McManus and the hired stevedores are loading crates into the Clyde Imports wagon. Its horse is tied up at the foot of the pier, champing and snuffling, tossing its head morosely in its blinders. McManus does not look up from the rope he’s tying off when Alma and Folkstone walk past, toward the freight warehouse that anchors the wharf. There is no sign of Driscoll.
At the landward side of the warehouse, where they’re sheltered from the weather, Folkstone lights a cigarette. He takes a long draw, hands it to Alma. They smoke in silence as Orion, blocked from view by the building, signals twice, three times, and thunders away from the dock. The landed passengers haul their goods off into the night or stride into Hoop & Barrow, the wharf’s saloon. Street noise trickles in to fill the void left by the side-wheeler’s splashes. Shouts from Sailor Town dives, a man hollering a hymn as he pisses against Hoop & Barrow’s wall. The everywhere tapping of rain. A fistfight spills out of the saloon and briefly distracts Alma from the mess at hand.
Then McManus’s peculiar dragging gait, at last. He comes round the corner of the warehouse. As he approaches Alma and Folkstone, his face gleams paler than usual, streaked with rainwater.
“Get the horse,” McManus says to Folkstone, his tone flat yet somehow conveying fault that encompasses Alma, too. She flicks away the cigarette, those unused wires of power tingling in her arms and thighs.
“Driscoll’s with the cart,” McManus continues. “We’ll meet you at the warehouse.”
“Yes, sir.” Folkstone touches his forehead and starts down the pier.
This is the first time Alma has been alone with McManus. He stands angled from her, his face turned, putting distance between them though they are close enough to lock elbows. He did his part and told the men to mind her, but his posture, his tight mouth, signal his disapproval.
“The unloaded lot is safe, then,” she says.
He nods.
“So is this business as usual?” She wishes Folkstone were here; anyone to witness her taking rank over McManus. He is Wheeler’s favorite. And maybe Wheeler’s blind spot. “Do you routinely have unknown inspectors barge in and go sniffing around the product?”
“He’s new.” McManus glares at her out of the corners of his eyes, then shifts his gaze toward the lights onshore, where crowds tumble along Water Street. Folkstone approaches, leading the steaming shadow of the cart horse.
“Don’t make excuses.”
Alma is pleased when McManus tenses, his jaw locking. It might save her a heap of trouble if he throws a swing at her now—she’d go right for his bad leg, get him out of order quick, and there’s one less man for Wheeler to stand on as he stands in her way.
“I don’t care if he got his badge this afternoon,” she says. “Not sweetening the collectors is two-bit, amateur nonsense. Their bribes should be the first thing you look to. Their wives should be getting flowers. Their dogs should be getting marrowbones. Do you understand me?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Now she has McManus’s full attention: his face in hers, clean-shaven, pale as milk, blue eyes blazing under the brim of his cap. Sour gin breath—he must keep a flask on him, though he seems steady as a rock.
“You didn’t do a thing to help while he came down on us,” she says, and neither of them looks up as the cart and horse rumble past, fifteen feet away, shaking the boards under their feet. “So I can see why you’re upset with your performance. But if you take it out on me—if you stand here and insult me—you had better be prepared to put your money where your mouth is.”
He does not move, does not blink, and she wonders if Wheeler did give him a private talking-to, for him to show such restraint.
“Go on.” Alma lets her voice go almost soft. “Start something.”
“No.” McManus closes his eyes, his nostrils flaring. When he snaps them open again, his gaze is pointing at their feet. This is enough to reset the space between them, take some of the crackling tension away. “I was given orders.”
“How convenient, to follow them now.”
McManus grunts, flips his collar up to his ears, and ducks into the rain. Alma lets him lead the way down the dock, past Hoop & Barrow, past the shuttered tailor’s shop at the pier’s foot. On Water Street she leaves even more space between them, like a rope let to sag, and allows her attention to wander over passersby and bright windows. A gold sign across the road reads THE CAPTAIN’S. This is the dance hall where Nell works sometimes, according to Wheeler. He seemed cagey about sharing the name of the place, and she’s not convinced he told the truth.
She stops to take out a cigarette in the light of the window. Behind the fogged glazing, dancers whirl on a square floor, girls in gay dresses, men in calico shirts and dented hats. A fiddle band sways on a raised platform. Alma searches the room for Nell’s face, her golden hair. Nell works for Delphine, too—of course she does, she’s devastating, and Delphine chooses only the best. Alma wants to know more about her. She wants to buy her a drink, slide her hand up that yellow skirt. Wet heat and honeysuckle.
The match burns down to her fingers, a hot nip of pain. She shakes it out. Walks on, the wires of her veins sparking, full of current with nowhere to go. McManus’s dark blue coat, his limping gait—she latches on to them just as he turns off Water Street onto Quincy, toward the pier.
At the corner she finds him again. He is halfway to the water. Slowing to a stop under the last streetlamp. Then he takes off running, his awkward gait amplified by quickness. Out by the Clyde Imports warehouse a dark tangle of bodies seethes beside the horse cart.
“Shit.”
Alma throws herself into a run, too, barreling past a pair of sailors who swear after her, so ready for a fight she is salivating. Onto the wharf boards and she’s close enough to see Driscoll drop a man with a beauty of a head hook, Folkstone on his knees taking a kick to the stomach, curling in, McManus slowing ten feet from the fight to pull out a pistol and take measured aim at the man atop the cart. Just as the sound splits the night air open, Alma skids up behind the man kicking Folkstone and whips his jacket down, trapping his arms, yanking his body back so her knee slams into his kidney. The collision echoes into her pelvis, into the thick pulse collecting at the apex of her thighs. He goes limp, groaning, and she catches him up by the hair to smash a fist into his nose, hot crunch of bone and blood and her teeth are bared and another bucko slams her in the shoulder with a punch, she wheels on him ducks his wild swing and feeds him her fist, yeah, this is what she’s been wanting, half of it, anyway, someone is screaming, the man is still standing and connects with her chest, lungfire, let it out, swing—
Another gunshot, so near it leaves her ears ringing, and the men on their feet are stumbling away, blood on the boards, sweat in her mouth, Driscoll grinning a wild red smile as he shakes out his fists.
The last thief falls out of the cart, hands locked around his strangely crooked knees. He is screaming. He writhes on the boards, and now it is Alma’s crew and this lone man, Driscoll helping Folkstone to stand, Alma sucking in cold ocean air. McManus tucks his gun away. He limps over to where the man is flopping, lifts his eyes to Alma’s, then rears back his good leg. His boot thunks into bone. The screaming stops.
12
JANUARY 15, 1887
“Edward Edmonds. In two days ago from … Missoula, by train through Tacoma, and took the government cutter from there, which is how we missed him.” Wheeler tosses the stack of papers onto his desk. “Where the fuck is Missoula.”
“Montana Territory,” Alma says. “He’s a cowboy in shiny shoes.”
“He’s a problem,” Wheeler says. “There couldn’t be a worse time for a new deputy collector to ride in from the wastelands.”
McManus stands stiffly beside Alma. Wheeler has not offered either of them a chair, and McManus’s left foot is trembling, lamp glow slipping over his waxed bootlaces. In the windowless rectangle of Wheeler’s office it is always dusk—the light smoky, faintly golden. This morning the room s
till smells of blood. Blood and a faint sweetness, coming from the little twine-tied box at the edge of Wheeler’s desk.
“Well, I can’t send you, after you nearly mauled him.” Wheeler looks up at Alma without raising his head from the note he’s writing, his eyes sharp under lowered brows.
She shrugs, rubs the bruise on her collarbone left by last night’s brawl.
“Tommy, give this to Moore.” He holds the paper out; McManus limps forward and pockets it. “He’d better have a damn good explanation for his absence. And we’ll have to find out what Edmonds wants. What will keep him friendly on our boats.”
“What keeps Inspector Moore friendly?” Alma says. “Besides his extra cash.”
Wheeler taps his pen, twice.
“We give him time with Nell Roberts,” he says, and takes a sip of whiskey.
Alma rakes her teeth over her lower lip. She is itching to see Nell, her body primed by the brawl. It’s a long-ingrained habit: fighting, then fucking. And today she woke hungry. Her cot a tangle of cloth and sweat, honeysuckle scent lingering from her dreams, her sex so tight and aching that half a minute’s touch had her biting her pillow, her hitched breaths damped by cheap cotton batting.
“Anything else?” McManus says.
His foot is still unsteady. Wheeler can’t see it from behind his desk, but Alma looks down pointedly. The trembling stops. Starts again.
“Were they all Sloan’s boys?” Wheeler says, so McManus has to stand there, shaking, on his bad leg.
“Two were,” he says. “A pair of others I didn’t get a good look at, and I didn’t know the last man.”
“The one you shot the kneecaps off of?” Wheeler says, sharp.
McManus puts one hand on the chair in front of him. Leans forward, jaw clenched. Alma considers his limp and shakes her head. Doesn’t like to see others walking proper, does he, the bastard.
“The problem with a signature move, Tommy, is that people start to know it was you that did it.”
“I couldn’t go in after Edmonds.” McManus’s face hasn’t changed, but a strange note is in his voice—repentance, or appeal. “I had to do something.”
Wheeler finishes his whiskey. He lets McManus stand there, bracing white-knuckled on the chair, for a few long breaths.
“Give that to Moore, lad,” he says at last. “Then have a rest.”
“I’m fine,” McManus says, but his shoulders are high and stiff as he walks to the door, landing hard on his bad leg and unable to conceal his limp.
After the door closes, Alma sits in the chair he was just leaning on. She takes off her cap, drapes it over one thigh.
“Your signature move,” she says. “Making people stand there when they’re about to fall over?”
“It was good for him,” Wheeler says. “It showed him he could stand, even if it hurt.”
“Is he your son?”
Wheeler barks out a laugh, his eyebrows high and incredulous.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “My son? No.”
“You treat him like it.”
“He’s worked for me eleven years.”
McManus could still be the weak link: The man who’ll shoot too soon, or move too slowly to intervene when needed. The man who allowed that seventy-five pounds of tar to go missing, or made it disappear himself.
“He fucked you with the Peterson beating, though, and now maybe he’s fucked me,” she says, liking how Wheeler bristles at her choice of words. “I’ve got to walk into Sloan’s house in an hour, and Pike aside, one of our men just crippled one of his.”
Alma goes to the sideboard, not so much because she’s thirsty but because she’s bored of sitting down. An uneasy truce has settled between her and Wheeler since their briefing yesterday, and though it’s fun to banter about business, she won’t let him get too comfortable. She rattles through glassware. Lifts the silver-topped decanter, the expensive stuff, and holds it to the lamplight. Picks up the gin. She wants Wheeler to watch her touch his things like she owns them.
“If you’re going to help yourself, get me another,” he says.
Alma pauses, gin bottle in hand, making it clear she’s heard him. Then she finishes pouring her drink and stays at the sideboard, facing the blue wall.
“What’s your plan for Edmonds?” she says, following a thin stain on the wallpaper up to the ceiling, where a penny-size crack splits the plaster.
“See what Moore has to say about him.” Papers crackle; he is riffling through them again, always at it with pen and ink, keeping notes or marking ledgers in that alphanumeric system she has not yet deciphered. “Then use a carrot or a stick.”
“In the city we had it pretty good,” she says. “Most everyone in the customhouse was willing to be bought. But there was a deputy collector who would not cooperate. He didn’t want money, girls, boys, tar. What to do?”
She turns around. Wheeler is watching her from under lowered brows. His empty tumbler sits on the edge of the desk, waiting.
“He got a little too drunk.” She carries the gin bottle over to Wheeler’s desk though she’s never seen him touch the stuff; fills his whiskey-filmed cup deliberately. “And ended up on a slow boat to China.”
“You had him shanghaied?”
“Crimps are good for something.” A clink as she nudges his cup toward him with the decanter. “We should keep that in mind while dealing with Sloan’s boys.”
“I don’t take gin,” he says, not touching the muddled liquor.
“My mistake.” Alma picks up the twine-tied box. She shakes it; inside, a dull shifting. “Any special messages for our new friend Mr. Sloan?”
“Tell him the Chain Locker meeting is off.”
“How scintillating,” Alma says.
She leans one hip against the desk, three feet from Wheeler’s writing hand and the heavy lacquered pen he’s rolling between thumb and forefinger. He sets the pen down.
“Ought I write him a poem instead?” he says.
He turns toward her but folds his arms over his chest. Opening his body, then closing it off. Picking up on her jokes but not letting any looseness come over his face. She can’t read what he’ll do next. There is the sense of circling—of a dare, or an invitation, that has been laid out. She will throw some bait. See if he bites.
“I bet I’ll get Sloan on the line before you get Edmonds,” she says, tapping the box.
“And what’s the prize?”
“Time with Nell Roberts.”
His eyes go hard. The line of his shoulders rises. Yeah. Come on, Wheeler.
“If you can give her time to Moore,” she says, “you can dole it out otherwise. Right?”
“Not to you.”
Now there’s blood in the water. His hands move back to the desk, fisted. Alma shifts forward a notch. Ready to cause trouble. Ready to fight, if he throws a punch. Or engage in other sport. Her tongue ticks over her back left molars, where the teeth are sharp, the sensation satisfying.
“I’m not good enough to share your woman?”
The leather of his chair creaks.
“She is otherwise occupied,” he says.
“I’ll bet. More and more customhouse men to look after.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Wheeler says. “She’s our forger. And she has better things to do than … entertain you.”
“Forger?” Alma resets her stance; takes the tilt out of her hips, gives Wheeler some space. She’d pegged Nell as Delphine’s sugar dish, set out to entice the various officials whose cooperation the business depends upon. Set out, perhaps, to entice Wheeler into obedience. But Nell is even more interesting. “And a body like that.”
“She’s a woman of many talents.”
“I look forward to enjoying them.” Alma pulls on her cap, winks at Wheeler. “Forgers have nimble hands. Don’t you find?”
He stands up, a harsh scrape of chair legs over carpet. Neck red, mouth tight.
“Save it,” Alma says. “I’ll be back in an
hour.”
She walks to the door with the box, waiting for him to follow, collar her, start something, but then the brass knob is turning in her palm and she is in the bitter kerosene chill of the hallway and it’s time to pay a visit to Barnaby Sloan.
* * *
Wheeler called it a sty, but Alma has seen far worse flophouses than Sloan’s boarding quarters. A two-storied clapboard building, it is marked with a simple LODGINGS sign and a row of signal flags tacked to the lintel, spelling out for sailors what some of them might not be able to read in words. White paint edging mossy pine boards. The usual collection of men loafing on the steps. Inside, salvaged wood knocked together into a bar counter in one corner of the drowsy afternoon lobby. A few rooms; one open and full of cots doused in dust-glinting sunlight. At the back, by the stairs, a couple of hard cases. Caps low, lips fat with tobacco plugs. Eyes locked on Alma from the minute her feet cross the threshold. She walks straight toward them, the wooden box tucked under one arm, her pistol snug under the other.
“I’m here to see Sloan,” she says.
“What’s your business?” one of the men, wearing an ashy cap, says.
“That’s between me and him.”
“He don’t want to see you.” The other man tucks his hands in his pockets, his elbows flaring out. The posture looks lazy, relaxed, but Alma keeps part of her attention on his hidden fists, on what they might yank out and stab at her given an excuse.
“That’s because he doesn’t know who I am yet,” she says. “Or what I’m offering.”
“Chocolates?” The man nods at the box under Alma’s arm. His face, too, is streaked with ash. A splotch by one ear. A pale smudge along his stubbled jaw, the skin there wrinkling as he grins. “Cigars?”
“You can suck on these if you like.” She unpicks the twine, holds the opened box toward the men. Nestled in a red bed of cotton are a few of Pike’s fingers. Thumb, pointer, and middle. Skin shiny with the burn scars that licked up along his left hand and arm.
The Best Bad Things Page 13