Liahona (6 page)

Tam recognized the man from his conversation with Clemens;
it was Stovepipe.
 
He approached at
a calm but determined pace, one hand holding a sheet of paper in front of him
and the other hand invisible inside his long duster.
 
Probably holding a gun, Tam thought.
 
Bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons.
 
Tam shaded his eyes as if to protect
them from the glare of the electricks and quickly scanned the yard while his
features were in shadow.
 
There was
no one in sight—the time to act was now, and quickly.

“Good evenin’, suh,” Tam said pleasantly, trying to fake a
Virginia drawl through his scarf and wishing he were better at accents.
 
“I wonder if you might give me a hand
with this load?
 
I find myself not
quite up to the task, and you are a tall and strong-looking young man.”
 
Don’t overdo it, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy
me boy, he chided himself.
 
The
fewer bloody words, the better.
 
Plus, you don’t want to make the fellow think your interest in him is
romantic
.

“Pardon me,” Stovepipe said, holding out his sheet of paper
and stepping closer, “but could you tell me if you’ve seen this man?”
 
He squinted.

Alarm bells went off in Tam’s head, and he didn’t wait.
 
Releasing the spring of his stiletto,
he grabbed the hilt of the knife as it leaped into his hand and punched
straight out, swiping Stovepipe across his Adam’s apple.
 
Stovepipe lurched back, but not fast
enough to get out of reach, and blood sprayed forward and down onto Tam’s arm
and shoulder, hot and wet and sweet-stinking.

Tam slashed again and took a second slice out of the
Pinkerton’s throat.
 
Bloody bastard
could take all the time in the world he wanted to die, so long as he didn’t
call out to anyone.

Chunk!
 
Chunk!
 
Small craters of gravel exploded around Tam’s feet.
 
Is someone shooting at me?
 
He wondered.
 
But I don’t hear shots.
 
Then he saw the holes in the front of the Pinkerton’s
duster, heard a sharp
zing!
and
saw another hole rip open just as an explosion of gravel kicked up beside
him.
 

A Maxim Husher, he thought.
 
Bloody self-righteous Pinkertons with all their high talk
and rules and principled objections to a little bit of traditional graft, and
the bastard’s shooting at me with a silenced gun.
 
He stabbed at Stovepipe’s eye—

another
zing!
—

at the same moment, Tam sank his stiletto deep into the
private detective’s skull and felt a sharp bite in his thigh.

The Pinkerton collapsed backward with Tam, off-balance and
flailing, on top of him.
 
For a
moment, Tam could do nothing but catch his breath and fight to calm his wildly
beating heart.
 
Got to move, you
dumb Irish bastard, he cursed himself, the Pinkerton didn’t come here alone,
and he forced his body into action.

He took the Pinkerton’s Husher (and aren’t you a
strange-looking little fellow? he thought, looking at the pistol whose barrel
looked like two onion bulbs stitched together, front and back), along with
powder, shot and bullets, and shoved them into his own coat.
 
Stovepipe was larger than he was, but
Tam’s wiry frame was all sinew, and the adrenalin in his body now made it easy
to drag the corpse a few dozen paces across the gravel, hiding it in the shadow
of the
Liahona
.

He searched the man’s coat and took the calotype.
 
No sense leaving that to float around;
he’d ball it up and throw it into the boiler of the
Jim Smiley
, and good riddance to it.

When he stood up from that effort, the pain shooting through
his leg reminded him that he’d been shot, and must be bleeding.
 
He couldn’t see, so he felt with his
fingers for the slickness to determine how bad the bleeding was (not so bad,
all things considered), tied his scarf around the wound and then hop-walked
quickly back to the crate.
 
He
examined the ground.
 
The gravel
was scuffed where the body had been dragged, but he doubted it would show
footprints with any clarity at all, and Tam didn’t think he was leaving a trail
of blood.
 

He grunted, picked up the crate, and headed for the
Jim
Smiley
.
 
Be careful, O’Shaughnessy, he reminded himself.
 
There’s still another one of those
two-faced dirty bastards around here somewhere.

*
  
*
  
*

Burton led the way, but in his heart he knew that Roxie was
directing his steps.
 
It felt good,
though, to wrestle with a woman who was his match.
 
To feel at risk in the contest of the heart, that was what
he wanted, what he needed.

He shut thoughts of Isabel, his fiancée, out of his mind.

A niggling worry about Fearnley-Standish tried to creep into
their place, and he slammed that out as well.

The transition through the Saloon doors was a plunge from a
warm, smoky, amber bowl full of placid human goldfish into the cold, crackling,
blue ocean floor, among sleeping leviathans who could with a single bite
swallow you.
 
As he crossed the
crinkled gravel carpet, the spitting blue balls of the Saloon’s Franklin Poles
propelled him out of their own sphere and into the bone-white realm of a dusty,
enchanted moon.
 
A carpet of pale
moonlight like a silver dusting of snow lay across the nearest mountains, visible
over the stockade walls, and all thoughts of Burton’s fiancée and his nebbish
associate vanished.
 
This was a
wilderness, he was a man, and he was about to have the experience of this
mysterious, exciting woman.

He tightened his grip on her hand, which squeezed him back
with a surprising strength, and headed for the near-side ladder, but Roxie
pulled him to the right, underneath the ship-like prow of the vehicle and just
beneath the exotic characters that Burton assumed must spell out its name; they
looked vaguely like the Devanagari script, he thought distractedly, though not
cursive.
 
She pulled his body into
hers.
 
Her mouth was sharp, salty
and exhilarating, a foamy wave concealing deadly shoals beneath, and he was
hard put to breathe between kisses.
 
“Dick,” she moaned.

“Roxie,” he breathed.

“Nefertiti,” she corrected.
 
Her body blazed against his like a fire.

“Nefertiti,” he agreed, intoxicated.

“Cleopatra,” she continued.
 
She smelled like an entire orchard of sweet pollen.
 
He tightened from head to toe, poised
for intimate combat.

“Cleopatra,” he said, “Bathsheba.”
 
This, by the fires of Vizaresh and the House of Lies,
this
was what a woman was supposed to do to a man!

“The Queen of Sheba,” she added, and he thought her mouth
was on the verge of drawing his very soul up from his chest and consuming it.

“Balqis,” he agreed, then suddenly jerked to his full
height, pulling away from her.
 
“Vishnu’s beard!” he barked.

“Yes, Vishnu,” she murmured.
 
“Don’t pull back!”

But Burton did withdraw his mouth from hers, and his hand
went to the gun at his belt, the well-worn and deadly accurate Colt 1851 Navy
Revolver.
 
Behind Roxie, on the
other side of the
Liahona
, invisible to
the Saloon, someone lay on the ground.
 
All he could see of the person were two heavy boots, toes up, poking
around the corner of the vehicle.

“There’s someone there,” Burton muttered.
 
The boots weren’t moving, despite all
the noise the pair had been making, and he didn’t hear any snoring.
 
“Or a body.”

“Yes,” Roxie breathed, but then she caught his tone,
stopped, and looked where he was looking.
 
“Oh,” she said simply.

“It could be Isabel,” Burton said, and edged forward for a
look.

“Isabel?” Roxie asked.
 
“Is that your fiancée, then?”
 
There was no accusation in her voice, only amusement.
 
Still, Burton gritted his teeth for his
humiliating slip.
 
“She has large
feet.”

“I… I mean Absalom,” he corrected himself.
 
“I mean my colleague, Absalom
Fearnley-Standish.”

“Is Mr. Fearnley-Standish a drunk?”

“No,” Burton frowned, and turned the corner of the
Liahona
to finally look at the body lying on the
ground.
 
“And neither is this
man.
 
He’s dead.
 
Been cut several times to the head,
neck and eyes.”

“Be careful, Dick,” Roxie whispered, hanging slightly
back.
 
“Too much of that kind of
talk may cool my ardor.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” Burton murmured, and he meant
it.
 
He considered what his
obligations might be.
 
The dead man
was one of the Pinkertons who had accosted him in the Saloon, demanding to know
if he had seen some Irishman McNamara.
 
He owed the Pinkertons nothing.
 
Ought he to inform some kind of law enforcement officer of the
Fort?
 
He didn’t know who that
would be, but didn’t he owe at least that much to the general principles of law
and order?

Roxie looked past Burton’s elbow at the dead man.
 
“Yes, Dick, I believe he’s dead.
 
Now I’m going up the ladder, and if you
want an opportunity to show me how lively
you
are, you’d better move quick.”
 
Then she was gone, and Burton heard her shoes
crunch
on the gravel and then
click
on the ladder of the
Liahona
.

It surprised him, but this was as dangerous a country as
he’d ever been in.
 
It made him
wonder if perhaps he ought to be carrying his sword around, as well as his
pistol, rather than leaving it in its case with the rest of his luggage.
 
He had brought the sword thinking he
might at some point have an opportunity for a little exercise, but perhaps he
actually needed it as a weapon, in this lawless place.

Burton turned and admired Roxie’s form, lithely flitting up
the iron rungs of the ladder.

Perhaps it took such a country to make such a woman.
 

He would inform someone on the
Liahona
of the body, he resolved as he gripped the bottom
rungs of the ladder to throw himself up after her.
 
It was hard to see that he had any more obligation than
that.
 

*
  
*
  
*

Moments after Annie excused herself and disappeared, the
Irishman slammed down into her chair.
 
He had his porkpie pulled low over his face and the collar of his coat
(not his coat at all, actually—Sam’s long moleskin overcoat, and Sam didn’t
recall offering to lend it to him) turned up, giving him the ridiculous
appearance of skulking in a room full of people.
 
He was pale and sweating, and Sam found that he resented his
associate for not being a beautiful, interesting girl.

“You don’t look well, O’Shaughnessy,” he observed mildly.

“Damn fookin’ straight,” the Irishman agreed
vehemently.
 
“I’m not well.
 
I’m bleeding is what I am.”

“The Pinkertons catch up with you?”

“One of ’em, and not to his own gain,” the Irishman huddled
deeper into his collar.
 
“Was it
you that turned me in, Sam Clemens?”

Sam snorted, unwilling to answer such a stupid
question.
 
“You’re welcome to
borrow my coat, by the way.
 
But
shouldn’t you be hiding?”

“Yeah,” O’Shaughnessy agreed, “I should.
 
The other one’s in the loo, so I’ve
only got a minute.
 
Only I had to
tell you something, something right bloody damn urgent!”
 
His pointed nose, green eyes and
reddish blonde hair made his apparent anxiety comical.
 
He looked like an irate fairy, Sam
thought.

“I’m listening,” Sam said.

“Sabotage!” the Irishman hissed.
 
“Filthy underhanded tricks, and it was the English that done
it!”

Sam took a punch in the stomach from cold fear, but he
wasn’t about to share his feelings with Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy.
 
“What is it you think the English did
to sabotage us?” he asked mildly.
 
“Did they steal your coat?”

“You ought to be thanking me, Sam Clemens, and not taking
the bloody mick,” O’Shaughnessy pouted.
 
“Those bastards punched holes in the precious bloody boiler pipes of
your precious fancy truck, and then they went and stole the tools and patches,
and who was it if it wasn’t me that went and snuck onto that big hump of the
Liahona
and stole the tools and patches back?”

That was an interesting development.
 
“Good job, O’Shaughnessy,” Clemens
complimented the man grudgingly.
 
“When Washington asks, I’ll tell them you’re earning your paycheck.
 
Now unless you happen to know that that
Pinkerton is a world champion at Endurance Micturition, you’d better take a
powder.”