Bounty Hunter, page 10
“I know what I look like.”
“Since you don’t have a pigtail, a hat will cover your hair, but the big mustache has to go.”
Tone was horrified. “It’s taken me years to get this mustache to where I like it. It stays. Rather than shave it off, I’d dress like a sailor again and take my chances.”
Chastity shrugged. “Your funeral, Mr. Tone.” “Thanks, but when we’re in bed you can call me John.”
Chastity gave him a sidelong glance but said nothing.
She picked up her bag off the floor and laid it on the bed. She removed her .41-caliber Remington over-and-under derringer and a strange-looking gun rig that Tone had never seen before.
The woman held it up for him to see. “It’s a sleeve holster. Not something I use often,” she said. She raised an arm, revealing the wide sleeve of her tunic. “But tonight, this will conceal it.”
The holster was finely crafted of soft, thin leather, and two thin straps secured it to Chastity’s forearm. The derringer snapped into a leather-covered metal clip.
Chastity let her sleeve cover the rig, then she raised her arm and opened her hand. The derringer sprang into her palm, hammer up and ready.
“I had it made for me in El Paso,” she said. “It’s uncomfortable to wear, like your shoulder holsters, but, under certain circumstances, quite effective.”
Tone smiled as Chastity replaced the derringer in the rig. “I’ve got to get me one of those,” he said.
“Then you’d better wear a coat with roomy enough sleeves or the gun will snag inside and you’ll be a dead man.”
“A thing to remember,” Tone said, immediately losing any passing interest he might have had in sleeve holsters.
He stepped to the window and glanced outside, bending to see the sky. It was still raining, but the dark clouds were splintered with light.
“Long time until dark,” Tone said. He looked at Chastity and raised an eyebrow. “What can we do to pass the dreary hours?”
“I’ll get Chang to bring you a book,” the woman said.
Chapter 16
Night fell along the Barbary Coast and the streets thronged with sailors who rubbed shoulders with drovers down from the hills, bearded miners, rubes from the sticks and respectable businessmen in from the city who knew that any degenerate appetite they possessed, no matter how perverted, would be satisfied, so long as they had money to pay. Amid this bedlam bustled thugs, murderers, thieves, burglars, gamblers, pimps and whores, scuttling through the darkness like cockroaches.
The rain that had promised to stop had lied, and now fell in a light drizzle that added its gray curtain to the veil of the fog. Wet cobblestones gleamed like polished blue iron in the light of the streetlamps and passing cabs threw up cascades of water from their rattling wheels.
A gas lamp burned in the rear room of Chang’s house in Murder Alley, the window a rectangle of pale turquoise in the gloom.
Inside, John Tone was not in the best of moods. The round Chinese hat Chang had given him to wear was, like his clothes, too big for him and kept falling down over his eyes. Irritably, he pushed it back for the tenth time that evening, then growled when Chastity asked him a question.
Getting no answer, she asked it again: “How do you want to play this?”
Tone snatched the infernal hat off his head and glared at the woman. “Mickey Kerr is visiting his lady-love in her room above the Opera Comique. I plan to climb the stairs, kick in the door and gun him. Then I’ll turn around and get the hell out of there.”
Chastity nodded. “A fine plan, Tone. Just a couple of problems: One, Luther Penman told me the Opera Comique is a concert saloon with a dance hall in the cellar. The front door will be guarded and they won’t let you inside. You’re supposed to be Chinese, remember? And two, you’d never get out of there alive after shooting Kerr.”
Fighting down his irritation, Tone said, “Then what, pray, do you suggest?”
“I’ll go inside and take care of Kerr. But when I come out again, I want your guns covering me.”
“You’re also supposed to be Chinese, you know. Why would they let you inside and not me?”
Chastity stepped to the closet. She settled a straw coolie hat on her head, then picked up a bundle of clothing. Taking small, mincing steps, she trotted toward Tone, carrying the bundle.
“Let pass, please,” she said in a high, accented voice, keeping her head down, her face covered by the wide brim of the hat. “Laundlee for missy upstairs. She in velly big hurry.” She looked at Tone and said in her normal voice. “The toughs at the door will let me go. They’ll probably grope my tits and ass as I run past, but I’ll get to Mickey Kerr.”
Despite his peevishness, Tone saw the logic in what Chastity was suggesting. It showed in his eyes, because the woman said, “What are you worried about, Tone? You’ll still get credit for the kill.”
That gave Tone pause. Bounty hunting was a dirty, sometimes violent and bloody business, but he’d never bragged on the men he’d killed and considered those who did to be low-life tinhorns.
Chastity knew his wages depended on gunning Kerr and five others, and that was why she’d told him he’d get the credit. But to hear it put so coldly and matter-offactly as she’d just done troubled him.
Or was it bounty hunting that troubled him? Had he ever been completely at ease killing men or tearing them away from their wives and children all in the name of supporting his expensive lifestyle in Reno?
Angry at himself now, realizing that having second thoughts about his profession was a form of betrayal, Tone shoved the notion from his mind. His reaction to his self-damning introspection was to tear the Chinese tunic off his back and yell, “Hell, I’m dressing like a white man. I’ve had enough of this coolie shit.”
Chastity’s voice was controlled, level. “Penman is trying to save your life, Tone, or at least keep you alive long enough to fulfill your contract. I suggest you do as he says and wear the Chinaman’s clothes.”
Tone threw the round hat across the room. “Penman is an idiot!”
The woman refused to be baited. In the same controlled voice she said, “He is far from being an idiot. He’s possessed of a shrewd, calculating brain that helped make Mr. Sprague a millionaire.” She smiled without warmth. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating Luther Penman.”
Tone stripped off the shoulder rig and picked up his seaman’s jersey.
“Where did you get those shoulders, Tone?” Chastity asked, smiling.
“Down on the farm, when I was a boy.”
“Your father was a farmer?”
“Yes, and a good one. Then the British came and burned everything he had. My mother died, of grief, the doctor said, and me dad soon followed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ireland’s history is written in sorrow.” Tone pulled on the jersey. “Anyway, it all happened a long time ago when I still had songs to sing.”
“You don’t sing now?”
“No. I can recall the words of the songs, but the music has long since fled.”
“How sad that is.”
“I don’t need sympathy.” Tone strapped on the shoulder rig.
“No, I suppose you’re not a man who does. But it’s still sad.”
Tone shrugged into his peacoat, then donned his watch cap. He glanced in the mirror. “There. I look myself again.”
“You mean you’re a target again,” Chastity said.
“I mean I’m a bounty hunter with a job to do and I start doing it tonight.” He looked at the woman, a delicate, haunting beauty in the pale blue gaslight. “Are you ready?”
Chastity checked her derringer, then picked up her bundle of linens. “I’m ready.”
“Then let’s get it done,” Tone said.
Chapter 17
The Opera Comique was a large two-story frame and timber building located on what was locally known as Murderer’s Corner. The rain had stopped, but fog prowled the streets and alleys. When the sky was visible, the moon looked like a red pool tucked in the clouds and the night air smelled of the shoaling fish out in the bay. Earlier, the crowds had sought shelter from the drizzle in the saloons and there were few travelers on the streets.
To Tone’s joy, a fruit and vegetable stand stood opposite the door to the concert saloon, bare and abandoned now that darkness had fallen. The building behind the stand had fallen on hard times and was boarded up. A faded sign above its door said:THE SEAMAN’S MISSION
Bible meetings at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. every weeknight
Tone guided Chastity along the docks, well clear of the taverns and brothels, then angled toward the fruit stand.
“I’ll be here when you come out,” he said quietly. “Run across the road, then keep on going.” He pointed down Jackson Street. “That way. A lot of the streetlamps are out for some reason and there will be plenty of dark places to hole up until I find you.”
“When I come out, I’ll be yelling, ‘Murder! Murder! ’ ” Chastity said. “With luck, the guards at the door will ignore a hysterical Chinese girl and dash upstairs.”
“If they don’t, I’ll open up,” Tone said. “Then run like hell. Just be sure not to shoot me, because I’ll be right on your heels.”
In the shadowed night, the woman looked small and vulnerable. “You certain you’re up for this?” Tone asked. “You’re about to make a grandstand play, you know.”
“I’m up for it. I’ve been in worse scrapes.”
“Back!” Tone exclaimed suddenly. He pushed Chastity into the dark doorway of the abandoned mission.
A man had stepped out of the Opera Comique and a match flared as he lit his pipe, casting a brief red glare on his tough, bearded features.
He smoked for a few minutes, then tapped out his pipe on his heel and walked back inside.
“One of the guards,” Tone said. “He sure was a big feller.”
“You trying to scare me?” Chastity asked.
“He’ll be a bigger target, is all.”
“No, you tried to scare me, Tone, and you succeeded. I don’t know the whore’s room, or that Mickey Kerr will even be there.”
“Chastity,” Tone said, using the woman’s name for the first time since he met her, “let me do it. I’ll claim to be a friend of Mickey’s and say I’m going upstairs to talk to him.”
“And if the guards don’t let you pass?”
“Then I start shooting.”
Chastity shook her head. “I told you before, that won’t work.” She hefted her bundle of linens. “I’ll find her room.” She smiled. “Me askee nice mens at door.”
Then she was gone, trotting across the street. Tone watched her disappear into the Opera Comique . . . and suddenly he was chewing on his own heart.
He drew his guns, thumbed back the hammers for faster first shots, then crouched behind the fruit stand, his arms straight out in front of him, elbows resting on the rim of a wooden display box.
A minute passed . . . then another. . . .
Tone touched his tongue to his dry top lip. Where was the woman? What was happening? An errant breeze tugged at him, then swirled among the fog. He felt sweat on his palms.
A shot! Muffled by the walls of the saloon. Then one more.
Long moments dragged past. Tone stood, his guns up and ready.
Chastity ran out of the door, screaming, “Murder!” at the top of her lungs. She ran past Tone, grinned at him, then vanished into the gaslit gloom of Jackson Street.
Tone waited a few moments, watching for any pursuit. There was none, and he followed after Chastity. He caught up with her after a hundred yards. She was standing, waiting for him, outside a noisy dance hall.
The woman’s face was vibrant, alive, as though illuminated by a strange inner glow. It did not add to Chastity’s prettiness; rather, it detracted from it. To Tone, her radiance seemed unearthly . . . unholy.
Her words came out in a rush. “They let me upstairs, and the door wasn’t even locked. Mickey Kerr, I suppose it was him, had the woman kneeling on the bed and he was humping behind her, both of them as naked as jaybirds. He tried to go for his gun on the nightstand, but I shot him right between his eyes. The redheaded bitch opened her big mouth to scream and I put a bullet into it.”
Chastity held up a hammered-silver bracelet. “I took this off her wrist, then started screaming blue murder. The stupid guards ran past me on the stairs. Can you believe that?”
“Why . . . but why did you take time to steal the woman’s bracelet?”
“A trophy—what else? When I make a kill I always take a memento. Mickey probably gave the whore this.”
Almost breathless with excitement, Chastity lifted shining eyes to Tone. “Now I’ve got five kills. Wherever Western men gather, they’ll talk about me in the same breath as Hardin, Thompson and Hickok. Think about it: I’m only a woman, but I’m making history.”
Tone was too stunned to speak. Was this what a born killer sounded like? And was he disturbed because he was hearing an unsettling echo of his own arrogance?
Chastity Christian enjoyed the act of killing and she was a woman without a conscience. Where was his own conscience? He had always presumed it was dead and buried with Molly O’Hara. But had he killed it himself, much later, when he’d first taken up the gun and hunted men?
Tone had no chance to question himself further. Chastity pressed her body against his, her lips parted, scarlet and glistening, her pelvis grinding into his. “Take me home, Tone. Take me home now, and ride me like an unbroken mare. I feel wonderful!”
They walked back to the alley through the thickening fog and neither of them spoke. But Chastity’s shining eyes were everywhere, as though seeing her surroundings for the first time and in a different light. The woman was ecstatic, radiant and as beautiful as a fallen angel.
In bed, Chastity came to Tone willingly, eagerly, but before he could hold her he had to invade her, forced to penetrate a defensive bulwark of elbows and knees.
When Tone woke, Chastity was already out of bed. She sat at the dresser, where she’d just finished cleaning her derringer.
She saw that Tone was awake and smiled at him. “I asked Chang to bring us coffee.”
“How long have you been up?”
“About an hour. You were sound asleep and I didn’t want to wake you.”
Chastity rose to her feet, wearing only the pink Chinese tunic, her breasts unfettered. She sat on the bed and crossed her legs.
“We meet Mr. Sprague later today, remember?” she said. “At least you have good news to give him.” She leaned over and kissed Tone lightly on the mouth. “I suspect Luther will also be here to greet his boss.”
At that moment the woman looked so desirable that Tone reached for her. She evaded him and got to her feet. “The moment’s gone, Tone,” she said, smiling. “I needed it last night, but not today. Wait until I make my next kill, huh?”
Tone shook his head, the woman’s coldness again shaking him to the core. “Chastity,” he said, “there’s more to life than killing.”
“That, coming from you, John Tone, the famous bounty hunter? How many have you killed?”
“I don’t enjoy killing. Every one of those men were notified and I tried my best to take them in alive.”
Chastity no longer seemed cold, merely indifferent. “The dodgers on the first three men I killed said, ‘Wanted, dead or alive,’ so I took them in dead. What was wrong in that?”
“It’s the fact that you enjoy killing that’s wrong. Can’t you understand?”
The woman slowed her speech, as though she was talking to a child. “Tone, when I was eight years old I watched my father beat my mother to death in a drunken rage. He tried to beat me too, but I ran away. I told our local sheriff what had happened and he brought me back to our cabin. The sheriff—I remember his name was Hank Dillbury—looked at what my father had done to my mother. Then he looked at my father snoring in his chair, then at me.
“Dillbury drew his gun, pressed the muzzle against my father’s forehead and pulled the trigger. I saw it happen and I smiled and so did the sheriff.”
Chastity waved her hand dismissively. “Men kill each other all the time, Tone, and most enjoy it. I can tell you that Dillbury did. Why should a woman be any different?”
“When you killed Mickey Kerr, why did you have to shoot the girl?”
“She was about to scream. She would have told the others what had happened.” Chastity shrugged. “Besides, like my mother, she was a whore. Does anybody care about the death of a whore?”
“It seems that Sheriff Dillbury did.”
The woman laughed. “Hell, he was one of them who went at Ma every chance they got. Dillbury didn’t care about her. He was mad at Pa for killing his favorite poke.”
Chastity picked up the hammered-silver bracelet and pushed it onto her left wrist. She held it up so it caught the morning light and asked Tone: “You like?”
He was spared the necessity of answering when Chang scratched at the door. Chastity told him to come in, and the little man entered, a grin on his face and a tray in his hands.
“Did missy sleep well?” he asked.
“Well enough, Mr. Chang,” the woman answered.
The man set the tray, bearing a coffeepot and cups, on the dresser, then turned to Chastity again. “Mr. Penman was here. He say he going to the docks, come back later. Seemed very cross.”
“Thank you,” Chastity said. “That will be all for now.”
She poured coffee into the cups. “Better get dressed, Tone,” she said. “If Penman really is cross, our good news should cheer him up.”
Tone nodded, but said nothing.
Chapter 18
“Mickey Kerr was the least of them,” Luther Penman said. “During the late war he wasn’t even an officer, just an ordinary seaman with more brawn than brains.”
The lawyer opened his briefcase. “Nevertheless, you have a payment coming to you, Mr. Tone, less deductions for the guns you bought and miscellaneous expenses incurred while entertaining whores.”
Chastity gave Tone a sidelong look, half annoyed and half amused.
