Touched by Angels (27 page)

***

As Quint stood opposite room seven, h
e was aware too that other guests would be coming out of their rooms soon, so he would have to be quick.

First, he put his ear to it, but could hear nothing.
He tried the brass knob. The door was locked, so he kicked it as hard as he could. The door flew back on its hinges with a juddering bang. He walked in, with his gun held at the hip, certain the entire fortune was there for the taking.

But
the room was empty.

He cussed in frustration
and smashed his left fist through the worm-eaten wardrobe door. He heard the sound of voices from somewhere downstairs; probably the police. Seeing no other way out, but the way he had come, he tried to lift the sash window to escape that way.

It was jammed shut.

Near to panic, he drew his gun, intending to fight his way out, but then noticed a trapdoor in the ceiling.

After re-holstering his gun, he drew out a chair from the dressing table, climbed up, and pushed the trap door open. It was hinged, and he squirmed as it made a bang as it fell onto the rafters.

He coughed as he batted away some dust that came down.

He pulled himself up, and
hearing the pounding of feet up the stairs, was about to close the trap, when he remembered the chair.

It would give him away in an instant, left where it was
; but it was too big to fit through the hole.

T
hen he had a flash of inspiration.

Lying on his belly
, he was just able to reach it.

He lifted it up, and swung it as hard as he could through the window.

Not only did that get rid of it, he thought, but
they would also think
he had escaped that way.

He
closed the trap carefully, and grinned in the dark, as he heard them charging into the room.

Sam Sullivan was speechless, after Billy told him of the vast fortune he believed to be in the suitcase depicted in the drawing he held at arm
’s length.

Initially, h
e reckoned that in the panic of the ship’s sinking, she must have gathered it from the unsuspecting, most of whom were now dead, probably by ransacking their cabins after they were evacuated from them.

A voracious newspaper reader, Sam had soaked u
p all he could about the disaster.

The
Hartford Times
, Sam’s favourite journal, mainly because of its staunchly Republican views, had run an article about the on-board thief; a short piece that many people would have overlooked, as being secondary to the disaster itself.

The article had stated that
he
(it was always
he
Sam noticed) had absconded with enough wealth, “to fight the Republican campaign in the fall”.

Why
should
it be a he
,
Sam thought now, having sniggered at the thin wit.

Why shouldn’t it be a woman?

What better cover was there, especially with a kid in tow?

Or….perhaps she wasn’t a thief at all.

From what Billy had told him, she sounded very well-to-do herself.

Was she on the run for other, more innocent reasons?

Did she need protecting, in this foreign, harsh land?

And the most poignant question of all; did he want the death of another beautiful woman on his conscience, if he could prevent it?

He didn’t think so.

He needed to catch up with her, and quickly.

***

Jack Quint thought so too, as he looked through a large hole in the rotting wood, where the guttering had long since fallen away.

There was a small, overgrown yard beneath. The chair lay on its side among the broken glass. Thankfully, the hotel overlooked the rear end of another, much taller building, with no windows, that he guessed was a factory of some sort.

The yard was surrounded by a tall crumbling, ivy
-covered wall, and he knew that it wouldn’t take a genius to imagine that that was the way he had gone.

***

As the police enter
ed the room below, and started ransacking it, Lil Smith was looking herself up and down in a long mirror, amazed at the transformation unthinkable scant weeks ago.

To send out a message to the world that she would never be at the mercy of any man again,
she wore a pair of hand stitched platform hide boots, topped with a tan coloured dress with white fringing, while a broad, low crowned hat adorned her head. Her blonde hair hung to her shoulders.

She stood around five ten in the boots and, as she gazed at herself, she thought she looked a force to be reckoned with, unlike the down-trodden wife who was beaten and raped by her slob of a husband, a continent and a lifetime away.

They had left the hotel at three in the morning, when the itching had become intolerable and Robert had woken up screaming with a cockroach resting on his face.

The store was on the outskirts of the city. After studying a map of the eastern seaboard of the United States, pinned to one of the walls, she had told Robert of her plan to escape New York altogether.

They would move inland, probably south, to where it would be warmer, but he cut her off by snapping, “Mum, I don’t want to run any more!”

She looked at him critically. He looked completely drained, but she knew they had no choice but to keep on moving.

“
I’m afraid we’ve got to.”

“
No, we haven’t. I’m tired. I want to go home!” He was close to tears.

“
This
is
our home now. Don’t you understand? At least for the next few years.”

He looked at her as though she’d punched him, so she said more softly, “Do you remember Mr King, the landlord?”

He nodded.

“
This man is just like him. He’ll keep on coming and coming, and he absolutely will not stop until he gets the money, and he won’t flinch from killing us to get it. This isn’t England. Life isn’t worth a carrot here, so to survive, we must be like him, understand?”

He nodded grudgingly.

Her eyes were moist as she crouched before him and said, as she held his shoulders, “We’ve fought all our lives. We’ve been pushed about, never knowing where our next meal will come from, or whether we will have clothes on our backs, or a roof over our heads the next day. So this time, we’re going to win! All right?”

She gripped him harder and stared into his brown eyes, knowing she would kill anybody who so much as touched him.

“
Now, the last thing he expects us to do is to move inland. Do you agree?”

He nodded. “S’pose so.”

“
Good boy. Then one day
we’ll find another port, somewhere else, and then we
will
go home, this time without worry.”

He nodded again. It sounded so simple…

Quint
ducked back as he saw two peaked caps suddenly poking out from the smashed window below; both of them cops. He could hear their conversation quite clearly.

“
Cunning bastard!” said one.

He sounded like he was the senior of the two.

Quint heard him spit out a mouthful of chewing tobacco.

“
See his style
, Clarke? Smashes this window to make us think he escaped this way, and so waste valuable time. Well, we ain’t gonna be fooled. Kinda obvious what he did next, don’t yer think?”.

There was a long pause, as if he was trying to get the younger man to work it out for himself.

Then h
e laughed, and said, as he smacked his forehead, “Don’t you worry. You don’t understand the criminal mind yet, green as you are. This is how
I
figure it. He put the chair through the glass, to draw our attention, and then went back the way he came. You see, Clarke, it’s what I got up here, boy, that got me mah stripes, brains, and lots of ’em, like you’ll have one day, you care to watch and listen. Then, when you’ve earned ’em, you’ll be a true professional, just like me.”

“
But…
er, shouldn’t we, well, you know… just check?”

Quint closed his eyes
cringing, knowing which of them should be wearing the stripes.

“
Damn you, boy! Don’t you ever listen to nuthin? I done near fifteen years, afore you was even a twinklin’ in yer
daddy’s
loins, let alone yer mumma’s, so don’t you never contra…”

“
Sorry, boss.”

Quint
felt his heart slow down as they went back inside, and could imagine the greenhorn watching the posturing sergeant with open-mouthed admiration, as he threw back his shoulders, and tucked his thumbs into his Sam Browne belt.

He sank back against the inner brickwork, relieved, but frustrated too, knowing the longer he waited, the further away the woman and kid were going to get.

***

As
Quint was tuning his ears into building below, for noise, Sam Sullivan and Billy Tweed were looking out the window above the cigar shop, as Sam stuffed his favourite pipe; the one he was sure imbued him with inspiration.

He had a rack containing six others above the mantelpiece, each of which were smoked depending on the mood he was in. Sometimes, when he was melancholy, his thick briar was puffed. Today it was his meerschaum with the amber stem.

Aromatic smoke drifted in swathes around Billy’s head. They had heard the window breaking and the shouts, before seeing a young woman being helped to walk by two police officers. Sam recognised her as the hotel maid, with a blanket around her shoulders.

He knew there was no other exit from the hotel except out through the front door, so he knew it possible that Quint had hidden himself away somewhere inside until the cops moved on.

They saw the other guests leave every so often, but when the woman and child never appeared, they guessed they must have left before Quint had even turned up.

***

Billy could see no future without that money. Worse, this man might decide to turn him in for a nice easy thousand bucks after all, if he decided the woman wasn’t worth pursuing.

While they had been watching, he had asked Sullivan, more to test the waters than anything, what the job here entailed, just in case. After all, anything would be better than the streets. It was, as he had suspected, as a counter assistant, with no prospects whatsoever.

It started to get dark.

Billy
turned to see Sullivan tapping out his pipe in the hearth, his brow creased in concentration, as he thought. Billy felt defeated as he watched him, sure that if Quint had escaped, they would never catch up with him. He was probably near them already and would kill anybody who tried to interfere. Over the next few hours, each of them took odd peeks out the window in case he appeared.

Billy
found himself seething once more at the way Quint had humiliated him. He said, “I’m already wanted for murder. I know if they get me, I won’t stand a chance, so it won’t matter if I kill again, will it?”

“
I guess not,” Sullivan said, as he blew along the stem. Satisfied it was clean, he replaced it in the rack with the others. Without turning, he asked, “Who’re you intendin’ to kill?”

“
Quint!” He punched the palm of one hand with his fist, as his temples pounded with fury. Sullivan nodded, chewing his lip, as unpleasant memories were stirred.

He turned. “Ever shot a man?”

“
No, but I will!” Billy punched his palm again.

“
You seem a decent enough kid to me, and if what you’ve told me about the events of last night are completely true, then you were provoked before you slit that kid’s belly, and it was a genuine accident when the place…”

“
It
was
an accident, I swear on my mother’s memory.” He crossed his chest several times, though
he
knew, as well as Sullivan, that no court in the land would ever believe it.

“
I don’t doubt you, boy, but… you shoot this man, however much you hate him, it won’t be an accident and you will have to live with it. Think you can do that?”

Billy said nothing.

“
I
shot a man once and I mean once, down south, in a dusty street outside Santa Fe. No witnesses and nobody ever knew I did it. I even kept it from Ruth. I was a Deputy Marshal and the man was a murderer, by the name of Ross McKenna.

“
I’d been on his trail for more than a month. That was the day I tossed my badge away forever. I swore I would never kill a human being again, whatever they did. Want to know why?”