Wilderness Double Edition 22, page 26
“Tell my friend what you just told me,” Alain directed. The skinny one raised her face to Zach. “He says you’re looking for a girl named Evelyn, is that right?”
“Yes,” Zach said, his breath catching in his throat.
“There’s a new girl here by that name. I’ve talked to her a couple of times, but I don’t know where she is now.”
Zach couldn’t help himself; he gripped her shoulders. “You must have some idea! Where can I find her?”
“You’re squeezing too hard,” the girl said, wresting free. “When the shooting started, everyone started running every which way. I don’t know where she got to.”
Fear seized him. Zach sprinted from room to room bawling Evelyn’s name but there was no answer. The last door was to the outside, and it was open. A block away a small figure was running for dear life. “Wait!” he hollered, about to go after her. Then he noticed how she was running, with short, clipped steps. Evelyn had the long loping gait of an antelope. It wasn’t his sister.
Alain still had hold of the pair in the hall. “You ran off without hearing the rest,” he said.
“What else is there?” Zach’s emotions were in a jumble. He did not know what to do next.
The skinny girl answered. “Mr. Vasklin might have taken her away. He has a house where he keeps a few girls for himself. The girls who catch his fancy. He’s never told me where it is.”
She had more to say but Zach did not stay to hear it. Rage filled him. Boundless, roiling, total rage. It was the same way he felt that night months ago when he slew Athena Borke’s brother, Artemis, at the trading post, and again later when he slit Phineas’s throat. It propelled him down the hall and out into the main room.
The Regal Club was a shambles. Tables and chairs had been knocked over, table legs and chairs had been shattered. Chips and money and glasses littered the floor. So did spreading pools of blood from dozens of dead and dying. The sickly sweet smell of it was enough to make weaker stomachs gag.
Duncan was by the bar, cradling Fontaine’s head on his leg. He looked up and sadly shook his head. Further off lay Owen, dead; Richard openly weeping over him. Quinton and Thorne had both been wounded but were on their feet. Vin was untouched but soaked in the blood of those he had slain.
Zach was sorry for their loss. Truly sorry. But only one thing was on his mind. “Martin Vasklin?”
Duncan scowled. “The weasel got away in all the confusion. He could be anywhere by now.”
The news deflated Zach as if he were a punctured water skin. They had accomplished nothing. Two of them slain, and for what? How many others had died, to what end? The polecat responsible for it all was gone, and Evelyn was still in his clutches.
Zach closed his eyes and groaned.
Sixteen
“I don’t understand why no one has come,” Zach commented. Fifteen minutes had gone by and the authorities had not appeared.
“They are not paid enough to brave a hail of bullets,” Thorne said, while having his arm bandaged by Vin. “We don’t need them butting in, anyway.”
“They won’t show up until after sunrise,” was Quinton’s opinion. He lay on the bar, Duncan busily tending his four wounds.
“This one in your side is serious. You need a doctor. Thorne will take you to the hospital.”
“Me?” Thorne pulled away from Vin and Vin pulled him back again. “Why do I have to go?”
“You’re wounded, too,” Duncan said. “The rest of us only have nicks and cuts.”
“I don’t like being left out.”
“Would you rather Quinton died?” Duncan demanded. “I think he’s bleeding inside, and a sawbones can do a lot better job of sewing him up than I can.”
Alain was helping himself to some brandy, chugging it straight from the bottle. Richard was on his knees beside Owen’s bloodstained body, clasping Owen’s hand.
Duncan started toward them but stopped beside one of Vasklin’s henchmen who had taken a slug high in the chest and was lying on his back, whining. “What have we here?” Duncan nudged him and the man cried out.
“Don’t! I hurt! God, I hurt!”
Bending, Duncan examined the wound. “Looks like you don’t have very long to live, so you’d better talk fast.” He gripped the man’s stubbly chin. “I’m going to ask you a question. I will only ask once. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, the pain you are feeling now will be nothing compared to the pain you will feel when I am done with you.”
“Please,” the man whimpered.
“Where does Martin Vasklin live?”
“How the hell should I know? He’s never told me. I work for him, is all.” The man groaned. “Haven’t you done enough? Go away.”
“I warned you,” Duncan said, and stomped on the wound.
A howl of anguish rose to the ceiling. The man tried to sit up but couldn’t with Duncan’s foot pinning him. “Stop! Don’t! I can’t stand it!”
“Your employer’s address,” Duncan said. “We know he has girls there, and we mean to find them.”
“What are they to you?” the man asked, then shrieked when Duncan applied more pressure. “Damn you! Damn you all to hell! I’ll never tell, do you hear me? Not in a million years!”
Zach’s legs were in motion before he knew what he was going to do. Drawing the bowie, he stood over the coward. “Permit me,” he said to Duncan, and squatted. “Vasklin has my sister.”
The whites of the man’s eyes showed. “What’s that to me? I have nothing to do with the girls. None of us are allowed anywhere near them.”
“Tell me where he lives.”
“What I told your friend goes double for you!” the man defied him. “I don’t care what you want, and I don’t care about your stinking sister.”
“I do. His address,” Zach said.
“No! No! No!”
“You do not hear very well,” Zach said. “So I guess you have no use for this.” He swung the knife in a glittering arc.
An ear plopped to the floor, tufts of hair still attached. The man opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He began to tremble as blood seeped between his fingers and down his neck.
“Where?” Zach said, raising his arm to strike again.
“No! No! I’ll tell you! Dear God in heaven, I’ll tell you. Just don’t cut me again.” He gave them the address.
“Thank you,” Zach said, and sank the bowie into his chest. He held on as the body flopped and kicked and gradually subsided, then he wiped the blade clean on the man’s shirt, and stood. Everyone was staring at him. “What?"
“Nothing,” Duncan said.
“I put him out of his misery,” Zach said to justify his deed.
“I would have done the same,” Vin said.
It was plain some of the others disagreed. Thorne, in particular, looked vexed, but he didn’t say anything as Duncan and Vin helped Quinton to stand and Quinton slipped a thin arm over Thorne’s broad shoulders.
“Off you go,” Duncan said. “We’ll come to the hospital after our business with Vasklin is finished.”
Thorne tried one more time. “I don’t like leaving you. Can’t someone else take him? Vin, how about you?”
“I trust you are joking.”
“Richard?”
“Do you have eyes? Do you see what they did to Owen? I won’t rest until every last one of the bastards has met his Maker.”
Duncan clapped Thorne on the back. “There you have it. Off you go. Fremont Street is one block over and you can usually find a cab there, even at this hour.” He clasped Quinton’s hand. “Thank you.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” the white-haired giant grinned. “Next time, though, I’m bringing a brace of pistols, two rifles and a cannon.” He laughed at his joke, or tried to, and had a coughing fit.
“Get going,” Duncan urged Thorne, and saw them to the door.
Zach had come to a decision. Clearing his throat to get their attention, he announced, “I’m grateful for your help.” He truly was. He could not get over that these strangers, white men, no less, had risked their lives to aid someone they only just met. “But I do not want any more of you to die.” Fontaine and Owen were two more lives chalked up to Athena Borke’s account. “I will go it alone from here.”
“Like hell you will,” Vin said. “You’re not the only one whose sister has been snared in Vasklin’s net. I’ll see this through to the end, and nothing you can say will stop me.”
“I, too, mon ami,” Alain said.
“It’s not necessary,” Zach replied. “You have repaid me for saving your life many times over.”
The Creole shrugged. “I have come this far, eh? I would be less of a man were I to leave you in the lurch now.”
Richard had come over and was wiping his tear-moistened cheeks with his sleeve. “Don’t even think of leaving me out. I’ll shoot you if you do.”
That left Duncan. His handsome face streaked with black powder residue and spattered with red drops, his body bearing the mark of a dozen minor hurts, he said, “Fontaine was like a brother to me. I have a blood debt of my own to settle now.”
The first faint hint of dawn tinged the eastern horizon as the five of them wound along the narrow streets. Here and there an early riser sat on a patio or a balcony and watched them go by.
Zach was mired in thought. Now that he knew beyond any shade of doubt that Evelyn had been at the club, his heart was heavy with sorrow. She had always been the sweetest of creatures, the most innocent of innocents. Because of Vasklin, her purity had been perverted, her soul marked forever by his taint. For that alone Vasklin must die the most horrible of deaths. No quick mercy for him. Zach would make sure Martin Vasklin suffered as few men ever had.
Torture was not new to him. It was a common practice among some tribes to torture captured enemies. Not out of cruelty, nor from a depraved desire to see others suffer, but to test a captive’s mettle. The Shoshones did not indulge in the practice that often, but when they did, they were every bit as thorough as the Crows or the Sioux or the Blackfeet.
When he was six, Zach happened to be staying with his folks at Touch The Clouds’s village when a Piegan raiding party tried to steal some horses but was driven away. In the fight, two boys tending the herd were slain. Not long after, one of the Piegans took an arrow in the leg and was captured.
Zach still remembered holding his mother’s hand, watching, horror-struck, as the Piegan’s stomach was slit open and his intestines were unwound like a spool of thick, pulpy thread. He remembered the Piegan’s tongue being cut out. Remembered the grandmother of one of the slain boys taking off the Piegan’s pants and doing something that to this day sent a shiver down his spine. Other things, too, terrible, terrible things, never to be talked about for as long as he lived. Yet the Piegan never cried out, never pleaded for his life. That Piegan was an enemy, but he died as a warrior should and in doing so earned the respect of every Shoshone there.
That was the first time. There were others. Atrocities Zach witnessed that would sicken most whites. He had seen the Sioux skin a soldier alive and stake him out under the burning sun, then gouge out his eyes. He had seen what was left of a party of Mexicans after Apaches mutilated them. And more. So much more.
Violence was a daily part of life on the frontier. Brutal acts were committed as a matter of course; a grizzly ripped an unwary warrior to pieces, Comanches honed their skill with their lances on a prisoner tied to a tree, a pack of wolves brought down a frightened fawn. It was the cycle of life in all its violent splendor.
Everyone who lived west of the Mississippi, every frontiersman and Indian, knew that one day he might be called on to endure the horror of horrors. No one complained. No one railed in protest to the heavens. It was the nature of things. It had always been the nature of things. It would always be the nature of things. To rail at violence was to rail at life, and where was the sense in that?
Zach had learned that most whites did not share that view. Most avoided dwelling on the unthinkable. They tried to deny death existed by shutting it from their minds. But death was never truly denied, never truly held at bay. Death always had the last word, for the basic and inescapable reason that all life ended in death.
All Zach asked was that his own death be delayed long enough for him to save Evelyn and avenge himself on Athena Borke.
Suddenly Duncan broke their long silence, saying, “Life is full of surprises. The Regal Club must be more lucrative than I imagined if Vasklin can afford to live here.”
Zach looked around. He had taken it for granted that a despicable pile of dung like Vasklin lived in the worst section of the city, but such was not the case. Fine homes graced both sides of an oak-lined street. Every home had a garden shaded by magnolias and a wide front porch. “Where are we?”
“The Garden District,” Vin said. “Americans live here mostly. Well-to-do Americans, I should say.”
“I have friends here,” Richard remarked. He had been uncharacteristically quiet since his friend’s passing.
“Vasklin always has wanted to rub elbows with the upper crust,” Duncan said. “He likes to pretend he’s one of them.”
“We all have our pretensions,” Richard commented.
“Mon Dieu. Are you defending him?” This from Alain.
“Never in a million years,” Richard said. “He’s a rabid cur who needs to be disposed of once and for all.”
“On that we could not agree more,” Alain said. “I have met many despicable excuses for human beings in my time, but none can hold a candle to this one.”
Around them quiet reigned. The Garden District had not yet stirred to life to greet the imminent dawn. A dog barked at them and was hushed by its owner. A man came out on his porch in a robe and at sight of them hastily went back inside. A woman peered at them from a window and Alain blew her a kiss.
Duncan was reading house numbers. “We’re close,” he informed them. “It should be just ahead if I’m not mistaken.”
Alain stopped. “Perhaps we should take a moment to dedicate ourselves to our cause.” He held a fist out at chest height. “I vow to give my life, if need be, in our noble cause.”
Zach did not see the point. They were already determined to see it through. But he went along with the rest and held a fist out.
“To vengeance,” Alain swore. “May none of us give up or turn back until we have done what we came here to do.”
“I second that,” Duncan said.
“You needn’t worry on my account,” Vin declared, brandishing his sword cane. “My blade has not drunk enough blood.”
“I will see it through, too,” said Richard.
Without anyone suggesting they should, they spread across the street. Zach was on the right, and as it turned out, so was Vasklin’s house. Painted white with black shutters, it was flanked by willows. Roses bordered the porch. It was a perfect home in a perfect neighborhood.
“Can this really be it?” Alain marveled.
Zach was alert for dogs but did not see any. Nor were there any guards. Like Alain, he had his doubts.
Five abreast, they warily crossed the lawn. No angry shouts greeted them. No shots blasted.
“It can’t be this easy,” Duncan said.
“Perhaps we were lied to,” Richard replied.
Zach swore under his breath. The cutthroat at the club had been braver than he thought. He was about to say that he, too, thought they must have the wrong house, when suddenly every ground floor window was smashed to bits by rifle barrels thrust from inside, and above the din rose the sadistically gleeful shout of Martin Vasklin, yelling what he had yelled back in his club:
“Kill them! Kill them all!”
Seventeen
Vasklin’s impatience cost him. Had he waited until they climbed the steps, Zach and his allies would have been shot where they stood. But as it was, they were at the bottom of the steps, and when the windows dissolved in showers of shimmering shards, they did what anyone else would have done: They threw themselves to the ground.
A ragged volley spewed hot lead and acrid smoke but not one shot scored.
Zach was instantly on his knees, a pistol in each had. The Hawken was at Duncan’s apartment since he couldn’t very well have carried it into the club. Not that he needed it. At close range pistols were just as effective, as he proved with two swift shots that spun one rifleman around and punched another from a window.
The others were firing: Duncan, Alain, Richard and Vin peppered the ground floor,
Zach could not say how many assassins were inside, but it was a safe guess that once again he and the others were outnumbered. Dropping down, he swiftly reloaded. Inside the house Vasklin was bellowing, but Zach could not quite make out what he was shouting about.
With a loud tinkling of glass, a window on the upper floor shattered and a rifleman sighted down at them, aiming at Richard.
“Down!” Duncan yelled, and fired from the hip. He was as skilled a marksman as he was at cards.
The rifleman pitched out the window and dangled half in and half out, spilling what was left of his brains on the porch eaves.
Zach was watching the windows but no more shooters appeared. He glimpsed a silhouette and took a swift bead but it vanished.
Then Alain whispered his name. “Maybe it is better if we hold our fire and ask for a truce.”
“Why would we want to do that?” Zach responded. Personally, he did not intend to rest until Vasklin was dead at his feet.
“Your sister, eh?”
To Zach it was like a slap in the face. How could he forget Evelyn? She might be hit by a stray slug. He glanced at the others; Duncan nodded; Richard shook his head; Vin mouthed, “Yes.”
Zach faced the house. “Vasklin! Can you hear me in there?”
“My ears work fine, breed!” came the angry reply. “What will it take to be rid of you?”
“I want my sister!” Zach shouted. “Send her out unharmed and we will go away without firing another shot.”
