“Peterson doesn’t know him from Adam,” Wheeler says.
“That’s right,” McManus says. “I made sure of it. He swore he hadn’t said anything stupid, but they’d knocked him around a fair bit. I knocked him around some more.”
“You knocked him around,” Wheeler says, on his feet in an abrupt surge of motion that has McManus blinking in surprise. “No. I’ll tell you what you did. You fucked me. I needed a favor today, and instead I got a lecture about how Peterson’s missing teeth.”
“That was the police.” McManus stands up a notch taller. “I only hit him in the body.”
A smart fighter, if not an agile one. Get a man on the torso so his bruises aren’t visible under clothes and save your knuckles from the jawbones, the skull bones, that might slow them.
“I don’t want excuses,” Wheeler says. “You have bright ideas about keeping men quiet, you come clear them with me first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Wheeler sinks back into his chair, runs a palm over his pomaded hair. “Is Orion’s shipment ready?”
“Waiting at the refinery,” McManus says, with another patently mistrustful glare at Alma. There is more venom in his eyes than before his scolding—he has been dressed down in her presence, and it’s a mark against her. “Packed in the stamped trunks. Johnny Yee says the boats are all late with the storm.”
“Take thirty pounds out of the shipment when it comes through and bring it in.”
Wheeler unlocks a desk drawer and withdraws an unmarked envelope. McManus steps forward to take it, his left boot dragging just slightly over the carpet.
“That’s thirty pounds.” Alma sets her coffee on the sideboard. “Or how about an easier number: two cases. With all the tar gone missing lately I wonder if you know how to count.”
McManus pauses, the envelope halfway into his inner jacket pocket, his shoulders stiff.
“Watch your mouth.” Wheeler relocks the drawer. “Go on then, Tom.”
McManus nods, not bothering to conceal his scowl as he puts on his cap and sees himself out. The door clicks shut.
“Am I not meant to give friendly reminders?” Alma says.
“Not if they involve you bleating about missing product.”
Or if they involve Tom McManus. Wheeler jumped to his defense quick enough. Alma finishes her coffee, wipes her mouth on her sleeve.
“When I shook Beckett down, he said he’d tipped the cops onto Peterson’s yard,” Alma says.
“That’s why I sent you to shut him up.”
“But he said he did it anonymously.”
“I know.”
Alma strides to Wheeler’s desk. She pours herself more coffee, then splashes some into his still-empty cup, spattering nearby papers. While he scoops up a handful of wet pages and shakes them out, swearing, she takes the hot tin cup to her seat.
“All right,” she says. “We have coffee. We have privacy. Tell me everything about your operation: people, drop spots, merchants, payoffs. Customhouse paperwork. The missing tar, and where it disappeared. I ran the San Francisco deliveries—I know the ropes. Follow your god damn orders and demonstrate how you do things here.”
“Don’t you ever speak to me in that tone again.” Wheeler drops the coffee-streaked papers onto the desk, his face bloodless.
“You want my respect, you earn it,” Alma says. “I hear you’ve got near on two tons of tar moving through every month. That’s impressive. Tell me how it moves. I’m all ears.”
11
JANUARY 14, 1887
Again, that ghost howl: a foghorn, far off, fading. Still no sign of ship’s lights. Then, like a match being struck on a distant street corner, a yellow glow flickers to life. Another. Drifting steadily nearer through the mist that blends Union Wharf’s boards into bay into sky. Alma pulls her jacket tight against the damp, takes the flask the young man slouched beside her holds out.
“About time.” She tongues low gin off the corners of her lips. “It’s past ten.”
“These Red Line cunts,” Driscoll says, capping the flask. “Never made an early landing in their lives.”
Passengers scattered across the wharf are stirring, standing from their steamer trunks, shaking condensation off their cloaks and hats. Boards creak under boots. Faces are blurred in the dim haze cast by lanterns strung along the pier, but Alma picks out Wheeler’s men by their postures, by the positions they’ve taken. McManus stands with three hired longshoremen at the far pylons, smoking and checking the tags of their cargo with the aid of a hand lantern. Lyle and Folkstone slap their arms for warmth and share a packet of cocaine, taking snorts of the stuff and shaking their heads like wet dogs. Driscoll, next to her, is the boxy kid from the warehouse she never got to fight, and that’s just as well—up close he’s a bruiser, with thirty pounds on her and a youngster’s reckless energy.
“Last month it was fog delays every time, sure.” Driscoll’s hands are shoved deep in his pockets, his body in constant motion, rocking from heels to toes and back again. “And then that hailstorm, Christ Jesus, we waited in that for a steamer, two hours late, whatever excuse they had Tom wasn’t ready to hear it, oh, no, not with his girl waiting on him in town. Fucking hailstones the size of conkers, I had one hit me in the teeth and thought I’d lost the buggers.”
He’s nervous as hell and gabbing to match, Alma following the looping skeins of his sentences with interest. Driscoll is the one who let Sloan’s man Pike get close to the crew and eventually into the warehouse. What Driscoll had to say about that incident sounded innocent enough: he seems far too in awe of Wheeler to steal from him. In the end, the kid’s too friendly and talks too god damn much. Not ideal for a crewman. But he’s strong. Seems loyal. And the dips and blurs of his thick Irish burr pull Alma back to Chicago. To the boys she spied on from her boarding school, imagining herself in their midst, jostling over marbles and cigarettes, wearing their tatty tweed vests and cropped trousers.
“McManus has a girl?” she says. “One he’s not paying for? I don’t believe it.”
When she speaks, she has to make an effort to not fall into Driscoll’s rhythm. The chameleon’s danger: a tendency to mimic whoever’s near. As Camp she uses a bland Western twang. He could be from anywhere west of the Mississippi, and the accent is common enough in California. Other patterns come easy, too—easy enough to throw her off and smear into Camp’s low drawl. Driscoll’s is one of them.
“All I know is her name’s Mary.” Driscoll grins at her as he scrubs fog droplets off his stubbled chin. “Conaway says she must be ugly, but I think she’s a proper beauty. And rich. Maybe lives up high on the hill.”
Orion is close now, three tiers of lanterns glossing the fog gold. As the thrum-thrum-thrum of her side-wheel grows to a roar, McManus limps across the pier. So he’s got a secret woman. Might be interesting to find out what about her makes him shy. He approaches a waiting passenger. The man takes out his watch, shows the time to McManus while shaking his head.
Driscoll’s teeth worry at a raw patch on his lip. He’s going to crack open the opium shipment—on this run it’s packed into steamer trunks, one hundred pounds each, tagged with recycled duties stamps through to Tacoma—and bring up the thirty pounds of tar that Alma will offer to Sloan. Driscoll’s never done this part of the job. When there’s product to extract, a crewman called Barker usually does it, Driscoll said, but Barker is laid up with a kidney stone. So tonight McManus has placed the responsibility on the younger man. Another way for him to earn some trust back, after the Pike problem. Driscoll’s coat pockets bulge and shudder. He is making nervous fists there, in the dark confines of the wool.
“Don’t fuck this up,” Alma says, testing him.
If the kid gets too jittery, she will take the burlap sack and skeleton key he’s got tucked into his belt and get the cases herself. That would add some fun to the evening. She wanted to see a shipment in progress—how the tar passes safe through Port Townsend’s customs checkpoint, how the rid
e-along man is put into position for the trip to Tacoma—and after some negotiation with Wheeler she was introduced to the crew as McManus’s new mate. That makes her an unofficial boss man.
“I’m grand, I’m grand.” Driscoll flares an elbow at her, playful, not overstepping too much. “Only watched out for Barker a hundred times.”
A wet slap as Orion’s lead tie-line lands on the planks, then the steamer nudges into the bumpers and the whole wharf shudders. The passengers have formed a straggling cluster, baggage at hand, and three crewmen hop off the side of the boat to draw it closer with more lines. They lead out a gangway to the top deck and throw out another to the lowest, for the loading crew.
“Ready?” Alma says.
Driscoll nods. They push out of their shallow alcove—thick air chilling Alma’s back, her neck—and cross the wharf to join the little crowd of stevedores. In this sweat-soured circle the men converse quietly: “Evening, pal,” someone says to Alma, and she returns the greeting, tips her hat at Folkstone, who reeks of smoked fish, Driscoll, behind her, is muttering about the fog, and Lyle replies in an undertone that the Red Line is a bunch of sods.
Their gangway is tied in. Alma and Driscoll are eased to the front of the group. It’s so smoothly done that Alma is surprised to find herself first at the walkway, hustling down, the roped planks tilting uncertainly under her boots. She ducks into the storeroom, Driscoll warm behind her, and lets him pass as Folkstone enters the low compartment, then Lyle. The two men get to work carting out crates and boxes labeled for Port Townsend, while in the shadows at the back, Alma blocks the shallow window with her body and keeps her attention split between the storeroom’s starboard door and Driscoll. The kid creeps among the Tacoma-tagged luggage, pulls free a large trunk, and fits the key into its padlock.
A shout outside. Lyle, arms full with a crate, flinches toward the door.
The shout again, and then Folkstone repeats it loudly from the doorway: “Step aside, quick. Quick, step aside.”
Someone is coming down—someone not on Wheeler’s crew, which means it’s not Moore, the bribed customs inspector, either.
Driscoll pauses, his hands in the open trunk, his eyes wide. She nods at him to keep working. Straw scatters as he pulls out a case. Alma threads through the waist-high piles of cargo toward the gangway, hauls up the closest item marked P.T. It’s a burlap sack of something heavy and formless, grain, or sand, and it shifts in a way that pulls hard on her shoulder.
An unfamiliar man ducks into the storage room, squirming around Lyle, who goes suddenly clumsy with the crate he’s carrying, apologizing as he bumbles into the man. The stranger is doughy in the face and torso, with dense black hair and muttonchops. He’s not a laborer, not with that build. Not with that peacoat, those pressed trousers. His shiny shoes make Alma’s spit go sour.
“Give us a hand,” she says, and heaves the sack at him.
He catches it with a grunt, staggering backward. Drops it hard to the floorboards. A few coins fall out of his pocket.
“I’m not here to cart things around,” he says, brushing hay off his coat.
“You’re in the way of those who are.”
Alma lifts her chin. Her knife is a hard flatness against her bound rib cage; another blade waits in her boot. The man looks damn like a customhouse inspector—but he’s not Moore, the ring’s new friend in the customhouse after Max Beckett’s ouster. Moore, who just last week received a five-hundred-dollar bonus for his sterling ability to turn a blind eye to opium shipments.
A grunted call comes down the gangway, passed from man to man.
“Ten minutes.” Folkstone hollers the call into the hold, his hoarse voice too loud in the dim confines. He is staring at the intruder, a bewildered worry in his eyes. He and Lyle don’t know this man—another red flag.
“I’m here to inspect this ship’s cargo.” The man holds out a printed card. “Edward Edmonds, U.S. Assistant Deputy Collector.”
“I can’t read,” Alma says, ignoring the card. How much longer is Driscoll going to fuck around with the trunk, is one question. Another: How can she punch out a customhouse man and not cause trouble for Delphine? “All’s I know is you’re in my way and we have ten minutes to get this dunnage shifted.”
“Then I’ll start at the back,” Edmonds says, shouldering past.
Alma falls away as if he’s knocked her off-balance, her hip thumping into a slatted crate. She uses the surface to impel her back toward Edmonds.
“You don’t manhandle me, lawman,” she says, grabbing him by the lapel. She shoves him into a stack of crates with far more force than he used against her. The top lip of a crate catches him in the upper back and he wheezes, eyes wide, Alma’s fist pressed into his fat-padded jaw.
“Inspect whatever you want, but apologize to me first.” She thrusts his chin up with her knuckles. “I’ve had just about enough of being knocked around today.”
The bruises on her face and hands fit this angle. And not all of her reaction is feigned: she is sore, her neck a low-grade aching; she’s been battered about over the last few days and is only too ready to dole out a throttling. But this diversion, authentic as it feels, will only work if Folkstone or Lyle joins in. She can’t look at them to see if they’re catching on, but she prays one of them is quick enough to pick up on what she’s playing at.
“I will have you arrested,” Edmonds says.
His pale face is flushed, dark red at the ears and cheekbones, hot against Alma’s hand. He is angry. But there is fear in his eyes, too: the fear of a soft fellow who stormed into a room full of workingmen and found his office did not protect him. This flash of coward’s remorse sends a surge of viciousness through Alma. Her free hand is slipping into her vest when someone grabs her by the shoulder.
“Jesus! Easy now!”
Lyle is behind her, pulling her away from the collector, her fingertips just brushing the handle of her knife but coming away empty.
“I’m sorry, sir.” Lyle moves between Alma and Edmonds, offering the collector a hand, which the other man slaps away. “Forgive him, he had a rough time with some union boys earlier. We’re all on edge after they came at us.”
Good thing Lyle is a ready man. Folkstone is still gaping by the doorway.
“He didn’t mean nothing,” Lyle adds lamely.
“I don’t know if you’re drunk, or just stupid.” Saved from a beating, Edmonds is brave again. He stands up to his full height, straightening his lapel and sneering at Alma, who positions herself so that the collector is facing the door, not the hold. “But it’s a good thing your fellows are here to restrain you before you land yourself in jail.”
She glowers at him. Over his shoulder, in the shadows, Driscoll reemerges from the piled luggage and vaults through the back window to the deck. Alma covers the brief wandering of her eyes by spitting copiously at the collector’s boots and wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
“All right,” Lyle says. “Come on.”
He tows her by the sleeve toward a large steamer trunk. They heft it up together, eyes locking over the top. Alma gives him a tiny, approving nod. His mouth twitches into a lopsided grin, just for a second, and then it’s back to business as he counts, “One, two, three!” to lift the trunk onto the back of the first man on the gangway, one of the hired fellows, whose massive muscled plane of a body bears the weight up the steep ten feet to the dock.
While Edmonds pokes around with a hand lantern, Alma helps move the rest of the P.T.-tagged bags and crates out of the hold. Lyle leads her into the back, to the last few boxes marked for Port Townsend. Nothing marking Driscoll’s efforts save a little straw on the deck. They cart out the boxes under the customhouse man’s glare. She is sweating, moisture collecting at her temples, the cut at her neck prickling with a fierce itch. If Edmonds doesn’t look too hard at the luggage with customs-cleared stamps, they will come through the night unscathed.
But this was supposed to be a routine operation, the same one that takes place ev
ery time a loaded Red Line boat touches in from Victoria en route to Tacoma. There was supposed to be a friendly inspector, who would idly peer at a box or two, have a smoke with the men, leave. No high stakes, no surprises. Just a chance for Alma to see things in motion, see how the product moves south. So is Edmonds’s presence an accident, or was she was meant to blunder—set up by Wheeler to fail? No. Not this way. Not by endangering the supply line. The Victoria–Tacoma steamers are half the business’s main artery, and to damage that would be suicide.
“Coming down!” the men shout along the gangway line.
The new passengers’ gear is being stowed. Alma and Lyle stack crates and trunks, Folkstone mumbling as he carts dunnage in; he did not act fast or well in the crisis, and he won’t meet their eyes. When Edmonds makes his way forward to inspect the new baggage, Alma steps back, kicking at the straw-dusted floor and scowling. Without a word to them, the collector pockets his notebook, turns up his collar, and leaves the hold.
“What the fuck was that about?” Lyle says, once the customhouse man has climbed the gangway and is out of earshot.
“I don’t know,” Alma tells him. “But he didn’t linger too long among the goods, thank Christ.”
“I’ve been working with this crew for near on a year,” Lyle says. “Never seen hide nor hair of an unfriendly collection agent.”
The side-wheel, muted while the boat was tied in, is picking up—slow, loud slaps against the water. Alma thinks again of the timing. It is bad. But it would have been worse if she were not there. If Barker was out, Driscoll in his place, and there was no extra man to think fast in the hold and buy two minutes more for Driscoll’s extraction.
She leaves Lyle at the lower rail; he’s the ride-along man, staying with the product until Tacoma to make the handoff to the middlemen there. Folkstone is close behind her as she climbs out of the hold, the fog thickening into rain, pent-up tension roping through her neck and shoulders and stiffening her joints. The hurt she was ready to put on Edmonds is bottled up inside her arms, her chest.
The Best Bad Things Page 12