The Shotgun Arcana (46 page)

“They hit all of Gillian’s customers,” Maude said. “Even ones that were of no threat to Zeal whatsoever. It’s not just a mission for them, they enjoy this.”

“So where does one go if one enjoys poisoning folks in Golgotha?” Kate asked as she holstered her gun and examined a used butcher knife.

Maude’s eyes suddenly grew wide. “I think I know,” she said.

*   *   *

Delmonico Hauk struggled in the straight back chair he was tied to in the dining room of his closed restaurant. His face was a swollen, bloody mass of broken bone and torn tissue from a morning of beatings from Pa and Ernst Brecht. Del had arrived before sunup to begin the preparations for the lunch crowd only to discover his restaurant had been invaded. Del was a scrapper, he had to be to survive in the boroughs and warrens of New York. He had given the odd young man, named Ernst, a run for his money when the boy had tried to jump him. But when the obese giant known as Pa Brecht had placed a meat cleaver against his neck, Del had stopped resisting and allowed himself to be tied down. After that Ernst, Pa and even the Ma and her daughter, Hilde, only recently returned from their own murderous mission, beat on Del savagely and frequently. He had lost awareness several times. It was well after dawn now and Del listened in horror as Hilde described to her brother what she’d seen on her errands.

“Und then, the little girl, she tried to claw at her throat, she didn’t understand vat vas happening. The fear in her eyes, oh, Ernst, it was so pure. She watched her momma und poppa slide to the floor, the teacups crashing. It vas perfect. I vish you could have been there,” Hilde said. “She died so confused, in so much fear and pain. The little ones always do! It was beautiful.”

Ernst wiped a little drool from his lips and pulled his eyes away from his sister’s heaving chest. The light caught his eyes and they held red pinpoints. With his pointed ears, it gave Ernst the appearance of a hungry rat. “After ve own der town, ve can have a little tea party for the kinder,” he muttered gutturally. Hilde clapped her hands and nodded eagerly, her long blond tresses bouncing.

Del tried to play dead, but his heart was pounding. These people were lunatics. The monstrous mother and father were in the kitchen even now, preparing poisoned food to serve his customers in just a few hours. He wished Mutt was here, or that he could work his hands free enough to reach the straight razor he always carried in his back pocket—an old habit from his rough childhood days. But the Brechts had tied him tight. All he could do was wait and pray to St. Michael for a chance to stop these maniacs.

*   *   *

“An awful lot of windows over there,” Kate said to Maude. “Even if the shades are down, no guarantee that there aren’t lookouts. That’s a long ways to cover in broad daylight, and they might start shooting at us or killing hostages if they were sane enough to keep any.”

“There’s a kitchen entrance,” Maude said. “I could sneak back and try to get in that way and cause a distraction while you hit the front door.”

“You are so eager to ditch me,” Kate said. “I’m holding you back, aren’t I?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Maude said.

“I’ve stayed alive a long time by trusting my hunches, Maude,” Kate said. “And my intuition about you is screaming. Okay, you take the back, I’ll hit the front. Want one of my guns?”

“No, thank you,” Maude said quietly, her eyes locked with Kate.

“No fear of the things, no apprehension, just a mild disdain,” Kate said. “I’d say be careful, but I already know you will be.”

“Pay attention to what’s going on in there and that front door, not me,” Maude said. “Meet you in the middle.”

Maude was up and moving quickly. She was hampered by her dress and restrictive clothes, but she’d make do. Kate Warne was a very dangerous woman. She knew who Maude was, but like any good detective, she was waiting to collect the evidence to make her theory into a fact.

Maude doubled back up Dry Well Road and crossed over. Odd Tom’s place was at the foot of Rose Hill and Hauk’s restaurant had been built right next to the house he had purchased. Maude cut through Hauk’s backyard and grabbed up a handful of wooden laundry pins from off his clothesline.

She reached the kitchen door and smelled the thick, greasy aroma of roasting meat, possibly pork. Maude tried the door and found it unlocked. She pushed it open and entered as silent as thought. The kitchen was large and well apportioned to handle a full house of hungry patrons. An enormous, corpulent man with thinning, unwashed blond hair in a filthy apron was busy chopping slabs of meat on a butcher-block table with a meat cleaver and then tossing the pieces into a steaming stew pot on the black iron cook stove. The man held up a piece of the uncooked meat and plucked an earring off the severed ear, pocketing the jewelry and tossing the ear in the pot.

Maude dashed toward the butcher, hurling the handful of wooden clothespins ahead of her. The tiny wooden darts thudded with great force into Pa’s throat and both his eyes as he turned toward Maude. One crushed his windpipe and the other two tore through his eyes, coming to rest in the orbits of his skull.

Two things happened simultaneously that stunned Maude into inaction for a second. One, the gray, scaly mass of Ma Brecht blindsided her from a corner of the kitchen hidden to the door. Ma struck Maude with inhuman force, swatting her with the barrel of her shotgun. The blow lifted Maude off the floor and knocked her into a rack of posts and pans, raising a terrible clatter as the kitchen implements and Maude crashed to the floor. Ma leveled the double-barreled scattergun at Maude and cocked both hammers.

The other thing that froze Maude, froze the blood in her for just a moment, was that Pa Brecht, choking due to lack of air and blinded and partly brain damaged by the loss of his eyes, did not fall down. He staggered back, clutched the meat cleaver tightly and sniffed the air, turning his blind, bloody face in Maude’s direction. Pa charged forward, cleaver raised.

*   *   *

Kate crashed through the locked doors of Delmonico Hauk’s, shooting the lock off as she kicked the door in. Ernst and Hilde were both up, having heard the commotion in back. Kate heard the blast of a shotgun in the kitchen and cursed herself for letting Maude go in alone. Ernst, his sledgehammer in hand, charged at Kate, swinging the twenty-pound hammer as if it weighed nothing. He closed as the detective fired her revolver into his chest. The pistol spat fire and barked thunder, but Brecht staggered toward her, ready to crush her skull as he had done so many times before. One bullet ripped through his chest, another, another and another. Ernst fell at her feet even as the pistol clicked empty. The sledge slid across the floor and lay as still as its wielder.

Hilde had grabbed a steak knife from one of the tables. She stood behind Hauk’s chair and put the blade to the restaurateur’s bruised throat. Kate raised the revolver she carried in her other hand. She cocked it, aimed it at Hilde.

“Drop it,” Hilde shouted, “or I vill cut his…”

Kate fired once. The bullet entered Hilde’s perfect blue right eye, destroying it, and then her brain, before blowing out the back of her head. Hilde dropped without another sound.

“Shit!” Kate said as she raced to the kitchen.

*   *   *

Ma was covering Maude with the shotgun, ready to drop her if her dying husband didn’t complete his last kill. Pa staggered forward, seeming to track on instinct and smell, like a shark. The cleaver was poised to split Maude’s skull. Maude rose to her feet, a black cast-iron skillet in either hand. She twisted at the waist and spun like a top. The first blow to Pa’s head drove the clothespins in his eyes deep enough into his brain to stop him. He lurched forward and then fell to the floor. Ma, seeing this, opened fire with both barrels of the shotgun.

Maude had trained for years under the merciless, meticulous eyes of Anne Bonny. She had been forced to memorize and practice with rock salt and then with bird shot the scatter patterns of shotguns at different ranges. She had the scars of the practice still. She knew, like she knew her next breath, where the pellets in Ma’s 20-gauge were most likely to spread to and she had her cast-iron shields there ready to cover her where they might intersect with her shifting body. There was a rumble, like the world splitting, as the shotgun fired, and a thick cloud of gun smoke. One of the skillets was knocked from Maude’s hand by the force of the impact, but it served its purpose. Before the smoke cleared, Maude launched the remaining skillet at Ma’s neck, which ripped her head clean off, and the headless body staggered back and slid down the wall and was still.

Kate crashed into the kitchen, pistol at the ready. She found a panting, disheveled Maude and two massive, dead bodies.

“You okay?” Kate called out. Maude nodded. “You hit?”

“No,” Maude said. “I’m fine. Is Del okay?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “He’s all right. What happened here?”

“Some kind of … horrible kitchen-related workplace accident,” Maude said, walking past Kate out to the restaurant and Del.

Kate holstered her pistols and regarded the two bodies. She sighed.

“Bitch is good,” she said, and followed Maude out.

The Hierophant

“Hei wa!”
Ch’eng Huang said, rising fluidly as Malachi Bick was escorted into Huang’s inner sanctum above the Celestial Palace by a cadre of Green Ribbon hatchet men. “This is a most delightful surprise, Malachi, and I do not receive many of those any more.
Zh
ē
nshì f
ā
nti
ā
n fùdì!”

“Indeed,” Bick said. “I must confess a degree of apprehension whenever I enter your domain, Huang, my old friend, I hope you can understand.
H
ē
ng tè hé wéi liè wù.
I mean no insult.”

“None taken,” Huang said, smiling. He dismissed his men with a gesture. They bowed and closed the doors behind them. “I seldom go past the borders of my realm for the same reasons. Your need must be dire, indeed, to make you take the risk, Malachi. Tea?”

“Yes, thank you,” Bick said. He sat on the cushions by the low teak table and Huang returned to his seat opposite him. Bick took the proffered cup. The two sipped the hot tea silently for a time. Finally, Bick spoke.

“I find myself locked in troubling thought, Huang. I am questioning the motives of my creator, my Lord. I know it may seem absurd to come to you with this, but you are the only one in this town who has an inkling of what I am experiencing.”

“I disagree,” Huang said. “I think any street you wander down in Golgotha, or in any other town or city on the planet, you will find many souls seeking answers of validation and proof.”

“They do not possess the rather unique perspective I have,” Bick said. “That we both possess. If I were to describe to you the eternal streets of gold in my home, the Pearlescent Gates, how much like your home, your heaven, would it be? Yet we both know with certainty that our heavens exist, yes?”

“I try to not be too certain of anything, until I am,” Huang said, smiling. “In the fullness of time, all is revealed. I think patience is one of the major differences between your world and mine, Malachi. The West is like a youth—eager, hungry to do, to know, but unwilling to be still and accumulate the wisdom. You want it all, now.”

“Be that as it may, tomorrow one of my brethren is riding into town to slay me, to do unspeakable evil to the people here. He draws his power, his commission to act, from the same source I do.”

“Yes,” Huang said. “And this troubles you?”

“I … I don’t understand the God I serve anymore,” Bick said. “How can He do nothing, say nothing and allow one of His own creations, His own servants to do these things unchecked?”

“You do intend to oppose him, yes? I assume the sheriff and his men will aid you in that endeavor, the little ‘Golgotha Social Club’ you gathered last year?” Huang said, and sipped his tea.

“Yes,” Bick said. “Of course.”

“Then perhaps you and they are your God’s agency in thwarting the things this being intends to do.”

Bick shook his head dismissively. “A quaint fiction, Huang, not a real answer.”

Huang placed his cup before him. “Malachi, you and I are visitors in this strange land. We walk through it, and we swim in the waters of mortality, pretending to be of this world, but we are not. Tell me, do you recall much of your Heaven, of your time there?”

“Less with each passing year here,” Bick said.

“Do you recall if you were content? Were all your questions answered there?”

“No,” Bick said. “My discontent was the prime reason I was sent here, at least I think it was. I thought God was trying to show me the intricacies of His plan, but now, after Zeal, I truly don’t understand any of it anymore.”

“Have you ever killed, Malachi?” Huang asked.

“Yes,” Bick said.

“For your mission, or for yourself, your own goals?” Huang said.

“Both,” Bick said. “I killed a man, a prospector, years ago, to keep control of Argent, to keep possession of the vault, but also to make me very wealthy. I did that for me, not for my God, not for my duty. Last year I intended to kill the men who reopened the mine, but they met a different fate.”

“Did you wonder then why your God, furious and disappointed by your actions, did not come down to Earth and strike you down for your indiscretions? Your, what is the word your people like to throw about…” Huang snapped his finger as it came to him. “Ah, yes—your sins?”

“I didn’t come to you to be mocked, Huang,” Bick said.

“And I assure you, I am not,” Huang said. “Did you lose your faith when your God allowed you to do as you wished, to exercise your own will, even though the actions were, as you would say, ‘evil’?”

“Honestly, a little, but nothing came of it. It was the camel’s nose in the tent,” Bick said. “It was when I first began to doubt He was paying attention to anything going on here. Now Zeal is acting in direct defiance of Him—calling himself a god, drawing followers to himself, killers and worse than killers. He wants to drown this world in blood and God does nothing.”