The Six-Gun Tarot (28 page)

“Upstairs,” the giant said to the two businessmen, “please.”

The office was dark. The light in the room came from a large fan-shaped window that took up most of the wall behind the desk. It gave an impressive view of Main Street and the darker streets that lay beyond it; Rose Hill, standing like a sentinel at the edge of Golgotha, was a great shadow and above it was the cold black ocean of the desert night, brilliant stars shining like lonely islands. As barren above as below.

Moore and Deerfield entered the room with the giant a few steps behind. Moore was frightened, Deerfield angry. Jacob glanced around the room. There was a beautiful Chippendale sofa, all mahogany and leather, on the left side of the office. The primary piece on the right side was a large glass display table, like something you might see in a museum. It was filled with various items of historical curiosity, like rough-hewn primitive knives, chunks of silver and a grisly collection of what appeared to be small human skulls. Books were everywhere, shelves full of them covering every nook and cranny of the walls. Behind the desk sat Malachi Bick, like some dark Renaissance prince, clothed in shadow.

“Mr. Deerfield, Mr. Moore, what a pleasure to finally meet in person. Welcome to Golgotha.”

“What’s the meaning of this, Mr. Bick?” Deerfield said, stepping forward and slamming his fist down on the desktop. “Is this how you treat your paying customers! Having your ruffian accost us and force up here? How dare you!”

Bick’s eyes flickered in the dark. He regarded Deerfield for a long moment in silence. Long enough for both Moore and Deerfield to grow still with fear.

“Um, what my partner means, Mr. Bick,” Moore said, stepping forward timidly, “is, why have you asked to meet with us under such dire circumstances?”

Bick leaned forward and turned up the flame on a small lamp at the edge of his desk. The shadows retreated and the saloon owner lost some of his dread demeanor. He smiled at the two men standing before his desk. It was a white, even smile.

“Gentlemen, my apologies, if Caleb gave you the wrong impression. I sent him personally to retrieve you as a sign of my respect and admiration. He is one of my few surviving children and my favorite son.”

“Your son?” Deerfield said. “Boy’s blacker than coal.”

“Leave us, Caleb,” Bick said.

“Yes, Father.” The giant nodded. “I’ll be close if you need me.” He retreated silently from the office.

Bick leaned back in his chair with a soft creak. A tall grandfather clock marked the seconds with metallic ticks in a corner of the room. Bick looked through slitted eyes at the two men standing before his desk, like errant children before a schoolmaster.

“Gentlemen, I want my mine back,” he said softly. “I want you to give it to me.”

“I’m sure you do, Bick,” Deerfield said. “Unfortunately, that is not going to happen.”

“Yes, it is,” Bick said, steepling his fingers. “You just don’t realize it yet.”

“I’ve heard of you, Malachi,” Deerfield said. “All the way over in Carson City, Virginia City. Your family seems to think they own all of Nevada. Well, you were the one who made the error of giving poor Arthur control of the mine. You made a mistake and we profited from an opportunity. That’s business.”

“Yes,” Bick said. “It was a mistake to sign the property over to Arthur. It was also exceptional serendipity that you and Mr. Moore were able to capitalize on my folly.”

He leaned forward in his chair; his dark eyes caught the light of the lamp like a cat’s. “One could say it was almost preternatural, yes?”

Moore blanched and looked to Deerfield.

Deerfield raised a hand to calm his partner. “Okay, Bick. You’ve lived up to your reputation. You’ve made your intentions clear and you’ve managed to scare Jacob. I, however, am not impressed. You heard those people out there—we’ve given them something you can’t anymore; we’ve given them hope for the future of their home. This town loves us, and you, you are yesterday’s news, Malachi.”

The clock’s ticking stopped. The sounds of the saloon and Main Street seemed to fade. It was as if the air itself was held, frozen. Moore stepped back and tried to interpose Oscar between himself and Bick.

“You’ve given this town death,” Bick said. “Worse than death. You’re not businessmen, you’re not even fools, Oscar. You’re pawns. You have no idea what you have set in motion here.”

“We’re done here,” Deerfield said, turning toward the door. “Come on, Jacob.”

“Louis Gantner,” Bick said.

Deerfield stopped. “What did you say?”

“Louis Gantner. You do remember him, don’t you, Oscar?”

Moore tugged at Deerfield’s sleeve, “Oscar, what is it?”

“You had Mr. Gantner murdered three years ago in Baltimore,” Bick said. “It had to do with the affections of a young lady from a very prominent, very wealthy family. You paid a cutthroat named Diggs to do the deed, because a man of your status and breeding wouldn’t do such a thing. Surely, Oscar, you told your partner about this, didn’t you?”

“How?” Deerfield whispered. Moore let go of Oscar. He backed away, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, by midnight tomorrow, I will have the deed to the mine back, or the authorities in Baltimore will have a letter detailing your plot and naming the names of those involved and where they can be found.”

“I had nothing to do with any murder!” Moore shouted. “I don’t know anything about this, I swear!”

“Of course you don’t,” Bick said. “You, Mr. Moore, do not have the courage to commit murder. No, you will receive a telegram tomorrow from your solicitors in Boston. Your mother is dying, Mr. Moore; she has fallen very ill. Or will, if I don’t have that deed by midnight, tomorrow.”

Moore was sweating, his eyes blinking. Deerfield didn’t look much better.

“These things I have told will come to pass,” Bick said, rising from his chair, the shadows spreading behind him. “As surely as day follows night, as sure as rain will fall this evening—your ruin is at hand, gentlemen. However, if I receive the deed, then no secrets will be revealed, no plagues will befall your loved ones. Instead, you will find a very generous sum in your accounts in Virginia City. Enough money to compensate you for your time and trouble and pay your men handsomely for theirs.”

The clock resumed its steady cadence, the pendulum chasing the endless seconds.

“Now you’re done here,” Bick said. “Caleb will show you out. Your money is no longer good in my establishment. Good evening, gentlemen.”

The giant’s hands were upon their backs again, lifting them, dragging them. There had been no sound of Caleb’s approach, no warning. They clattered down a dark, narrow stairwell, tight with the smoke and noise of the unseen saloon floor. A door crashed open and they were flying, tumbling through the air. The businessmen smashed into the wall of the alleyway, slid and settled into a pile of red dirt, straw and trash. The door slammed shut and they were alone in the cold night air.

“Are you all right?” Deerfield finally said, struggling to stand.

“We, we need to go to the sheriff,” Moore said.

“And tell him what? That he threatened to make your mother, thousands of miles away, ill? That I’m implicated in a murder?”

“Good Lord in Heaven, Oscar! Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Deerfield glared. He reached out a hand and helped his partner up. “No sheriff. We handle Bick ourselves.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No, but Ambrose is. I’ll send him word tonight through one of those ragamuffins he’s been evangelizing. He’ll deal with this.”

The pair stumbled down the alleyway toward the street behind the Paradise Falls.

“Can we trust him? I mean, Oscar, we could just take him up on his offer. Cut our losses and leave with our skin.”

“I’m not going anywhere. No one does that to me, no one! This is our town, our time! No, we’ll let the good reverend and his man deal with Malachi Bick.”

As if the heavens themselves were offended by the utterance of Bick’s name, there came a growl of thunder. A rising wind scattered the trash in the alleyway like frightened birds. Fat, cold raindrops began to fall from a night sky bankrupt of stars.

The storm was more wind than water, but there was enough rain to irritate Otis Haglund as he made a dash from the Black Dog Saloon, at the corner of Duffer and Old Stone, to his single-room shack off of Prosperity Street. Otis was drunk, good and drunk—just the way he had planned it—but now his warm, content, fuzzy inebriation was getting chased away by cold rain and knife-edged winds.

“Damn it all to Hell!” he shouted as he lumbered between the rows of dark homes. He pulled his coat up over his head, but that left his considerable middle exposed to the wind and the spitting rain and that made him curse too.

When he first came to Golgotha he had lived in the back of his butcher shop. However, complaints about his general appearance and cleanliness, and the difficulty of enticing women, even whores, to return with him to the slaughterhouse, had prompted him to build a home among the other working-class citizens of the town.

He reached his house and fumbled to retrieve the door key around his neck. Rain trickled down the back of his neck and he knew the jig was up. He was sober.

It was that haughty bitch Proctor’s fault. If he hadn’t stayed late at the butcher shop to go over the details of what she needed for the church social this Saturday, he would have gotten to the Dog on time and then he would have been home by now and wouldn’t have the Devil pissing all over him, wasting a perfectly good drunk.

The wind grabbed the handle from his hands and the thin wooden door slammed open, spilling what little light the cloudy night provided across his floor and far wall. It illuminated a small, embroidered homily in a wooden frame. His mother had made it for him before she passed, twelve years ago. It was the only piece of Scripture he had in his house.

As he fumbled to find the lantern and the matches on the shelf by the door, he undressed Gillian Proctor in his mind for the thousandth time that day. The widow had a striking figure and Otis knew,
knew,
if he could only get that witch to let her hair down he could give her what she must want, must
need
, with Will Proctor five years in the ground.

Thick, blunt fingers still dark with the blood of Otis’s craft fumbled with the lantern’s shroud. He held a matchstick in his mouth as he struggled. Just this afternoon, while they discussed the cuts and the weight of the meat she needed him to deliver to her by Friday morning, he caught a flash of white stocking above her ankles when she “adjusted” her dress. The little whore was teasing him! When she noticed his attentions, she had the nerve to blush behind her owl-like spectacles and look away. The very thought of it made him hungry for her again, made his anger and need churn.

Otis sniffed the air. He smelled something, something pungent and musky even thorough the cold night air and the rain at his back.

In the darkness, the scent called to him. It spoke to the dark little scuttling corners of his mind, the parts that wanted to hang Gillian Proctor on a meat hook and do what he wanted to her undisturbed. The part of him that lost itself in the flesh of Ch’eng Huang’s whores and the warm spray of slaughtering a cow. That was it! That was what he smelled—it was the perfume of rutting and slaughter. His manhood stirred as he struck the match. The sharp, acrid scent of sulfur seemed completely appropriate as he touched the match to the lantern’s wick. Soft yellow light filled the room and illuminated his ramshackle home.

Holly Pratt, long golden locks falling to her shoulders, sat, long legs crossed, on his cot, smiling with her perfect, white teeth.

“Hello, Otis, I’m so glad you’re home. I’ve been waiting for you. Please shut the door.”

“Mrs. Pratt?” he stammered. It was hard to think straight with the thoughts swirling around his skull and the smell. He stepped inside and closed the door. The scent seemed to surge, like the storm outside. It enveloped him and he found himself breathing it in deeply, eagerly. He felt alive, potent, real. He realized, he
knew,
the scent was coming from Holly. He placed the lantern on its shelf, near the window.

“You know, I always liked the way you used to look at me out of the corners of your eyes,” she said as she rose. She was wearing a long coat, heavy and gray—a man’s military coat from the war. It fell to her bare ankles and feet. “Like a dog that hadn’t eaten in a week. Starving. You were starving for me, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said with a croak. It was very hot in the small room. It should be cold, a distant, timid part of his mind said. Holly opened the coat and shrugged. It fell to the floor.

She was nude, her skin luminescent in the lantern’s buttery light. Her nipples and thighs were dark and wet, slick with something blacker than molasses.

“I loved the way your shop always smelled,” she said. “The fresh slaughter, the coppery stench. It thrilled me. I was too timid, too weak and afraid to admit it, even to myself.”

She stepped toward him. The blackness leaking from her breasts and nethers was rich with the scent. He breathed it in, breathed her in.

“Come to me. Never be afraid; never hide from yourself, from what’s inside, again,” she said.

He was close enough now to see her eyes. They were black and something was moving behind the darkness, like eels swimming in oil. Her teeth were still beautiful, but he could see now that they, too, were stained midnight, as was her mouth and tongue. The sweet blood-sex-death smell wafted from inside her mouth.

“Come.” She cradled his neck and pulled him to her bosom. His hungry mouth found the slick nipple. His rough hands clutched at her alabaster buttocks, like a drowning man grabbing for a rope. He sucked her nipple, the sweet, bitter nectar filling his mouth and mind. He bit down savagely on her flesh and she moaned and mewled in pleasure and pain. She finally pulled him away, his lips black now. His mind was afire with all the dreams he had chased from his mind in fear and guilt, all the desires he refused to acknowledge. He glanced briefly at his mother’s homily and renounced her impotent God, his humanity drowning in honeyed tar. He had to share this feeling with Gillian Proctor, with the world. The absolute peace of savagery, the sublime ecstasy of obliteration. Death was pleasure; death was union; death was power; death was freedom. Death was life.