The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  When she looks back, Loomis has his gun out, two feet away, the barrel gaping and terrible and pointed at her. McManus yanks at her shirt in time with a heart-stomping explosion. The room snaps sideways.

  She can’t breathe.

  Driscoll’s face is snow-colored next to hers.

  21

  JANUARY 25, 1887

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL REED

  WHEREUPON THE FOLLOWING PROCEEDINGS WERE HAD IN THE JEFFERSON COUNTY JAIL, PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON TERRITORY, ON JANUARY 25, 1887.

  LAWMEN PRESENT: CITY MARSHAL GEORGE FORRESTER, OFFICER WAYLAN HUGHES

  TRANSCRIPTION: EDWARD EDMONDS, ASSISTANT DEPUTY COLLECTOR, U.S. CUSTOMHOUSE

  OFFICER HUGHES: That’s all we’re asking for, Sam. The truth. So let’s start fresh. From the day … from that day Sloan attacked you. After you woke up, his man, Loomis, took you to a room in the house? What happened then?

  MR REED: I slept for a long time. Maybe half a day. Someone brought me some soup and bread, a little vial of Figg’s Tincture for the pain.

  OFFICER HUGHES: And once you were up again?

  MR REED: Loomis was waiting for me in the hall. He said we were going to go to work.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: This was the next morning?

  MR REED: No, it was the middle of the night. It was snowing. We went out to the cannery, and on the way Loomis gave me a gun. I didn’t want it. I was seeing double with the pain. He took me to a room inside the cannery.

  OFFICER HUGHES: What was in the room?

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Opium?

  MR REED: There were men chained to the walls. At least ten of them, maybe more? It was dark. The fellow closest to me had bare feet. It must have been awful, in the cold …

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Who were these men? Were they Chinese?

  MR REED: No. No Chinese, not that I could see. Later Loomis told me they were men Sloan’s crimps had picked up, promised to the captain of an incoming boat.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Shanghaied.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You’ll see it a lot round here. Tacoma’s got it worse.

  OFFICER HUGHES: How is this possible? Every vice on the waterfront is happening under Sloan’s watch, and we’ve got nothing on him.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Like I said, I’ve heard things.

  MR REED: Then why are you giving me such a bad time?

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You speak when you’re spoken to.

  OFFICER HUGHES: We should send men to arrest Sloan. If we wait too long, he’ll notice Reed is missing. He’ll get suspicious. Maybe run.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I want the full story. And I want to be there to collar the bastard.

  MR REED: He’ll know by now you picked me up. He’ll know I’m talking—

  OFFICER HUGHES: More reason to act—

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I’m going to be the one to arrest Sloan, once I have all the facts. This is going to be the police bust of the decade. It’s got shanghaiing, girls, opium … Everyone will be watching. It’s not the time for us to make a mistake.

  MR REED: Just let me out before he comes in—

  OFFICER HUGHES: A woman was killed. I’m more interested in solving that crime than the publicity.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You’re pretty damn green when it comes to police work, Hughes.

  OFFICER HUGHES: I served for six years in Peoria, sir.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: And you’ve served for three months in Port Townsend. We do things differently here. There are a lot of concerned citizens to consider.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Jackson can at least get some men together—

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Sit down. You sit down until we get the whole story.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Sir—

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: That’s an order.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Yes, sir.

  MR REED: Please. Let me out, then get Sloan. Don’t bother with the cannery—those men are long gone, and there won’t be dope either. Sloan just sent off a big shipment last night.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Well, I’ll be.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Wait a minute. Something’s not adding up. Why would Sloan want Miss Calhoun’s girls to be his mules if he was shipping out crates of the stuff already?

  MR REED: He wanted to move more dope, I guess.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You guess.

  MR REED: All I know is that Sloan wanted to use Sugar’s girls. She said no, he left her alone. Would have kept leaving her alone, except she sent me to the cannery to copy the keys … and I got caught.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You never found out why she had you casing Sloan’s cannery?

  MR REED: I did.

  OFFICER HUGHES: And? How?

  MR REED: I saw Sugar. One more time, before last night.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You said you couldn’t get away from Sloan, or his men. How’d you manage a visit with her?

  MR REED: It was the night of that boxing match. Everyone cleared out to go watch it—Sloan, Loomis, the other men. They posted me at the cannery. It’s on Quincy Wharf, same as Chain Locker. Sloan swore he’d gut me if I tried to run off. I started to creep away about a hundred times, but I was too frightened to leave the wharf.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Twenty feet from freedom, and you couldn’t find the nerve.

  MR REED: Leave me alone, won’t you.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: Not a chance in hell, son.

  OFFICER HUGHES: And Miss Calhoun? Did you go to her that night?

  MR REED: She passed by on Water Street. I was on the cannery steps, smoking. She called my name.

  OFFICER HUGHES: She was alone?

  MR REED: Yes. She seemed frightened—when she walked up to me she had her derringer out, ready at her hip.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: A woman’s intuition. She might have saved her own life if she took yours, then.

  MR REED: Damn you.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Just tell us what she said, Sam.

  MR REED: She asked if I was Sloan’s man, now. I told her I was, but not by choice. I said it was her own fault that I was working for a criminal. She said she was sorry, that she wasn’t trying to get me into trouble, that she only wanted the cannery keys to give to the police, anonymously.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Anonymously? Why?

  MR REED: She said she’d come to the police once, to lodge a complaint about Sloan, but instead of receiving assistance she was threatened with arrest herself, for keeping a bawdy house.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Sir?

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I’ll have to look into that. I don’t know who was on duty, or why she didn’t just pay the fine, like the other women do. But why was she after Sloan?

  MR REED: Because he’d threatened her. She was afraid of him. She’d heard rumors of dope and kidnapped men in his cannery, and she hoped exposing him would land him in jail.

  OFFICER HUGHES: We turned her away. She might still be alive, but we turned her away.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: They all have to pay the fine, Hughes.

  MR REED: That night, at the cannery, she asked for my help again. I was on Sloan’s crew, she said, and I could help her bring him down.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: You didn’t agree? That ought to have suited you just fine, based on how he’d treated you.

  MR REED: I told her it was a bad idea. Sloan would kill us both … We were arguing when the boxing match ended. There was gunfire inside the saloon. Men brawling outside, fifty feet away. Sugar left in a hurry.

  OFFICER HUGHES: Did Sloan know why she wanted the cannery keys? Did he know Sugar was trying to have him arrested?

  MR REED: I didn’t say a thing about that night, but Sloan had suspected her from the start. He had asked me if she was working with the police, when he first caught me, and was … was hurting me. He was wary of everyone. He thought a lot of people were after him—even some of his own men.

  OFFICER HUGHES: So Sloan had cause to kill Miss Calhoun after all. He killed her and had you load her body into the scow.

  MR REED: Yes.

  MARSHAL FORRESTER: I’m go
ing to get him.

  MR REED: Oh, I hope you do.

  22

  JANUARY 19, 1887

  Breathe and it’s hot ash burning, lungs bellowing, wires of pain lacing her shoulder tight, her teeth tight. Her left deltoid a blazing mash. Boots pounding into wood at her ear. Gunpowder in her mouth.

  “Back off! God damn you.”

  Glass bursting behind her, so close she squeezes her eyes against the shards, a cold rain on her face.

  Grunts, swearing. Coming from her or another, she can’t tell. Roll over, get up. Her left hand doesn’t exist. Her left elbow. Get up, Rosales. No. Camp. Get up, Camp.

  “He glassed Conall, I’ll break his fucking—”

  “Shut up. Go outside. Now.”

  A shadow looms over her closed eyes. She cracks them open, careful of glass caught on her lids, and Conaway is upside-down, stunned.

  “Help him.”

  She can’t see Wheeler, but this is his voice. Past Conaway is a ring of faces. Blood needles back into her limbs, kicked fast by fear. She puts her right hand, still in a fist around her knife, to her chest—her left hand ghostly, not where it should be—and her shirt is hot and slippy. Sickness. If the bullet tore an artery, she might die here, in this shithole town, drained of her own dark matter. She breathes deep. Smells blood. Gunpowder. Whiskey.

  “Let’s see how bad, Camp.”

  Conaway puts his hands on her shirtfront as if to tear it open. She wrenches away.

  “Get off me,” she says.

  She angles her knife at him. Scrabbles her boots against the wood. They don’t stick enough to act as leverage. Don’t panic. Get up.

  Fear, sickness. She needs to move fast, needs to keep herself mobile in this seething crowd. The staring circle of others wavers. The lantern above the bar splits into two lanterns, four, more. Then Wheeler is standing over her, his gray coat brushing her jaw, his mouth at Conaway’s ear, and they hoist her up with their arms around her low ribs, her shirt still buttoned on, the movement tearing at her shoulder and she’s going to vomit. It hurts so much more than she remembers, but she won’t go down like this, god damn it.

  “Damn it! Easy.” She’s saying that aloud, there’s a belt cutting into her armpit, sharp leather biting into skin, an extra jacket packed over her shoulder and it’s Driscoll’s lined denim and it’s bloody and they are outside in the snow, flakes glowing honey-gold as they swarm around the streetlamps. Stumbling, limbs locked with Conaway’s. He bears most of her weight. Cold on her face. Cold on her chest. Nothing on her left hand.

  A blur of buildings, the men muttering over her slumped head, the office stairs snowy, so familiar to the night she was first dragged in that she laughs, but it comes out as a cough that shakes fire out of her shoulder and down into her lungs.

  “Get Nell Roberts,” Wheeler says, and Barker is standing there, cap to chest.

  “No!” Alma twists in Conaway’s grip. “No. Not her.”

  Nell can’t see her like this, she can’t see her as Camp peeled open and showing her cloth underpinnings like this, the breasts she’s done so well hiding, the way Nell looked at her when they were dancing, when she ate candy out of Alma’s hand—she was promised cake, she was promised time alone with all that soft skin.

  “Who would you rather?” Wheeler says in her ear, harsh.

  And there’s no one else. It can’t be Conaway. It can’t be Barker or McManus. Driscoll is gone. There’s no one else.

  The blue hall. The blue carpet. Wheeler never uses the Quincy door—he’s in a hurry.

  They prop her against the office wall, Wheeler leaning into her, warm and good smelling after rancid Conaway, who has a wife—how can she stand him? Wheeler’s hip pressed against hers to keep her upright. This is not how the night was supposed to run—or it is, but it’s wrung out, crumpled. It’s hard to stand, but this is the smart thing to do, keep the blood away from her shoulder and where she needs it, in her heart and in her head. Buck up, kid, Hannah would say, laughing. Hannah would tell the story of the operative who was shot in the arm and tied her limb to a lintel, letting gravity act as a tourniquet while she fainted, until she could recover enough to see to the wound.

  “Jesus, he’s bleeding,” Conaway says, lighting a lamp, shaking out the match. “Sir, your coat—”

  She closes her eyes to focus. Each inhale a wheeze she hears high in her throat. Wheeler undoes the belt at her arm socket and yanks it tighter. Pain jolt. Buckle click.

  “Let Nell in when she comes. Let only Nell in.”

  Conaway hustling to the door, footsteps shaking the floorboards. Blink hard and there is Wheeler’s face, close.

  “Oh, Christ,” she says.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “It’s McManus,” she says. “He’s the thief.”

  His hand on her chin, hard, tips her lolling head up.

  “The both of you, drunk and brawling like fools.” His face pale, a dark strand of hair knocked loose from the rest to fall over his forehead. “Half the waterfront there and you pick a fight with Sloan’s man when you know, you know, you have to leave him be.”

  McManus started it, she wants to say, but that would sound like an excuse. And it’s not true. McManus is the thief. That is true. Her arm gnaws away at her concentration.

  “I’ll deal with Tom,” Wheeler says, and Alma doesn’t know what she’s thinking and what she’s said aloud. She blinks down at her bloodstained sleeve, vision splintered.

  “Is it bad?” she says.

  A shadow in his eyes; a pause in his breath.

  “I don’t know yet.” His fingers loosen, thumb tracing the front notch of her jaw.

  “Driscoll,” she says, remembering his face, and it’s too close to Yuma now, Hannah’s voice in her head, “Make sure we’re out before you move,” passing a bottle around on the hill behind the safe house, piss-reek of sagebrush, horseflies thick in the summer night, “Make sure,” Hannah had said, but Alma got impatient for action, for gunfire, the smoke clearing so she saw—

  Gut heave and she curls sideways, away from Wheeler, the steak dinner she ate before the fight and the gin she pounded down during ripping out of her, the busted muscles at her shoulder tearing with each jerky coil-in of her body.

  “What is going on?”

  “He’s been shot. Maybe more.”

  “Oh, God, his shirt—”

  Bile tang and iron blood. She is hauled upright, Wheeler rough in his handling, but then a softer touch on her cheek, a cloth wiping her mouth. Gold hair, sweet perfume. Nell. Still in her green dress.

  “Mind the belt,” Wheeler says.

  Silver glint of scissors up her sleeve. The stained cotton peeling away.

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “Is that the only wound?”

  Nell unbuttoning her collar, soft fingers on the underside of her chin. Alma slides to one side evasively. The wall slippery against her back. No knives of pain apart from her arm and Wheeler, you son of a bitch, did you say that just so Nell would strip off the shirt and see the bindings? He keeps her in place with his knee, his side.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Shh,” Nell says. “Let’s get this off.”

  Nell works down the buttons, a line of touch from sternum to navel, pulling open the shirt as she goes. Smile worried, but warm. Golden curls at her ears asway.

  “Let Wheeler do the rest,” Alma tells her, but Nell peels off the sticky cotton.

  Alma is folded away from the wall and onto Wheeler. Fingers on the back of her neck. His twill vest rasping against the skin of her stomach, bare and cold below her binding cloth.

  “I can stand just fine,” she says, stupid.

  Wheeler laughs, short, a huff of sound that pushes his belly against hers.

  “Shut up, would you,” he says.

  Nell saw. She saw the binding. Wheeler made sure of it. Made sure Alma’s game with Nell was up. Even though he liked to hear about it, red ears, red throat. Doesn’t he want to b
e in the office all three tangled, heat from the hearth and skin slick on the dark-wood desk and the leather chair creaking? Alma wants it. But not like this, with puke reeking on the carpet and her head going dim. Warm hands track around the pain in her shoulder.

  “The bullet cut deep,” Nell says beside her. “And there’s glass. The bleeding is slowing, but you left it so long.”

  Maybe too long. Her vision fuzzed, her pulse sluggish. At least the bullet didn’t stick. There will be no knife tip digging into her living meat.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “It needs stitching,” Nell says. “And I’ll have to get the glass out.”

  Alma buries her face in Wheeler’s neck. He stiffens, his arm around her waist stiffens, she could bite him when they’re this close, her nose below his ear, his pulse against her cheek. He deserves it.

  “Here,” Nell says.

  Wheeler resettles her against the wall, pressing the edge of his body into hers. He holds up a cup brimming with whiskey. His vest splotched with dark stains. She gulps it quick.

  “The good stuff,” she says.

  Nell is rummaging through a bag on the desk, ten feet away, her forest-green dress shimmering in the lamplight. She is threading a needle. She is pouring out another cup of liquor.

  “I only keep the good stuff,” Wheeler says.

  “You did that on purpose,” Alma says, quiet. “So she would see.”

  “I was being careful.”

  “Fuck you.”

  His eyes flinted with anger but he’s hiding something again, like he does, something twitching at the edges of his mouth, in the movement of his eyebrows. Then he leans into her again. Pulls her against him. One hand splayed warm over her bare lower back, thumb fitting into the groove of her spine. His other hand worms between them to shove the starched collar of his shirt between her teeth.

  “Hold on,” Nell says, and then cold, pain, the whole world condensing into a bolt of fire in her deltoid. Brassy peat sting, ice dripping down her shoulder blade, wet along her binding cloth, disappearing on her nowhere lower arm.

  It lasts for too long, needle piercing, fever, oh, Jesus, her jaw is trembling from grinding down onto cotton, but she is quiet save for the breaths hissing in and out of her nose, and that composure is good, Hannah taught her good, taught her well, it’s been eight years since she died and Alma can still hear her voice, “Make sure before you move,” when they said goodbye at the Yuma hotel not knowing it was the last goodbye. Red, hot, red, she is sweating, angry, gutsick, Conall and Hannah sound the same when whispered, hot, red.