Crooked Hearts (42 page)

“Hold it—
hold
it! The least you can do is let me kiss the bride.” He tried a sickly smile. Whatever happened, he wasn’t walking out of here without Grace.

“It’s all right,” she said evenly, with a calmness belied by the fear sparking behind her eyes. “Isn’t it, Mark? After all, he is my brother.” Wing couldn’t seem to speak, and Grace took the initiative by lifting her arms and gliding past him toward Reuben.

They embraced. His ardor knocked her floppy hat sideways, and for a moment her face was shielded. She took the opportunity to mumble in his ear, “How come there’s never a cop around when you need one?”

“Gus, what the hell?” he whispered urgently. She straightened her hat, one-handed, and kissed him on the mouth. It wasn’t the least bit sisterly. He barely heard the vicious hiss of Wing’s curses, because the warm, solid reality of Grace in his arms crowded everything else out of his senses. But he retained enough presence of mind to drop his hand and grope her left thigh, the one turned away from the Godfather, in hopes of feeling the hard shape of a little derringer under her wedding gown. Not this time.

“Take your hands off my wife, do you hear? Otherwice I will kill you.”

No more time. He grasped her hand, which was slick with sweat, like his. “Let’s go,” he muttered. Spinning, pulling her with him, he made a dash for the courtyard door. The knob turned under his hand and the heavy door opened. In Re, who had been facing the street, pivoted in surprise. He looked a little like Santa Claus, Reuben remembered thinking once; but he reached under his black pajamas and came up with a big, shiny meat cleaver, and then he looked more like the world’s most intense butcher.

“Uh-oh,” said Grace.

They whirled back around. Tom Fun whipped his sword out of his belt, grinning, and made a bombastic whirring noise with it over his head. Wing barked out something in Chinese. Reuben felt the prick of In Re’s cleaver between his shoulder blades, nudging him forward. Tom Fun moved nearer in front. Reuben and Grace were in the middle: a hatchet sandwich. The muttering and yelling on all sides grew louder as the other highbinders closed in. Wing held out his hand. “Come, my dear,” he said seriously.

Then Reuben felt a rougher shove from behind. Grace stumbled; he caught at her and they both turned around, expecting an attack. “Hallelujah,” Reuben prayed in an awed whisper. “It’s the cavalry.”

Almost. A phalanx of blue-coated policemen tunneled into the courtyard, wearing helmets and wielding pistols and wooden billies. Like spooked prairie dogs, the whores in the windows ducked out of sight, and a weird quiet blanketed the concrete courtyard. Grace came into Reuben’s arms with a soft cry, and he held her tight, whispering, “Baby, baby,” not sure which of them was trembling harder. He’d never been so glad to see a policeman in his life, and damn the consequences.

The lead police officer gave an unintelligible order that sounded like “Soich douse,” and two officers trotted across the courtyard and into Wing’s house. The police were outnumbered by about five to one, but when the leader ordered everybody to drop their weapons and put their hands up, the hatchet men obeyed. All except Wing, who was paralyzed. He wasn’t even mad yet, he was just—paralyzed.

“Youse!” bawled the lead cop, whose back was to Reuben. “Is your name Mark Wing?” The Godfather came out of his trance enough to nod. “Den I got a soich warrant for youse. Dis is it.” He handed him a folded paper, which Wing mechanically unfolded and tried to read.

Reuben pulled back far enough to look at Grace, who was grinning like the Cheshire cat.

“I’m Captain Gallant, see, I’m wit’ a special task force dat’s charged wit’ cleanin’ up vice and rootin’ out illegal drug importers, get it? We had a tip about youse, and we’re crackin’ down now.”

Reuben dropped his forehead on Grace’s shoulder and let the laughter bubble up, smothering it in her veil.
“Captain Gallant?”
he wheezed, afraid to look at her. She was trying to make her snorts and snickers sound like sobs of relief, which only made them both laugh harder.

“We found it, Captain!”

The two “policemen” who’d disappeared into the house lumbered out, hunched over a heavy wooden chest. They set it down at Lincoln Croaker’s feet. “It’s opium, sir,” said one; if Reuben wasn’t mistaken, it was Winky. “Dere’s half a ton o’ the stuff down in the basement.”

Captain Gallant drew himself up and said something he’d probably wanted to say all his life. “You’re under arrest.”

Wing finally came out of his stupor. “For what?”

“Violations of the Narcotics Act.”

“If there isn’t such a thing,” whispered Grace, “there ought to be.”

“We’ve had youse under surveillance for mont’s, Wing. Get the resta the stuff outa there, boys, and hurry it up. We’re confiscatin’ it for evidence, see? You’ll have t’ come wit us downtown.” He turned around. Reuben couldn’t get over how official he looked in his uniform and helmet. His shiny buttons winked in the sunshine, dazzling the eye; even his posture was authoritative, and his raspy voice carried like a rusty bell in the courtyard. Who would’ve thought it? Lincoln had missed his calling.

“An’ who might you be?” he demanded, smacking his wooden club against his palm.

“Algernon Smith, at your service,” Reuben said respectfully. “And this is my sister, the new Mrs. Wing. She can go, can’t she?”

He stroked his mustache, which hardly looked pasted on at all. “I don’t see why not. We got nuttin’ on no
Mrs.
Wing, so she’s—”

Wing lunged like a springing tiger, clawed fingers straining for Grace’s throat. Reuben only had time to pivot, so Wing’s snarling, flat-out onslaught landed on him, not her. But they were both slammed against the wall with torpedo force, and Reuben felt rabid fingers clutch and close around his neck. Through blurring eyes, he took note that Wing had his teeth sunk into the unpadded shoulder of his coat, and he was shaking him like a badger while he strangled him. Grace screamed.

A bony
whack
sounded loud and clear, and instantly the pressure was off. Reuben gasped for air, while Wing slid to his knees and toppled over on his back. Above him, Lincoln shook his head in deep disappointment, twirling his billy. “Tsk-tsk-tsk,” he mourned. “Now I gotta add assault to the charges. An’ resistin’ arrest. Cuff ’im, Sergeant.”

Grace pulled Reuben, who was still clutching his throat and choking, away from the body. “He
bit
you, she marveled, checking his torn sleeve.

“It didn’t go through,” he grated hoarsely. “He only got a mouthful of coat.”

“Now dere’s just one more little thing.” Turning his back on all the gawking, emasculated-looking hatchet men, Lincoln lifted his beetle brows expectantly.

“Pay him,” Grace muttered when Reuben looked blank.

“Ah, of course,” he said agreeably, as understanding dawned. “And what was the, ah, arrangement?”

“All of it.”

He looked at her in disbelief.
“All of it?”

“Shhh.
Pay him, Reuben, and let’s get out of here.”

Lincoln gave his palm a few more smacks with his club, waiting.

Deeply disgusted, Reuben pulled the bulging envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. “Of course we’ll be happy to cooperate,” he said loudly. “Here’s my card if you want to get in touch with me, Captain.”

“Yeah, I’ll do dat.”

“Oh, one last thing.” Grace dropped Reuben’s hand and left him to walk back over to Wing’s prostrate body. He had his eyes open, but they weren’t focusing on much. Not until she bent over him, leaning into his line of vision, and plucked the little leather bankbook out of his breast pocket. “That’s mine, I believe,” she murmured, securing it in her reticule. “Bye, Mark. I’ll come and visit you sometime in prison.” Wing mouthed, quite distinctly, a blunt Anglo-Saxon curse. Grace gasped prettily. “All right, then, I won’t,” she huffed, and flounced away. “Come on, Algie, let’s go home.”

“Yes, Augustine.”

But at the door, a thought struck him. “Wait here for two seconds,” he told Grace, and walked over to where Lincoln was supervising the burgeoning pile of opium chests in the center of the yard. “Do something for me,” he said quietly.

“I ain’t done enough already?”

“You’ve done splendidly, and been well paid for it.”

He couldn’t argue with that. “So now what?”

“That’s a whorehouse,” Reuben said, dipping his chin at the House of Celestial Peace and Fulfillment. “There’s a girl in it named Toy Gun. I want you to get her out and take her to the Presbyterian Mission on China Street. She’ll be scared to death, she might even claim she doesn’t want to go. But she does. Take her there, and don’t let her out of your sight till she’s safe. Will you do it?”

Lincoln twirled his fake mustache while he looked at Reuben curiously. He didn’t leer and he didn’t make any lewd remarks; he just said, “Yeah, sure. Consider it done.”

“Thanks.” He felt like shaking hands, but decided it wouldn’t look right. “See you around,” he said instead, although he considered it unlikely.

“Yeah,” Lincoln rasped in his sandpaper voice. “See you around.”

Out on Jackson Street, Grace grabbed Reuben’s hand and pulled on it. “Hurry, there’s a hansom cab waiting for us right—”

He scooped her up and twirled her around in a jubilant circle, cutting off her startled laugh with a kiss. “We did it!” he crowed.
“You
did it,” he amended out of fairness. Over her shoulder, he saw a covered patrol wagon and four horses standing beside the curb. Part of the Croakers’ constabulary force, he surmised. “Where are they really taking Wing?” he asked, setting her on her feet but not letting go of her.

She grinned that sly grin that always unhinged him. “To the Embarcadero. The captain of the
Silver Pearl
was persuaded to take on a last-minute passenger for his Canton run.”

All he could do was shake his head.

“Hurry, Reuben,” she urged, pulling on his arm. “We have to meet Doc at the Colonial Bank on Montgomery Street at twelve-thirty.”

“How come?” He came along amiably, thinking they looked pretty spiffy together, she in white and he in black.

“Because he’s got the marriage license.”

“Of course.”

“Plus he’s waiting to get paid.”

“How does he know to go to that particular bank?”

“Because I—”

“You whispered it to him when he kissed you goodbye,” he guessed, enchanted.

She dropped her eyes modestly. “Hurry,” she remembered, pulling on him again. “After the bank, we’ve got a one o’clock ferry to catch.”

“Where are we going?”

She looked amazed at his dullness. “Home, of course! Where else?”

21

Would you hurt a woman worst, aim at her affections.

—Lew Wallace

“I
T’S EMPTY!”
R
EUBEN WHISPERED
in Grace’s ear.

She started; she’d been staring out at the Sonoma hills gliding past the train window, her head filled with a hundred and one thoughts, and she hadn’t heard him come back. He’d only left a minute ago. “What’s empty?”

“The smoking car!” He glanced over the back of her seat, where Henry was snoring in his chair, having drunk a little too much champagne on the ferry boat to Vallejo. “Come on, Gus,” he urged, reaching for her hand. “Let’s go.”

“To the smoking car? Why—” She stopped. She knew why, and if she hadn’t known, his face would’ve told her: he wanted to be alone with her. Smiling like a child’s drawing of the sun, she picked up her purse and her wedding bouquet and went with him.

The smoking car smelled like a smoking car, but the couchlike seats, facing each other across low tables, were more comfortable than the regular parlor-car chairs. But the main attraction of this particular smoking car was that nobody was in it. Grace sat down primly on the bench seat opposite Reuben’s, and watched him reach into his pocket for a cheroot. “Nasty habit,” she remarked, admiring his dexterous, long-fingered hands and the white flash of his teeth when he stuck the cigar in his mouth. He’d taken off his tie; he looked like a cross between a pirate and a riverboat gambler in his handsome black wedding suit. A Jewish riverboat gambler. She remembered the first time they’d met, on the Monterey stage, and how easily she’d swallowed the story that he was a blind Spanish ranchero with an Oxford education. She wasn’t a gullible person; she saw through most buncos because she’d perpetrated so many herself. But Reuben had rooked her like the greenest gull on the wire, and all she could do was admire him for it. Truly he was a prince among thieves.

Her mouth dropped open when he set a match to a rolled-up dollar bill and used the bill to light his cigar. “How unbelievably tacky,” she reproved him, while a smile twitched at the sides of her mouth.

He grinned and uncrossed his long, handsome legs. “Come over here and sit on my lap.”

The grin and the gleam of his teeth clamped around the cheroot did something profound to the muscles of her stomach. She clucked her tongue. “I’ve never seen this vulgar, boorish side to you before. This is a real awakening.”

He patted his lap. “Come on.”

“I will not. Somebody might come.” His brown eyes twinkled with humor and innuendo, and she heard her words in a different light. She blushed.

He patted his lap again. “Come on over here and give me a kiss. And bring your money with you.”

The rakish tilt of his cigar got to her. If only he wasn’t so damn cute. She made disgusted sounds, staring out the window. Then she got up, with a defeated sigh, and went to sit beside him.

He was quick. While she was lowering her behind to the seat, he seized her around the waist and forced her to detour, dragging her onto his lap. She put up a halfhearted fight, even said, “Reuben—damn it—” before she subsided, relaxing against his chest and clasping her hands around his far shoulder.

“Did you bring your money?”

She smiled that smile that always got to him, and batted her eyelashes. “I did, but do you know what? I can’t remember where I put it.”

“I’ll help you find it,” he said silkily. “Do you think you left it somewhere on your person?”