The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (16 page)

I'm a Pinkerton man. That means something. I've got the gun, a cold blue Colt and a card with my name engraved beneath the unblinking eye. I'm the genuine article. I'm a dead shot, a deadeye Dick. I was on the mark in Baltimore when assassins went for Honest Abe. I skinned my iron and plugged them varmints. Abe should've treated me to the theater. Might still be here. Might be in a rocker scribbling how the South was won.

Can't squeeze no trigger now can I? I can squirt my initials on the ceiling.

I'm a Pinkerton I'm a Pinkerton a goddamned Pinkerton.

That's right you sorry sonofabitch you chew on that you swallow like a python and I'll keep on chanting it while I paint these walls.

Belphegor ain't my FatherMother Father thou art in Heaven Jesus loves me.

Jesus Christ.

My balls clank when I walk.

I'm walking to the window.

Well I'm crawling.

If I make it to the window I'll smash the glass and do a stiff drop.

I've got to hustle the shades are dropping from left to right.

Earth on its axis tilting to the black black black iris rolling back inside a socket.

I'm glad the girl hopped the last train. Hope she's in Frisco selling it for more money than she's ever seen here in the sticks.

I taste hard Irish whiskey sweet inside her navel. She's whip smart she's got gams to run she's got blue eyes like the barrel of the gun on the floor under the dresser I can't believe how much blood can spurt from a stump I can't believe it's come to this I hear Him coming heavy on the floorboards buckling He's had a bite He wants more meat.

Pick up the iron southpaw Pinkerton pick it up and point like a man with grit in his liver not a drunk seeing double.

Hallelujah.

Who's laughing now you slack-jawed motherfucker I told you I'm a dead shot now you know now that it's too late.

Let me just say kapow-kapow.

I rest my case, ladies and gennulmen of the jury. I'm

2.

"A Pinkerton man. Well, shit my drawers." The engineer, a greasy brute in striped coveralls, gave me the once-over. Then he spat a stream of chaw and bent his back to feeding the furnace. Never heard of my man Rueben Hicks, so he said. He didn't utter another word until the narrow gauge spur rolled up to the wretched outskirts of Purdon.

Ugly as rot in a molar, here we were after miles of pasture and hill stitched with barbwire.

Rude frame boxes squatted in the stinking alkaline mud beside the river. Rain pounded like God's own darning needles, stood in orange puddles along the banks, pooled in ruts beneath the awnings. Dull lamplight warmed coke-rimed windows. Shadows fluttered, moths against glass. Already, above the hiss and drum of the rain came faint screams, shouts, piano music.

Just another wild and wooly California mining town that sprang from the ground fast and would fall to ruin faster when the gold played out. Three decades was as the day of a mayfly in the scope of the great dim geography of an ancient continent freshly opened to white men.

Industry crowded in on the main street: Bank. Hotel. Whorehouse. Feed & Tack. Dry Goods. Sawbones. Sheriff's Office. A whole bunch of barrelhouses. Light of the Lord Baptist Temple up the lane and yonder. Purdon Cemetery. A-frame houses, cottages, shanties galore. Lanky men in flannels. Scrawny sows with litters of squalling brats. A rat warren.

The bruised mist held back a wilderness of pines and crooked hills. End of the world for all intents and purposes.

I stood on the leaking platform and decided this was a raw deal. I didn't care if the circus strongman was behind one of the piss-burned saloon façades, swilling whiskey, feeling up the thigh of a horse-toothed showgirl. I'd temporarily lost my hard-on for his scalp with the first rancid-sweet whiff of gunsmoke and open sewage. Suddenly, I'd had a bellyful.

Nothing for it but to do it. I slung my rifle, picked up my bags and began the slog.

3.

I signed
Jonah Koenig
on the ledger at the Riverfront Hotel, a rambling colonial monolith with oil paintings of Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and the newly anointed Grover Cleveland hanging large as doom in the lobby. This wasn't the first time I'd used my real name on a job since the affair in Schuylkill, just the first time it felt natural. A sense of finality had settled into my bones.

Hicks surely knew I was closing in. Frankly, I didn't much care after eleven months of eating coal dust from Boston to San Francisco. I cared about securing a whiskey, a bath and a lay. Not in any particular order.

The clerk, a veteran of the trade, understood perfectly. He set me up on the third floor in a room with a liquor cabinet, a poster bed and a view of the mountains. The presidential suite. Some kid drew a washtub of lukewarm water and took my travel clothes to get cleaned. Shortly, a winsome, blue-eyed girl in a low-cut dress arrived without knocking. She unlocked a bottle of bourbon, two glasses and offered to scrub my back.

She told me to call her Violet and didn't seem fazed that I was buck-naked or that I'd almost blown her head off. I grinned and hung gun and belt on the back of a chair. Tomorrow was more than soon enough to brace the sheriff.

Violet sidled over, got a handle on the situation without preamble. She had enough sense not to mention the brand on my left shoulder, the old needle tracks or the field of puckered scars uncoiling on my back.

We got so busy I completely forgot to ask if she'd ever happened to screw a dear chum of mine as went by Rueben Hicks. Or Tom Mullen, or Ezra Slade. Later I was half-seas over and when I awoke, she was gone.

I noticed a crack in the plaster. A bleeding fault line.

4.

"Business or pleasure, Mr. Koenig?" Sheriff Murtaugh was a stout Irishman of my generation who'd lost most of his brogue and all of his hair. His right leg was propped on the filthy desk, foot encased in bandages gone the shade of rotten fruit. It reeked of gangrene. "Chink stabbed it with a pickaxe, can y'beat that? Be gone to hell before I let Doc Campion have a peek—he'll want to chop the fucker at the ankle." He'd laughed, polishing his tarnished lawman's star with his sleeve. Supposedly there was a camp full of Chinese nearby; the ones who'd stayed on and fallen into mining after the railroad pushed west. Bad sorts, according to the sheriff and his perforated foot.

We sat in his cramped office, sharing evil coffee from a pot that had probably been bubbling on the stove for several days. At the end of the room was the lockup, dingy as a Roman catacomb and vacant but for a deputy named Levi sleeping off a bender in an open cell.

I showed Murtaugh a creased photograph of Hicks taken during a P. T. Barnum extravaganza in Philadelphia. Hicks was lifting a grand piano on his back while ladies in tights applauded before a pyramid of elephants. "Recognize this fellow? I got a lead off a wanted poster in Frisco. Miner thought he'd seen him in town. Wasn't positive." The miner was a nice break—the trail was nearly three months cold and I'd combed every two-bit backwater within six hundred miles before the man and I bumped into each other at the Gold Digger Saloon and started swapping tales.

"Who wants to know?"

"The Man himself."

"Barnum? Really?"

"Oh, yes indeed." I began rolling a cigarette.

Murtaugh whistled through mismatched teeth. "Holy shit, that's Iron Man Hicks. Yuh, I seen him around. Came in 'bout June. Calls hisself Mullen, says he's from Philly. Gotta admit he looks different from his pictures. Don't stack up to much in person. So what's he done to bring a Pinkerton to the ass-end o' the mule?"

I struck a match on the desk, took a few moments to get the cigarette smoldering nicely. There was a trace of hash mixed with the tobacco. Ah, that was better. "Year and half back, some murders along the East Coast were connected to the presence of the circus. Ritual slayings—pentagrams, black candles, possible cannibalism. Nasty stuff. The investigation pointed to the strongman. Cops hauled him in, nothing stuck. Barnum doesn't take chances; fires the old boy and has him committed. Cedar Grove may not be pleasant, but it beats getting lynched, right? Iron Man didn't think so. He repaid his boss by ripping off some trinkets Barnum collected and skipping town."

"Real important cultural artifacts, I bet," Murtaugh said.

"Each to his own. Most of the junk turned up with local pawn dealers, antiquarians' shelves, spooky shops and you get the idea. We recovered everything except the original translation of the
Dictionnaire Infernal
by a dead Frenchman, Collin de Plancy."

"What's that?"

"A book about demons and devils. Something to talk about at church."

"The hell y'say. Lord have mercy. Well, I ain't seen Mullen, uh, Hicks, in weeks, though y'might want to check with the Honeybee Ranch. And Trosper over to the Longrifle. Be advised—Trosper hates lawmen. Did a stretch in the pokey, I reckon.
We
got us an understandin', o' course."

"Good thing I'm not really a lawman, isn't it?"

"What's the guy's story?" Murtaugh stared at the photo, shifting it in his blunt hands.

I said, "Hicks was born in Plymouth. His father was a minister, did missionary work here in California—tried to save the Gold Rush crowd. Guess the minister beat him something fierce. Kid runs off and joins the circus. Turns out he's a freak of nature and a natural showman. P. T. squires him to every city in the Union. One day, Iron Man Hicks decides to start cutting the throats of rag pickers and whores. At least, that's my theory. According to the docs at Cedar Grove, there's medical problems—might be consumption or syph or something completely foreign. Because of this disease maybe he hears voices, wants to be America's Jack the Ripper. Thinks God has a plan for him. Who knows for sure? He's got a stash of dubious bedside material on the order of the crap he stole from Barnum, which was confiscated; he'd filled the margins with notes the agency eggs still haven't deciphered. Somebody introduced him to the lovely hobby of demonology—probably his own dear dad. I can't check that because Hicks senior died in '67 and all his possessions were auctioned. Anyway, Junior gets slapped into a cozy asylum with the help of Barnum's legal team. Hicks escapes and, well, I've told you the rest."

"Jesus H., what a charmin' tale."

We drank our coffee, listened to rain thud on tin. Eventually Murtaugh got around to what had probably been ticking in his brain the minute he recognized my name. "You're the fellow who did for the Molly Maguires."

"Afraid so."

He smirked. "Yeah, I thought it was you. Dirty business that, eh?"

"Nothing pretty about it, Sheriff." Sixteen years and the legend kept growing, a cattle carcass bloating in the sun.

"I expect not. We don't get the paper up here, 'cept when the mail train comes in. I do recall mention that some folks are thinkin' yer Mollies weren't really the bad guys. Maybe the railroad lads had a hand in them killin's."

"That's true. It's also true that sometimes a horsethief gets hanged for another scoundrel's misdeed. The books get balanced either way, don't they? Everybody in Schuylkill got what they wanted."

Murtaugh said, "Might put that theory to the twenty sods as got hung up to dry."

I sucked on my cigarette, studied the ash drifting toward my knees. "Sheriff, did you ever talk to Hicks?"

"Bumped into him at one of the saloons durin' a faro game. Said howdy. No occasion for a philosophical debate."

"Anything he do or say seem odd?" I proffered my smoke.

"Sure. He smelled right foul and he wasn't winnin' any blue ribbons on account o' his handsome looks. He had fits—somethin' to do with his nerves, accordin' to Doc Campion." Murtaugh extended his hand and accepted the cigarette. He dragged, made an appreciative expression and closed his eyes. "I dunno, I myself ain't ever seen Hicks foamin' at the mouth. Others did, I allow."

"And that's it?"

"Y'mean, did the lad strike me as a thief and a murderer? I'm bound to say no more'n the rest o' the cowpunchers and prospectors that drift here. I allow most of 'em would plug you for a sawbuck . . .or a smoke." He grinned, rubbed ashes from his fingers. "Y'mentioned nothing stuck to our lad. Has that changed?"

"The evidence is pending."

"Think he did it?"

"I think he's doing it now."

"But you can't prove it."

"Nope."

"So, officially you're here to collect P. T.'s long lost valuables. I imagine Hicks is mighty attached to that book by now. Probbly won't part with it without a fight."

"Probably not."

"Billy Cullins might be fittin' him for a pine box, I suppose."

I pulled out a roll of wrinkled bills, subtracted a significant number and tossed them on the desk. Plenty more where that came from, hidden under a floorboard at the hotel. I always travel flush. "The agency's contribution to the Purdon widows and orphans fund."

"Much obliged, Mr. K. Whole lotta widows and orphans in these parts."

"More every day," I said.

5.

BELPHEGOR IS YOUR FATHERMOTHER.
This carmine missive scrawled in a New Orleans hotel room. In the unmade bed, a phallus sculpted from human excrement. Flies crawled upon the sheets, buzzing and sluggish.

In Lubbock, a partially burned letter—"O FatherMother, may the blood of the- (indecipherable)-erate urchin be pleasing in thy throat. I am of the tradition."

Come Albuquerque, the deterioration had accelerated. Hicks did not bother to destroy this particular letter, rather scattered its befouled pages on the floor among vermiculate designs scriven in blood—"worms, godawful! i am changed! Blessed the sacrament of decay! Glut Obloodyhole O bloodymaggots Obloodybowels O Lordof shite! Fearthegash! iamcomeiamcome"

Finally, Bakersfield in script writ large upon a flophouse wall—

EATEATEATEATEAT!
Found wedged under a mattress, the severed hand and arm of an unidentified person. Doubtless a young female. The authorities figured these remains belonged to a prostitute. Unfortunately, a few of them were always missing.