest alley. There he held him against a wall with one hand.

  “What? What?” His cry more a squeal than a howl, shrill.

  “Shut up!” Cole said.

  Kip moaned, trapped by the dope and Cole, trapped in a place he didn’t want to be. He offered a feeble struggle, then he finally settled down.

  “If you can make out what I’m saying, Kip, just shake your head, OK?”

  Caine looked at Cole, the eyes struggling to focus, his mind fighting the effects of the dope and the heart-stopping cold of the icy water. It was the look of something worse than fear, like he’d been caught in a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from. Cole had been there himself.

  “I’ve got a problem, Kip. And I need you, and this,” Cole said, holding up Caine’s Whitney. The eyes narrowed a little. Cole knew he understood. “You back me, I’ll see you get the reward money Liddy Winslow was offering. How’ll that be?”

  He rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand. “I don’t understand,” he mumbled.

  “You don’t need to. You stil
l know how to use this, don’t you, when you’re sober?”

  Caine looked at the Navy. “That looks like the one I own.”

  Cole shoved it in Caine’s pocket.

  “You want me to kill somebody, that it?” His eyes crawled over Cole’s face, looking for an answer, a solution to the nightmare he was having.

  “I want you sober.”

  Caine tilted his head; his tongue lolled out of his mouth; he gave a deep sigh and moaned.

  “Don’t get melancholy on me, Kip.”

  Caine blinked several times, not understanding.

  “It’s the dope,” Cole said. “It does that to some men, makes them melancholy.”

  Caine’s head rolled back until it smacked the side of the wall he was leaning against. “Jesus!” he said again, a look of pain sliding behind his eyes. “Why you doing this?”

  “I’ll explain once I get you dry again.”

  “Well, that’ll be a friggin’ relief,” he grumbled, then looked up at the red sky, the swirling flakes coming down. “Is that snow?”

  “Come on,” Cole said, shoving him along through the alley.

  “Huh . . . ?”

  “Just go.”

  Cole pushed him ahead of him until they reached Liddy’s and went in the back way. It was dark and Caine stumbled around while Cole looked for a lamp.

  “You gonna light a lamp,” Caine demanded, “or are we just gonna stand around here in the dark like two old maids trying to save the fuel oil?”

  “To tell the truth, Kip, I’m not sure I like you sober.”

  “Good! You think I give a damn what you think?”

  Cole checked the street from the front windows, saw no one outside, pulled the curtains, struck a match to the wick in one of the lamps, and slid the chimney down over it. The light danced around inside like it was alive and trying to free itself.

  Cole spent the next fifteen minutes making a pot of mean black coffee. “Drink that,” he ordered.

  Kip looked at it, sniffed it, screwed up his face.

  “Drink it!”