The Best of Penny Dread Tales (11 page)

For the briefest of moments, made even smaller by his unending life, their eyes met. “Rosalina,” he said.

Her gaze hardened, jaw clenched with inexhaustible anger. She stepped back into the shade of her home and slammed the door, her final word terse and stinging.

“Adíos.”

The Visitor looked down to the salutation penciled on his tract: “History and Myth are the same tale, told differently—Rosa.”

The girls, witness to the scene, could no longer dam their questions. Inquisitive voices sung in chorus, the jumble of
quieras
and
mamas
forming an incomprehensible and beautiful round.

The Rider put his fingers to his lips and whistled. His horse—the only true Rosie now—jumped the corral fence and ran to his side.

With a tip of his hat he mounted the horse. He flung the book into Rosie’s saddle pack. Its pages curled around a small vial of luminescent water. He turned Rosie east, toward the spilled ink of night, and without taking pause to look back, spurred her on. The Rider galloped toward the blackness, ready to pen another chapter in his miserable and infinite fiction.

***

Lasater’s Lucky Left

Quincy J. Allen

With an annoyed scowl setting the exposed part of his face into deep lines, Jake Lasater slowly returned his hot Colts to the holsters at each hip and waited for the thick white veil of smoke to clear. He let out a long, resigned sigh and winced as he rubbed the shallow gash in his right sleeve and bicep. That’s when he noticed the black shuriken sticking out of his left arm just above the elbow. He pulled the irritating little weapon out with a jerk, dropped it on the ground and realized that the fingers of his right glove were now sticky. Holding his fingers up to his good eye, he saw a yellow residue, like honey or pinesap. It coated the dark leather in a jagged pattern that matched the shuriken points. He gave his fingers a sniff and regretted his curiosity straightaway, turning his head with a jerk. The stuff smelled like a cross between snake oil and horse piss fermented in a cheese cellar too long.

“Tricky Tong bastards,” he muttered with a sour, southern Missouri drawl. He aimed his curse like a pistol at the four, silk-clad bodies lying in the muddy alley between him and the bright daylight of Sacramento Street. He’d seen men in the street go running when the shooting started, but they were already starting to walk by as if nothing happened. Chinatown was a rough place where people minded their own. On top of that, everyone knew that the San Fran Marshals would take their own sweet time to check things out in that part of town—if they came at all.

Lasater kneeled and wiped his fingers on the crimson shirt of the dead gambler who’d started the whole thing, trying to remove the sticky resin. “And here I thought we were friends, Po,” Lasater said to the corpse as he rolled it over and looked down into a still, muddy face. All four bodies were clad in red silk, which meant they were part of the Tong. “And you have your boys try to poison me?” Annoyed disbelief filled Lasater’s voice. “San Francisco is not at all what I expected.”

Lasater reached beyond Po’s body and picked up his short top hat from where it had fallen during the fight. Miraculously, it had landed on the one dry spot for twenty feet in both directions along the alley. With a muted whine of clockwork gears from his legs, Lasater stood, brushed the dust off the brim of his hat and adjusted the silver and turquoise hatband so it was straight once again. “You’re lucky you didn’t muss up my hat, Po, or I’d have to kill you again, damn it.”

Lasater gave an irritated shake of his head and pressed the top hat back into place. As it settled over his wavy dark hair, a relieved smile broke up the irritated scowl. He’d had the hat made special back in Kansas City only eight months ago. The inside of the brim had a small inner notch so that it fit snugly around both his head and the skin-tight leather strap that held his left ocular in place. The intricately hinged, brass-set lens was as dark as pitch and blocked out most of the light. The whole thing was set into a steel plate that covered a quarter of his face from cheek to forehead, and the steel had been riveted to the leather band that wrapped around his head and tied at the back. He’d worn the thing since he was discharged from the Union Army back in ’64.

Amputations were common in the Civil War, and like so many others, Lasater had left a fair amount of flesh, bone, and blood in that hot Army tent after a Reb canon did its job on him. When the bandages had finally come off his face, the Army docs discovered that, along with everything else, the canon round had made his left eye permanently dilated. Even low light hurt him, but Tinker Farris, at the expense of Lasater’s inheritance, had fixed him up pretty well in all quarters. Lasater was actually more of a man now than when he started. He took his discharge and what little money he got for the amputations and headed West to find his fortune and forget about other people’s wars.

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 power plant 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.”