Black Dove (37 page)

I dared anyway: I rolled out the barrels.

The first took a bullet from Aldo’s Peacemaker as I pushed it out. The little spout of beer that poured forth was nothing compared to the geyser when it hit the street.

The barrel disappeared in an explosion of wooden planks and foam.

The second keg actually survived its drop to the cobblestones, and it bore down on Aldo and his buddy fast, a giant skittle ball about to take out a pair of pins. As the beer men threw themselves from its path, I shouted the magic words that would ensure their pursuit was over.

“
Free beer! Free beer! Free beer!
”

Cheering rowdies rushed into the street, only to be mowed down by the barrels that didn’t bust when they hit. By the time the last keg had been shoved out, Aldo and the shotgun man had disappeared into the waves of hooligans and beer like the Pharaoh’s army being swallowed by the Red Sea.

With the wagon’s load lightened so, we were able to tear over to the waterfront in mere minutes. Of course, mere minutes were all we had, and after abandoning our chariot on East Street, we took the last stretch at a sprint. There was just enough light from the streetlamps out front to espy the time on the Ferry House’s squat clock tower: five till nine.

The usually bustling building was nearly deserted, and we came racing up to the ticket windows inside just as the last clerk was closing up for the night. We all started jabbering at him at once.

“Hold on!”

“Don’t go!”

“Hey! Wait!”

The clerk’s sleepy, half-lidded eyes didn’t open a hair wider.

“Closed,” he said, and he snapped down his window shade.

“This is an emergency!” Old Red shouted. “Matter of life and death!”

The shade stayed drawn.

“We’re detectives!” I tried. “We think you got a killer on the Oakland ferry!”

The shade stayed drawn.

“Four dollars for three tickets,” Diana said.

The shade went up.

The ride to Oakland costs seventy-five cents.

“You see any Chinamen tonight?” Gustav asked as the clerk handed over our tickets.

“I see Chinamen every night,” the clerk said, and once again he vanished behind the black cloth of his window shade.

Diana pointed at an oversized clock hanging from the east wall.

“
Gentlemen
.”

“Well, of all the goddamned luck,” Old Red spit, while I opted for the blunter but no-less appropriate “Shit!”

It was five
after
nine. The tower clock was slow.

Another dash took us around to the building’s back doors. Then we were outside again, the cutting breeze off the bay giving me chills as it blew over my beer-soaked clothes.

But my blood suddenly running cold the way it did—that had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the sight of our ferry that did that.

There were no ropes or gangplank to link it to the pier any longer. Just a stripe of foamy water churned up by the turning of the paddlewheel.

The ferry was already a hundred yards out.

We’d missed the boat.

Or, Old Red Goes to the Edge—and We Wind Up in the Middle of a Mess

I waited for the
explosion. It was going to be big, I knew. Blow-out-your-eardrums loud.

Gustav took in a deep breath . . . and I fought the urge to put my fingers in my ears.

But then he let the breath go, and there was no scream of rage, no glass-shattering obscenities. He didn’t throw down his hat, stomp his feet or look for something to break. Why, he didn’t even try to take it out on
me
. He just walked to the edge of the pier as the boat to Oakland chugged off into the darkness of the night.

It almost looked like he was going to follow the ferry, try to walk across the waters after it. Or just drop off the pier like he was walking the plank.

I hustled up next to him. Diana did the same on the other side.

Old Red stopped one step from plummeting into the bay. It would’ve been a long fall: twenty feet down to water as cold and black as oblivion.

“We can still check for Hawaii-bound ships,” Diana said softly. “Maybe we were wrong about—”

“No,” Old Red said.

“We could head back to Chinatown,” I suggested. “Try to find—”

“No.”

Diana leaned forward to look my brother in the face, putting herself out over the void in a way that made me sweat even as I shivered in the frigid night air.

“You’re not giving up, are you?”

Gustav refused to meet her gaze. But it wasn’t out of shyness anymore. It was more like she was a mirror he couldn’t stand looking into.

“It ain’t a matter of givin’ up. We just plain failed,” he said. “Failed the doc. Failed the gal.”

“You don’t know that, Brother. Could be Hok Gup’s still stashed away someplace. A prisoner. So many folks after her, who’s to say where she ended up?”

Old Red shook his head. “If she’s on that boat, she needs our help. And if she’s still back there”—he jerked his head to the west, toward Chinatown—“she’s beyond our help.”

“So,” Diana said, “you
are
giving up.”

Gustav finally looked over at her. “Miss, you can dig in your spurs much as you want, but it don’t change facts. We . . . have . . . failed.”

Then he looked away again, back out at the ferry as it dwindled to a hazy blob of light that shimmered in the gloom like a lonely star. The lady stayed there beside him, following his gaze, and I did the same. It seemed like the first time we’d actually stood still together all day, just the three of us, with nowhere to run to and nothing to run
from
. Woebegone and weary though I was, I kind of liked it.

Nearby, a buoy bell clanged in time to the lapping of the water against the pillars of the pier. Further out, a boat horn blew mournfully, sounding remarkably like the lowing of herd-cattle bedded for the night. Below us, something stirred in the brine—a big fish or sea lion. Maybe even a shark.

And then another sound blew in on the wind off the water.

Voices.
Angry
voices.

Gustav and Diana’s heads turned at the exact moment mine did, like we were three ponies in the same bridle.

The pier stretched out into the bay another seventy-five feet, at least, and there were crates and coils of thick rope and what looked like a shack further down, to our right. That’s where the voices were coming from: the
very end of the pier. The very end of San Francisco and California and the United States, too, if you angled yourself right. It may as well have been the end of everything. One more step dropped you into the abyss. It was as far as you could walk without drowning.

And somebody was out there—a few somebodies who didn’t care much for each other, from the sound of things. I didn’t recognize words or even voices so much as tones: a man barking orders, a woman wheedling, another man jeering, and all of them speaking over each other, as if they were competing to be heard.

Old Red, Diana, and I moved toward the sound, walking slowly, wordlessly. Our pace picked up once we were close enough to make out actual words. Not that we understood half of them.

They were Chinese.

“Stop gibbering that monkey talk!” a man snapped. “English only when I’m around!”

It had to be the Coolietown Crusader himself—Sgt. Cathal Mahoney.

“Oh, Charlie just say, ‘Look at
fan kwei
son of bitch. He still think badge is crown.’ ”

It sure sounded like Scientific.

So that gave us three names on the guest list. The rest we filled in when we peeked around the corner of the shed near the end of the pier. A big, red-tinted lantern hung out over the water from a post, and by its crimson light we could see Mahoney squared off against Scientific and Chinatown Charlie—and Madam Fong and Big Queue, to boot.

The latter held a familiar-looking gun in one massive hand: Doc Chan’s derringer. It was easy to see how the hatchet man had come to have it. All you had to do was look where he was pointing it—or, to be more precise, look at who he was pointing it at.

Facing the others, their backs to the bay, were two Chinamen in dark business suits and bowlers. One was tallish, sunken-eyed, pale, with the saggy-prune look of a man who’d recently lost more weight than was good for him. Fat Choy, I had little doubt. His left hand was wrapped around his right wrist, seemingly nursing a fresh sprain—like the kind you get when a bigger man twists a gun from your grip.

The other fellow was the highbinder’s opposite in every respect—short, bespectacled, dark-skinned, bulky, with cheeks as round and smooth as a pair of peaches. His neck and hands were surprisingly slender, though, giving the man an altogether feminine air that made a lot more sense once I realized he was, indeed, altogether feminine.

He
was a
she
. We’d found the Black Dove at last.

I stared at her hard, studying her, searching beneath the eyeglasses and bowler and bulging men’s clothes for the great beauty men had killed for. I couldn’t see it. The Black Dove looked more like the Overstuffed Turkey, and all I found in her face was fear.

She was cowering half-behind Fat Choy, peering around at Mahoney and the others with the same look of bewildered desperation a treed coon gives the baying bloodhounds below it. Fat Choy was keeping his left elbow jutted out over her chest, but it was impossible to say if he was trying to protect her or fixing to knock her backwards off the dock.

Madam Fong turned toward the girl and said something in Chinese, her voice as smooth and cool as fresh-churned butter.

“I said
English
, dammit!”

The madam looked over at Mahoney—as did Big Queue beside her. She smiled. The hatchet man scowled.

“I just told her not to worry, that’s all. If she comes home, everything will be OK. We can fix whatever needs fixing.”

“Hok Gup has no ‘home’ with you,” Scientific said.

“She still belongs to the Kwong Ducks.”

“Not anymore, she doesn’t,” Charlie said. “You sold her.”

Madam Fong flicked a sneer at Charlie, her smile disappearing for the one second she bothered looking at him.

“Show me a receipt.”

Then she looked back at Scientific, her smile returning. She obviously considered the man an equal—or at least a worthy adversary.

“What claim do
you
have on the girl?”

“She belong to Gee Woo Chan. He owe Little Pete.” Scientific shrugged. “Now I collect.”

“Shut up, the both of you,” Mahoney spat. “I’m the law here. She’s coming with
me
.”

Scientific held his hands out toward Hok Gup and Fat Choy, palms up. “Why you not take, then? Why stand here for this talk talk talk?”

“Like I told you when I first got here,” Mahoney said, “before I do anything with those two, I want the rest of you to clear the hell out.”

“Why? So you do what you want to
him?
” Scientific jerked his head at Fat Choy—then ran a hand lightly over his stomach, which was no doubt bruised grapeskin-purple from the punts Mahoney had put to him earlier. “Or because you afraid we don’t let you leave?”

Mahoney looked as though he’d upchuck if he could actually believe his own ears.

“Afraid that
you
won’t let
me
leave?”

Scientific nodded, smirking like he’d just told the pope the one about the priest, the monk, and the nun with the naughty habit.

“Very foolish, you come here alone. Or . . . you have reason?”

Mahoney’s face glowed as red as the lantern overhead, and he snarled out the Curse of Curses. (I’ve heard said curse a million times but have never seen it written anywhere but outhouse walls, so I won’t besmear these pages with it now.)

“The girl’s coming with me,” he went on, and he slipped a hand inside his jacket.

“
Stop him
.”

That was all my brother needed to say. I knew who he was talking to. And I was more than happy to oblige.

I charged out of the shadows and slapped a bear hug around Mahoney from behind before he could draw his iron from its shoulder-holster.

“Surprise,” I whispered in his ear.

Mahoney knew just what to do, I’ll give him that. He tried to elbow my ribs and stomp my toes and bring his heel up into my balls. I just squeezed him tighter.

“I’ll let you go if you promise to play nice,” I said to him.

He dropped his head forward—another classic tactic, given the circumstances. Before he could throw his head back, smashing my nose with
his thick skull, I lifted him off his feet and threw him down to the planks onto his tailbone.

He instinctively grabbed his ass and wailed. Which was all the opportunity I needed to bend down and relieve him of his equalizer.

“Oh, ho!” I crowed, enjoying the heft of Mahoney’s stubby Colt Lightning. “I been waitin’ all day to get my hands on a—”

Quick as that, my hand wasn’t on anything. A blur, a jabbing, stabbing pain to my wrist, and the gun was gone.

“You clodhopper shithead!” Mahoney hollered up at me. “You’ve screwed us all!”

Scientific had the cop’s Colt.

I saw now why the little
boo how doy
had goaded Mahoney so. He’d planned on doing to the detective what he’d just done to me, though probably a hell of a lot rougher. I’d spoiled his fun—and his chance to win back some
mien tzu
.