Smugglers' Gold (8 page)

Ryder bolted down a shot of rotgut, trying hard to keep a grimace off his face, as Marley turned to him and said, “So, George. You want a job?”

Ryder tried to keep it casual, pouring another dram of whiskey. “Doing what?

“Are you particular?” asked Marley.

“Not especially.”

“I didn't think so. Way you fight and wear that Colt, I figure you've been in your share of scrapes.”

“I've been around,” Ryder confirmed.

“You wanted anywhere?” asked Seitz.

“That's not polite, Otto,” said Marley. “Everyone we know's been wanted somewhere, one time or another.”

“Yeah, but if somebody's trackin' him—”

“I'd say he's come to the right place. Where better to get lost than Galveston?”

“If you say so,” Seitz groused.

“I do.” To Ryder, then: “So, how about it, George?”

“I always need more money,” Ryder answered. “Sure. Why not.”

“Let's drink to that, and then I've got a little something special for you.”

Ryder didn't ask, downing the liquor he had poured himself and letting Marley fill his glass again, before he passed the bottle on to Seitz and it began to make its way around the table. Marley raised his glass and toasted, “Here's to George, for being in the right place at the right time.”

Other whiskey voices croaked, “To George,” but Otto Seitz stayed silent, tossing back his shot, eyes fixed on Ryder till it hit his throat and made him wince, despite himself.

Ryder took a moment to recover, making sure he wouldn't wheeze when speaking. “Now, about that job . . .”

“Tomorrow's soon enough,” Marley advised him. “Have you got someplace to stay?”

“I booked into a boardinghouse.”

“You may not make it back tonight,” said Marley, smiling. “Come along and get your present.”

She was somewhere in her later teens, a slim brunette, still fresh enough to get along without a pound of war paint on her heart-shaped face. Her name was Nell, and when she smiled Ryder was pleased to find she still had all her teeth.

When Marley introduced them, Nell clasped Ryder's hand in both of hers and stroked his palm while giving him a sultry smile. “Long fingers,” she observed.

Ryder could feel the color rising in his cheeks as he replied, “I never thought about it.”

“Nell,” said Marley, “try and give my friend here something special.”

“Everything I got is special,” she retorted. “You should know that, Bryan.”

“True enough. You two have fun.”

That said, Marley retreated toward the bar's back room, while Nell kept hold of Ryder's hand in one of hers and led him toward the stairs. Before they started climbing to the second floor, she paused and rose on tiptoes, whispering into his left ear, “I can't wait to feel those nice long fingers up inside of me.”

Ryder had trouble walking up the stairs then, but he made it, trailing Nell along the second-story hallway to the third door on their right. She opened it without a knock and pulled him in behind her, taking care to lock the door when it was closed again.

“Some of the drunks go wandering around,” she told him. “We don't want to be disturbed, do we?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Oh, it's ‘ma'am,' is it? I remind you of your teacher back in school?”

“Not so you'd notice.”

“Not your mommy?”

“Definitely not.”

“I'm glad to hear it.”

Nell's working outfit was a kind of corset that laced up in front, together with a frilly knee-length skirt, dark hose, and high-heeled patent leather boots that added inches to her height. She tugged at one end of the bow securing her corset at the bust line, then glanced down at the lopsided knot and frowned.

“You want to help me out with this?” she asked.

“I wouldn't mind.”

“A gentleman.”

“I try to be.”

“But not
too
gentle, hmm? I guarantee you, it's more fun that way.”

*   *   *

W
hen Marley had released the others, Otto cornered him, asking, “What do you know about this guy?”

“I told you. I was cornered and he waded in. I likely wouldn't be here if he hadn't helped me out.”

“Convenient, ain't it,” Seitz suggested.

“Meaning what?”

“Just when you're in a tight spot, there he is.”

“I'm tired,” said Marley. “If you've got a point, get to it.”

“I just think it's stretching a . . . a . . . damn! A whatchacallit.”

“A coincidence?”

“That's it.”

Marley appeared to take him seriously, frowning as he asked, “So, you think—what? He works for Menefee?”

“The hell would I know?”

“Because otherwise, it's nothing
but
coincidence, him happening along just when he did.”

“Bryan—”

“You heard me say I stuck Bill Hunsaker tonight. He's dead, Otto. You think Jack Menefee would sacrifice his best foot soldier so I'd buy some character a drink?”

“It ain't a drink! You offered him a
job.
”

“That's right. I did.”

“And I don't think—”

“Remind me who's in charge, Otto.”

Seitz swallowed down the first retort that came to mind and said, “You are.”

“Because I wasn't sure there, for a second.”

“All I'm sayin' is—”

“Enough!” Seitz recognized the tone that brooked no contradiction. Kept his mouth shut tight as Marley finished. “George is with us. If he does his job, so be it. If he doesn't . . . well . . . I'll see you in the morning, Otto.”

“Right.”

When Marley left, Seitz sat alone in the back room of Awful Annie's, brooding. He could understand the boss feeling a sense of gratitude toward someone who had helped him when his back was up against the wall, but how did that translate to asking someone he had never met before to join their operation? What was Marley thinking, anyhow?

This George Revere was new in town, had never been to Galveston if you believed his story, and they welcomed him aboard as if they'd all known him for years? It stuck in Otto's craw. Not simple jealousy, he told himself. It was a matter of security for what they'd built up over time, and for the pending operations they were working on.

He went back to the main barroom, made sure Marley was gone, then whistled up Joe Wallander. The big Swede ambled over, with the normal blank expression on his face below a shock of hair so blond that it was almost white. He was a mountain of a man, so muscular it always looked as if he wore his shirts a size too small.

“Step in here for a minute,” Otto said and led him back into the private room.

Wallander rarely showed a spark of curiosity, and this was no exception to the rule. He took a seat and poured himself another shot of red-eye without offering to do the same for Seitz, then sipped it, waiting.

“Any thoughts about the new guy?” Seitz inquired.

Wallander shrugged. “He seems all right.”

“Judging by what?”

“He gave the boss a hand.”

“Did he?”

“You heard what Bryan said.”

“Yeah, yeah. But did he
really
help?”

Wallander's pallid eyebrows edged closer together as he frowned. “Hold on. You saying Bryan made it up?”

Seitz shook his head. “I'm sayin' maybe it was too goddamn convenient that this character none of us ever met before just
happens
by and jumps into the middle of a knife fight, buncha total strangers, when the odds are four to one.”

“Good thing he did, for Bryan's sake.”

“But what if it's a put-up job?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Just a feeling, so far. But I need to check it out.”

“Okay.”

Wallander rose as if to leave, but Otto caught him by the sleeve. “Hold on. You're helpin' me.”

“Do what?”

“Keep track of him. See where he goes and who he talks to.”

“Bryan likes him, Otto.”

“Makes it easier for him to take advantage.”

“And I've got my own work needing to be done.”

“This'll pay a bonus. Shadow him tonight, and we can talk about the rest later.”

“That's easy. He's upstairs with Nell.”

“She never keeps a customer all night. Just find out where he's stayin'. Can you do that much?”

“For twenty in advance.”

“Jesus, you Swedes!”

Once Wallander had left with Seitz's money in his pocket, Otto gave some thought to what should happen next. If he looked close enough, he might find something that would sink the new man, or he might not. All that mattered in the long run was the basic rule that Marley had laid down: the new boy had to prove himself before he was accepted as a full-fledged member of the team.

And if he failed?

By that time he would know too much to simply let him walk away.

It would be Otto's mission to ensure that George Revere fell short—and once he started falling, see him tumble all the way to Hell.

R
yder walked back through more or less deserted streets at half past one o'clock, to reach his rooming house. Between the street fight, meeting Marley's crew, the alcohol they had consumed, and energetic little Nell, he felt wrung out and capable of sleeping through tomorrow, maybe even the day after.

Not a choice that circumstance was offering.

In parting, Bryan Marley had been vague about their meeting time tomorrow—or
today
, that was—and the arrangements for their get-together. Ryder didn't know if he was meant to rendezvous with Marley and the others back at Awful Annie's or, if so, when he should put in an appearance there. He'd made a start, but that was all. Whatever happened next, he had to gauge the situation as it was developing and keep a sharp eye out for booby traps along the way.

When he had covered roughly half the distance to his rooming house, a scuffling sound behind him interrupted Ryder's pensive thoughts. Already cloaked in shadow, walking down the east side of a residential street with no lamps burning, Ryder stopped and turned to face the block he'd just traversed. He seemed to be the only person out and moving on the street, but proving that required him to go back and search the darkness for potential hiding spots, a fruitless exercise.

Who might be trailing him? The easy answer would be one of Bryan Marley's crew, whether the boss had ordered it himself or someone from the ranks had chosen to pursue the mission on his own. Nothing Marley had said or done before they parted hinted at suspicion, but he
was
a criminal who'd managed to outwit the law for better than a decade, even while his smuggling activities were recognized. From that record alone, Ryder presumed he was a cautious man who hedged his bets and only took a chance when he believed the odds were in his favor.

Standing in the dark with one hand on his Colt, Ryder breathed slowly, silently, and listened to the night. The sound he'd heard was not repeated, leading him to wonder if he had imagined it. More likely, it had been something pedestrian: a cat seizing a rodent for a midnight snack, or something at a distance, misinterpreted as being close at hand. Despite that rationale, he stood and waited for a full two minutes, staring into shadows his vision could not penetrate, until his eyes began to burn from lack of blinking.

Nothing there,
he thought and finally moved on. But for the last five blocks he walked more carefully, took care to make no shuffling noises of his own that might come back to haunt him as an echo. Far off, toward the waterfront, he heard drunkards carousing, scraps of tinny music carried on the breeze. As far as anyone pursuing him, the night was dead and sterile.

He paused once more, outside the rooming house, then took care when he entered, not to rouse the owner or her other guests in residence. A couple of the stairs creaked as he climbed them, but another moment put him in his room and at its window facing on the street. He left the lamp alone and scanned the block as far as he could see, one final check, but he caught no one lurking in the neighborhood.

Stretched out on his bed, the Colt beside him on a chair he had positioned for convenience, Ryder replayed the night's events once more, skipping the interlude with Nell, and found his progress satisfactory so far. It could have taken days to simply locate Marley, but a stroke of luck had placed Ryder inside the smuggler's orbit without any of the convoluted schemes he had considered on the trip from Washington.

Easy? Not yet.

He had contrived an introduction and secured a little trust, but nothing more. Marley's lieutenant, Otto Seitz, had not been welcoming and might turn out to be a problem, but for now, at least he'd found a starting point. Where Ryder went from there depended on his adversaries and his own initiative, his willingness to play the role that was assigned to him.

He had no doubt it would mean wading into dirty work, but that was inescapable. You couldn't penetrate a gang of criminals without becoming one of them. The trick, he thought, was setting limits, drawing lines, and then deciding which were relatively safe to cross in an emergency.

Safe for himself, and for the job at hand.

Still pondering that riddle, Ryder drifted into sleep.

*   *   *

T
he price of Ryder's room included breakfast. On his first morning in Galveston that wound up being two fried eggs, a biscuit topped with sausage gravy, and a steaming cup of coffee that might well have been the best he'd ever drunk. The food was good and plentiful, preparing him to face the day ahead although he still had no clear notion as to what it held in store for him.

His first surprise occurred when Ryder left the boardinghouse, a little after nine o'clock. A boy was loitering outside, pacing along the curb with hands stuffed in his trouser pockets. Ryder guessed that he was probably eleven, maybe twelve years old, with wild dark hair, a face that needed washing, and a slender frame that hinted at a paltry diet. Spotting Ryder, he stopped pacing and stood close beside the small gate in the rooming house's picket fence.

“Would you be Mr. George Revere?” he asked, as Ryder cleared the gate.

“I would. I am.”

The kid's eyes dropped to Ryder's belt, the pistol holstered there, then snapped back to his face. “I got a message for you, from the boss.”

“Who's that?” Ryder inquired.

The boy looked back at him as if he'd lost his senses. “Mr. Marley. Who else would it be?”

“Just checking. What's the message?”

“Meet the boss at Awful Annie's. Sundown.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not that he tells the likes o' me.”

Duty performed, the youth left Ryder, sauntering along the sidewalk in the general direction of the waterfront. He had a certain air about him, strutting like a bad man in the making now that he had taken care of business and was on his own once more.

Ryder dismissed the boy from mind and focused on the more important question—namely, how had Marley tracked him to the boardinghouse when Ryder had not given him the address? He recalled the sound he'd heard the night before, while walking back from Awful Annie's, realizing that he likely had been followed after all.

Good news and bad news mixed together there. The
good
was that he'd done nothing while walking home that should arouse suspicion from whoever shadowed him. The
bad
was that he had not actually caught the watcher, hadn't even glimpsed him, even when a careless scuffing footstep had betrayed the spy.

Ryder decided to brush up on his survival skills. When he had been a U.S. marshal, there'd been times when he was called upon to follow suspects, but he'd never worried much about a felon trailing him. His present job was altogether different, requiring a new level of alertness if he wanted to survive.

Beginning now.

He owed Director Wood another telegram, reporting progress on his mission, and he didn't want a follower from Bryan Marley's crew tagging along to watch him send it. Knowledge that a message had been sent was one short step from learning what it said. A telegram could be diverted, stolen, or the clerk who sent it could be bribed, maybe intimidated, into giving up its contents. Ryder planned to keep his message cryptic, but the very act of visiting the Western Union office might arouse suspicion that he didn't need right now.

Plus, watching for a shadow on his way would be good practice.

And if he discovered one? What then?

That only took a moment to decide. He was supposed to be a criminal, which meant that he would not appreciate a stranger dogging him around the streets of Galveston. He had a role to play, which would include expressing disapproval of such actions in a forceful way.

Of course, the way he handled it—if there was anything to handle—would depend on who was trailing him. If it turned out to be a youngster like his morning messenger, a swift kick in the pants might be sufficient to discourage him. For someone else, like one of Marley's men he'd met the night before, dissuasion would required more energy. More force.

He didn't want a feud with Marley's crew, particularly when he'd just made their acquaintance, but it wouldn't hurt his reputation to be seen as someone with a taste for privacy, who took offense at being placed under surveillance. He might even turn it further to his own advantage, claiming that he thought the shadow was a copper snooping into his affairs.

That prospect put a smile on Ryder's face as he moved off along the street.

*   *   *

I
t was risky using Western Union at the docks, where Ryder knew he might be spotted by some member of the Marley gang he had not met so far, but he had no alternative. Before proceeding to the waterfront, he spent the best part of an hour roaming aimlessly past shops and offices, ducking down alleyways, watching for anyone who might be trailing him, and came up empty. He spotted no one in the process and could only hope that he'd invested time and energy enough to lose a shadow if there had been one he'd failed to spot.

The Western Union clerk on morning duty was a sickly looking man with sunken cheeks and a mustache that made his mouth appear off-center on his face, somehow. One of his eyes was lower than the other, too, as if his face had once been cut in half and reassembled out of kilter, carelessly. Ryder supposed that was the reason why he didn't smile at customers or hazard any small talk while he took their messages and pocketed their money.

During his maneuvers to avoid pursuit, Ryder had sketched the content of his telegram to Washington. Again, the address for delivery would be Director Wood's home in the capital, and after due consideration, Ryder had reduced the message to its simplest form:

CONTACT ACHIEVED

He signed it
GR
, which could stand for George Revere, and paid the sallow clerk to send it on.

Which left the best part of a day to kill, with no plan for exactly how to spend the time. The one thing Ryder
couldn't
do was loiter around Awful Annie's through the afternoon, assuming that the place was even open during daylight hours. At best, he would seem overeager; at the worst, somebody might suspect that he was prying into gang affairs. In either case, it made a bad beginning to whatever Bryan Marley had in mind for him.

To fill time, Ryder strolled along the waterfront, watching the work gangs loading and unloading ships. If he was seen and questioned later, he could chalk it up to normal curiosity, a smuggler taking stock of operations in an unfamiliar port of call. In fact, he witnessed nothing that aroused his personal suspicion, but the sheer volume of cargo passing in and out of Galveston would tax an honest team of Customs agents to discover any hidden contraband. If they were paid to turn a blind eye on the docks, the possibilities were limitless.

Ryder observed no evidence of payoffs going on, but he had not expected to. If Marley knew his business, he would deal with crooked officers in private, letting one or two distribute money to the rest, without a public assignation to embarrass anyone. And since Ryder had been dispatched to deal with Marley, not investigate the local Customs house, his only interest in local officers lay in avoiding them. If he discovered evidence of bribery, he would report it back to Washington and let somebody else follow that trail.

At noon he stopped for lunch at a restaurant that advertised Acadian cooking, soon identified as a selection of dishes prepared by descendants of French settlers in Louisiana, now transplanted to Texas. He wound up eating jambalaya and a filé gumbo, both of which conspired to set his mouth and throat on fire. As luck would have it, the establishment kept adequate supplies of beer on ice to soothe a scalded palate, and when Ryder left the place an hour later he felt game for anything.

More time to kill, and he employed it at the now familiar game of watching out for anyone who might be trailing him, pretending to examine wares displayed in windows of the shops he passed, using reflections in the glass to check for anyone suspicious in the neighborhood. As afternoon wore on, he gave it up, secure in knowing that the gang members he'd met last night, at least, were not pursuing him. If someone else had taken up the job, it hardly mattered, since they'd catch him doing nothing that was worth reporting back to Marley.

Finally, after a stop for coffee at a small sidewalk café and a detour to one of Galveston's convenient, if unpleasant, public privies, Ryder made his slow way back toward Awful Annie's through the purple shades of dusk.

*   *   *

O
tto Seitz was covering the door when Ryder got to the saloon. At sight of him, the bald man grimaced as if he had tasted something sour. “Didn't think you'd make it,” he told Ryder.

“Disappointed?”

One side of the smuggler's mouth ticked upward for a beat, before he said, “Back room. The rest are here already.”

Ryder led the way, Seitz trailing. Bryan Marley had a dozen men gathered around him in the room they'd occupied last night, most of them smoking. Several, thought Ryder, would have benefited from a bath. Marley shook hands with Ryder, introducing him to those he hadn't met before, while Seitz hung back a bit and practiced glaring from the sidelines.

“Big doings?” Ryder asked, after he'd made the rounds.

“Settling old scores,” Marley replied. “Jack Menefee's boys have been stepping on our toes for months. Tonight, we put an end to it.”

“These are the ones who tried for you last night?”

“None other. We'll be having the last word this evening.”

“Ready for that?” asked Seitz, off to his left.

“O' course he is,” Marley replied, before Ryder could speak. “He brought his pistol, didn't he?”

The Colt Army felt heavier, for some reason, once Marley called attention to it. Ryder glanced around the crowded room and saw that all the others present had some kind of weapon tucked into their belts or close at hand. Most carried six-guns, half of them packing knives as well. Three double-barreled shotguns lay at one end of the table where their chief was sketching plans on butcher's paper.