Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  She was a large woman, large and sad—her love for Doc having cost her a lot. “I think I do remember … vaguely,” she said. “Doc’s got so many friends, so many acquaintances … seems to me you were looking for him back in Deadwood, too.”

  “It’s a different reason this time. Do you know where he is? It’s important that I talk to him.”

  “Try the Golden Spur,” she said.

  “Already have.”

  She shrugged; her face was bloated. “Then he might be at the Vaudeville Theater.”

  “Tried there, too.”

  “Well god damn him,” she said, and began to close the door but not before Cole could wedge his boot in.

  “I’ll call the police if you try and molest me,” she warned.

  “I’m not trying to molest you. I’m trying to find out where Doc is and I’m not leaving until you tell me.”

  “Well, he’s not here.”

  Cole gave her a hard stare to let her know he wasn’t budging.

  A sob caught in her throat. “Try Fanny Porter’s sporting house down the street. He has a particular little red-haired whore he enjoys there … apparently I’m not enough for him. Now leave me the hell alone!”

  Cole removed his foot and she slammed the door hard. He heard the lock click from the inside. Then he heard sobs that quickly became wails.

  The light of evening had gone from crimson to black silver. An almost golden dust seemed to have descended on the city, and lights in windows were winking on. Cole descended the steps and went up the street, looking for Fanny Porter’s sporting house.

  It might have been any one of a number of bagnios, for he came to a block where a red light glowed in almost every window. He picked one at random and knocked and a young Oriental woman with black hair nearly to her hips answered. She was pretty and small and wore a tight-fitting green dress.

  “Yes, come in,” she said.

  “Is this Fanny Porter’s?”

  “Why you want to go there? You come in, we got everything you need right here. We got white girls and Negro girls and China girls. You don’t need to go no place else. Come in, come in.”

  “I’m not looking for a girl,” Cole said. “I’m looking for a man.”

  He realized what that sounded like the minute he’d said it. The Celestial clasped her hand to her mouth and giggled.

  “Oh, we don’t got no men for you. Why a nice handsome fellah like you want a man for when you can have cute girl like me?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Cole said. “Just tell me which way to Fanny Porter’s.”

  “She got no men for you. No, no. She don’t have no men like that. Come in, you see, girl be OK for you now.”

  Cole turned and left, her laughter still burning his ears. He knocked on the next door and this time a large black man who looked like he could bend a crowbar without breaking a sweat answered and stared at him. “You got forty dollars?” he said. “That’s the price of admission you want to come inside, sample the ladies. You ain’t got forty dollars, keep on moving … this ain’t no crib joint like most the places up and down this here street.”

  “I’m looking for Fanny Porter’s,” Cole said.

  “This is Fanny Porter’s. You got forty dollars, or ain’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He started to close the door.

  “But I got this.”

  He stopped when he saw the Colt Peacemaker aimed at his nose.

  “I’m looking for Doc Holliday. He around?”

  He looked at the iron for another second and said: “Please, step in, suh. I’ll go fetch Doc.”

  The scent of lilacs and cigar smoke is a smell that reeks of loneliness and desperation and the room was filled with it. So, too, does the clink of whiskey glasses and loud laughter, red drapes and wilted flowers dropping from cheap vases. Cole looked around, remembered a time when a place like this was exciting, remembered his first time in a whorehouse in Abilene not nearly this fancy. Barely seventeen he was and with some others just off their first cattle drive. They’d been thinking about it all the way from the Brazos and found it exciting. But what it turned out to be was just a spare room over a saloon—an iron bed and a hollow-eyed woman who wanted $3. Yet for a jug-eared, whiskey-soaked kid it was exciting. Now it simply seemed to Cole to be a sad place for a man to have to find refuge in, to have to find some sense of himself.

  A woman with platinum hair and a mole on her left cheek descended the steps leading from the upper floor. She was barely dressed in a lavender kimono that parted at the top enough to show the mounds of her breasts. She looked to be all of maybe twenty years old unless you looked into her eyes—the eyes were a lot older.

  “Howdy, slick,” she said. “You come for any particular gal, or will I do?”

  “I’m waiting on a friend,” Cole said.

  “Well, while you’re waiting won’t you buy a lady a drink, only cost you a dollar, honey.”

  “Dollar for cheap watered-down whiskey? I hope you got a lot of charm.”

  She smiled. “I got enough,” she said. “But I can see I can’t fool no hardcase such as yourself, sugar. Where you hail from, somewhere in the South? I’m from Alabama.”

  “This what you did in Alabama?”

  She snorted, said: “Hell, no. I was a preacher’s wife in Alabama.”

  “That must have been some church.”

  She laughed, then suddenly looked sad. “If I could go back with my head up, I would, but I’m afraid it’s too late for salvation.”

  “Well, salvation comes in many forms, but I’m not one. Thanks for the offer, sis.”

  She snorted again. “How’ll you know what you’re missing, if you don’t give it a try?”

  “I got a feeling I know what I’m missing. Thanks, anyway.”

  “John Henry Cole.”

  Cole turned to the rasp of Doc Holliday’s voice. He stood in a doorway in just a nightshirt and trousers, the galluses down, stocking feet, a glass of whiskey in his hand, his arm around an ample woman with hair as red as autumn leaves. Surprisingly, except for the hair, she looked very much like Big Nose Kate.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m in the middle of something. Joseph says you pulled a pistol on him, threatened to blow out his brains, he didn’t come retrieve me.”

  “Joseph exaggerated. I only meant to shoot him in the knees, if he didn’t tell me where you were.”

  Doc smiled. “Can it wait ten minutes?”

  “If it could, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  “OK, OK,” he said with a wave of his glass. “At least let this poor pilgrim get dressed. I see you met Phoebe.” He indicated the woman with the platinum hair.

  “This poor sucker a friend of yours, Doc? Well, if I’d known, I’d have thrown him a free one.”

  Doc shook his head. “You’ll have to excuse Phoebe,” he said. “She’s a mite loose-mouthed. She’s lost all her gentility somewhere along the way.”

  “Hell, that and a whole lot more, Doc!” The woman’s voice was full of regret.

  “Be gone with you, sister, this man and I have personal business to discuss.” Holliday’s gaze had suddenly turned serious.

  Cole waited until Doc went back inside the room with his lady, then emerged, fully dressed. He reeked of whiskey and cheap perfume.

  “Let’s go into the parlor, where we might have some privacy,” he suggested. “And where I might have a drink to settle my hash. Young Jasmine in there is enough to make a man nervous with anticipation of her comely charms. Coitus interruptus will fray a man’s nerves every time.”

  Cole waited while he poured himself a drink, declining an offer to join him.

  “What is it you’d have of me, sir?” he said at last.

  Cole took out the tintype and showed it t
o him. “You ever see this woman, Doc?”

  He looked at it, brought it closer to the lamp, where the flame glowed white.

  “Well … she has a certain resemblance to someone I’ve seen about recently,” he said.

  “Tell me where.”

  “First let me ask you why you thought I’d know her?”

  “Call it a hunch, Doc.”

  “Because you think I’m a man who knows everyone and everything that has to do with the dark side of humanity.”

  “I’m interested only in finding this woman.”

  He looked again. “She’s a new girl … just showed up here in the district a day or two ago, recent acquisition of Madame Lu over on Water Street, near the river. Lu’s a high-class Chinawoman, sells everything but herself, charges high rates. She also runs a dope den.”

  Something hammered at Cole’s heart. “Take a good look, Doc. Are you sure it’s the same person?”

  He looked again, nodded his head. “I’m fairly sure, but not a hundred percent. The lady in question was a bit more drawn, older, hair a bit lighter … but, she bears a strong resemblance.”

  “How do I find this place?”

  Cole felt as if his blood was on fire as he walked from Fanny Porter’s down toward the river. A heavy fog had begun to settle over the city and the only distinct sounds were the ringing of his spurs as the fog closed in the nearer he got to the river.

  Somewhere in the shadowy mist a sudden burst of laughter shattered the stillness, then stopped as quickly as it had begun. He was remembering the answer Teddy Green had given him the time he had gone into the tenderloin of Ogallala looking for Ella: I thought maybe, I might find her there. Teddy Green knew something about Ella that Cole hadn’t until he’d read the letter taken from Green’s pocket—her reference to her life in Denver, the sins she’d alluded to, the loneliness. It was what gave Cole the hunch to come looking for her here now. That, and the feeling he’d gotten the last time he’d walked these streets. Sometimes all a man has to go on is the feeling in his gut. If Doc Holliday wasn’t mistaken, then Cole’s hunch had proved right. He hurried his step.

  The lights on the bridge were shrouded in fog. A set of stone steps led from the bridge to the street below—which had to be Water Street, according to Doc Holliday’s directions. Cole reached the bottom, heard the lap of water along the banks, the splash of a fish. To his right he could barely make out the shapes of buildings, most without light, others farther down too enshrouded to see. Holliday had said to look for a door that had Chinese lanterns and a red dragon painted on it. That’s what Cole was looking for when suddenly several shapes emerged from the fog.

  “Where you bound to, mister?” one of them asked.

  Cole’s warning instincts went up immediately. He was reaching for the Peacemaker when something struck him from behind, something hard that sent him reeling until a fist smashed into his ribs and another into his jaw almost simultaneously. He went down, spitting blood under a rain of blows and curses, hands grabbing at his pockets while others smashed into him. The Peacemaker, knocked from his hand, Cole reached for the Starr single-action—the one he’d taken off Batwings in the cañon fight—jerked it from where he’d positioned it at the base of his spine and shot one of the feet nearest his face. The owner screamed when he blew off his toe. He fired blindly and heard another yelp that he’d been shot, then the running of footsteps fading into the night. Cole thought at first it was the fog closing in on him, then, too late, realized it wasn’t.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  John Henry Cole awoke to a dull ache, his head buzzing. When he went to move, everything hurt. He rolled over and sat up, found himself sitting on a hard bunk in a jail cell, the smell of human waste nearby. In the cell next to him slept a man with a long, tangled beard, his mouth open in a steady snore. The smell was coming from a bucket under his cot.

  Cole’s left eye was nearly closed. He could feel the lump when he went to rub it with the heel of his hand. His ribs ached every time he took a breath. He couldn’t tell if it was daylight or still dark—there were no windows, just a row of cells, lanterns hung on hooks from the stamped tin ceiling.

  His weapons were gone and so were the contents of his pockets. He’d been robbed and his mood was black. He thought of the letter and the tintype and how he’d hoped to return them to Ella. Now they were gone.

  An iron door leading back to the cells cranked open and a fellow with a black vest, white shirt with garters on his sleeves, and trousers tucked inside his mule-deer boots came strolling down the aisle. He looked in at the man in the cell next to Cole and said: “Jesus, Bart, you stink worse’n a cow’s butt!”

  Then the man stopped in front of Cole’s cell, took a key, turned it in the lock, and jerked open the door. “Come’n out.”

  Cole followed him into an office where three others stood or sat around—all wearing badges, two drinking coffee, one cleaning his boots.

  “Have a chair, amigo,” the man with the gartered sleeves said as he sat down behind a desk across from Cole. Cole saw the contents of his pockets spread on the desk—saw Teddy Green’s Ranger badge, the packet with the letter and tintype—and he was relieved they hadn’t been stolen. “You’re mighty careless for a Ranger,” the man said. “Letting a bunch of trash jump you down on Water Street. Lucky them boys didn’t cave in your skull and throw you in the Guadalupe. Pull two or three bodies a week out a that river.”

  “I shot one in the foot,” Cole said. “Maybe shot another one, too. If you find a man with his toe shot off, you’ll find one of them.”

  The lawman looked at the other deputies, then back at Cole.

  “How come I don’t know you?” he said. “I know practically every Ranger around these parts, but I ain’t never seen you before.”

  “I’m out of Houston, looking for someone,” Cole said. A lie was good only if it worked to your advantage.

  “Houston, huh? I suppose you know Bob Sugar, captain with the Rangers over there.”

  Cole nodded. “Good man,” he said.

  “You’ve got that right,” the man said, and extended his hand for Cole to shake.

  “Cal Morris,” he said, “chief of police. Some of my deputies were cruising the river area, heard the gunshots, and found you cold-cocked. Most get cold-cocked down on Water Street ain’t so fortunate, are they R.J.?” He looked at the deputy cleaning his boots, who nodded.

  “I’ve always been more lucky than smart,” Cole said.

  “You don’t look so danged lucky. Who was it you say you were looking for?”

  Cole nodded toward the tintype. “That woman.”

  “She commit a crime in Houston?”

  “She’s wanted for the investigation of a murder there.”

  He picked up the tintype, studied it for a moment, then laid it back down. “Jesus, pretty woman like that,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So you figure you’d find her down on Water Street?”

  “I heard she might be in the area somewhere.”

  “You carrying a warrant for her arrest? ’Cause I didn’t see no warrant papers among your personal effects.”

  “I’m not out to arrest her,” Cole said. “I just want to ask her some questions. Not likely she did the killing, but she may have a handle on who was involved.”

  “See, the way it works, any arrests to be made in San Antone, me or one of my men make ’em. You Rangers want ’em, you come here first, ask for my assistance … sorta what I consider professional courtesy.”

  “You’re right,” Cole said. “Next time I will. But like I said, I’m not wanting to arrest her, just to ask her some questions. That OK with you, if I do that?”

  He seemed to relax a little. “You want us to help you find her?”

  “Not yet. Let me see if I can run her down. If not, I’d be grateful for the assi
stance. I’m sure you boys got lots better things to do than find a woman.”

  One of them snorted.

  “I can’t think of a thing better’n finding a woman, can you, Cal?” the one cleaning his boots said.

  Morris grinned, took a cigar from his waistcoat pocket, one that had already been lit and snuffed out once, and screwed it into his mouth. “Maybe the first thing you ought to do is find yourself a sawbones, have him look at that face.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “You’d scare babies and old folks. Looks like maybe those thieves broke your nose, too.”

  “Thanks,” Cole said. “You mind I gather up my things and get in the wind?”

  “No, go right ahead.”

  “I had some weapons on me when I got jumped last night,” Cole said. “A Colt, a Deane Adams, a Smith and Wesson, and a Winchester.”

  Morris opened a drawer, took out the Dean Adams, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester, and laid them on the desk next to the tintype, badge, and packet that held the letter.

  “Didn’t find a Colt. Those boys probably grabbed it up and run off with it. Probably will use it to kill or rob someone with.”

  “Loss of a pistol, a broken nose, cut eye … I’ll settle for that,” Cole said, and took up his belongings.

  “Water Street’s a bad place to go alone day or night,” Morris said. “But I guess you already figured that out.”

  “Thanks, Chief, maybe sometime, you ever get to Houston, I’ll be able to return the favor.”

  He sniffed, said: “Hell, don’t hold your breath waiting for me to show my face in Houston again. Last time I was there, I caught the clap. If you ever caught the clap, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Adiós.”

  “Take care, pardner,” he said.

  It was good to breathe fresh air again, and in the light of day, even seeing it with only one eye, the world looked new and full of hope. Cole headed back to Water Street.

  He was perhaps two blocks from the jail when he heard someone call his name. He looked around and there, standing across the street at the edge of the plaza, was Roy Bean, Cleopatra’s former boss, pimp, and sweetheart. He’d asked Cole once whether or not he thought there was opportunity in Texas. Cole had told him he thought there was for an enterprising man.