The Shotgun Arcana (25 page)

Bick shook his head. “I trusted in my Creator, have obeyed His words to me loyally and for it. I’m an exile. I trusted men here to protect my secrets and defend this world. They fell to greed and weakness. They almost let the most terrible thing in all creation loose. I have met an angel that tells me God whispered horrors and nightmares into his ear since before time began. Is that my God? Is that the God who showed me mercy and love? How can that be? No, I can’t afford to trust, Emily. I have to control and, if necessary, crush.”

“That is very sad,” Emily said. There was a brief silence before she spoke again. “Do you trust me?”

“I don’t know yet,” Bick said. “I’d like to. It’s hard to believe in anything or anyone when you have heard God’s voice but can’t recall it, when you have heard the choirs of the Radiance, but Heaven is silent now.”

“Well,” Emily said, patting his hand, “welcome to the human race. We trust every day and we have far less awareness than you do. Faith is dangerous, but hopelessness is death. We stumble about in the universe with a blindfold on and hope the powers that be don’t trip us.”

Bick took his daughter’s hand, squeezed it.

“I think I believe in you,” Emily said.

“Well,” Bick said, “that makes one of us.”

The Three of Swords

The smoke from the fine home on Joseph Street in New Orleans led the intrepid volunteers of the Fireman’s Charitable Association to smash down the kitchen door on a Saturday in late October, 1870. Inside they found two black servants, former slaves, chained to the stove in an advanced state of starvation and showing signs of long-term torture. They set the fires in hopes of dying in them, to end their suffering.

Upstairs the men of the FCA, and the local constabulary they had summoned, discovered an antechamber to Hell in the mansion’s attic. Dozens of servants, all former slaves, shackled to the walls and floor of the narrow, cramped, hot room. Some had been experimented upon. One woman was in a small cage, her bones broken and reset to resemble a crab. Another man had been the subject of a crude attempt to alter his sex—breasts and sexual organs taken from one of the women had been stitched to the man after his own genitals had been hacked off. Several of the victims had their hands sewn to parts of their body. Some died of starvation after having their mouths sewed shut. One woman had her arms and legs cut off and her skin mutilated to resemble the patterns found on a caterpillar. The ones that hadn’t died begged their rescuers to kill them.

The author of this macabre and inhuman tableau, one Mme. Delilah LaTour, was the mistress of the house and widow of a well-respected Spanish ship captain. She was skinny to the point of looking unwell, with coal-black locks that fell well to her waist. The surviving servants told stories of the Madame pleasuring herself while either torturing the servants or simply watching the maimed and the mutilated struggle to survive. A collection of amputated and taxidermied phalluses in her bedroom had been well used. All told, with the bodies found in her “garden,” she had ended forty-two lives and tortured and ruined another fifty that they knew of.

LaTour had fled the property when she was given a warning only moments before the firemen arrived. The warning came from the mouth of a crow, which lighted upon her gatepost and told her what was to come. It was the same crow that gave it to her as a gift long ago. The crow told her to flee west and to meet her god, the Lord of Torture, Pain and Suffering. It told her that her good works were not yet at an end. She grabbed a small bag with a few precious possessions, trophies of her victims and, of course, it. Mme. LaTour’s was the eighteenth.

The Devil

It was early morning the day after Highfather and Kate had survived their violent showdown on Argent with the late Nikos Vellas. They had made it back to Highfather’s house just off Absalom Road, in the dark of night.

To call it a “house” was being very generous. It was a one-room shack that the sheriff had built a few months after coming to Golgotha, figuring he’d build something better later on. He never seemed to find the time for that, though. There were still stakes in his yard, marking the places for a large addition—a master bedroom, a nursery—a home for more than one. The stakes were old and rotted now.

Highfather had helped Kate, with her injured leg, off his horse, Bright, and the two had stumbled to the door in the freezing cold and the stygian darkness. He found his key while Kate helped keep him from falling over. She had bound his bullet wound on the mountain as well as she could, but it was hard for Jon to stay conscious. Once the door was opened he had managed to light the lantern hanging on a nail next to the door. The room was filled with warm yellow light. Jon sat the lantern on the kitchen table.

There was a wrought-iron bed with a small side table, the kitchen table with a few chairs, some sparsely filled shelves and bookcases, cupboards, a wood stove, a wash basin and mirror and an old, frayed George III wingback chair by the window. Sitting above the hearth that had no fireplace yet was a bouquet of dried flowers in a crystal vase. They were the only real decoration. They had been a bridal bouquet. Highfather began to make a fire in the stove.

“You take the bed,” he muttered. “There’s fresh water in the pitcher here if you’d care for any. Privy is out back, if you need it.”

“We need to get you to a doctor,” Kate said with a groan as she sat on the edge of the bed.

“If you knew the doctor we had hereabouts, you wouldn’t be so eager to get to him,” Highfather said. “I’ll keep.”

“This looks like every policeman’s house I’ve ever seen,” Kate said as she wrestled off her boots, hissing as she began to work the boot off her tender leg. “How often are you here a week? Two, three nights?”

The fire caught in the stove and Highfather shut the stove’s small door. “Bunks at the jail are just fine most nights,” he said. He slowly limped to the corner chair and eased into it. Every part of him ached. Kate got both boots off. The red and black stockings she was wearing were in tatters.

“I usually don’t wear my inexpressibles out to a shoot-out,” Highfather said, “but that’s just me.”

“I could either change clothes or run save your hide,” Kate said, pouring sand from her shoes. “Please don’t make me regret my choice.”

Highfather leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Just thankful for the assist, Kate … Kate?”

He opened his eyes with great effort. Kate was asleep, her stocking feet dangling over the side of the bed. Highfather grunted as he stood. He lifted the Pinkerton agent’s strong, well-shaped legs and shifted them over on his bed. Then he pulled a quilt up over her. He dimmed the lantern on the table, locked the door and sat back down in his chair. He was asleep before he even got his boots off.

There was a persistent banging at his door shortly after dawn. Highfather blinked and tried to stand. His whole body felt as if it were made of fused bones and broken glass. He snapped open the door and saw Mutt and Jim looking at him. They started to open their mouths to speak, but he cut them off.

“Yes, I’m alive,” Jon said. “Yes, I am hurt. Yes, Agent Warne saved me. Yes, I want the doc over here after you fellas collect whatever bodies are up on the ridge. Pay special attention to Vellas. He’s liable to jump back up. Anything else?”

Mutt looked past him and saw Kate stretch lithely in the sheriff’s bed, like a cat sunning herself. The Indian’s eyebrows raised like a drawbridge.

“Whoa,” Jim said as he saw Kate sit up and blink, still wearing the skimpy attire he saw her in at the Dove’s Roost.

The evil smile spread across Mutt’s face and he opened his mouth to speak.

“No, we didn’t,” Highfather said to his deputies and shut the door in Mutt’s grinning face.

*   *   *

When the deputies returned from asking Tumblety to come check on the sheriff, Jim told Highfather about the dead public girl at the church and his pursuit of the killer. The victim had been identified by the Scholar as a young German immigrant known only as Rica. She had been at the Roost for a little less than a year. She had no family here but sent money home to her sisters and mother in Chicago.

“I would have made it to the scrap to help,” Mutt said to Highfather and Kate. “But I decided it would be quicker to cut through the mining camp than circle all around the mountain to hit Backtrail Road. I ran smack into the middle of a little disagreement between Wynn’s boys and the Nail’s crew. By the time I gentled them all down, you and Agent Warne here had headed on down the mountain and left a lot of dead bodies behind you.”

“Well, you didn’t miss much,” Highfather said. “He threw a wagon wheel at me. That was new.”

“Flaming wagon wheel,” Kate corrected.

“The mining camp is getting too crowded for all them desperados, Jonathan,” Mutt said. “Sooner, later, it’s gonna blow and we’re gonna have us a war.”

“A bunch of normal criminals trying to kill each other, for good old-fashioned greed,” Highfather said to Mutt. “Let’s hope we live long enough to see that in this town.”

“Clay’s looking over the wagon the killer was driving out into the desert,” Jim said. “I’m sorry I let him get away,”

The sheriff shrugged. “Hell, Jim, you got a damn sight closer to bagging him than anyone else has. You did real good, Deputy. I’m proud of you.”

Jim beamed like the sun.

“Thanks, sir,” he said. “I’m gonna get before Doc Tumblety shows up. He’s always trying to touch me as he asks me a lot of questions about, um, stuff I rather not discuss in front of Miss. Warne.”

“Come on,” Mutt said to Jim. “Let’s scare up some grub. Tumblety makes me want to punch him till he stops jawin’.”

“Go on, “Highfather said. “Truth be told, Jim, I don’t care much for the doc laying hands on me either.”

*   *   *

“Well done, Jonathan,” Dr. Francis Tumblety said upon arriving at the sheriff’s home. He spoke in his usual gruff bellow. “You not only managed to undo that swarthy, degenerate Greek goat-banger, Vellas, you also received mere minor injuries in the exchange. A true testament to your superior bloodline and moral and national character.”

Highfather winced as Tumblety poked and prodded the raw gunshot wound in his left arm with stained, dirty fingers thick as sausages.

“Here,” Highfather said through gritted teeth. “That’s … great … Doc.”

Kate, dressed now in a narrow skirt that fell to her ankle boots, a simple white blouse and a dark bolero jacket and hat she had fetched from her bags at the Roost, leaned against the wall in the corner by the window with her arms crossed, watching the exchange with slight amusement. “See,” Tumblety said, taking his hands away. “Hornet claimed a hunk of meat, but nothing else. The blood loss made you weak, but you stanched that well enough.”

Highfather’s bare chest was covered front and back in scars, bullet and knife wounds, claw and fang marks and, of course, the three sets of rope scars about his neck.

“Miss Warne was gracious enough to help me keep from bleeding out,” Highfather said to the doctor, “till I could get ahold of you, Doc, and get you over to give the hit a look-see.”

“Hmm.” Tumblety looked to Kate with narrowed eyes, then back to Highfather. “Well, you are dashed lucky then, to trust your ephemeral soul to the Asclepian ministering of some water-kneed quean.”

“Pardon me?” Kate said. Tumblety turned back to her.

“Hush now,” he said. “Men are talking.”

Kate started to say something, but Highfather gestured for her to wait.

“The burns are also minor,” the doctor continued. “Some singed hair, a bit of redness and swelling on that Olympian body of yours, Jonathan. Dashed lucky, like you danced between the flames. Certainly adds to the legend of the sheriff who cannot die, eh? Good bit of balderdash for the superstitious, what? We know better, don’t we, eh? You bleed as well as the next man. I’d hazard to say your preternatural reputation is due, in large part, to my care.”

“Yeah, Doc,” Highfather said. “Don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Tumblety handed Highfather an envelope out of his physician’s bag. “This is all that remains of the possessions of that ram-headed gobbler, Vellas, as you requested. I had to set Turlough in his place. The man was insistent on examining the remains, but I set him straight to his station. Not much on Vellas, I’m sorry to say, but these items seemed to endure the fire with great fortitude.”

“Well, thanks for coming by, Doc,” Highfather said, hopping off the wooden dinner table he had been sitting on while Tumblety took a look at his arm. He winced a bit when he did.

“Of course,” Tumblety said. “When that cherubic lad, Jim, came to me like a vision of beauty and mercy, I knew I must make haste to your domicile.” He glanced again at Kate. “A pity a strapping male specimen such as yourself feels the need to keep such company. I’d preferred to examine you away from unscholared eyes.” He extended his hand while Highfather retied the cloth bandage around his bicep. “Always happy to be of service to an agency of lex loci.”

“Oh,” Highfather said. He fished in his trousers and handed the doctor a silver dollar. “Much obliged, Doc.”

Tumblety pocketed the coin and gathered up his bag and medal-festooned coat. “A word to the wise, Jonathan,” he said as he went about his task. “A man in your position must show great care in trucking with adventuresses. Their horrid female sex is replete with disease that can lay a man low faster than any bullet. Beware, I caution you as a physician, beware!”

“I’ve seen better sawbones in a Chinese brothel,” Kate said. Tumblety’s face grew ruddy with rage and he strode toward Kate with hatred glazing his eyes. “Shut your mouth, you haughty bitch! I’m going to beat the sass out of your whore gob!”

Highfather moved to stop Tumblety, but by the time he rested a restraining hand on the blustering doctor’s shoulder, Tumblety was staring into the short barrels of two .36 Colt revolvers Kate had cross-drawn from under her short jacket. Tumblety stopped abruptly and gasped.

“Are you just?” she said coolly, cocking both guns. “Tell me, you pompous gasbag, who’s going to reattach your ugly face when I blow it all over the walls?”