Gunslinger 04, page 4
‘I’m good,’ said Ryker, ‘an’ I need to know what the job is.’
‘Quite.’ Anthony paused as a busboy in some kind of fanciful hotel uniform darted to open the doors. As they went through, Anthony turned back. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed.’
The busboy nodded enough to shake his head loose and Ryker began to wonder what kind of money had bought all this obsequious respect. Bennet Anthony clearly commanded a great deal: maybe the setup would be as profitable as Nolan had hinted.
Ryker went on into the room, automatically checking it over. It was around fifteen feet square, with a high ceiling and no windows. There was a carpet on the floor that felt like it was reaching up to cover his feet, and a set of chairs spaced out around a low table covered by a big silver tray sporting more bottles than Ryker had seen in a great many saloons. Two glasses stood beside the bottles, each one a heavy tumbler of cut crystal that threw rainbow patterns back at the chandelier with the solid brilliance of very expensive workmanship. The chairs were dressed cowhide, padded with velvet cushions worked into the leather along the arms and backs. The walls were of polished , oak, and hung with pictures that Ryker could only recognize as costly.
‘Pleasant, isn’t it?’
Anthony’s question was mildly amused.
‘Looks that way,’ said Ryker. ‘I never seen anything like it, so I’ll take your word.’
Anthony laughed, gesturing at the table. ‘Sit down, please. You came a long way to see me, so let me offer you a drink.’ He waved a manicured hand over the table. ‘Whiskey? I have rye or bourbon or genuine Scotch. Perhaps you’d prefer tequila? Or port?’
‘Bourbon.’ Ryker hadn’t tasted real bourbon in a long time. It brought back memories he wasn’t sure of enjoying. ‘That’ll be fine.’
Anthony filled the glasses, then lolled back, smiling indulgently.
‘The word I got from Tucson was that you’re the best. At making a gun, or using it. Is that true?’
Ryker shrugged. ‘I’m not the one to say, am I? I’m good, an’ that’s a fact.’
‘I heard you brought in the Muerta gang.’ Anthony toyed with his drink. ‘Arid that you accounted for Jamey Hedges.’
‘I killed them,’ agreed Ryker, ‘if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.’
‘Umm.’ The silvery-haired man toyed with the facing of his jacket. ‘That’s exactly what I’m getting at: you’re good at killing.’
The anger Ryker had felt when the doormen sneered at him began to bubble over again. Eight hundred miles was a long way to come to be patronized, even with the promise of a high wage.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly, ‘I guess I am.’
‘That Sharps I saw on your saddle.’ Anthony smiled and topped up Ryker’s glass. ‘I hear you’re very good with that.’
Ryker wasn’t given to boasting, but he was very particular about his skills. He didn’t enjoy them being questioned by a middle-aged hedonist with money to buy what he couldn’t do for himself. So he lifted his hat off the table and pointed at the band, where a plugged dollar was mounted at the front.
‘You see that dollar there? You see the hole in the center? I blew that through at eight hundred paces. With the Sharps. If I can see it, I can hit it.’
Anthony bowed his head, miming apology. ‘I accept your word, Mr. Ryker. And that of Sheriff Nolan. I only wanted to be sure you were the right man for the problem in question; now I am.’
‘Maybe,’ said Ryker, still angry. ‘But am I?’
‘Listen, please.’ Anthony began to look sincere now. ‘I need reliable men to work for me. I need to check them out—to know they’re the best. I believe that you are one. I’m paying over the odds. One hundred dollars a week? How does that sound?’
‘For what?’ asked Ryker. ‘You ain't even explained the work yet.’
‘Forgive me. Please forgive me,’ Anthony eased down into his chair. ‘I should have explained before. Let me do that now.’
He paused, topping both their glasses before speaking again.
‘I have numerous interests around San Francisco. I own part of this hotel along with various business Ventures about the city and some mines up in the hills. Lately, those mines have been hit by gangs of Chinese. At the same time, my other ventures have been similarly afflicted. I hired a private detective to investigate the affair. He was found in an alley near here, with his head split apart. I decided then to hire professional gunmen to protect my interests. Two of them were killed, and after that no others in this city would even talk about the job.
‘Meanwhile, my mines are losing money and the shipping line I own has nothing to ship. I need men to guard my interests. Men who won’t be scared by the Chinese.’
‘How much you offerin'?’ asked Ryker.
‘One hundred dollars a week,’ said Anthony, ‘as I said to your friends.’
Make it two hundred,’ grunted Ryker, ‘an’ I'll find your Chinese an’ warn them off.’
‘Done!’
‘With two hundred right now, for expenses.’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Ryker.’
‘I earn my money,’ he answered. ‘Mostly the hard way.’
Chapter Four
BENNET ANTHONY EXPLAINED the situation in greater detail over dinner.
The meal was brought in to his private rooms on a trolley and served with almost as much care as Ryker would lavish on a gun. After the waiters had left and Ryker was cutting into a steak that looked to have come from the biggest steer in California, he acquainted the gunslinger with the state’s history and his part in it.
The discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill had resulted in the big rush of ’49. Thousands of men had joined the search for a personal El Dorado, boosting the population and swelling the coffers of the territory. Most of the forty-niners quit broke, but before they drifted away, or turned to other work, they had made California a wide-open, wealthy territory. In 1853, they took $67 million out of the hills; the population had been a meager 14,000, it grew to a quarter million in the six years following the discovery at Sutter’s Mill, and California became a state in 1850.
Although individual miners lifted fortunes from the ground—in three months, ox-team driver John Sullivan raised $26,000 from his claim—the real money, the kind that stayed and went on growing, was made by the investors, the saloonkeepers and the store men. By the time the surface gold petered out, the individual miners either had their grubstake or went bust. What remained was obtainable only with sophisticated mining techniques that. called for heavy equipment and a large degree of organization: the kind only a large combine could supply.
Bennet Anthony was one such combine.
He had made his original poke working a claim up towards Hangman’s Creek, then invested all his earnings in various businesses. He owned a share in the Royal Grand hotel, numerous stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles, was part-owner of a shipping line, and still ran several deep mines along the edges of the mountains.
His main labor force was made up of immigrant Chinese. They lived in shanty towns around the diggings, retaining the culture of their home land with a fierce independence, even more secretive than the Irish miners. And within that closed society there had grown up an alternative to white American rule, a subtle structure of law-givers and executioners known as Tongs.
Ryker had never heard the word before, but when Anthony explained the setup to him, it sounded like a vigorously-enforced protection racket, its extortions enforced by hired killers not that much different to the gunmen working the same kind of deal around the cow towns of the Southwest.
‘Trouble is,’ said the businessman, ‘that I don’t know who they are. If I did it would be easy to deal with them. They’re so damn’ close-mouthed that not a one will talk. And meanwhile, the Tongs are hitting my gold shipments and terrorizing the laborers. I’m losing money every day.’
‘Why not hire a Chinese, then?’ Ryker wiped crumbs of apple pie from his mouth. ‘A Chinaman could finger them so you’d know who to go after.’
‘I can’t,’ said Anthony. ‘They won’t talk and they’re afraid of the Tongs.’
‘So what you got in mind for me?’ Ryker asked. ‘You believe I can keep them off?’
That’s what I’m hoping,’ nodded Anthony. ‘I’ve hired three men from outside so far. One’s guarding the shipping office, the other two look after the stores. I want you to check the mines. Ride herd on the delivery wagons.’
‘Alright,’ grunted Ryker, ‘I’ll do that. First I want to look around.’
‘Why?’ asked Anthony. ‘I thought you’d head out tomorrow.’
Ryker shook his head. ‘No. I ain’t overly familiar with Chinamen, so I’ll spend a day or so lookin’ around. Just so I can get to tell one from another.’
He spent most of the next day wandering around the city. From Market Street to the docks, then back in a wide sweep that took him along the border of Chinatown. He still didn’t like San Francisco, but he had to admit that the swing of the bay looked good, and that there was more excitement packed inside that single area than most Arizona-born men would see in a lifetime. The ocean surprised him—he had never seen so much water before—and he spent a long time staring at the oily-looking waves lapping gently around the hulls of the ships: he had never seen a ship before, either.
The water seemed unnatural. It moved with a motion of its own, not like the wind-driven ripples of a lake, or stream, but with some internal motion that made him feel uneasy yet fascinated. There was a smell around the docks that was totally alien to his experience, an odor that was simultaneously pungent and sickly. Had he known, he would have guessed it as the intermingled miasma of whale oil and spices, salt water and tarred wood, sweat and cotton and powder and leather. He had no way of telling and after a bit it got too strong and he went to find a saloon.
It was called the Lonely Digger, and it was mostly full of sailors and Chinese wharf-rats.
Ryker went up to the bar and ordered whiskey. The barkeep was a tired-looking man with as much grease on his thinning hair as stained his apron. He put a bottle in front of Ryker along with a smeared glass, took his money and doled out change with an air of bored indifference. Ryker sipped the whiskey cautiously, then, finding it drinkable, turned to study the saloon. It was as good a place as any to begin his searching.
There was an upper floor with rooms built around a three-sided balcony reached by a narrow staircase set halfway down the room. The only activity up there seemed to be the coming and going of the saloon-girls and their clients. Most of the girls were Chinese. Downstairs the place was typical: a long room set round with tables and chairs, a full-length bar ran along the left-hand wall with shelves for bottles built up behind it. There was a badly-oiled portrait of a naked woman nailed to the wall at the center of the bar, and an open space in front. Ryker hooked a heel on the brass rail and rested his elbows on the top of the bar. There were two bouncers; one sat just inside the door, toying with a set of brass knuckles. The other was seated on a high-standing stool alongside the stairwell, cradling a cutdown Pauly. Ryker was surprised that a bouncer would carry so delicate a weapon: he knew that the Pauly, for all its fast breech action, was liable to jam and misfire.
The other occupants appeared normal. There were a few soldiers losing their pay to cardsharps and whores; a sprinkling of itinerant drummers; some cowboys ridden too far from home; and a whole lot of sailors.
And a few tables occupied by Chinese engrossed in card games or something to do with dice and counters that Ryker didn’t understand at all.
He emptied his glass and filled it again. The whiskey began to take the heavy taste of the waterfront from his mouth, and he concentrated on watching the occupants of the Lonely Digger.
They were mostly concentrating on drinking or gambling, though a group of seamen appeared more interested in the girls than the cards. Ryker watched a pretty Chinese girl serve them fresh drinks, then fight clear of the groping hands while the bouncer laughed, calling encouragement to the sailors.
After a while they hollered for fresh drinks and a new girl appeared. She looked to be little more than twenty, maybe younger, with long, sleekly-black hair falling around an oval face that was both youthful and knowing. Her eyes were big, soft brown almond-shapes in a pert-nosed face of pale olive. Her mouth was a succulent bow of full, red lips above a pointed chin and a slender neck that led on down to a lissome body that couldn’t hide under the skimpy red dress she wore.
Ryker felt himself straining against his trousers as she went across the room, and couldn’t feel overly surprised when a sailor grabbed her wrist to tug her round onto his knees.
He yanked her over and kicked her feet away so that she tumbled across him. As she fell, he thrust a hand up her skirt while his other arm wrapped round her and his face pressed tight against her mouth. His companions laughed, shouting lewd encouragement, and no one else paid much attention.
The girl screamed.
And Ryker moved away from the bar.
He set down his glass and walked slowly over to the table. The two sailors watching the struggling girl looked up and smiled. The other man was too busy with the girl.
‘Why not let her loose?’ Ryker’s voice was calm and quiet. ‘It don’t sound like she wants to stay with you.’
‘What?’ The sailor looked up through the girl’s hair. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Ryker had deliberately positioned himself some four feet distant from the table. That way, the sailor had to ease away from the girl in order to see him clearly; it also gave Ryker ample room to draw, and see most of the room from the corners of his eyes. A few people were looking up to see what the ruckus was about, but the two bouncers appeared cheerfully disinterested. The man by the door was intent on polishing his brass knuckles against the lapel of his jacket and the one with the shotgun was sitting grinning as though he looked forward to a good fight. Ryker took a step sideways to keep him in better view.
‘Name’s Ryker, but that don’t matter. You want the young lady to sit with you, why not ask her?’
‘A gentleman!’ The sailor made it sound like an insult. ‘A bleedin’ gentleman.’
Ryker recognized the oddly nasal accent as being English. The fact registered in his mind alongside another: the few Englishmen he had met seldom carried a pistol. Maybe that was why the bouncers weren’t paying too much attention.
‘Why don’t you take a walk, friend?’ Another of the sailors eased his chair back. ‘This ain’t nuthin’ to do with you. After all, she’s only a Chink whore an’ we saw her first. You want one, you find your own. Alright?’
‘No,’ said Ryker softly. ‘It’s not alright.’
The girl wriggled free of the first man’s grip and sidled back against the wall. Her big brown eyes were filled with tears from the pain of the sailor’s grasp and they fluttered nervously from Ryker to the three sailors.
The first one stood up. A knife dropped into his right hand from a sheath hidden inside the sleeve of his oily jacket. His companions climbed to their feet. One pulled a twelve-inch billy club from his belt, the other produced a knife. Both blades glistened in the lamp light. They were long, narrow-bladed things, the edges giving off the tell-tale dull sheen of much honing. Both men held them extended out in front of their bodies, thumbs set against the guards so that a cutting edge stood uppermost. They held them low, points angling up on a level with Ryker’s stomach. They moved forwards with their left arms held out and forwards, knees slightly bent, and the blades moving slowly from side to side.
Ryker saw the professionalism of their stance.
And flipped back his jacket, holding the tail back with the upper part of his right arm.
‘No pistols!’
The command was accompanied by the sound of the Pauly’s hammer going back.
Ryker let his eyes drift fractionally sideways. And saw the bouncer by the stairs coming down off his stool with the shotgun cradled against his ribs. One finger was on the trigger and the twin muzzles were leveled on his midriff,
‘Let’s keep this straight. The management don’t like gunplay—unless it comes from me—so drop the belt.’
‘An’ go up against three men?’ snarled Ryker. ‘I don’t like the odds.’
‘You shoulda thought about that afore you started it.’ The bouncer smiled, exposing tobacco-stained teeth. ‘I don’t like troublemakers. An’ you, mister; are one. Now you drop that fancy belt an’ take your medicine.’
Ryker looked at him. His eyes were small and blue, tinged around the edges with a boozy red. His mouth was fleshy and ugly, spread out in the kind of grin that anticipates a blood-letting. There was no compassion anywhere on his face: Ryker knew that he had no choice. Not against a cocked shotgun, or against three sailors armed with knives and a club. He was not afraid of violence—couldn’t afford to be—but he knew that he was no fist fighter.
He reached down to unfasten the leather strap holding the Colt’s holster down against his thigh.
The three sailors stood waiting. Grinning.
He unbuckled the belt and drew it loose from his waist. Then he set it down on the floor. Gently. As he stood up, he let his hand drift against his boot, and when he stood up he was holding the .44 derringer hidden there in his hand.
He threw himself sideways and forwards in a dive that carried him across the dusty planking of the floor almost to the foot of the stairs.
The bouncer’s shotgun went off over his head, but he was close enough to the man’s position that the cone-shaped charge of shot splattered past him, spreading out in a growing arc to waste itself on the empty bar and the wall beyond. There was the sound of shattering glass and a scream from the barkeep, closely followed by the yell of the bouncer as Ryker tugged him over.
The gunfighter landed flat on his stomach. Lifted on his right elbow to reach up with his left hand and grab a fistful of the bouncer’s shirtfront. The bouncer, already off-balanced by the Pauly’s discharge, lost his footing completely and pitched forwards. As he fell, Ryker drove the derringer up hard into his belly. The man groaned and dropped the shotgun. Ryker kicked it away and hung his left arm tight around the man’s neck. He pressed the derringer up against the bouncer’s head.
