Bounty Hunter

Chapter 37

The rain had swept Pacific Street clear of people, but every drinking den and dance hall was bursting at the seams. Six English clipper ships had come in during the week and were tied up at the docks, leaving their crews with time and money to spend.

A damp, patchy mist hung over the road, drifting in the wind. Rain ticked from the eaves of the waterfront buildings and formed wide puddles on the sidewalks that captured the blue light of the gas lamps.

The collar of his peacoat turned up around his ears, Tone stepped into Murder Alley, but it seemed that even the hardworking Chinese had taken refuge from the rain. The passageway was deserted and its tossing paper lanterns were shredding in the wind-driven downpour.

An old woman opened a door as Tone passed and he stopped and asked after Weimin. The woman shook her head, let go with a torrent of Chinese, then bent and shooed him away from her, as though she was chasing a trespassing rooster.

There were other alleys where brothels and opium dens prospered, and Tone resigned himself to trying each and every one of them.

After an hour, he was ready to give up. Weimin could be anywhere, even back in Chinatown, where it would be impossible to find him.

Irritated by a sense of failure, he retraced his steps along Pacific Street, head bent against the sheeting rain. A man stumbled from a saloon, spotted Tone and staggered directly toward him.

The man bumped into Tone and immediately launched into a string of apologies. “Sorry, Mister, real sorry. Sorry that. I didn’t watch where I was headed. . . .”

But his fluttering hands were in constant motion, now and then landing lightly on Tone’s chest and hips.

It was the oldest trick in the book, and Langford had once told him how to spot it, even from a distance. The dip’s plan was to keep the mark preoccupied with a fast string of patter while his searching hands picked his pocket.

Tone smiled, quickly reached down, grabbed the dip’s forefinger and bent it backward. The man squealed and his feet did a little jig on the wet cobbles.

“Does that hurt?” Tone asked.

“Yes! Yes! Damn you, it hurts! Let me go!”

“Sure,” Tone said. He bent the finger back until he heard bone snap.

The dip screamed and clutched at his mangled hand. Tone smiled. “Mister, I’m too old a cat to be played with by a kittlin’. Now get the hell out of here or I may take it into my head to break some more of your fingers.”

The man cast a single horrified glance at his tall assailant, then lurched back toward the saloon, groaning.

Tone’s smile grew as he watched the dip scamper. He didn’t like pickpockets. It had served the man right.

His mood considerably lightened, Tone walked along Pacific Street, his eyes searching everywhere, hoping to catch a glimpse of Weimin.

The Tong takeover of the waterfront was not apparent and every dive seemed to be doing business as usual. Drunken sailors lurched from saloon to brothel and back again, bold-eyed whores stood in doorways, welcoming customers, and gaunt, pale-faced addicts patronized the opium dens.

Most of the owners had capitulated easily, deciding that paying protection money to the Tong was better than being forced out of business.

The only holdout seemed to be Sprague, and Tone could spot his establishments easily. They were the ones with a half dozen Chinese boo how doy—hatchet men—standing outside their doors, discouraging customers from entering. Judging from the silence in Sprague’s saloons, not many had been willing to run that particular gauntlet.

The Tong takeover of the opium and slave trade was even less obvious, but Tone guessed that it was now completely under Chinese control.

He recalled what Langford had said about letting the Tong get rid of Sprague, then routing out the Chinese gangsters. He would have his hands full. The way it was now, with the Tong firmly entrenched along the waterfront, it would take a citywide fire or an earthquake to cleanse the Barbary Coast, and neither was likely to happen.

Tone made one last check of Murder Alley, saw no one, and stepped back to the street. With few people about, a movement to his right caught his eye. He turned and saw a man and a young woman walk into another alley about fifty yards away.

He wasn’t sure, but the small, frail-looking man in the long gray coat looked familiar.

Could it have been Luther Penman? With a whore, of all things?

An alarm bell rang in Tone’s head. A small, thin man in a gray coat . . . the eyewitness’s description of the Ripper.

Tone headed toward the alley, his heart thumping in his chest.

Was he about to walk in the tracks of a monster?

Fog had drifted into the alley and, sheltered from the wind, hung in the air like an empty shroud. There were no lights, no sound, only a vast quiet that so unnerved Tone he slowed his pace as he began to clothe every shadow in a coat of gray.

Alert for any noise, he walked to the end of the alley and stopped. There was no sign of Penman, if it had really been him, or the woman.

The cross lane was as he remembered it, the rear walls of Pacific Street buildings to his left, a collection of reeking outhouses and piles of debris of all kinds littering the ground. To his right were the tumbledown shacks of whores, saloon workers and tinhorn gamblers, all of them in darkness.

Tone glanced toward the far end of the lane. A light burned in a shack about a hundred yards away, the pale blue glow of a gas lamp. He walked in that direction, gun in hand.

Gravel crunched under his feet and the rain drove into his face and the darkness around him was inky black. A tiny calico cat glared at him from the shadows and hissed, arching its back, tail puffed in alarm.

Tone walked on, his mouth dry as bone.

There were no curtains in the windows of the shack. He stopped and stepped wide, where he could see inside the house. A woman stood in the middle of the floor and she lifted a small child, then turned her head and as though speaking to someone in another room. A man appeared at the doorway, said something in return, and walked out again.

Penman was not there.

A growing sense of frustration in him, Tone retraced his steps. He had just passed Murder Alley when he saw a window in a shack ahead of him casting a rectangle of lamplight on the wet ground.

There had been no light there a few minutes before. Tone quickened his pace. He was a few yards from the shack when a noise from inside made him pause . . . a loud cry followed by a long, sighing gasp.

Had it been an outburst of passion—or a shriek of pain?

Tone didn’t wait to figure out the answer. He ran for the door of the shack.

The door was locked, but he put his shoulder to it hard and it burst inward, its frail timber splintering.

The room and what it contained hurtled toward Tone, as though he was seeing it from the cab of a speeding locomotive . . . fleeting, vivid, scarlet and white impressions that took time to register on his overwhelmed brain.

A naked woman propped again the wall, slashed wide-open like a gutted deer . . . the woman’s crimson-painted mouth agape in her last, frantic scream of agony . . . Luther Penman, bloodied knife in hand, staring at Tone with demented eyes . . . Penman snarling, like a wild beast at bay . . . then . . .

“Wait, Tone, it’s not what you think. I was passing by and—”

Suddenly a gun in Penman’s hand . . . a shot . . . beside Tone the gas lamp shattered and went out. . . .

Tone fired, fired again, flashes of harsh orange light slamming into the darkness.

The back door crashed open, then slammed shut. . . . The sound of running feet . . .

Taking a moment to turn off the hissing gas, Tone went after Penman, sprinting into the open ground behind the shack. Where was the man?

A bullet split the air beside Tone’s right ear. He saw the flare of the gun and fired in that direction. Then he was running again, stumbling around in the littered gloom.

Ahead of him rose the ominous black bulks of several tall warehouses and scattered outbuildings, including one with the sawdust smell of a carpenter’s workshop. Beyond the buildings to his right lay Mansion Avenue, its streetlamps winking in the distance, and to his left the back of the waterfront dives.

Gunshots were not rare in this neighborhood, and nobody was paying any attention.

Tone stepped warily, his restless eyes searching the darkness. From somewhere in front of him, a bottle clinked. He stopped. “Penman, you son of a bitch, show yourself!” he yelled. “You’re heeled, so let’s have this out.”

A strange laugh floated into the night like black gossamer. “Everything is going to shit, Mr. Tone. But Jolly Jack is still having fun. If you want me, come looking.” A pause, then, “Be circumspect, now. I’m pretty good with a revolver.”

Stepping toward the sound of the man’s voice, Tone banged his knee on a rusted plate of sheet iron and bent to rub it, cursing.

The stooping motion saved his life.

A bullet whipped through the air where his head had been a moment earlier.

“Did I get you, Mr. Tone?” Penman cackled. “Are you dead, dead, dead, like the filthy whore back there?”

Tone made no answer, crouched behind the plate, probably part of an old ship’s hull, and waited for Penman to show himself.

“She smelled, Mr. Tone, like a perfumed fish.” A pause, then, “Jaunty Jack still thinks all women are dirty, Mr. Tone, and that their only real purpose is to breed pretty boys.” Another moment passed. “Are you dead, Mr. Tone? I’m quite the gentleman, you see, and I shouldn’t be talking to the corpse of a low person like you.”

Tone made some quick calculations. The warehouses would stop his bullets from reaching the street and he had a fair idea of where Penman was located. It was now or never.

He drew his second revolver, stood up and cut loose. He hammered his guns dry, a rolling thunder that lasted only a couple of seconds. Wreathed in smoke, he waited, listening into the darkness.

A few moments ticked past . . . then came the hollow clap of mocking applause.

“Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah nah! You didn’t even come close, Mr. Tone!”

“Penman!” Tone roared, his anger a fearsome thing. “I’m going to tear you apart.”

He ran in the lawyer’s direction, cursing through teeth clenched in an ungovernable fury . . . and he charged into emptiness.

Luther Penman was gone.

John Tone searched the darkness for thirty minutes before he finally admitted to himself that Penman had made a clean getaway.

He returned to the shack and established that all was as it had been before, only now there was a haunting quiet that only the presence of the noiseless dead can bring to a house.