“You people have caused me a lot of trouble tonight,” said the gray man with the golden teeth. He studied me closely, then slowly permitted his dull, gray eyes to turn slightly toward Boon. “I do not allow chinks here except those working for me, but as you will not survive the night, I suppose I will let it pass.”
He grinned broadly, his grotesque mouth of gold making it fair hard to look at.
I said, “That’s him, ain’t it.”
“That’s him,” Boon said.
“Not the one we expected.”
“No.”
“Figure Willocks knew what he was sending us into?”
“Seems like.”
“Well, shit.”
“Used to be,” Stanley said, spreading his arms, “in the old days, you understand, the Vigilance Committee would take you out of here and hang you from the yardarm before sunup. These days we’re a little more civilized here, I’m somewhat sorry to say. Man is a savage animal when you cut to the bone, and I find too much civility sells him too short.”
Tears spilled from Boon’s big brown eyes, but she did not blubber or anything. She was dead still and quiet as a corpse. The Colt stayed in her hand, though she kept it at her side, pointed at the floor. I expected her to take her chance then and there, fire once and make it count, but she did not move. For a minute, no one did. It was eerie and my head swam.
In his clipped, English accent, Stanley said, “Anyway, the rest is up to you, I suppose. How civil you wish this to be, I mean. These men will lose no sleep cutting you down here and now, the both of you, for what you have done in the cellar. However, it needn’t be that way, and you are full within your rights to lay down your arms right here and right now, whereupon you shall be escorted to the county jail to await trial, provided no lynching parties take it upon themselves to break you out and string you up like the trash you both most undoubtedly are.”
I said, “This man uses too many words to get a point across.”
Boon said, “Shut up, will you.”
“What will it be?” Stanley pressed. “My Palace is a shambles and I’m short of time for it.”
“Do you know who we are?” I asked him.
He tilted his gray head and bunched up his pale brow, looking me over again.
“Killers,” he said after a bit. “Assassins come up from Texas. About that business in the Hill Country, I should think.”
“Heard about that,” I said.
“Wadsworth,” Boon said.
“I remember.”
“Not our business.”
“It ain’t,” I agreed. “Do you often have assassins pestering you, Mr. Arthur Stanley?”
“I am old and I though I am not rich, I have made and lost fortunes many times over,” he said. “It is my experience that wealth cannot be accumulated without some men losing something, which leads to all degrees of enmity. I have enemies the world over.”
“How about Connecticut?” I said.
“Or Siam,” said Boon.
The policemen behind and beside Stanley got to fidgeting, bored with all the talk and desiring either action or retirement—but the Englishman his own self turned still paler as the import of our few words found purchase in his brain.
“My God,” he said. “Christ Jesus in Heaven.”
“Do you think he’s got it?” I asked Boon.
She ignored me, her eyes fixed on her father. He stepped forward two paces, stopped again. Narrowed his eyes at her. He shook his head and blinked several times. Then he turned his attention to me.
“I will tell you something, son,” he said. “If you sire enough bastards and mongrels, it is inevitable that some small number of them will come looking for you, and you can be just as certain that one or two has murder on his—or her—mind.” He showed his strange golden plates again, licking them. “Now you tell me, child: might you be the mongrel Pimchan birthed?”
“Pimchan is my mother,” she said, sidestepping the insult. Cleverly, I thought.
“Bully for you,” said Stanley. “But you have no father.”
With that, he rose and dropped his right arm and turned to melt back into the throng of coppers, who were delighted to a man that the moment for talking was over and the time for action was begun. I raised my pilfered pistol, but before I could squeeze off a shot, Boon shouldered me out of the way and I stumbled back into the stairwell, where I promptly tumbled down to the cellar. On the way down, I heard two shots, and when I collided with the floor there came three or four more. Boon cried out, and feet stomped rapidly down after me. The gun had flown from my hand and I scrambled about in search of it, realizing too late how stupid this was for there were several other guns belonging to most every corpse in the cellar from which I could choose. By this time, though, Boon was upon me, hoisting me up and shouting, “Go, go!”
I got to my feet and sprinted for the front stairs, Boon ahead of me and voices shouting behind me. In the last moment before we plunged into the darkness of the front stairwell, I saw that her chemise was spattered red in the back, oozing blood from beneath her shoulder blade. She was shot.
“Did you kill him?” I said breathlessly. “Is he dead?”
“He lives, damn you,” Boon hissed, and she burst through the vestibule and out the front door.
The street outside was curiously empty. Ominously so. Boon went out by inches, leading with the .44. A carriage stood still across and up the street, a lantern burning over the coachman’s perch where no coachman perched. Two black horses waited impatiently in front, geldings blowing steam out of their nostrils and occasionally stamping their hooves. I looked left, then right, and then up at the structures crowding one another with windows in their upper stories lit and faces peering back down at me.
Boon slumped her left shoulder, letting the arm dangle like meat on a hook. The wound beneath the shoulder shone wet in the light of the lantern and the windows and the moon.
I said, “We ought to find you a sawbones.”
She hushed me and swung around to her right, where a policeman sprang from the alley beside the Palace and drew down on her. Boon shot him in the head.
Another blue tunic leapt from the front door, and Boon swung the Colt at him, too. She thumbed the hammer, squeezed the trigger, and the damned thing just clicked against an empty chamber. The policeman grinned a drew a bead on her. I threw my great bulk between him and her, and I squeezed my eyes shut so that I would not have to look upon the man who killed me.
God damn San Francisco, I thought, and God damn Arthur Stanley, too. I could only hope my sacrifice would be sufficient to permit Boon to escape. If so, then my whole wretched life would not have been lived entirely in vain, from a youth wasted on hog farming to my years running from conscription, to the very many annoyances and headaches I always caused my poor, long-suffering, dear friend Boon. I never was any good and I never felt that more acutely than in that terrible, frightening moment. Let my death mean something!
And perhaps it will, but at that moment I was not to be Boon’s savior. Another fellow assumed that role, and by opening my eyes again I beheld that it was the Chinese man from the Palace. He held a crude dagger with one hand and the policeman’s hair by the other, and he opened the officer’s throat with one fluid motion that spilled a dark curtain of blood down the front of his tunic. The copper dropped and died, his killer took up the policeman’s pistol, and the Chinese man padded lightly and quickly for the carriage, his queue slapping against his back as he called back, “Come, come, come.”
We went. The man clambered up to the reins and whipped the horses into moving before my feet were off the road. Two more policemen scampered out of the alley and three from the door, and behind them all came Arthur Stanley with his head held high but his face twisted in a grimace.
“He is not dead,” I said.
The police opened fire, their bullets striking the wheels and frame of the carriage when they didn’t go wild, slamming into the street or the clustered buildings. Our curious driver shouted something that might have been Chinese and the horses fell into a trot, shaking the carriage side to side as Boon and I struggled not to topple out of the still-open door. It was all we could do not to tumble to our deaths. The best we could hope for was escape, however temporary, and that was in the hands of the complete stranger driving the coach.
“I realize he is not dead, Edward,” Boon snapped back at me.
“What did you do?”
“I struck a policeman with my gun so I could get a hold of his and shoot Stanley.”
“He didn’t look shot.”
“It was me got shot,” she said.
I did not tell her this was evident, and she did not offer any further information. Instead, I pulled the coach door shut and latched it, and the Chinese fellow drove the horses away from our pursuers until they were no longer visible to us. He did not shout again. Boon leaned back and closed her eyes, which spilled tears—from pain or sorrow, I did not know.