The Shotgun Arcana (26 page)

“Jon … Jonathan! You are the law here! You’re not going to allow this … this … to…”

Highfather dropped the doctor’s coat and bag in his hands as he led Tumblety to the door. “Naw, Doc. I’m not going to let the mean lady shoot you in the face this time, but you may want to consider trying to talk nicer to folks in the future. Thanks again.”

Tumblety stood outside the door, his face purple.

“Filthy slut,” he snarled.

“I’m a damn fine shot,” Kate said. “I can shoot that little amusement you call a pecker off you from over here quicker than you can kill a patient from incompetence.”

“Thanks again, Doc,” Jon said, and slammed the door in Tumblety’s face before the angry doctor could summon a retort. He turned to Kate. “And that’s our first-rate medical care here in sunny Golgotha. He may seem pretty horrible at first, but after a while, you come to realize that deep down inside, he’s much worse than that.”

“Why don’t you people get a real doctor out here?” Kate asked. She decocked her guns, carefully, and holstered them in the curious shoulder rigs she wore under her jacket.

“Well, he’s what we were able to attract in the bust years,” Highfather said. “That and our last doctor turned out to be some kind of … thing … that turned people into stone … and drank their memories, or something like that. One ’fore that, I had to stake him through the liver and bury his head on an eastern-bound railroad track … or was it westbound? Anyway, he was all monstery too. At least Tumblety is human, a creepy jackass, but human.”

“Monsters…,” Kate murmured. “How long have you been sheriff here, Jon?”

“I’d cypher it seems like … about a thousand years, give or take,” Highfather said. He slid on his shirt and began to button it. “Have a seat, coffee should be ready.”

He pulled Kate’s chair out for her and she sat. “Thank you,” she said. Highfather took down two porcelain mugs from a cabinet and then fetched the coffeepot from the top of the small wood stove he used to heat his house and for cooking. He poured her a cup, then himself, returned the pot, and sat down across from her.

“Can you tell me why the U.S. government sent you to my town and why you didn’t tell me?”

Kate sipped her coffee. “Like I said before, your town in in terrible danger, Jon. However, from the reports I’ve read, what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen since I’ve been here, that really isn’t anything new, is it?”

“Reports?” Highfather said. “What do you mean reports? About Golgotha? Kate, tell me what’s going on here?”

“Well,” she said, “you saved me up there, too, and I’ve seen and heard enough to trust you, Jon, but here’s the thing. My presence here and my work and even who I am have to stay as quiet as possible.”

“My deputies know about you, and you can trust both of them with your life,” Highfather said. “And no one listens to anything Doc Tumblety says anyway. We’ll hold our peace. That’s kind of how we do things around here anyway.”

Kate nodded. “Your younger deputy, Jim, is a sucker for a pretty leg, but he seemed trustworthy enough. If you vouch for your men, that is good enough for me. Golgotha is part of why I’m here, Jon. Let me give you this from the start. Fourteen years ago, I walked into Allan Pinkerton’s office in New York City and applied for a job.”

“
The
Allan Pinkerton,” Highfather said. “Scottish fella, hobnobs with presidents, has the detective agency with that big eye symbol, ‘we never sleep,’ and all that? That Pinkerton?”

“Yes,” Kate said with a strange smile. “The legend himself. Apparently he was hiring for office help and for detectives that day, and he asked me what I was there to apply for. I told him I was a month late on my rent and would take any job he might have. We began to talk. He’s a fascinating man, remarkable mind. He hired me as a detective on the spot.”

“Never heard of a female Pinkerton man before,” Highfather said. “Did you enjoy the work?”

She smiled. “I’m impressed. I usually get a lecture about how that’s no work for a lady and all that claptrap. It’s refreshing to not hear it.”

“I’ve seen you in action,” Highfather said. “You can handle yourself just fine.”

“You actually live up to your reputation, Jon Highfather,” she said, then continued. “Yes, I loved my work. It was exciting, challenging and I discovered why Allan had hired a woman. Men will tell things to a woman in confidence they would never spill to a man. I had adventures, Jon. I got to help keep President Lincoln safe from an assassination attempt on him before the war, during the inauguration. I met Lincoln, Jon,” she said, her eyes brightening. “A little dirt-poor Five Points girl from Cross Street got to meet the President of the United States and help keep him alive. How could I do anything but love a job like that?”

“What was he like? Lincoln?” Highfather asked, as he sipped his coffee.

“Sad,” Kate said. “He hid it behind humor but if you spent any real time with him, you could feel it leaking out of him. He seemed a good man.

“Allan worked for the president during the war as head of the Union Intelligence Service. That was when the odd reports and accounts began to filter in to him. Tales of cultists trying to summon some nameless ancient god in the swamps outside New Orleans; some giant winged creature with eyes like glowing dinner plates terrorizing the people of West Virginia; a man claiming to be the devil’s son performing miracles and inciting riots in Chicago; murderous frog men in Loveland, Ohio; headless Confederate soldiers with flaming sabers overrunning Union positions and slaughtering every man before falling over dead. The list goes on and on.

“Allan Pinkerton has a very precise and detail-oriented mind, but it’s fluid as well. He took to investigating these claims, as much to debunk them as to verify them. When he began to see more and more of these fantastic stories that could not be rationally explained, he brought the matter to the president’s attention. President Lincoln was receptive to these fantastic tales since he had nearly died in an assassination attempt by an assailant that could only be described as a Confederate sorcerer, earlier in the year.

“The last document the president signed the night he was assassinated by that sorry secesh, Booth, was an executive order to create the Office of Special Intelligence Resources, Investigation, and Security.”

“Sounds fancy enough to beat the Dutch,” Highfather said, rising and refreshing both his and Kate’s mugs. “And what is all that, exactly?”

Kate took a sip and resumed. “It’s an esoteric branch of the Secret Service, which the president also signed into being the night of his death.”

“Secret Service works like the Marshals as I understand,” Highfather said. “Work any cases they care to: murders, bank robbery, try to hunt down folks passing bum script, too, I gather.”

Kate nodded. “Yes, and we carry normal Secret Service credentials. Our department is under the independent authority of Allan Pinkerton and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. We’re tasked with investigating activities and individuals of a preternatural nature that may prove to be a threat to the Republic. Allan reports directly to the president and his cabinet. We investigate the things that go bump in the night, Jon. I’ve been at it for five years.”

“I expect if it’s anything like around here, you all don’t make the papers too often,” Highfather said.

Kate laughed. “No, no we don’t. In fact, I was declared officially dead two years ago; most of the senior operatives are.”

“Dead? Don’t you have any family?” Highfather asked.

“No,” she said. “I guess Allan is the closest thing I have to that. I’m officially ‘buried’ in his plot, next to where he will eventually lie. Considering the kind of work I do, it’s best I don’t have anyone to fret over.”

“Sounds like Pinkerton looks after you pretty well,” Highfather said, looking straight at Kate as he took another drink. Kate waved her hand dismissively and laughed.

“Oh, no, no. Nothing like that. Mr. Pinkerton is a married man.”

“‘Mr. Pinkerton,’ not ‘Allan,’” Highfather said. Kate blushed and nodded.

“Very astute, Sheriff. You are quite a detective yourself.”

“None of my business, Kate,” Highfather said. “Pretty woman like yourself, man would have to be dead, buried and married not to notice you about.”

“Is that so?” she said, smiling and tracing her finger along the rim of the mug. “Well, aren’t you quite the charmer, Jon Highfather?”

“So what led you here?” he said.

“Changing the subject?” she said, laughing.

“Getting shot’s a damn sight less dangerous than dancing around pretty words with a woman, Kate,” he said. “So why are you in Golgotha and why have you been spying on us without at least checking in?”

“A wise man, you are. It’s called ‘assuming a role,’” she explained. “Allan developed it during the war. You go into enemy territory under a false pretense and with a false identity and cover story. It’s very effective, especially for me, as a woman. I walked past you quite a few times as a fancy girl and you never gave me a second glance. That hurt my feelings a little bit, to be honest.”

“My heart is as pure as Galahad,” Highfather said, grinning. “And my head is as thick as Gibraltar. So you were pretending to be one of the Doves for better part of two months.…”He let the implication hang in the air.

“It wasn’t the first time I’ve had to do something like that, Jon,” she said. “Doubt it will be the last.”

“How can Pinkerton do that to you?” Highfather said. “If he cares about you, loves you, how could he send you into…”

“Allan Pinkerton cares about duty first, country second, and everything else third,” she said. “He expects the same from his employees. He didn’t make me do anything, Jon. This is dirty work, and I knew that going in.”

Highfather shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kate. So you were tracking Vellas?”

Warne shook her head. “No, your boy Jim just dropped his name and I knew what he was capable of, so I took off to help you. I lost a good friend and a good partner to that evil bastard a few years back in Saint Louis. Vellas had been killing folks for a long time. We think he slaughtered a settlement near Fort Chambly in the northeast—forty-three men, women and children—all by himself. It felt damn good to see him finally go down.”

“Well, if it wasn’t Vellas, then who?”

Kate sighed. “This past summer, in the District of Columbia, someone started murdering women. His targets were all public girls, but very high-class ones—the secret mistresses of some of the congressmen and other government officials who reside in the District. The killer sewed his victims’ eyes shut as part of the mutilation of the bodies. He claimed five victims. I want him and I think he’s here.”

“Why here, Kate?” Highfather said. “Not that he wouldn’t fit in. But our Dove killer hasn’t sewn any eyes shut as far as I know. The only thing in common is they both prey on public girls, and even then it’s a long stretch from a senator’s girl to working the Dove’s Roost.”

“All very true,” Kate said. “And again, excellent detective work. However, I have one piece of information you are lacking that explains why I’ve been hiding out and looking for my killer here, Jon. Our District killer’s fifth and final victim was murdered in a suite at a very posh hotel in the District. She was slaughtered without a sound. He painted the walls in her blood.…”

Kate’s face became ashen and Highfather knew. He knew she was in that hotel room, right now, trying to snort the thick coppery stench out of her nostrils as she visited with the ripped and savaged dead. Instinctively, his hands went across the table and took hers. She looked at him as if she didn’t quite recognize him. He nodded, his lips moved, but he said nothing, just held her hands, anchoring her, like he had wished someone could have anchored him through all those horrible, frozen tumors of memory. Eden had, Larson had, until they became part of the atrocity gallery’s exhibits. Now he had no one to hold his hand as he walked between the screaming, looping paintings. But Kate did, at least this one time. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back.

“Does it ever get easier?” she said softly, finally.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If Pinkerton is your armor, Kate, then use him. You walk this alone, it will eat you alive.”

“How do you manage?” she asked.

“I’m a dead man,” he said.

She pulled her hands away from his, crossed her chest with them, hugging herself.

“Our District killer, he wrote on the walls in her blood. One word over and over and over.”

“Let me guess,” Highfather said.

“Golgotha,” she said.

The Three of Swords

Chi Mo Duan was cast out of the venerable Green Ribbon Tong of Chinese mystics, assassins and trained killers. Duan had been a member of the tong in Hangzhou and was considered one of the finest killers the secret society had ever produced. His downfall came due to his mental instability and bloodlust against the city’s community of Chinese, Muslims and Jews, whom he viewed as “infected.” His wanton, bloody killing sprees drew too much attention to an order whose greatest weapons were silence and anonymity.

Duan had the arrogance and presumption to voice his disgust with the direction of the tong to its leader, Ah Kung Ch’eng Huang, within the tong boss’s underground sanctum far beneath the squalid Chinese city’s streets. For his presumption and lack of respect, he was told to leave China or die, and was warned by Huang himself to stay out of Chinese communities across the globe. He was an outcast and unwelcome.

Duan sailed to America in 1865 and began to wander the railroad camps that dotted the American West, driving rail spikes into the eyes of his thirty-one Chinese and American victims. The Union-Pacific Railroad dicks who unsuccessfully tried to hunt him and stop him came to call him what the Chinamen who feared him called him: Yeng-Wang-Yeh. The Lord and Judge of the Dead.

Duan’s was number thirteen. He headed west, inspired by the voice in the dying sun to seek out one who could give him his fill of blood, and of revenge.

The Knight of Wands