Bounty Hunter

Chapter 9

Night fell on the Barbary Coast and the gas lamps were lit in the streets, illuminating another long orgy of intoxication, fornication and homicide.

The dance halls, concert saloons and gambling dives were open for business, already filled to the walls with sailors, miners, slack-jawed rubes from the hills, whores, pimps, robbers and cutthroats of all kinds. Everywhere could be seen licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, disease, insanity from bad liquor, dissipation, misery, grinding poverty, great wealth, profanity, blasphemy, death . . . and here and there pale-faced preachers, Bibles clutched to their breasts, warning the few who would listen that hell was yawning open to receive the whole putrid mess.

Into this maelstrom of sin that came easy but never cheap walked John Tone, his short-barreled Colt in a shoulder holster under his navy blue peacoat. Penman had told him that he was being paid to make himself a target, and he’d decided that anything was better than waiting in his room for another assassin to strike.

Pacific Street was crowded with humanity and few people paid Tone any attention, intent as they were on their own pleasures.

The alleys leading off the street were mysterious canyons of shadowed darkness, except those where the Chinese lived, which were bright with paper lanterns, teeming with male and female Celestials wearing gaudy red, yellow and blue silks.

Jostled by the crowds, Tone strolled along the street, his restless eyes everywhere, the weight of the Colt bringing him a measure of comfort. He passed a saloon where sailors were singing a popular waterfront song about the used-clothing dealer Solomon Levy.

After a couple of minutes Tone passed Levy’s store, conveniently located between Montgomery and Sansome streets, and open for business twenty-four hours a day. In front of Levy’s door were huge piles of worn blankets and old clothes and shoes, chained and pad-locked to large iron staples driven into the front of the building.

Every customer who bought a dollar’s worth of goods received from Levy’s own hand, with great ceremony, a card on which he’d painstakingly penned a composition of his own making:

My name is Solomon Levy,

And I own a clothing store

A way up on Pacific Street—

A hundred and fifty-four.

If you want to buy an overcoat,

A pair of pants or vest,

Step up to Solomon Levy,

And he’ll sell you all the best.

The sailors considered Levy’s verse first-rate poetry and they sang it to every tune they could bend to the words.

Beyond Levy’s store the crowd thinned a little, but there were more Chinese in evidence. Small men hurried past Tone, each carrying heavy burdens on the ends of a supple bamboo pole slung across a shoulder. Others balanced huge bundles of soiled clothing on their heads. None spared Tone a glance as they trotted past, chattering to each other in a language he could not understand.

Tone walked by another alley, this one dark, and his hand strayed to his gun. His instinct for danger clamoring a warning, he saw nothing. Then he heard a short, sharp scream from somewhere ahead of him. Here there were few streetlamps and the fog drifting in from the bay reduced their light to hazy blue and yellow orbs.

It had been a girl yelling out; he was sure of that. But women’s screams were heard often along the waterfront and he was inclined to walk away and let the whore and her pimp work things out for themselves.

Another little shriek, then a man’s harsh voice, followed by the hard crack of a backhanded slap. Tone sighed and walked toward the disturbance, cursing himself for being a meddling fool.

He was coming up on an alley, and he slid his Colt from the leather. As he stepped closer he saw black shadows move against the lesser darkness of the alley. Then he heard the man’s growl again.

“Get her on the ground, Clem. We’ll do her there. And rip them damn Chink pants off’n her and we’ll see what she’s got.”

On cat feet, Tone stepped into the alley. A man had his back turned to him and Tone tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said.

The man swung around, his face frozen in shocked surprise. Tone hammered the barrel of his Colt across the man’s nose, hearing bone break. Sudden blood streaming into his mouth, the man squealed and staggered back. Tone ignored him, aware of the second man jumping up from between the girl’s naked thighs. His pants and long johns were down around his ankles and he tripped, staggered a step and fell. Tone drew back his right foot, then kicked the man full in the face. The kick should have stopped him. But it didn’t. This would-be rapist was big and mean and full of fight.

He sprang to his feet, quickly stepped out of his pants, and a knife suddenly appeared in his right hand, held low and sharp blade uppermost for a slashing belly cut.

“Damn you.” He snarled. “I’ll gut you from balls to navel, I will.”

It was an English voice. Tone fired, fired again. Hit twice dead center of his chest, the Englishman groaned and sank to the ground, his right cheek scraping down the rough brick of the alley wall.

Tone looked down at him. “This was to be a gunfight, Englishman,” he said. “I’m real surprised you didn’t notice.”

The man with the broken nose got to his feet, cast a pained, terrified glance at Tone, lurched into the street and took off in a staggering run. Tone let him go.

As the dying man’s last breath rattled in his throat, Tone kneeled by the girl. She was very young, her black eyes huge and scared. Her legs were open and a small dark triangle pointed the way to the portal where all the mysteries of womanhood began.

He spoke to her, trying to make his voice calm and reassuring, but he knew the girl, a child really, did not understand a word he said.

After Tone helped the girl to her feet, she found a scrap of white handkerchief in a pocket of her pien-fu, the silk knee-length tunic worn by Chinese women along the waterfront. She carefully wiped off the top of her thighs, then grimaced in disgust and threw the handkerchief away. She pulled up her baggy silk pants and tied them at her waist and stepped to the two baskets suspended from a bamboo pole that she’d been carrying when she was attacked.

The baskets were filled with burlap sacks that leaked a black powder. Tone tested the stuff between his thumb and forefinger and nodded to himself.

He’d heard somewhere that Celestials were much given to fireworks of all kinds and the sacks contained the raw material for such displays, gunpowder.

The girl bent to pick up the pole, but Tone lifted it himself and hefted it on his shoulder. It was a balanced load but surprisingly heavy, too heavy for the slight girl who’d carried it.

He smiled. “Allow me to escort you home, ma’am.”

The blank look on the girl’s face told him she didn’t understand, but she walked out of the alley and turned left and Tone followed.

They passed Solomon Levy’s store, where a couple of drunk sailors were laughing and slapping each other on the back as they tried on silk top hats, and then the girl led the way into one of the Chinese alleys, ablaze with paper lanterns and gaslit shop fronts.

Tone’s nerves were stretched as taut as fiddle strings and what happened next came at him too fast, and for a moment he felt a surge of panic.

The girl threw herself into the arms of an older woman with a dark, deeply lined face, and began to shriek words between sobs. Immediately Tone was surrounded by a hostile crowd of Chinese men, some of them wielding wicked-looking knives, all of them yelling, their black eyes glittering with rage.

He took a step back, burdened by the bamboo pole on his shoulder. He had three rounds left in the Colt . . . three more men dead on the ground . . . then he’d be chopped to pieces.