Heaven with a Gun

by Connie Brockway

  “Ride, Gilly! Ride like hell!”

  Chapter Twelve

  New York City,

  New York, 1883

  “You are damn lucky you didn’t get sent to prison on charges of obstructing justice.”

  “Someone would have had to be in pursuit of a criminal in order for me to have obstructed them. Lightning Lil has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes. And, besides, I don’t know any Lightning Lil.”

  “You’re taking up law, Jim?” his editor asked, rocking back on his heels.

  “Nope.” Jim opened up the bottom drawer of his desk and started emptying it. “Besides, I still maintain that those boys were after a ghost. I didn’t see anyone in that alley, and I’d been there awhile.”

  “That’s right.” His editor, Jonas, nodded. “You were drunk. And, if I remember your testimony, feeling ‘pugnacious.’ At least that’s the reason you gave for beating up on those poor men.”

  “Don’t rub it in, Jonas. I feel very bad about my actions that night.” He didn’t say it with much conviction.

  “Sure you do. What really went on out there, Jim?”

  Jim finished piling his belongings into cardboard boxes. He sat down on the edge of his desk and looked out the smoke-fogged window at New York. He’d miss the bustle. “Well,” he said pensively, “the way I got it figured is, what with all the brouhaha that kid editor kicked up claiming my . . . er . . .wife was Lightning Lil, the real thing just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take center stage. And it wasn’t a bad idea either.” He rubbed his jaw. “I mean, seeing how he’d just been there and left, the one place in the territory she could be pretty sure the U.S. marshal wouldn’t be was Far Enough, Texas.”

  “About this wife . . .”

  “Yeah.” Heat burned the tips of Jim’s ears, and for once he blessed the gift of his mother’s telling complexion. “Hell, Jonas, I was bored, all right? So I sent for a, ah, friend to come and visit me. I tried to be discreet, to consider the sensibilities of the local population, and where did my chivalry get me? A courtroom appearance.”

  “Would have been nice if your friend had shown up for your court appearance,” Jonas muttered. “Might have substantiated your story and got you out of there faster. Your legal bill cost a pretty penny, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “Yeah, and this paper got a damn good story out of it. Plus a fine series on graft and corruption in the land speculation offices too.”

  Jonas knew when he’d been outmaneuvered. He picked up Jim’s boxing trophy and polished it on his sleeve. “Jim,” he said, “what the hell are you going to do out there in that big nothing?”

  Jim shrugged. “Count cows, I imagine.”

  “You don’t sound too excited by the prospect.”

  “I wouldn’t be going at all, Jonas, if I thought I could find what I’m looking for here. I love my job. I love this city.”

  “The paper needs another editor, Jim.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Can’t you live without whatever it is you’re looking for?”

  “Maybe,” Jim’s smile was crooked. “But I don’t want to.”

  “Well, if you change your mind . . .” He lifted his hand in a farewell salute and left Jim to his work.

  It was an hour before Jim finished loading the last cardboard box. He looked around his “office”: the unused storage closet he’d turned into his own corner. Here he’d written countless articles and chased down a thousand leads. He’d miss it. But he didn’t have one misgiving about what he was doing.

  Last week, he’d read an article in a Chicago newspaper. It reported that a lady philanthropist, Miss Gillian Jones, had recently made a substantial endowment to the local orphanage.

  He’d found her again. And he wasn’t ever going to lose her again. Chicago, it was.

  “Jim?” Sherbet, rich and smooth.

  His head snapped up. She stood framed by the doorway, her mouth curving, just a little, like she was remembering a smile. Her head tilted to the side, uncertainty in her expression.

  “I bought that ranch. The one I told you about. I bought a bunch of steers and I hired a foreman.”

  He straightened, unable to find his breath.

  “Last week my father got out. I deeded it all over to him.” Her voice was hesitant, almost embarrassed.

  He shook his head, unwilling to believe his eyes, unable to make himself blink for fear she’d disappear.

  “And then I bought a one-way ticket here. Because this is where you were, and this is where you belong.”

  He took a step forward, cautiously, as one approaches a dream.

  “I promised I’d never leave you, and I take those sorts of promises seriously.”

  “I know,” he heard himself say.

  Whatever she read in his face caused her mouth to bloom in a deep, rich smile.

  He was across the room, catching her, crushing her in his embrace, savage joy exploding with the feel of her arms wrapping tightly around his neck. Laughter spilled from her lips as tears streamed down her face.

  “Darlin’,” he whispered.

  THE END

  A special excerpt from the Connie Brockway’s best-selling historical romance,

  SO ENCHANTING

  Mayfair, London

  1892

  When exactly had the mediums of London gotten together and decided that the afterworld reeked of sandalwood? Lord Greyson Sheffield wondered, taking a sniff of the séance parlor. Because obviously they had, for in every one of the séances Grey had attended—and he’d attend many—the sickly-sweet stench inevitably preceded the resident spiritualist’s declaration that he’d made contact with the Hereafter.

  And sure enough, right on cue, Alphonse Brown’s eyes widened with childlike wonder.

  In appearance, Brown was typical of male mediums: pasty-complexioned, with white-blond hair, a thin, downy moustache, and a slight build. His only remarkable features were his large, heavy-lidded eyes, nearly imbecilic with guilelessness. Grey had been told by several females who’d met the man that he was a comely youth even though he suspected Brown was close to his own age of thirty two years. To Grey, he’d looked like a dim-witted adolescent.

  But then, Grey doubted two males could have looked more unalike than he and Brown. He was well aware that the combination of his swarthy complexion, the asymmetry of his features achieved by dint of a nose broken in a past altercation, and his perpetually beard shadowed jaw only augmented his resemblance to a Welsh physical laborer. His burly physique didn’t refute the similarity, either.

  He was tall, broad-shouldered, and frankly muscular, all assets he’d used to his advantage in the ring where he’d been his regiment’s boxing champion for three years running. Happily, those days were done with— he’d always disliked being hit. Currently his situation demanded he present a more refined persona to the world since presenting a refined appearance was out of the question. As the son of a marquis, it was not too great a stretch to pull off.

  “I sense we are going to meet with success tonight,” the medium now said aloud to the small group gathered in the dark room. “Can you not smell the perfume of the Other Side? Your Loved Ones are near.”

  A rumble of excited murmurs met this remark, followed by the usual round of barely voiced hopes, wet-eyed self-remonstrations, and eager questions all of which Brown answered with vague assurances. The wealthy industrialist nodded emphatically, while a renowned M.P., recently knighted, swallowed convulsively, and his wife dabbed at her eyes. Next to Grey, a plump opera singer sucked in enough air to sing an aria while on his other side an ancient German stared sadly at the ceiling above, waiting patiently for a glimpse of his lost love. There was only one empty chair at the table, that being directly across from where Brown sat, on the other side of the opera singer.

  “The scent of the divine,” the opera singer whispered raptly.

  More likely a smudgepot. The only mystery was how Brown had introduced the scent into the
room. Thick velvet draperies covered the walls from ceiling to floor, the only openings being the door through which they’d entered, another in the small cabinet in the corner of the room, and the small, unlit fireplace which Grey had surreptitiously examined while they waited for their host’s arrival. The smell came from none of these sources.

  “Mr. Kidd, you look dubious,” Brown said and Grey cursed himself. Spiritualists were successful because they read their quarry’s every expression and word and designed their responses accordingly. And Brown was very, very successful.

  “No. Just distracted,” he said. It had taken him weeks to secure an invitation to this sitting. Brown was cautious. He only invited true believers and only very wealthy believers. He’d arranged an introduction to Brown by posing as a recently immigrated and immensely rich widower. “I don’t dare hope too much,” he added.

  His answer must have succeeded in reassuring Brown, for he reached across the table and patted Grey’s hand consolingly. Grey tensed as he fought to keep his face immobile.

  He’d gotten very good at forgetting the events that had led him into his career as a special prosecutor for the Lord Chief Justice exposing frauds and confidence tricksters, but every now and then the past awoke and ripped his heart anew before he kicked it back into submission. Just now, when Brown had patted his hand, Grey had been a boy again, quivering with impotent rage as his father fawned over a smug, sweating little toad of a man who’d hinted he might be able to contact the Marquis’s long dead daughter— Grey’s half-sister Johanna. Grey had stood at his father’s side humiliated and impotent. The toad had noted Grey’s revulsion and patted his hand in just such a manner, his hard eyes mocking him as he’d simpered, “Now, don’t you worry, lad. I’ll find your dear sister for your dad. No matter how long it takes.”

  It had taken two years, a huge portion of his family’s heirlooms, and most of his father’s unentailed properties. After his father’s death, the recovery of each penny and every artifact had become Grey’s raison d’être.

  That, along with the complete annihilation of the toad.

  But he hadn’t stopped there. He found he enjoyed being the predator in this game, chasing his quarry to ground, dragging them into the Courts of Law where he exposed them as gimcrack charlatans, destroying their reputations and their livelihoods.

  “Let us begin,” the spiritualist now said, bringing Grey back to the moment.

  Grey watched, interested. Brown rose and headed toward a cabinet in the back of the room. Though he’d seen spirit cabinets before, he’d never seen a male simulate the effect. Generally, a female medium would enter the cabinet and forthwith fall into a “trance.” Only in this state could she conjure up the “spirit guide” who would appear on the other side of the room. Should anyone open the door to the cabinet during the manifestation, however, not only would the spirit vanish, but the medium’s very life would be imperiled. Or at least her credibility. Because inevitably the spirit was simply the medium herself who, after circumnavigating the room through a hidden hallway, flounced about in the dark room in a bed sheet and a wig.

  Grey hoped to God Brown didn’t don a wig. Even a medium should draw the line somewhere.

  But Brown simply opened the door, whispered something within, and turned with a tremulous smile. “My wife, Francesca.”

  A sylph entered the room. A creature of moonlight and shadows, wary, a hint of trepidation in the cant of her brows and the angle of her chin. That was his first impression of Francesca Brown, not of her beauty --he barely noted it at first-- but of the isolation that surrounded her like an aura, a detachment that suggested she did not share the same air with mortal man.

  He shook his head, troubled by such uncharacteristic fancifulness. She was young, perhaps not yet twenty, and luminous. There was no other word for it. Her eyes glowed like polished onyx. The sheen of the gaslight glistened on her flesh and caught in the inky coils of unbound hair that rippled down her back and around her breasts in a parody of innocence that verged on the indecent. Her gown of semi-transparent batiste revealed just enough of the figure beneath to ensure that every man in the room’s attention was focused on it rather than Brown.

  She hesitated as she came toward the table, her gaze sweeping over the sitters, catching on him before quickly passing on. Had he imagined it? She took her seat at the table without looking at her husband.

  She shouldn’t be here. The thought appeared out of nowhere with visceral certainty. I need to get her out of here.

  He frowned, astonished and disturbed. First, because she was another’s man’s wife—though more likely she was his mistress—and second, because it was his self-appointed task to hunt her type, not to get them out of here.

  She was a fake, a sham. Everything about her had been artfully orchestrated for the purpose of deceit. He’d witnessed similar performances hundreds of times. Why, during Madame Blavatsky’s séances, the “apparition” of a bawdy harem girl bounced from one delighted gentleman’s lap to the next--a conjuration for which Blavatsky was handsomely compensated.

  There was nothing unique about Francesca Brown. Except how she looked, how she moved, the midnight hue of her hair and the limitless depths of her eyes, the fullness of her lips and the exquisite sheen of her flesh. His body tightened in response, his reaction primal and uncomfortable.

  “Too bright! Too bright!” At the sound of Brown’s groan, Grey’s head snapped around.

  The medium had taken his seat at the table and Grey hadn’t even noticed, confirming his suspicions regarding Francesca’s role as a diversion. Now Brown’s eyes rolled back in his head. “The spirits cannot … find their way!”

  The industrialist leapt to his feet and turned down the sconce, plunging the room into utter darkness.

  Grey peered through the murk, trying to find Francesca, angered by his fascination, unable to help himself. He had just made her out, a slender shape dissolving into the darkness, when a sudden swirling pressure filled the room. He tried to pull his hands away, but the opera singer and the German held on with vise-like strength.

  “Angel wings,” Brown whispered reverentially and as quickly as the sound had arrived, it was gone.

  Grey ground his teeth in frustration. He’d been caught off guard. Preoccupied with libidinous thoughts of Francesca Brown, he’d been unable to bring his full faculties to the task of identifying what sort of chicanery was going on. It was this specific effect that had won Brown his fame. Angel wings, the brush of a loved one’s hand, the tug on a skirt-- the witnesses Grey had interviewed claimed it could not have been possible for Brown or his wife to manufacture the effect from their positions at the table without the use of magic or the presence of a spirit.

  Of course, they were wrong. There was no such thing as magic and the world wasn’t harboring ghosts. There were no mysteries, simply answers that had yet to be discovered.

  Another memory sprang forth unbidden. He’d been seventeen, forced to endure yet another séance. This one would be different, his father had promised. This woman was authentic.

  He could still see his father’s expression as he watched a face “materialize” above a table in a dimly lit backroom. It had been nothing but a plaster mask covered with luminescent paint and dropped from a box hidden in the ceiling. It was so pitiful and yet his father had whispered, “Johanna.” His father, someone he had once so admired and loved, had been reduced in that moment to a gullible buffoon.

  Grey wished they’d just come one night and taken everything from him, every bit of silver, every family treasure, every stick of furniture and deed of ownership, every penny, painting and promissory note, rather than take, as they had, that one thing no amount of effort on his part could every replace: his respect for his father.

  Grimly, Grey focused his attention on Brown, determined not to be distracted again. There followed the usual round of thumps, raps, and sighs, after which began a series of ear-offending twangs and off-key peeps (why had no one ever wondered why
the entire population of the hereafter did not count amongst their members one passable musician?)

  Francesca did not speak. She did not move. She did not, as far as Grey could determine, add anything to the proceedings besides her presence which, he allowed, was addition enough.

  Finally, after Brown had declared in a voice rife with wonder that the shriek of an ill-tuned violin was the spirit of Handel come to serenade them, Grey could stand it no more.

  Jerking free his hands, he bounded to his feet and flung open the door to the séance parlor, flooding the room with light and exposing to view the five burly policemen he’d arranged to be waiting without. Then, as the séance party gaped, blinked, and gasped, he ripped the damask cloth from the table, revealing Brown’s unclad right foot braced against a miniature violin, whilst the hoary toes of his left curled about a little bow. The trap door where he’d secreted his props still lay open beneath his chair.

  “There’s your spectral musician. No shade of Handel, just Mr. Brown’s unwashed feet,” he declared in disgust.

  His pale mustache quivering like an albino rabbit’s whiskers and his large, soulful eyes narrowing to not so soulful slits, Brown sprang up, upending his chair.

  Chaos erupted in the room. The opera singer collapsed in terror and the other women screamed. Red face with outrage and, Grey hoped, chagrin, the gentlemen rose to aid the ladies and confront their deceiver.

  Only Francesca remained motionless. Brown dove, seizing her by the shoulders and dragging her to her feet to use as a shield. She did not resist. She stood flinching in his bruising clasp, her expression contemptuous.

  A red haze filled Grey’s vision. He vaulted the table, jerking Francesca out of Brown’s clutches, and thrust her behind him. Desperate, the spiritualist scuttled away, grabbing a nearby chair and flinging it. Grey knocked it aside, advancing relentlessly.