Out Through the Attic (10 page)

Kansas City, Scottsbluff, Santa Fe, Denver, Fort Hall—he’d gambled his way across the territories and done pretty well moving from one saloon to the next, one poker game to the next. He’d tricked, bribed and shot his way out of or through a number of fiascos along the way and never once landed in jail, but the Central Pacific line pretty much ended in San Francisco, so here’s where he ended up. Unfortunately, the four bodies in front of him now meant that this latest fiasco was just getting started. It also meant he’d have to leave San Fran in a hurry when all was said and done. He had mixed feelings about that. He’d been there only a couple of weeks and even made friends with Hang, Po and a few other members of the Tong. He didn’t ask about their business, and they didn’t meddle with his. It was all poker between friends. Right up until he walked away with all those winnings.

It had actually been five men who had come up behind him and “urged” him into the alley at the point of a dagger in his back. The fifth, the one with the big scar running down his cheek, neck and under his collar, had run off with the bag of winnings Lasater dropped in the mud to distract the thieves. That’s how he got the drop on them. When their eyes followed the bag, his Colts sailed free and sang their song. He’d accumulated the bag’s contents in a particularly long and lucrative poker game over at Hang Ah’s saloon around the corner, and eight hundred dollars in paper and coin plus a fair amount of gold dust was not something he planned to just leave behind. He only had a few coins in his pocket, so the bag was pretty much his whole stake.

Lasater walked out of the alley, his black boots squishing through the mud, and stepped into the bright, morning sunshine of Sacramento Street. Hang Ah’s was just a block up and across the thoroughfare. Scar’s muddy footprints made a beeline straight for it, so he made a path of his own, following in the footsteps of the Chinese thief and reloading his Colts as he went.

It was still early morning and between mining shifts, so Lasater barely had to weave his way between the migrant residents of Chinatown to get to Hang Ah’s. A rainbow of brightly colored silk and patches of drab cotton walked up and down the street, with every man sporting a long, black queue either down his back or wrapped around his neck. He didn’t see a single woman amidst the workers. Lasater, at six-foot, could see easily over the pointed hats and silk caps that covered most every other head. A white man in Chinatown was an uncommon enough sight, and with his left ocular looking ominous and his dual shooters looking even more so, the path in front of him seemed to open up all by itself. That is, until one of those new-fangled mining rigs stepped out onto the street from the gaping warehouse doorway of Qi’s Emporium of Wondrous Power.

Its powerplant grumbling, the machine was at least twelve feet tall, and its brass and steel carapace glinted in the morning sunlight, looking all the world like a Chinese god of war. Riveted plates housed a steam-driven powerhouse that drove four, multi-jointed legs
hiss-stomping
out into the street. Its massive, four-toed feet squished and sucked through the mud, and the joints clicked and clanged in an unlikely rhythm as it turned towards Lasater and began walking forward. It had two partially retracted arms attached at the shoulders, and its elbows bent around massively hinged joints. Glinting brass hydraulic pistons gave the limbs life, pushing and pulling as the thing moved, and at the end of each arm were great, clam-shaped scoops that could close and contain at least a cubic yard each.

Lasater recognized it as one of Miss Qi’s diggers. Qi was the only tinker in Chinatown and also the only woman he’d seen treated as an equal by the men there. The diminutive little woman, dressed in bright blue coveralls, was folded up into a cockpit at the belly of the great beast, enclosed in a brass cage. Her long dark ponytail flipped and flopped behind her as the thing clunked down the street, and her dark goggles hid jade eyes and most of what Lasater considered a truly beautiful face. Her co-pilot was perched in a similar cage atop the thing, and his job was to operate the great arms during work.

Lasater stepped aside as the machine walked by, tipping his hat to the woman. She smiled and nodded her head towards him, a magnificent smile shining from within the cage. Lasater’s heart ached for the memory of that smile. He’d spent an evening playing cards with Qi—she was a hell of a card-player—the previous week, an evening that ended with Lasater waking in her bed. It was a night he would never forget, but they’d both agreed that no future was possible. She was committed to her work, and he was the consummate rolling stone. Lasater watched the digger make its way down the street, a wistful smile upon his face, and then turned back to the task at hand as Qi turned her machine around the far corner.

He strode the last twenty yards through the mud, stepped up to the doorway of Hang’s and pushed in the red, swinging doors. As the doors swung closed behind him, he looked around the saloon for any clue as to where Scar went. Aside from the bright red and green paint here and there, plus a few gold dragons decorating the corners, it looked like most saloons he’d been in. Although the room didn’t get quiet, the chatter that he’d heard from the other side of the doors dropped down a bit as sidelong glances from the men inside identified him. He spotted a few elbows make their way into other men’s ribs and saw a few hand-covered whispers, but he had no idea what was said. For mid-morning, the place looked as full as a white man’s saloon on a busy Friday night. Chinatown was funny that way. The mostly male population was crammed in like dynamite in a crate, and they worked in endless shifts, so there was a non-stop cycle of workers coming in and out of damn near every building.

There were still three mahjong games going on that had started the night before. The only other cowboy in the saloon was at one of them. He was a black man, his ebony skin standing out amongst the lighter skin of the Chinese, but he had wavy, shoulder-length hair and piercing, tan eyes, which told Lasater he was mulatto in some way. His clothes, what Lasater could see of them, were tidy—not new but well kept—with a blue button-down, a gray on black paisley vest and a black handkerchief tied around his neck. His dark hat dangled to the side of his chair, and Lasater thought it might be a Union cavalry hat, which meant they’d both chewed some of the same dirt back in the war, and the cowboy was probably a Buffalo. The tan of a heavy, weatherworn duster draped over the back of the chair peeked out from behind him when he leaned forward to flip a tile. Lasater didn’t recognize the cowboy, but when those tan eyes looked up, the two cowboys exchanged knowing nods and smiles that can only be understood between those in a minority amongst the majority—cowboys and Chinese respectively in this case.

Groups of Chinese men flowed over the inside of the saloon, with the drinkers wearing smiles and the opium smokers looking sleepy. Lasater spotted Hang standing behind the bar in black silk. The small Chinese man with streaks of gray in hair and beard glanced at him and then turned his eyes quickly to the glass he was cleaning. A guilty look flickered across the saloonkeeper’s moon of a face, and the short proprietor pretended not to notice Lasater by turning away from the front door. Lasater crossed the room in big strides, stepped up to the bar, reached out a black glove and firmly turned Hang towards him. Hang flowed with the motion and then threw up an innocent smile.

Hang spoke brightly through a thick, Chinese accent. “Mister Jake! How good it is—”

“Hang, let me set the tone for ya….” Lasater interrupted, cutting Hang’s pleasantries off with steely fatigue. Hang’s eyes widened just a shade, and he clamped his mouth shut. Lasater plucked the glass out of Hang’s hand, set it on the bar and grabbed a bottle of whisky. “I’ve been up for eighteen hours straight.” He poured a healthy shot into the glass. “I’m tired, sore and bleeding.” With a jerk, Lasater threw back the shot and set the empty glass back on the bar. “It seems as if Po,
your
friend and mine, was a sore loser.”

“Mister Jake,” Hang blurted, “you don’t think that I—”

“I don’t know what to think here, Hang. But let me tell you what I do know. A man in red pajamas just come running in here with a big bag in his hands.
My
bag.”

“I don’t know what you’re—” Hang blurted, but his face spoke volumes.

“You have a shitty poker face, Hang, and the guy’s muddy footprints lead right up to your front door.” Embarrassment filled the round face. “Hang, you still owe me thirty-five dollars from that card game last week. Thought I was too drunk to remember, did ya? I like to keep a few outstanding debts around town to call in for rainy days.” Lasater leaned in a few inches to make his point. “And it seems as if it’s raining, now don’t it?” Hang’s eyes shifted nervously between Lasater’s good eye and the black lens wrapped in brass of his left. “I’d be willing to forgive the debt if you let me know where that fella went … you know, the one with the scar from here to here?” Lasater traced a line from above his right eye down to his collar with a black-gloved finger. He stared at Hang with his one good eye and narrowed it down to a sliver. “Or….” he placed his hands on the Colts at his hips and then opened them, suggesting the alternative of loud and bloody conversation instead of the polite kind. “I’d much rather have this conversation without heating up my Colts, if you catch my meaning. Now where did he go?” Lasater wasn’t the kind of man to shoot people in cold blood, but Hang didn’t know that for certain, and the mahogany-gripped Colts were worn enough to tell a tale of crowded cemeteries.

Lasater was one hell of a card player, and he could see calculating going on behind Hang’s wide eyes. The saloonkeeper was probably trying figuring out who was more dangerous, Lasater or Scar, but Lasater picked up something else working in Hang’s eyes…. It looked like scheming.

Lasater watched the worry slowly evaporate off Hang’s face, replaced with something resembling resolve and perhaps a little venom mixed in for good measure. The salooner motioned with his head, the dark braid hanging down the middle of his chest doing a little dance over the black silk. Hang spoke slowly. “Through that door.” Lasater turned to see a red door under the stairs at the back of the saloon. He knew the stairs led up to the singsong girls above, but he had no idea what was behind the red door. During the poker game he’d seen a number of red-clad fellas coming and going through it, which meant that the Tong was probably down there in numbers. “Go down two flights. At the bottom, go through the black door, down the long hallway and through another door. You will probably find him there.”

Lasater turned back to Hang with a calculating eye. “That’s a short road, Hang. Rest assured, I’ll be able to find my way back if it turns out he’s not there … or someone else is. I’ll see you soon.” Lasater walked off without another word, made his way to the door, opened it and stepped inside.

Hang pulled a red rope hidden behind the bar, which disappeared through a hole in the floor, tugging it with three short pulls, two long and a short one. “Perhaps,” Hang said under his breath with vicious intent as he watched the red door close on Mister Jake Lasater.

The spiral of worn wooden stairs creaked under Lasater’s boots, and he made his way down them as quietly as he could. The faint, warm light of an oil lamp shone up from the bottom of the stairwell. One rotation of the spiral presented him with a dark hallway that stretched back underneath Hang’s saloon. Lasater could smell the opium and hear the occasional giggle or moan coming at him from the dimly lit hallway of red curtains that faded away from him through the thick smoke. Another rotation brought him to the bottom and a black door. Lasater put his left hand on a Colt, the other on the doorknob and opened the door slowly.

The hallway beyond was well lit with a lamp set on either side, each lamp set between a pair of doors along both walls. He picked up a scent of jasmine incense and old blood. Jasmine was something he’d never smelled before coming to San Francisco, but soldiers who lost limbs in Army tents never forgot the smell of old blood dried on wood and canvas. Lasater walked down the hallway and tested each door, finding every one locked. There was a door at the far end of the hall with a small iron bracket on each side bolted into the doorframe. There was no mistaking that the door could be barred from this side, but there wasn’t a plank lying around to drop into the brackets. Pulling the hammer back on the Colt, Lasater took a deep breath and twisted the doorknob, pulling the door open slowly and looking in with his good eye. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see, but the room beyond wasn’t anything he would have thought up, even in a bad dream.

The swinging door carried with it an even stronger smell of dried blood, and he could see lines, splatters and splotches of deep brown on the pine floor and walls beyond. The room had eight walls, about eight feet high and fifteen on a side, and in the middle of each was a lantern with a big, hinged lid. Under each lantern was a door just like the one he’d opened. Here and there the smooth pine walls were dotted with the splintered wounds of what could only be bullet holes. Lasater could see a railing going around what was clearly a fighting arena, and from the looks of it, these boys played for keeps. He didn’t see anyone on the upper level, but Scar was on the far side of the pit wearing black silk instead of red, and he held a slim sword in each hand. Courage and rage filled Scar’s face, and the flush of blood set off the pale line running down his cheek, looking like a white bolt of lightning in the flickering light.

Scar slowly moved into a fighting stance, his body twisted to the side, one sword held high the other low, both points aiming directly at Lasater’s heart. The bag was just behind Scar, lying on the floor, and all Lasater could do was look Scar in the eyes and sigh. He took a look at the half-inch planks of the door and doorframe and shook his head as he stepped into the room.

Clearly Lasater wasn’t the first gun-fighter to end up in that arena. “Y’all must think I got sawdust for brains,” Lasater concluded, chewing off each word like it was gristle. Stepping further into the arena, he slowly closed the door behind him with a mean smile on his face. The Colt rose up and out like it was on rails, the silver runes along the barrel glinting in the lamplight and the barrel now making a straight line between Lasater’s good eye and Scar’s head. Scar’s eyes got wide with a healthy mix of fear and hatred. “Seems I’m gonna hafta’ make a point, Scar.” He slowly lowered the hammer, dropped the pistol to his side and slid the Colt back into its holster.