“Don’t threaten me again,” he says.
“He has brown hair.” She ignores the gun. “Blue eyes. About three inches on me. Burn scars all down his left forearm and hand.”
Wheeler takes a sip of whiskey, some change working over his face. Perhaps he expected her to bluff. But while her motive is fiction—she doesn’t have a quarrel with Sloan’s man, never even spoke to him—Pike’s presence at the Madison warehouse is not. Poor bastard. He’s about to have a rough night.
“Since you’ve held up your part of the bargain…” Wheeler sets aside his glass, points at the address. “Here’s the job I have for you. Find a man called Beckett. Those are his lodgings. Don’t ask for him outright. Don’t call attention to yourself. He’s about six foot two, sickly, thinning black hair worn short. He’ll probably be drunk. He might be with a woman. Go knock him around.”
“What’s the objective?”
“He’s an acquaintance gone sour, and he’s talking about my business too much. I want him to stop talking. That’s all you need to know.”
Beckett sounds like just the man she needs to see. With some encouragement he’ll give her all he knows about Wheeler and his business—his illegal business, because it’s highly unlikely Beckett is talking about the quality of Clyde Imports’ Scotch. But it makes no sense for Wheeler to trust her with this job. He wouldn’t let her get dirt from Beckett and then walk away. The setup is a perfect death trap.
And she’s given up Sloan’s man. One less reason to keep her around.
Wheeler waves at the address she has not collected.
“Go get him,” he says. “Or are you not so keen to fight for me after all? You said you’d be effective. You said I’d be lucky to have you in my corner.”
“You remember conversations well.”
“I like to watch people eat their words. Are you going to make yourself a liar?”
“I’d rather work on Pike,” she says.
“I’d rather you didn’t work for me at all, being a turncoat and a bloody sideshow freak besides,” Wheeler says.
She wishes he would pick up his whiskey, stand from his chair, anything to force him to loosen up. But his hands are curled into a single fist. The great chunk of wooden desk sits between them. Without her edge she fires up, too; tucks her jaw and shifts her feet, so she’s in the shadow of a fighting stance.
“I delivered him. I ought to get first blood,” she says. “Not be kicking the shit out of some loudmouth drunk.”
“Before I give you any sort of reward, you need to prove your loyalty.” His teeth are bared. His neck flushed above his tight-buttoned collar. It reads as anger rather than eroding composure. “If I say bite, I expect you to come back with red teeth, do you understand me?”
If I had you in the ring, old man, you would be the one yelping, Alma thinks, and is surprised by the ferocity Wheeler calls out of her. The part of her not bristled and scowling is taken up with trying to understand how he does it, why she is so primed to respond to him. He’s not the first son of a bitch to give her a hard time, that’s sure, but she feels closer to doing something reckless. The toggling between female and male, between Alma and Jack, has her on uncertain ground: an undefined space between personas. For a moment she’s not playing a part or holding a pose, but just being; that sense she sometimes gets in Delphine’s company of truly being seen. Yet with Wheeler there’s danger in this visibility. With him it is a thrumming, high-wire walk. Exhilarating, dangerous, a comet burning across the night sky. She could do anything. With him. To him. Just as she is picking at some seam in him, he is doing the same to her.
“Is this Beckett job a trick?” she asks, watching his face. Some flicker, some twitch of cheek or eyelid, may answer her question. “Are you sending me there to die?”
“There are easier ways to get rid of you.” He nudges the gun with a forefinger.
“I don’t trust you,” she says.
“The feeling’s mutual.”
I work for her, too. That’s all she has to say. Then she can move about without waiting for a gunshot, for a knife in her back. But she will lose her cover before she’s finished her job: before she’s proven Wheeler’s loyalty or treason. And he will know she took the coward’s way out.
Alma reaches for the paper, at the same time glancing at the other ledgers and pages jumbled near at hand. Nothing she can identify quickly. She looks back to the address. The boardinghouse is on the south end of town, near the bones of the new pier and the scrap-heap shanties of Portuguese families. A lonely place. She and Wheeler spent nearly an hour there in his carriage, uninterrupted.
“When you say rough him up…”
“Have fun,” Wheeler says. “If he loses teeth, so much the better.”
He leans forward on his elbows. With Alma standing in arm’s reach of the desk, this is the closest they’ve been all night.
“If things get out of hand and he loses more than teeth … Well.” Now Wheeler’s voice is evened out, confidential. “Get rid of the body. You can throw it in the bay between twelve and two thirty and the tide will take it out.”
“I don’t intend to kill him,” Alma says.
“I am telling you what to do, just in case,” Wheeler says. “Unless you want to get caught dragging around a dead man. And don’t think you’d be able to pin it on me. Nobody knows you here, but I have lots of friends. You’ll have a bad time of it in jail when they find out what you are. Marshal Forrester doesn’t trouble himself to keep order in the lockup.”
Alma has not been threatened this way before. Only one other man alive knows she switches between skirts and trousers: William Pinkerton, who, despite disapproving of the practice, has no incentive to menace someone on his payroll. She hates that Wheeler would goad her to be afraid of what she has trained herself to not think about—how some would punish her for daring to wear men’s clothes. Camp is a fighter, his body bone-hard, wrapped tight in layers of cotton and bravado. No room for fear or softness.
Now she hopes Wheeler is double-crossing Delphine because she wants to pay him back in fear. Fear of pain. Of violation. She pictures standing behind him, holding his neck and her knife, feeling him breathe against the blade. Sneers at him as she pictures it. Before she can speak, he picks up his gun, cocks it, points it at her chest.
“Behave yourself,” he says. “I can tell you right now I don’t like employing loose cannons, and you’re not making a good impression.”
“I’ll go after your man.” Alma crowds the desk, its wood squeaking against the twill of her trousers. “But I don’t like your talk about going after me. You think about it? Yeah? You want to come at me yourself?”
“I’d fuck you into next Sunday if I wanted.” Wheeler rises, nudges the gun against her breastbone. “I was a few inches away from it in that carriage. But now that I’ve seen you like this, I’ve lost my appetite.”
Yet he looks hungry. He is wholly focused on her, and that feeds her conviction she has some hold on him. The gun digs into her clothing. Into her skin. His hand is steady. His middle knuckles yellowed by the bruises she noticed on their carriage ride, when his fingers were creeping up her thigh.
“I’m working for you,” she says. “That’s it.”
She does not back away. She waits for him to retreat first. But he does not drop his gaze or his pistol. He is breathing faster. She feels it in slight pressure changes of the muzzle against her chest.
“What do you want me to do with the woman?” she says.
He blinks, eyes narrowed.
“You said Beckett might be with a woman. Is she part of the problem, or not important?”
“Not important,” Wheeler says.
“All right.”
“Get out of here.” He uncocks the pistol, lowers it.
Only after this does Alma pull on her cap. Her sternum aches. She is satisfied because she stayed longer at the scratch. She is satisfied because Wheeler is as drawn to her as she suspects—he needs a loaded gun to k
eep them apart.
Now the high color is draining from Wheeler’s face. Circles of sweat darken the underarms of his shirt. Alma is sweating, too, as if she’s just fought a bout. She is eager to see him again. To burn with the rage and want and curiosity he calls out of her. To grapple with their words or limbs. Fighting. Fucking. They could do anything.
“Have a good one,” she says.
She leaves him standing behind his desk, grim faced, one inky hand curled around the dark grip of his pistol.
* * *
At its south end Port Townsend withers. The waterfront’s bricked industry dwindles into squat clapboard houses. The golden sandstone cliff stoops down, leaning eastward until it overtakes Water Street and plunges into the bay. Sailor Town’s ruckus fades, leaving lapping waves and the cries of night birds. Alma listens for footsteps among these muted sweeps of sound. There are none but her own, crunching in the ice-coated mud.
At the water’s edge the sweat-and-outhouse stench of town gives way to seal dung and tide-line kelp. Frying onions and fire smoke drift from the shanties. One block ahead, just before the cliff meets the beach, sits a square building pocked with knots of candlelight. Beckett’s boardinghouse.
Alma trudges through damp sand. She is freighted with protection against her misgivings: her knife, a set of brass knuckles in her pocket, a pistol strapped to her side under the cold oilcloth of her jacket. She stops before the wooden building and scans the path she just stamped across the landscape. A white shadow snags her gaze, but it is only a gull—alone, too, its pale wings skimming the wavelets.
Inside, the house is cold as the beach. A single candle gutters on a desk by the door. There is the bitter reek of a green-wood fire gone out. She stands with her hand on the knob, searching the low rectangular space for witnesses. A sleeping woman slumps in a chair. A ghost-pale, walleyed child sits among her skirts, gnawing on a chicken leg.
Alma holds a finger to her lips.
“No need to wake your mam,” she whispers, easing closed the door.
The child does not cease its slippery chewing noises. Alma finds the ledger on the desk and squints at it in the meager light. At the top of the last page is a neat signature: M. L. Beckett. Room 9.
She climbs the stairs quietly, favoring her knee. The upper hall is lit by a lamp at its far end. Smells of turpentine and sulfur hint at a louse outbreak. Alma shakes off the echo of an old itch and counts the rooms until she reaches nine. The door is set unevenly, dark along its seams.
On her good knee, she woos the lock with her picks. No sounds or stirring in the rooms along the hall. In another breath the handle dips. Wary of rusted hinges, she shoves the door open and slips inside.
Gin. Stale vomit. Low cot bristling with limbs. Moon-hazed sky bluing the high window. Alma settles her breath. Lets her eyes adjust. When she can see with more certainty, she reexamines the bed. A tall man, alone. Thin back heaving under his shirt with each uneven breath. Nothing else in the room but a crooked washstand and a chair in the corner.
In two strides she is at the cot, one hand on Beckett’s shoulder and the other unsheathing her knife. She flips him onto his back. Straddles his torso. Her ribs protest but she is heating up, eager for a fight.
“Don’t make a fucking sound.” She tucks her knife under his Adam’s apple, her other hand clamped over his mouth. His lips rough against her palm. The upper half of his face looks familiar—the heavy-lidded eyes coming gummily open; the hard jut of his nose. She tilts her head a notch, recalling, and pins him down in her memory as his eyes settle on hers. He’s friends with the railroad man Dom Kopp. Kopp called him Max. Max borrowed money off him at the Cosmopolitan, to have another try at the gambling tables.
Beckett stares up at her, eyes widening, but slowly. He is stupefied with drink. This is a problem. A drunk man does not comprehend threats the same way a sober man might. He is unpredictable. He might shriek despite the blade at his throat, or start sobbing, or pass out entirely.
“You’re going to get up and come outside with me,” Alma says.
Beckett starts to shiver. Good. The danger of his situation has penetrated the gin fog in his brain. Or he’s fixing to be sick again.
She sneers at him. Drunks remind her of her uncle and his rages. How he’d rail on about her father, that filthy Mexican who dared marry his sister, who dared teach Alma to speak a heathen tongue. He’d call her a half-breed, swear he’d beat her father’s blood out of her. Drunks remind Alma how men can forfeit control of their bodies, of their minds. Yet in the morning they’ll say, It was not me, it was the claret. Forgive me. Forgive me.
“If you shout when I let you go, I’ll gut you,” she says. “If you try to run on the stairs or knock on someone’s door, I’ll gut you. Nobody’s awake. Nobody saw me come in. You’ll be dead and I’ll be gone in an instant.”
All through this hushed set of instructions Alma has moved off Beckett and allowed him to stand, to get dressed. Now he waits, hands clasped before him. There is a dark bruise on his cheek, a raw split in his lip; marks she could not see with her fingers clapped over his mouth.
“Did Wheeler send you?” he says in a hoarse whisper.
“No.”
Beckett seems inclined to cooperate, so she will get all she can with words before switching to her fists.
“I was sent by someone who wants to take Wheeler down,” she says. “You need to tell me everything you know.”
“Why don’t we sit in here?” he asks, motioning toward the chair. There is an open bottle on the seat, a glass with flies crawling on its rim. Beside the chair a pool of vomit gleams.
“Outside.” She motions toward the door with her knife. “You can have another drink once you’ve talked.”
Beckett twitches, but he opens the door. He walks with his arms wrapped around his torso, so biddable that Alma again suspects a trap. Wheeler might have warned him she would be coming. He might only be playing drunk, waiting to try something on the stairs or on the dark beach.
They descend into the lobby without incident. Pass the sleeping woman and her child. Outside, Alma tucks her knife away. Beckett stops to glance back at the boardinghouse, and she nudges him on with her fist, once, twice. They walk until the bluff eclipses their faint shadows. High overhead, grasses whip the cliff face. Tears drip down Beckett’s sunken jowls.
“I want to help.” He is whispering, though there is now little need. “I want to serve Wheeler out for how he’s treated me. But what if he hears I talked to you? He’s already warned me not to cross him again.”
Beckett gestures at his mouth, at the ridged cut on his lower lip. Alma thinks of Wheeler’s bruised knuckles. So he went after Beckett himself. It must have been no contest, but she would have liked to have seen it. Seen Wheeler riled up and striking.
“I told you, no one saw me come,” Alma says, the hot fizz of interest fading as Beckett hiccups on his tears. “No one will know I’ve been here. I just need your information on Wheeler.”
“What will I get?” Beckett asks, lifting his wet chin.
“I brought money,” Alma lies.
“Show it to me,” he says, sharpening, getting suspicious.
“Not until I know you have something worth it.” Alma points at a piece of driftwood. She wants Beckett sitting, so she is not the one who has to look up. “Tell me what the hell Wheeler is up to. My employer is concerned about his side business’s legality.”
“So you’re from the railroad trust?” Beckett grins nastily, shouldering tears off his face in an abrupt movement that has Alma’s hand in her coat, on her gun. “They’ll never let Wheeler in once I talk to them. Everyone thinks he’s so respectable, sinking a mint into public works, that new pier, but I know where he gets his money.”
“Where.”
“Give me the cash you brought first.”
“I brought this.” Alma pulls out her pistol. It sobers Beckett up a bit, his face working between fear and rancor. “Stick to Wheeler.”
&
nbsp; “I used to pass forged duties receipts for him,” Beckett says. “I was an inspector for five years at the customhouse. Some of the forged receipts were for liquor and woolens for his import company—with my help, Clyde Imports dodged a nice lump of taxes each year. But the customhouse is happy to oblige businessmen that way, letting their duties go unpaid from time to time, as long as the staff gets a kickback.”
The customhouse. Beckett was Wheeler’s man there. Now Beckett is no longer a collector. If the Port Townsend setup is anything like San Francisco’s—thick with corruption, with the collectors taking payoffs from every thief on the Barbary Coast—that’s bad news for Beckett: a bribed customhouse man knows too much to be let off the payroll.
“Why’d you leave?” she asks.
“I was fired three weeks ago.” His voice is tear-clotted, sniveling. “For shirking my work, due to drink. My money’s running out and Wheeler won’t help me.”
“Why should he?”
“Because I also made him a god damn fortune with opium imports.”
Here’s the meat of it: what Wheeler wants silenced. Beckett is talking about the business too much, but Beckett hasn’t yet gotten the ear of the railroad trustees. So who is he talking to? His friend Dom Kopp, maybe.
“How much was he moving?” she says.
“Enough that I could build a couple mansions on the hill with the taxes he evaded,” Beckett says. “Five years’ worth of who knows how many hundred pounds a month, coming in from Victoria alongside his Clyde Imports goods. The opium money made his dodged liquor taxes look like pocket change. All that time I was the principal inspector. I was paid to not see opium on the boats, so I didn’t.”
Jesus. That’s Delphine’s main line. And this weeping man knows all about it. He should be dead, not getting a visit from a newly hired unknown like her. The sense of a net falling over Alma weighs heavier. She makes a sweep of the beach, of the low folds of the cliff face, waiting for the crack of bullets that will take them both out. Beckett stiffens, too, mirroring her unease. His skull shines through the stringy fall of his hair as he peers down the waterline.
The Best Bad Things Page 6