The Shotgun Arcana (34 page)

They walked again in silence for a time.

“Do you trust me?” Maude finally asked.

“You know I do,” Mutt said. “With my life.”

“Trust me now,” she said. “He must be stopped and I was trained to do this.”

“Fair deal,” Mutt said. “Like I said, it’s probably moot. Jon and them will nail his hide tonight, I’d wager. But if not, just remember what I said and be careful as hell.”

“I will,” Maude said. “I promise.”

They walked past the Kimball homestead and to her door in silence, holding hands.

“Well,” Mutt said. “Thank you for the pleasure of your company. This was … this was the best night of my life, Maude.”

“Come here.” She held his callused hand tighter and pulled him gently forward. Their lips touched. The first contact was soft, tentative, the desire fighting with the fear—the fear of opening to another, of beginnings. They slid together, their bodies fitting with ease, their scents teasing each other, and the hunger began to take ascendance. Their mouths struggled to make them whole, make them one. Then, like calm water moving, they moved their lips apart, moved their bodies apart, as one. Patient in the certainty of the feeling they had shared.

“Now it’s the best night of my life,” Mutt said with more than a little growl in his voice. Maude smiled at him.

“Good night,” she said, her voice soft like velvet. “Be safe as you can be.”

“You too,” he said.

Maude removed his coat and started to hand it back to him. Mutt stopped her.

“Keep it,” he said. “Means I get to come fetch it.”

“Yes,” Maude said. “Please do. I’d like that.”

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” she replied. Maude unlocked the door and stepped inside. A single oil lamp rested on the dinner table, guttering: Constance looking out for her before retiring. Maude closed the door with a click. She rested against it, smiling. She held Mutt’s coat tight in her arms.

Mutt stood looking at the door for a moment and then began his walk back down Rose Hill, whistling. This had to be some kind of dream. People like him didn’t get that lucky in this life. He’d wake up in some flop with an empty whiskey bottle in his hands, alone.

There was a thunder of hooves as he reached the descending stone path. A half-dozen men with hoods circled him, shotguns, torches and rope in hand.

“There’s the no-account red nigger thinks he can walk around and put his filthy hands on a white woman,” the leader said over the hiss and crackle of his torch.

“Thanks,” Mutt said.

“What the hell you talkin’ about, chief?” the hooded man said.

“You just convinced me this wasn’t a dream,” Mutt said.

The Ten of Pentacles (Reversed)

Kate Warne moved thorough the miners’ camp up on Argent Mountain, a huntress pretending to be prey. She was dressed as she had been during her months at the Dove’s Roost and was acutely aware of the hungry eyes that devoured her as she moved through crowds made up mostly of men, with a few female camp followers plying their trade among them.

The second shift was done in the Argent Mine and third shift was well underway. The night was cold, the diminishing moon smothered by black clouds. The camp was a labyrinth of shifting canvas walls and filth-filled canals that took the place of streets. You could get lost here very easily and with a wrong turn find yourself in the domain of some petty tyrant eager to relieve you of your coin, your virtue or your life.

Kate knew that the dirty miner staggering along about thirty yards behind her, covered in soot from head to toe and with a half-empty rye bottle clutched in his fist, was in fact Sheriff Jon Highfather. He bumped into folks in the crowd and mumbled apologies as he shadowed her, occasionally faking a swallow from his bottle. Jim Negrey, looking equally disheveled and unkempt, was walking along farther back behind Jon, with an empty water pail in his hands and a few sticks of kindling firewood over his shoulder.

Kate had taught the sheriff and the deputy what Allan Pinkerton had taught her about staggered surveillance, or at least as much as she could in a few hours. Jon would be Kate’s primary spotter, then he’d drop back into the crowd and Jim would advance to keep an eye on her, while still trailing behind and attracting as little notice as possible.

Her job was to be the bait. With Clay’s insights they had decided to take a run through the mining camp. So far no one had made a report of a missing wagon and two horses, so they were wandering the whole camp, hoping a “new girl” would attract the Dove killer’s attention. Kate turned off of the main thoroughfare and headed to the eastern side of the camp that intersected with Backtrail Road. She paused at a ramshackle church, part wooden skeleton and part canvas walls. An old man in black shirtsleeves held aloft a beautiful wooden cross and recited a prayer to the handful of faithful on the rickety pews, bowing their heads.

“Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men,” the preacher said. “Preserve me from violent men, who plan evil things in their hearts; they continually gather together for war. They sharpen their tongues like a serpent; the poison of asps
is
under their lips.…”

The congregation parroted the holy man’s words as he continued. Kate looked around and suddenly she felt like she was a girl again running through the streets and alleys of the Five Points in New York. That was a million lives ago. That girl and her life were dead and buried. She had the job now, she
was
the job now. She had no illusions about her future with Allan Pinkerton. Her empty grave was at the foot of his own future grave. His good lady wife would reside beside him and she would be at his feet. She pushed it away. She was no foolish schoolgirl. She knew the arrangement with Pinkerton when they began the dance. No sense moaning about it now. Eyes were on her, and it felt very good to know Jon Highfather knew that, too, and was in wait. The sheriff had developed a powerful reputation as part of the growing mythology of the West. If he were a self-promoting whore like Bill Cody and had attracted the notice of Ned Buntline, he’d be rich and famous now. But Highfather honestly didn’t want to be famous, he didn’t want to be a legend. It troubled Kate that now, in the middle of the job, when her mind should be on keeping her ass alive and catching this killer, she was wondering exactly what Jon Highfather did want.

Two men came toward her out of the crowd. Kate moved away from the church tent and turned to face them. Both were too clean to be miners and too rangy-looking to be honest.

“What the hell you doin’ here?” the bigger of the two men said. He wore a cheap, slightly crumpled top hat and had two pistols holstered in his gun belt and a third stuffed in the front by the buckle. “You got permission to be dragging your scrawny ass all over the Nail’s camp?”

Kate looked confused. “Do … Do I need that, darlin’?” she said, with a Texas accent now. She began to tear up. “Oh my. I … I didn’t know, sir.”

Derby looked at his silent companion, a smaller man who looked like he might be partly Chinese. The dark-haired silent man wore his long hair in a ponytail. He had a shotgun sheathed on his back, attached to a bandolier of shells, and a six-gun at his belt.

“You making coin on Mr. Devlin’s streets, you pay the freight, bitch,” Derby said. Kate was pretty sure these were not the Dove killers, but now she had a new mess to untangle.

Derby grabbed her by the arm and began to drag her toward one of the dark spaces between the tents. “I’m sure we can work something out, here,” he said. “Take it out in trade.”

A strong hand rested on Derby’s shoulder and pulled him around. He released Kate in surprise.

“I don’t think so, slick,” Highfather said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Derby said. The sheriff’s response was to strike Derby on the side of the head with the barrel of the .44 he had already drawn. The man’s hat flew off in one direction, his head in the other, and he went down hard.

“I’m the man throwing your sorry ass in jail,” Highfather said, flipping over the collar of his coat to reveal his silver star.

Ponytail went for his shotgun, but stopped cold when he saw that Jim had aimed the double-barreled shotgun pistol at his chest. Jim cocked both hammers at once. The deputy had been carrying the short, ugly, gun in his pail.

“You just keep that scatter gun slung,” Jim said. “Or a big patch of daylight will be poking through you.”

“I could have handled them in the alley,” Kate said to Highfather as he pulled Derby to his feet and wrestled irons onto the stuporous man’s wrists. Jim was cuffing Ponytail as well. “Our surveillance is shot now. Whole camp will be on us, Jon.”

“You’re welcome,” Highfather said. “My call. You’d probably end up having to shoot them in there. This way everyone stays alive.”

Kate shrugged. “I just could have gotten some more information out of them about this ‘Nail Devlin’ character is all. Well, at least we made a pretty decent sweep of the camp before this mess. No bodies, so signs of our Dove killer. Maybe Mr. Turlough was off about the stars and all that.”

“I hope so,” Highfather said. “Come on, let’s get these upstanding citizens into the clink.”

*   *   *

The word came shortly after Highfather, Kate and Jim had deposited the Nail’s two men into a jail cell. Jon and Jim were busy washing off their disguises and Kate had adjourned to a curtained-off cell to change back into her normal clothes. Brady Bowles, one of the local tradesmen, rushed in, white as a sheet.

“Sheriff!” Bowles shouted. “Come quick! They found a dead girl over in Johnny Town!”

*   *   *

Bowles and a few volunteers kept the crowds back until Ch’eng Huang’s Green Ribbon Tong hatchet men showed up in force and established a perimeter. The girl was hanging from one of the clotheslines that were everywhere in Johnny Town. She was roughly twenty feet in the air. Like the other two, she had been disemboweled, her entrails hanging from the bloody cavern of her stomach and abdomen, dripping down on the street below. Some of her guts had been wrapped about her wrists, arms and neck and tied to the clothesline. The blood had drained from her slashed and torn face and she was pale, almost white. Her eyes had been cut out, leaving bloody, empty cavities. She looked like a grisly marionette, left abandoned by some towering puppet master.

Jim stood silent and still as he looked at her. He was far past illness now. A cold rage settled in, the kind he had felt the night he had shot Charlie Upton down for murdering his pa.

“Her name is Abigail Holden,” the Scholar said to Highfather, looking up at the dead woman. “She is an employee of the Roost. She hadn’t been seen since this afternoon.”

“Freelancing?” Kate asked. The Scholar did not take his eyes from the body. He swallowed hard.

“Apparently so,” the Scholar said. “Unfortunate. I rather liked her. She was well read for a … woman in her position. I thought she was smarter than this.”

Highfather excused himself from the Scholar as Kate continued to question him. As he approached Jim, one of Huang’s lieutenants, a shovel-faced Chinaman named Shunli, intercepted him.

“I speak for Ch’eng Huang,” Shunli said. “He is most displeased by this atrocity being perpetrated in his community. He says resolve it quickly, Sheriff, or rest assured the Green Ribbon will.”

Highfather locked eyes with Shunli. “You tell Huang I’ll handle this and he needs to keep his dogs on their leashes and off my streets, or I’ll shut all of you down, y’hear me?”

Shunli turned away and departed without a word. Highfather walked over to stand beside Jim.

“You good?” Highfather said. “Stupid damn question to ask. How the hell could anybody be good after seeing that?”

“Sumbitch cut back on us,” Jim said, his eyes not leaving the hanging girl. “Maybe even let us … let me have the wagon to send us right where he wanted us to be.”

“I think you’re giving him too much credit,” Highfather said. “He’s trying to throw us off his scent to be sure, but we’re gonna get him, Jim. It’s just a matter of time.”

“And bodies,” Jim said.

The Six of Pentacles

They had shotguns. Mutt had nothing but the sweet memory of Maude’s kiss on his lips. He wouldn’t have traded it for a hundred guns.

“Walk,” the masked leader said, “or we’ll cut you in half right here and go visit your whore and her daughter.”

“You touch her and I’ll eat your fucking heart,” Mutt snarled, staring into the barrels of the gun. His eyes seemed to flash with unnatural color in the moonlight and the masked men’s horse became uneasy, whinnying and shuffling nervously.

“Move,” the leader repeated, and gestured with the gun. Mutt walked down the dark path, surrounded by the horsemen. They came off the road near the base of Rose Hill and led him out to a tall, wide mesquite tree standing alone in the waning moonlight.

“This will do jist fine,” one of the men said behind his mask. Mutt arched his head at the sound of the voice.

“Healy?” Mutt said, grinning. “Conn Healy? Is that your special brand of stupid leaking out from under that potato sack?”

“Don’t answer him, Conn,” another of the masked men said.

Mutt laughed.

“All of you shut the fuck up!” the leader said.

“And that would be Max Macomber,” Mutt said. Macomber—powerful, wealthy man. Mutt had crossed him outside the Dove’s Roost the night Molly James had died. Seems he took it personal.

“Well, hell, fellas, I didn’t know I was dealing with such a rowdy band of masterminds.” Mutt laughed again. “Shit, your wives cut those eyeholes for you, and make sure you didn’t put the masks on backward?”

“Shut up, you stinking half-breed!”

“Put the rope up over that branch,” Macomber said. “That will shut his fool mouth up for good.”

While the rest continued to train guns on Mutt, two of the men got off their horses and tossed a rope with a knotted noose already tied over a high branch and lowered it carefully.

“I know it’s a foreign concept to you all,” Mutt said. “But think for a minute. You do this and you will have more hurt come down on you than any of you want or can even imagine. If I can figure out who you are, you think Jon Highfather can’t? You can still walk away from this.”