Blood Storm

by Bill Brooks

  “She say who the other man was?” Cole asked.

  “That’s the interesting part,” he replied, staring at the amber liquid in his glass. “It was that Englishman, Stevens.” Torres spoke around the cigarette hanging from his mouth, the smoke curling up into his eyes, and it caused him to squint.

  “Well, now, that is a piece of interesting news. I think I know where they may have found their claim.”

  Miguel took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked the ashes in the palm of his hand and then rubbed it against his pants leg, a habit some men had to avoid flicking their ashes on a woman’s floor.

  “What do you intend to do now?” Cole asked, but with only partial interest because of his own problems. His last hole card was lying dead, a victim of his own greed and the Guzman family.

  “I think that one gal over at that cathouse knows something more than what she’s saying,” Miguel answered in a flat voice, as though talking more to himself than to Cole. “I think I need to go and question her again.”

  “The one you’ve been keeping tabs on?”

  He nodded.

  “What makes you think she’ll tell you any more than what she already has?” Cole asked, wondering if Torres didn’t have more interest in the woman than just asking her questions.

  “I got a feeling?” he muttered around the shuck.

  “I thought you weren’t much for gut reactions.”

  He looked at Cole, his right hand wrapped around the same glass of cognac from which Kip Caine had taken his last drink. “I’ve been doing this a long time, John Henry. Some things you just know.”

  “Because you’re a professional lawman, that it?”

  Torres stared hard. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said the other day, about the detective business. It’s just my way.”

  “To hell with it. I’m too old to get my feelings hurt.”

  “How’d you wind up with Kip Caine and these Mexican boys?” he asked, surveying the destruction again.

  “It’s a long story,” Cole said.

  “You know, a Mexican by nature does not like the cold weather, and these are the first two I’ve seen this far north,” Miguel observed. “Now, why would they come this far north?”

  “Like I said, Miguel, it’s a long story, and one I don’t have time to sit around and tell you.”

  He drank the last of his cognac. “I think I could get used to this,” he said, setting the glass down on the table. “It’s got sort of a pleasant feel about it.”

  “Look, why don’t we help each other here?”

  “What makes you think I need help?”

  “Maybe you don’t, Deputy, but I do.”

  His gaze shifted to the winter scene outside the window. “You mean with Charley Coffey and his bunch?”

  “Yeah, that’s why Caine was here, to back me. Only he decided to change the rules after I’d laid them out for him.”

  “So you killed him because of it?”

  “Not exactly, but it worked out that way.”

  “I could end up like that, John Henry,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the dead gunfighter. “Or either one of them two.”

  “If you do, it won’t be by my hand.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Maybe I can work the girl for you, get her to tell me what she might not tell you.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “She sees you as trouble.”

  “I’m listening,” he said, “but not real hard.”

  “I don’t know what went on between the two of you, but something did, something that scared her enough that she’s not going to tell you anything. Maybe she already knows you’re the law, or maybe she thinks you’re the one that killed those other women.”

  “How in the hell would you know how she sees me?”

  “The other day, when I ran into you out in front of the bagnio, you remember?”

  His nod was hesitant.

  “I saw her looking down from the window up on the second floor. Dark, pretty, that her?”

  “You saw her looking out a window, so what?” His irritation was evident by the way his eyes grew darker, more fixed.

  “She looked like she was afraid you might come back.”

  “You’re reading a lot into it, John Henry. Maybe she was afraid I wouldn’t come back. You ever think of that?”

  “I think maybe you went there to question her. I think you tried. But I think she got to you in a way you hadn’t counted on. I think you paid her and she took you up to her room and, somewhere along the way, she became afraid of you.”

  His entire body stiffened like he had been struck a blow; his jaw muscles knotted and his hands clenched so hard the glass shattered in it. “You think I . . . ?” He started to say something more, then the words retreated into his throat. He had a lot of anger he was trying to keep in check. It took a couple of seconds for him to say what he wanted to say. “I didn’t hurt her, if that’s what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like what you think. If she’s afraid of me, it’s not because I hurt her or laid a hand to her.” He grudgingly measured out his words like they were the last words he was ever going to speak. Droplets of blood fell from his cut hand.

  “I’m not judging you,” Cole said. “But what would it hurt for me to try talking to her this time?”

  “What is it you want, exactly, John Henry?”

  “I need you to back me up when I take on Charley and his bunch.”

  “I’m not a pistolero, or did you forget that?”

  “I’ve seen your work, Torres, it’ll do.”

  “I’m a federal lawman,” he said.

  “Then take off the badge and put it away for now, if it will make you feel any better.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “I don’t make deals, John Henry. You want to go ask that chippy what she knows, see if she’ll talk to you, that’s fine with me. I ain’t asking you to.”

  “And if I run into Charley and his bunch on the way?”

  “Then they better be armed and ready for a fight.”

  “That’s all I needed to know. Let’s go.”

  Miguel looked around the room once more. “At the rate you’re going, John Henry, Deadwood’s going to end up a ghost town.”

  “That might not be the worst thing that could happen to it, Miguel.”

  “Probably not,” he said, and stepped past the dead men and out into the storm.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Lucky for you,” Miguel Torres said, as he and John Henry Cole trudged through the deep drifts on their way to the bagnio called The Miners’ Retreat.

  “How am I lucky?” Cole asked, glad to have the protection of the big curly coat. It was difficult to see more than ten feet in front of them, the way the wind was blowing snow.

  “Lucky this storm came along when it did,” Miguel added. “It’s kept Charley and his crowd at bay, holed up over there in the Lucky Strike. I don’t know what they’ll do once they run out of whiskey and lies to tell each other. Die of boredom, I guess.”

  It was true, the storm had been a fortunate turn of events in Cole’s favor. About time, he thought.

  They walked with their heads bowed to the wind. The snow was drifted waist-deep in some places. For the second time since Cole had arrived, Deadwood appeared peaceful.

  Miguel didn’t bother to knock on the front door of the cathouse. He simply went inside. Cole kicked as much snow off his boots as was possible before following him in. They found themselves standing in a parlor. A mahogany settee with crushed red velvet upholstery stood against one wall. Against the facing wall there was a horsehair divan with a black fringe border wide enough for two people to sit on. There were glass lamps and blue drapes and a coat rack.

  “It’s where the women come to get selected,” Torres stated matter-of-factly as they stood in the room.

  “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  He toss
ed Cole a hard look. A little bell above the door had tinkled their arrival and a short, plump woman entered the room from behind a curtained archway. “Well, you boys must have a powerful itch, to hoof out on a day like this,” she said. She had rouged cheeks and a mole near the side of her mouth. Her platinum hair was done in sausage curls and she wore a bone corset and pantaloons and long purple stockings. “They call me Big Annie.” Then she stared at Miguel. “Ain’t I seen you here before?”

  “We come to see Josephine,” Torres said without fanfare.

  “Little Jo,” the woman said. “Sorry, gents, she’s laid up with the monthlies. I got other gals, though. And with it being a real slow day on account of this weather, why, you can take your pick. Let’s see, there’s Hettie, and Doreen, and Slo Foot Sue, except Sue’s got a bad tooth that’s been troubling her and ain’t in the best of moods, if you know what I mean. Getting rode by a man when your wisdom tooth is aching ain’t exactly something a girl looks forward to.”

  “We came to see Jo,” Miguel repeated.

  “Mister, I told you, Jo is out of commission for a few days.” The woman half scolded, but Miguel was a single-minded man who didn’t have much patience.

  “We just want to talk to her, is all,” Cole interjected.

  She looked at Cole. “Talk to her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You trudged through them snowdrifts just to talk to a whore? You ain’t even wanting to ride one?”

  “You mind telling me which room she’s in?” Cole asked.

  “It’ll cost you,” the woman said, “talk will.”

  “How much?”

  “Say, two dollars.”

  Cole was broke. He had given Suzanne Logan the last of his money. “Pay her, Miguel,” he said.

  Instead, Miguel showed her his badge. “You see this?” he said, stepping close to the madam. “I’m a federal lawman, and this is considered official business.”

  “Mister, I don’t care if you’re the king of Siam and you’re here to hunt turkeys, it’ll still cost you two dollars, you want to talk to Jo.”

  “Pay her, Miguel. Let’s get this over with,” Cole said.

  “I could arrest you and take you to Cheyenne,” Miguel told the woman. “How would you like to ride all the way to Cheyenne chained to the floor of a stagecoach?”

  She held out her hand. “You want to arrest me, go ahead. That, or pay the two dollars.”

  Miguel looked at Cole.

  “It’s why we came,” Cole said, “to talk to her.”

  Miguel reached inside his shirt pocket and found the money and handed her $2.

  “You both want to talk to her?” the woman asked.

  “No, just me,” Cole said.

  “She’s the third door down on your right, top of the stairs,” the woman said. “I’d knock first.”

  “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind,” Miguel said, placing his flat stare on the woman. He was still a little put out by the demand of payment just to talk to a woman.

  “No, hon, I don’t mind at all. Fact is, you change your mind, I’ll be right back there the other side of that curtain,” she said, offering a wink that Miguel ignored. “Big Annie ain’t too old nor too tired to go to the races.” Miguel ignored the comment.

  “I’ll go up and talk to her and see what I can find out about Robertito,” Cole said, ascending the stairs.

  “Yeah, I’ll just sit here and cool my heels,” Miguel said, pulling his tobacco out to make himself a cigarette.

  Cole knocked on the door and a soft voice on the other side asked who it was. Cole told her he wanted to talk to her. She said she wasn’t feeling well and that Big Annie must have made a mistake, sending him up. “I ain’t up to taking care of customers,” she said.

  “I’m not a customer.”

  She opened the door a crack and peered through it. “Then who are you?”

  “Just someone that wants to ask you a few questions about a friend of mine.” She was attractive with dark, alert eyes and dark skin. Young. Cole guessed her to be Indian, with maybe a little Mexican blood mixed in. “Big Annie said it was all right that we just talk.”

  She looked uncertain, but then opened the door wider and allowed Cole into the room. It was a small, spare room with a bed, a vanity, and an oval mirror framed in walnut. The mirror was cracked. There was the scent of crushed flowers in the air. She shuffled over and sat on the edge of the bed, and, when she did, the iron springs creaked. She was wearing a long cotton shift and her hair was black and straight and long. She had small brown feet showing below the hem of the shift. “What is it you want to ask me?”

  Cole noticed the traces of blunted speech common to Indians when they spoke the white man’s language. He figured maybe she was Sioux or Cheyenne. She looked a little hungry, thin, like lots of working girls he’d seen. Most of the time, it was the whiskey and hard life they led that kept them thin and hungry. For some, it was the opium they smoked in the Chinese dens that kept them emaciated. Then, when the whiskey and dope no longer worked, they turned to poison, and that always worked. She was young and pretty, but he could already see the slow death in her eyes. “I want to ask you about a man, an old friend of mine.”

  “Who?” She avoided his gaze, choosing instead to stare down at her bare feet.

  “His name is Robertito Torres.”

  She looked up suddenly. Cole saw the light of recognition knot the edges of her mouth. “No, mister, I don’t know any Robertito.”

  “I think you do.”

  She went back to staring at her feet, like a child that had just been scolded. “I’m not feeling too good,” she whispered, holding herself with those thin arms. “It’s that time, you know.”

  “Look,” Cole said, standing by the door, not wanting to pose a threat to her, “I just want to know what happened to Robertito Torres, that’s all. I’m not looking to hurt anybody or cause you any trouble.”

  She still didn’t look up. Her black coarse hair fell straight down over her face. “I don’t know this Robertito,” she repeated.

  “You sent his things home to his family. You took the trouble to do that much. I figure you must have cared about him to do that.”

  She swallowed back emotion that was trying to lose itself from some place deep within her. “So what if maybe I did?”

  “It was a right thing to do. It was a kindness on your part.” She rocked back and forth, holding herself. “The problem is, no one knows exactly what happened to him, because you didn’t include a note. His mother is grieving for her youngest boy and she doesn’t even know what became of him.”

  She bit her lower lip, trying hard to keep from saying more.

  Cole went over and stood in front of her and waited until she looked up. “Josephine,” he said, “you did a good thing, sending his belongings home to his mother. It just wasn’t everything that needed to be done. You can understand that, can’t you? You’ve gone this far. Why not just tell me the rest and put it behind you?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If they know I told you, I could end up like them other girls . . . the ones that got killed.”

  “No one has to know but me and you.” Cole wanted to reassure her. “You loved Robertito, didn’t you?”

  Her chin trembled and she blinked several times, trying to hold back the tears. “He said he was going to marry me,” she murmured. “He said soon’s he could clear up his problems with his gold claim, we were going to get married and go away. . . .”

  “How’d he die, Jo?” As he said it, Cole placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Them men . . . he had the trouble with . . . over his gold claim,” she stammered. “They . . . killed him.” She rocked back and forth, fighting the emotion of loss and fear. “I thought he was going to . . . take me away from here. I thought it was my chance to be something more than somebody’s damn’ whore. Robertito . . . I called him Bobby . . . he said he loved me. He said he did
n’t want me with other men no more. . . .”

  “How did they kill him, Josephine?”

  Her trembling hands came up to her face, the fingers trying desperately to wipe back the tears. Cole put her age at sixteen. “That man . . . that Johnny Logan.” She was forcing the words out. “He came here one night and he said that he was arresting Bobby for trespassing. Him and Bobby got into an argument . . . that lawman hit Bobby with his pistol and knocked him down. I tried to get him off Bobby, but he hit me, too. Then Bobby tried to stop him from hitting me and Bobby’s face was bleeding from where that lawman hit him. Bobby wasn’t no match for that Johnny Logan. . . .”

  “So Johnny arrested Bobby. Then what?”

  She sniffed, her hand brushing under her nose. “Then I don’t see Bobby no more, except the next day when I heard that someone had found him in an alley with his head broken in. By the time I could get down to see him, they already got him over at that man who fixes up dead people before they bury them. . . .” Her words broke under the sobs again.

  Cole walked over to the water basin and poured some water over a small hand towel and wrung it out, went back, and wiped her face with it. She held his hands as he tried to ease her pain. “Take your time, Josephine.”

  She looked at Cole, really looked at him for the first time, and all the hurt trapped within those dark obsidian eyes penetrated his soul. “That man . . . the one who took care of Bobby . . . cleaned him up and put a clean shirt on him,” she said, trembling. “He combed Bobby’s hair wrong. Bobby never combed his hair like that man had it. I couldn’t hardly believe it was even him when I saw him there in that box. He didn’t even look real to me. I touched his hands and his face, and they didn’t feel real to me, either. They were cold and hard, and it gave me a bad feeling, touching him like that, and I had to run away from there.”

  “Where did they bury him, Jo?” Cole asked as gently as he knew how.