Steampunk Banditos, page 4
The gangster blurted something in Chinese and I caught gou za zhong, their equivalent of gringo.
A guard tapped my arm. I became aware that I was no longer welcome and felt like a trespassing foreigner. The rumbling behind the vents made the silence among us stifling. I fastened the satchel flap and lifted the bag to sling it over one shoulder. Its heft surprised me. The two guards opened the doors and without further ceremony, I gave a parting glance to the bell jar, left the room, and continued to the bottom of the stairs.
The old Chinese woman and the tattooed guard crouched beside a wooden crate that blocked my path. She wrapped a severed arm—lacerated and mottled with rot—in waxed paper and fit the bundle into excelsior, filling the crate.
No mystery about the morgue smell now.
The guard fit a lid over the crate and secured it with nails. The dragon in the flaming ring design had been branded on the lid. A line of Chinese characters, also scorched into the wood, followed one edge. Return to Sender, perhaps?
The old woman made an angry chattering sound, and the guard dragged the crate out of my way. I proceeded down the hall to the exterior door. It opened eerily as I approached and shut after I had passed. I walked into the hot, sticky night and through the alley back to Market Street. My kundalini noir relaxed and I breathed deep, appreciating that I wasn’t dead. But the serenity didn’t last. The reek of horseshit, garbage, burning coal and tobacco, and the sidewalks teeming with crowds looking for cheap thrills reminded me that I was back on the gritty streets of the city.
At the corner of 20th, four drunken cowboys argued with a prostitute, who was dressed in an open robe thrown over lingerie. They wanted a group rate, ten bits; she wanted to charge them individually. “It’s the same amount of work, one at a time or all at once, you cheap bastards. You wanna sport, it’ll cost you each a buck.”
Anxiety over this assignment upset my guts like a bad meal. I read my watch. 11:10. Had I spent an hour with the gangster?
Who was stupid enough to kidnap a child of Wu Fei? What was to gain? And the gangster? He didn’t act like a father desperate to find his daughter. The Dragon was a powerful man, why wouldn’t he use his army of thugs instead of hiring me? So many vexing questions and when I groped my memory for answers, all I gathered were cobwebs.
And worse, I was walking onto the lawless boulevards of St. Charles with a bag of gold coins hanging on my shoulder.
My kundalini trilled an alarm.
Someone watched. Someone waited.
Chapter Four
Paranoia tugged at my nerves. I scoped the faces in the busy intersection, probing to see if anyone showed more than a passing interest. But everyone seemed too busy getting drunk and whoring, or fleecing the drunks and johns. But that paranoia kept tugging, cinching anxiety like a noose around my kundalini noir.
I searched the streets and raked my gaze across the tops of the surrounding buildings. A lone figure stood stock still on the roof of the Marcus Hotel. Dread wrapped icy fingers around my undead heart. The hood of a cloak obscured the figure’s face, yet I could have sworn its shadowed eyes were focused right on me.
Horses pulled a coach in front of me, blocking my view. When the coach passed the stranger had disappeared. I blinked, wondering if I had been hallucinating.
My kundalini noir writhed—unsettled, apprehensive—confirming that my eyes hadn’t deceived me.
One of the Dragon’s spies? Or a spy from a rival gang? Or someone who kept lookout on the comings and goings through Wu Fei’s door for a target of opportunity like me with this weighty bag of gold on my shoulder?
My fangs extended and I kept my mouth closed tight to keep them from showing. Hooking my right thumb over the front of my coat, I got ready to flip it back so I could make an easy reach for my Colt Navy.
Retreating from the curb, I put my back against the wall. My nerves were raw, tingling with dread and foreboding. What spooked me most was that I felt marooned, cast off in this strange world. I grew to hate Coyote. Why had he sent me here? When and how could I get back?
I felt vulnerable, like it was only a matter of time before crosshairs found me. I wished I wasn’t alone. I needed vampires I could trust. My friends Jolie and Carmen. We’d been through horrific scrapes together, and I was sure they could’ve helped me find my way home. But they were unreachable on the far side of whatever supernatural wall Coyote had flung me over. Were they even looking for me? Did they even know I was missing?
Then I perceived a new feeling, one that caused my fears to loosen.
I had a friend here.
A face coalesced in my memory, like a photo coming into focus. A lean, drawn face. Caucasian skin weathered and bronzed by hard life under the open Western sky. Gray eyes the color of storm clouds, as ready to smile as they were to squint down the barrel of a Sharps rifle. Lanky, powerful limbs that moved quick as a panther’s. A man as good on a horse as I was. A mustache that rivaled mine.
Then another thought made me wince. Since when could I ride a horse?
His name hovered on the edge of my awareness.
I couldn’t let myself get distracted. I put my mind back on locating who had been watching from the roof. I let my gaze range across the street, from face to window, from window to door, from door to rooftop. No one that I could see hunted me.
Hunted. Of course. Hunted. Hunter.
My friend’s name was Malachi Hunter. He was my longtime friend and business associate. Together we had administered plenty of justice. And on occasion, he was my partner in crime. Together we were expert in exploiting the slack between right and wrong.
Malachi was where? My thoughts lagged as I groped through the sparse memories Coyote had drizzled into my mind. I looked south, down Market Street, then realized I should be one street over on Larimer. At the Dizzy Ute Saloon. I tapped my shirt pocket where I kept the telegram. I had shown Malachi the message earlier today. He and I were to rendezvous at the saloon after my meeting with Wu Fei.
New worries added to my angst. Did Malachi know I was a vampire? Was he? Or was he my chalice? Did that mean we were more than business partners? Maybe it was Coyote’s idea of a joke to send me here to snuggle with a gay lover. In which case I’d be sucking more than Malachi’s blood.
Tamping down a tide of dismay, I resigned myself to roll with whatever life and relationships I had here. Still, Malachi didn’t seem my type, and hopefully, he wasn’t.
I clamped an arm against the bag and navigated through a gaggle of revelers to 19th and east to Larimer. In the streets, horses, buggies, and buckboards jostled for right of way.
An automatic tractor chugged down Larimer, belching smoke and sparks from its engine stack. Its small, forward-feeler wheels clattered on long whip-like struts like an insect’s forelegs. Steam vented from pistons rotating the drive wheels. A yellow glow pulsed erratically from the port at the front of the boiler. Behind the tractor, an enclosed trailer rumbled over the hard-packed road. A slogan painted on the side of the trailer read: Sure-Safe Delivery. Our Drivers Never Get Drunk.
The tractor hooted a blast of steam for the other traffic to stay clear. Horses whinnied and strained at their traces. Pedestrians scurried to safety before they were trampled by beast or machine. I darted behind the wagon to cross the street. Steam plumed over me. Halting beside the wooden Indian outside a tobacco shop, I surveyed the way I had come. Nothing suspicious.
But paranoia still tweaked my nerves. My vampire sixth sense whispered danger.
Continuing toward Larimer, I turned south at the first alley. The illumination from kitchen windows threw pools of dirty light into the murk. A couple of drunks teetered against a lamppost. Above them, a gas jet’s meager flame hissed inside the broken glass lantern. Moths fluttered dangerously close, and one burst into flames. Down the alley, a back door opened and someone emptied a bucket, its contents sloshing across the ground. I studied the alley with vampire night vision. Rats and raccoons picked through garbage.
Grimacing at the smell, I stepped around the drunks, pools of vomit, and scattered trash. I passed the kitchen windows and service doors of the public halls and saloons. With my hand firm on the grip of my .45, I halted occasionally and checked behind me and along the roofs to make sure no one followed. Still that prickle of paranoia wouldn’t go away.
I reached the kitchen behind the Dizzy Ute Saloon, lifted my feet over piles of garbage, and climbed the back stoop to the open door. I entered a steamy cloud of smells: hot stew and fried meat mixed with the alley’s rank odors.
Three cooks—a large black man and a couple of Mexican paisanos—worked at the stove and a cutting table. They paused to regard me. The black man’s gaze cut to a coach gun hanging with the pots and pans above the table. The paisanos menacingly adjusted their grips on the cleavers. I showed my open hands and shook my head, indicating I wasn’t here for trouble. The black man nodded curtly to the other door and let me pass.
Once at the far side of the kitchen, I stopped at the end of the short hall. Straight ahead, beneath layers of tobacco smoke, businessmen, saddle tramps, and saloon girls leaned against the bar and crowded around tables. A piano and mandolin accompanied peals of crude laughter. No one acted like they cared two road apples about me.
To my left, stairs to the second floor. To my right, a row of three snugs.
The snugs were enclosed booths with room barely enough for four. The perfect setting to make secret deals, deliver bribes, and act as favored hideaways for respectable gentlemen and ladies seeking to indulge in unrespectable recreation. You had to be careful to make sure the tables had been wiped clean. You never knew what happened on top of them.
The doors to the snugs were closed except for the one nearest me. It was ajar. A broken lucifer protruded from a crack in the adjacent paneling. Door barely open, matchstick in the wall. Malachi’s signal that the rendezvous was on.
Still, my paranoia did not relax. I looked back to the kitchen. To the bar. To stairs and the landing above. I halted by the snug’s entrance and listened. Aside from the merriment in the saloon and the rattle of kitchen implements, nothing.
I sniffed. Tobacco. Spilled beer. Faint perfume. All normal for a place like this.
Yet the alarm kept plucking my nerves. I was missing something.
I drew the Colt Navy and slowly levered the hammer back. The pistol cocked and ready, I pushed the door, cracking it open just enough to see a man with a rangy physique occupying one of the benches. Flickering light from a ceiling oil lamp etched shadows on his craggy face. Hard eyes stared at me.
Malachi Hunter. Looking stoic as always. He could have a scorpion in his union suit and wouldn’t act bothered. His derby was tipped back and the shaggy, blond hair draped over his ears shimmered in the shifting light. His open hands rested on the table.
A man in a rumpled black duster sat on the bench opposite Malachi. Elbow propped on the table, he pointed a gleaming snub-nose revolver at Malachi’s face. One twitch on the trigger, and a slug would’ve blasted my friend’s nose right through the back of his skull.
The identity of the man aiming the revolver bloomed in my memory, like a bloodstain spreading through cloth. The gruesome scar that started at his jaw and tore its way up his left cheek to bisect his eyebrow, gave him away. El Cicatriz—“the Scar”—Saul Sanchez. Bag man and thumb breaker.
“Felix, put your gun on the table,” Cicatriz ordered with a twitch of his pistol. “Get in and sit down. Tell me what news you bring from our good pal, Mr. Wu Fei.”
Chapter Five
I placed my revolver on the table and slid next to Malachi.
Cicatriz scowled. His hair was a greasy mop of black and silver. The nubby whiskers of his unshaven face glistened like the points of a barbed-wire fence. “Hands on the table. Now.”
I obeyed.
“Close the door.”
With the toe of my boot, I nudged it shut. I glanced at Malachi.
He looked at me and grumbled, “Nice move, jackass.”
Cicatriz’s black hat rested on the table. Beneath the brim peeked the ivory grips of two Schofields—Malachi’s revolvers. I replied, “I’m the dumbass? He got the drop on you first, goober.”
“Both of you,” Cicatriz barked, “shut up.”
When I turned back to him, I noticed a fleeting red iridescence in his irises, and then realized what my sixth sense was warning me about.
A werewolf had been waiting nearby. Cicatriz.
Back in the other world, the musky smell of a lycanthrope would’ve been as obvious to me as the odor of a kennel that needed a good scrubbing. Did werewolves not stink here?
As for Malachi, my memory confirmed he was human. Did he know Cicatriz was a werewolf? I wasn’t sure. But my gunslinger friend was so hard-boiled that even a lycanthrope wouldn’t faze him.
And did Cicatriz know I was a vampire? I was betting that he did. Was he going to reveal my undead identity or was there an omerta between us supernaturals?
A small leather pouch dangled just below Cicatriz’s open collar. Beads decorating the pouch glittered in the light of the oil lamp hanging over the table. The decorative fringe and the pattern of the beads—a red and yellow circle inside a ring of black and white—identified it as a Sioux medicine bag. The magical concoction of herbs and powders inside masked werewolf stench like supernatural deodorant.
Cicatriz noticed my interest in the bag. In a self-conscious move, his free hand tucked it back inside his shirt.
He swung his revolver in my direction. The gun was a nickel-plated Merwin Hulbert, probably a .44. The hammer wasn’t cocked back, but no matter. The pistol was a double-action so a quick squeeze of the trigger would be enough to write the first lines of my obituary.
As a vampire I could take one, two lead slugs, provided they didn’t drill my skull or break a major bone. But if the Merwin Hulbert was loaded with silver bullets, then all bets were off. Malachi was human. He had taken his share of gunshot wounds and kept fighting, but his body was a lot more vulnerable to bullets than mine. If we attacked simultaneously, one of us could take Cicatriz. The other would die. Not odds I’d gamble on.
Cicatriz studied me with quick stabs of his eyes. “What was your business with Wu Fei?”
“I was in the neighborhood and he wanted to chat. We had tea.”
His gaze fixed on the satchel slung over my shoulder. “Let’s see what’s in your bag.”
I didn’t move.
“You deaf?” Cicatriz asked. “The bag. What’s in your goddamn bag?”
I reached to slip its sling off my shoulder.
“Easy,” cautioned Cicatriz.
Slowly, carefully, I dragged the heavy satchel from my arm and let it go thunk on the wooden surface. Cicatriz and Malachi shifted in their seats, curious about the hefty, metallic sound.
“Open it,” Cicatriz commanded. His beady, wolfish eyes kept darting from me to Malachi and back.
I unfastened the brass buckles and lifted the canvas flap. Turning the satchel onto its side, I let its gold coins roll onto the table. Their reeded edges rattled hypnotically on the wood. I was hoping to distract Cicatriz, but he didn’t take the bait.
His left hand slapped over the coins. He scooped one and slid back on the bench until he wedged himself in the far corner of the snug. Lifting the coin, he brought it to eye level beside the Merwin Hulbert. His gaze flicked from me to the glittering coin, but only briefly. One furry eyebrow lifted.
“A fifty-dollar Sol.” He glanced at the other coins and grinned. “It seems you and Wu Fei had an interesting conversation.” As Cicatriz placed the coin back on the table, he asked Malachi, “What made the Dragon so generous? What does he want from you two?”
My buddy shrugged. “Wu Fei doesn’t want buffalo scat from me. If there’s a deal, it’s strictly between him and Felix.”
Keeping the revolver trained on us, Cicatriz scratched the whiskers on his jaw. Were we close to a full moon?
He said, “You present me with an interesting and advantageous conundrum.”
“How so?” I asked. My kundalini noir coiled against the floor of my belly, waiting for the moment to strike.
“The biggest problem is getting both of you out of here and to a safe place,” Cicatriz said. “Safe, I mean, for me.” He groped at his waist, unsheathed a Bowie knife and stabbed the table. “Once there, Felix, you will have the pleasure of watching me skin your friend until you tell me everything I want to know about your meeting with Wu Fei.”
Malachi sucked his teeth, unimpressed.
“Save yourself the trouble.” I chuckled and began to raise my hands. Cicatriz’s snarl made me lay them flat again. “Just head on over to the Dragon’s door and ask him. I found he can be a very reasonable man.”
Cicatriz glowered and touched his scar. “That reasonableness is up to interpretation.”
Malachi balled his fists and pushed up from the table. “Enough jawing. Let’s get this show going.”
“Sit back down,” Cicatriz ordered. “We’re not leaving yet.”
“What are you going to do?” Malachi replied, sitting. “Stare at us all night with that ugly puss of yours. Now that’s torture.”
“Quit running your mouth, gringo. How about I ask Felix one more time, right here, right now? If he bullshits me, I shoot you in the shoulder. I ask him again and if I get more bullshit, I put a bullet in your gut. And you should be plenty worried because Felix is always full of bullshit.”
“How many times do you intend to shoot him?” I asked. “Not that I care. I’m simply curious.”
“Four times ought to do it. I’ll keep the last two bullets for you.”
“Kill me and you won’t know about my business with Wu Fei.”
“Now that I have this gold, that’s a mystery that can wait until another day.”
“People will hear the gunshots.”
Cicatriz laughed, a coarse rattle from deep in his throat. “This is St. Charles. Gunshots from a snug can be forgotten with a simple exchange of money.” He patted the pile of gold coins.
