Boon’s hands came quickly and gracefully out of her sleeves when the one Pinkerton swept back one side of his frock coat to reveal the sawed-off he had poorly concealed there. He said, “Boonsri Angchuan,” and almost got it all the way right.
“I’m just another China girl,” she said. She wasn’t trying to act the part at all anymore. I got a hold of the hilt in my boot and took the knife out slow.
“How’s about you tell us where your accomplice is and come along like a good girl,” said the other Pink.
Boon half-smiled.
“I never was much good,” she said, slipping her hand into the opening at her hip.
I understood, picked up my feet. Her gown exploded near her right thigh before I reached her. The fabric caught fire and the Pinkerton with the scattergun collapsed in a haze of blood and gunsmoke. Two or three of the sporting girls screamed. Most everybody ran for cover, or at least those who weren’t heeled themselves and raring to join the mayhem.
Flames licked up Boon’s front, eating up the silk as she hurried to expand the tear in its side to rip herself free. The fiddler on the platform withdrew a belly gun, a little Derringer, and fired indiscriminately into the fray. I ducked. The dying detective on the floor blew a hole in the ceiling with the shotgun and expired. The remaining Pinkerton growled like a wolf and charged Boon. I meant to put my sticker in his heart, but she was faster. Her gown came apart and she tossed it up, smoking black, and brought the whole burning mass down on the man’s head.
Reduced to her chemise and knickers, Boon raised up the .44 she’d smuggled in beneath the gown and brought the grip down hard on the crown of the man’s skull, even as his hat and collar ignited from the flames. Her unmentionables blackened and skin red as strawberries, she furrowed her brow and took two steps back as the Pink clawed furiously at the silk burning up his head and neck.
“You yellow cunt,” he sputtered, tearing away gown, hat, and collar. His pomaded hair continued to burn, but he did not seem to notice. Even if he had, it would not have much mattered: Boon fired her Colt, and the bullet slammed right through his forehead and out the back of his skull. Half his brains spattered the bar behind him and the bartender hit the floor. It was the last ugly insult that Pink would ever give, and I couldn’t be too fussed about it.
When at first we heard the whistles, neither of us knew quite what to make of the racket. I had never heard such a noise before, and I winced at the pain of it in my ears. It was so shrill and unpleasant. What few people remained in the musty cellar started to scatter, and in watching them move, Boon’s face lightened and her eyes went wide, and she said, “Police.”
I had never seen a policeman to that point in my life, though I had read about them in newspapers. Eastern cities seemed to be lousy with them, organized militias of uniformed men who went about the streets and alleys, staving in heads with their cudgels and clubs. Some stories made it look like there were all-out wars in faraway places like New York City between the gangs and the police departments, some of their battles bloody enough to rank right up there with the Indian Wars in our neck of the woods. You might see a posse in Texas or Arkansas comprising ten or even fifteen men; in the cities there were dozens on top of dozens of these bell-capped killers, the preponderance of them Irishmen by the sound of it, just looking for skulls to crack and practicing their shooting skills on warm bodies.
I was not eager to meet the men with the whistles.
“Back stairs,” I said, though I hadn’t any idea as to where they led, apart from whatever accommodations the working girls kept up yonder.
Boon nodded once, sharply, and I led the charge for the opposite side of the cellar. Boots stamped like hooves down the stairs behind us, but then also in front of us. They were descending upon us from every direction. Only two others remained besides Boon, myself, and the bartender, and those were the melodeon player and the Chinaman, both of whom flattened themselves against walls on either side of the place as if they believed this to make them invisible. Boon thumbed back the hammer on her Colt and I stood still, stupidly, grasping the hilt of my knife and pivoting my head from side to side.
I would go down slashing, but I was fully confident that I would, in fact, go down.
A chorus of voices shouted over one another, and I found myself listening carefully to determine if they were indeed Irish. I couldn’t tell. The first of them I saw, scrambling down from the back stairs, looked like any other white man I’d ever seen. If there was anything particularly Irish about his countenance, I didn’t know about it.
The policeman wore a blue tunic with a star affixed to his breast, and in his hand was a shiny new single-action revolver. I would have been surprised to learn he had ever fired it. The man was younger than me by a decade at least, and his oily hair poured sweat down his brow and cheeks. He looked scared half to death, and his comrades who quickly followed him into the cellar did not appear much braver or more experienced.
“What is going on here,” said the first policeman. “We have heard there is shooting in this place.”
Boon leveled her .44 at his chest and said, “You have heard correctly.”
One of the other officers let out a squeak and jabbed his gun in the air at the half-immolated corpse of the Pinkerton on the floor. All three of them twitched their noses at the smell of it, which I did not notice.
“This woman is almost naked,” said the one who first noticed the body.
“It is a whorehouse,” said the first man, annoyed.
I said, “She ain’t no whore, you shit-headed pig.”
Boon said, “Shut up, Edward,” and kept her Colt on the “coppers,” as I understood them to be sometimes called.
Neither the melodeon man nor the Chinaman moved, and I was damned if any of the policemen saw them at all. The barman, however, peeked his head up from behind the bar, and the first officer barked at him.
“Out here with your hands up,” he said.
The barman complied, looking for all the world like he was fixing to start crying, when the rest of the squadron poured in from the front stairs. We were fairly surrounded then, and with only Boon’s Colt and a few bullets to face them down. My knife felt like little more than a knitting needle against so much iron. I slid it back into my boot and waited for Boon to make the call.
The barrel dropped by inches, and her face fell, too. She was licked, which I reckoned was the first time she ever was. I stood there facing her, worrying not so much about whether these men were going to shoot anyway, nor if I was like to get locked up, but that I might not ever see my friend again. An iron collar ’round my neck in Yuma for a hundred years did not sound worse to me than that.
The man leading the charge from the front stairs stepped close, but carefully, his weapon matching every other amongst the policemen. He wore a trimmed brown mustache and his eyes were small and watery.
“You speakee English?” he said.
Boon smiled.
That was when I knew we weren’t licked, after all, but that the situation was about to get messy.
She said, “I speak with this,” and she jammed the barrel of her .44 into the policeman’s belly before squeezing the trigger and blowing bits of his spine clear out his back.
The copper did not cry out, nor did he fire his gun. He merely took several short steps backward, dropped to his knees, and then fell forward on his face. Looking back, I suspect only seconds passed before the shock wore off and the rest of the policemen got to shooting, but in the moment, it surely felt like many long minutes. Whatever the case, there were now seven or eight living officers crowding both ways out, and every single one of them lunged forward, barrels first, and filled the fetid air with lead and smoke.
Boon and I both dropped to the boards at the same time. She held tight to her gun with one hand and used her other to knock the dead officer’s weapon across the floor to me. I caught it and rolled over onto my back to begin sighting down policemen. I shot one, two, three, just like that, and headshots all. Single-actions were nice that way. No need to bother with the hammer. I did not attempt a fourth shot, because I knew three was pushing my luck and half the coppers still standing aimed down and emptied chambers at the floor. I rolled and rolled some more, scuttled under a table and leaped up, knocking it over on its side and using it for cover while I spent the final two rounds available to me. One entered a fellow’s ear, the other only flew into another man’s thigh. This latter policeman mewled like a heifer birthing a foal, and the wound jetted blood like a geyser.
I hurled the empty gun at him and it struck him right in the mouth. He spit blood and broken teeth and staggered for the stairs. I pulled my knife and searched through the acrid gunsmoke and flailing limbs for Boon.
She had made it to the bar, which served as a considerably better barrier than my table. Bottles and glasses exploded behind her from the volley of bullets sent her way, and not a few punched right through the wood, only missing Boon due to blind firing. It aggrieved me to see such fine spirits go to waste and I wished for another pistol to revenge it all.
Boon had it well in hand. She emptied every chamber into the throng of blue tunics and plug hats, ducked to reload with sure and steady fingers, and popped back up again to resume fire. This method took more time than the first portion of the gunfight, but one by one she took our aggressors down until only two remained on their feet, and these two retreated to the stairwell to shoot around the corner without so much as looking where they shot.
For the time being, the back stairwell was clear. I signaled at Boon, waving my arms at our escape. In so doing, I realized that the Chinese fellow had vanished and the melodeon player was dead. Boon hurried out from the bar, stooping to scoop up a dead policeman’s revolver along the way, which she pressed into my hand when she reached me.
“Obliged,” I said, and together we rushed for the back stairs.
We tromped up, sagging, creaking step by step, from the smelly subterranean Palace to what I suspected to be the cribs for the whores above. And I was right about that, too—the whole back half of the ground story was partitioned into small quarters by dirty sheets strewn from the ceiling, a single cot in each. Most of the girls had lit out, probably at the first shots, though two or three still milled about in search of sufficient clothes for their flight. So, too, were there more of San Francisco’s police department officers, and emerging from their midst, right up the middle of the floor, was a tall, pale man with iron-gray hair, a pointed beard to match, and a dandified striped suit.
The gray man stopped some ten feet away from us and, casting glances at the assembled police, sucked a deep breath in through his nostrils which he pushed back out through his mouth.
Where teeth should have been inside that mouth, the gray man sported instead two rows of gold plates that gleamed in the lantern light.
Boon squeaked like a mouse at sight of the man I reckoned to be Arthur Stanley.