The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 52

“When El Niño and I reached Mr. Wooley’s stables, we found the liveryman up and sending Mrs. Hastings and Marcus off in the specially padded rig (he’d put a feather mattress in the bed) what the Doctor’d ordered. We waited for the man to go back into his house, figuring he would never have agreed to hire one of his animals out to a pair like us; then we shot over to the barn, where I made short work of a big but simple padlock with the set of picks in my pocket. Once inside, I looked around for the little Morgan what I knew to be such a strong, reliable animal; finding him, I told El Niño to get a bridle and saddle ready, while I scrounged around in an old desk by the door for a pencil and a scrap of paper. I wrote out a note explaining where Mr. Wooley could locate his animal-at the Troy train station-and then folded the note up with more than enough cash to cover the “loan.”

By the time I was finished, El Niño had the horse ready to ride; and as it turned out that he’d done some time with a band of horse-riding raiders in French Indochina, I helped him shorten the stirrups and then let him take the front of the saddle and the reins, while I got behind and grabbed on to his shoulders. Moving at a quiet walk out past Mr. Wooley’s house, we picked up a little speed as we trotted toward the southeast edge of town; and once on the Malta road, the aborigine turned the Morgan loose, so that we began to fly along at a pace what was both jarring and reassuring.

It was better than twenty miles to Troy, but that little Morgan-though loaded down with two riders-made short work of it, as I’d expected and hoped he would. Less encouraging was the news we received at the station: we’d missed the last passenger train to New York for the night, and we wouldn’t be able to secure seats on another until six P.M.But there was a West Shore Railroad freight train due through in another twenty minutes; and so, leaving our trusted mount behind, the aborigine and I made our way to the edge of the station yard, where we waited to hop aboard one of the boxcars of the train as it slowed to pass through the city. This arrangement, though less comfortable and picturesque than a ride in a passenger car (the West Shore traveled on inland tracks as far south as Poughkeepsie), turned out to be far better suited to our purposes, being as the freighter only made a few stops on its journey south; and though its final destination was Weehawken, New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan, there was a ferry line based in that town, one whose boats ran all night across the water to Franklin Street, which was only some twenty-five blocks south of the Dusters’ headquarters on Hudson Street.

None of which made the trip any easier on our spirits. For the first part of the train journey El Niño just sat in the open doorway of our box car, staring at the black countryside what was passing around us. Sometimes he looked like the hate he now felt for Libby Hatch had turned him to stone; other times his face softened and he wept quietly into his hands or knocked his head against the wooden doorway. Nothing I found to say consoled him, though I’ll admit my efforts weren’t the most determined; besides still being nearly heartbroken myself over what’d happened to Mr. Picton, I was far too worried about Kat to make any claim that things would all turn out all right in the end. And so when the west bank of the Hudson came back into view below Poughkeepsie, I just sat beside the aborigine and took to staring out at the river, trying but failing not to calculate how much blood Mr. Picton must’ve lost in the long minutes he’d lay there alone on the basement floor of the court house or how fast Libby Hatch might’ve gotten out of Ballston Spa.

That Libby’d arrive in New York considerably ahead of us was a given; the only question was what she would do when she got there. Was her main concern now getting rid of all traces of Ana Linares, securing what money she could from Goo Goo Knox, and then heading out of the state, probably to the West, where wanted criminals could and often did disappear into new lives under assumed names? Such would’ve been the most logical set of moves, but nobody’d ever accused Libby Hatch of being logical. Clever and devious, yes, to a point what sometimes made her look brilliant; but at bottom her actions-her whole life-were deathly nonsensical, and I knew that if I was going to predict her next steps I’d have to think like the Doctor, instead of drawing on my lifelong experience with criminals whose goals were more practical.

As we crossed into New Jersey and dawn started to turn the sky a strange, glowing blue I put my mind to this task and came up with only one consideration what I figured was cause for hope: with all that she’d been through upstate, with all that’d been discovered and revealed about her life of murder and destruction, Libby’s desire and even need to keep Ana alive-to nurture her as a way of proving that she could, finally, care properly for a child-would be increased. She’d try to escape the city, there was no question about that; but I figured she’d make the attempt with the baby, and so long as she didn’t try to do Ana any harm, there wouldn’t be any cause for Kat to try to step in and maybe get herself killed. This reasoning was, I told myself, sound; and I clung to it as tightly as our train hugged the inner side of the Palisades on its way into Weehawken.

El Niño and I jumped off the train as soon as it came within sight of the Weehawken yard, then ran full out for the ferry station, still not exchanging a word. More and more the aborigine was becoming all business: having rested his hopes for a new life on Mr. Picton, he was determined to have his revenge, an act what, it seemed, was very important in the part of the world where he came from. All the way across the Hudson on the ferry he took to sharpening his arrows and knife and readying his short bow, along with mixing ingredients from a few small pouches into a small wooden vial what held a sticky, gluelike substance. This, I figured, was the poison what he used to coat the tips of his missiles, and I could only guess that he was tampering with the mixture to make it more deadly than it’d been on any of the occasions when I’d seen him use it. So dark and determined did his face become as he went about this process that I began to feel that I needed to get a few things straight with him.

“El Niño,” I said, “nobody knows better than me how you feel. But our first worry is making sure that we get Ana and Kat out alive, right?” The aborigine just nodded slowly as he dipped the points of his arrows into the wooden vial. “And you know what the rest of them-the Doctor and Miss Howard and the others-would say about what comes after, don’t you? They’d say that if we get the chance, we should take Libby Hatch alive and hold her for trial.”

“She has had her trial,” El Niño mumbled back. “Because of the trial she almost went free. I know that the others believe this, Señorito Stevie…” Tucking his last arrow carefully inside his jacket, he looked me dead in the eye. “But do you?”

I just shook my head. “I’m telling you what they’d say. Once we’re sure Kat and the baby are okay, what you do is your business, so far as I’m concerned.”

He nodded, looking toward the Franklin Street ferry station as it began to loom up large before us. “Yes. You and I understand these things…”

There wasn’t any other way to handle it. If I’d tried to stop El Niño from doing what he believed he had to, I’d’ve only ended up at odds with him; besides, I wasn’t at all sure that his way wasn’t best. Libby Hatch was like a snake, one what seemed able to squirm or kill her way out of any predicament she found herself in; and I couldn’t imagine anybody better suited to deal with such a strange, deadly serpent than the little man from across the seas what was sitting next to me.

New York City is never uglier than at daybreak, and it never smells worse than during the month of August: both of these facts were more than demonstrated that morning as we sloshed and bumped our way into the Franklin Street ferry terminal. Sure, in the distance we could see all the sights what gave suckers from out of town such a jolt-the Western Union Building, the towers of Printing House Square, the steeple of Trinity Church-but none of it made up for the stench of rotting garbage and filthy water what infested the waterfront, or for the sight of those miserable, dirty blocks what lay beyond the ferry station. Of course, the mood what my companion and I were in when we arrived didn’t help our impression of the city any; after a night as horrifying-and sleepless-as ours’d been, there wasn’t much of a way any town could’ve looked good. The only thing I could be grateful for was that the mission we were on left little or no time for letting the miserable feeling of being back among the dirt and dangers of the metropolis get to us: as soon as we were ashore, we began to run the mile or so to our destination, never once thinking about taking a hansom.

The first order of business, pretty obviously, was to try to get some kind of an idea of what was going on inside the Dusters’ place. At that early hour of the morning the joint would likely be pretty dead (though you never could be sure, given that the Dusters were all burny fiends, and such people, when they do sleep, tend to do so at odd hours), so I thought our smartest move was to get ourselves hidden someplace where we could keep an eye on the comings and goings around the building. This would be easiest to do from a rooftop across Hudson Street: there wouldn’t be many street corners or such where we could lurk in broad daylight without getting spotted by some member of the gang. Working our way up through the warehouses, trade stores, and boarding-houses of Hudson Street, then past little St. Luke’s Chapel (the same route, I noted, what Cyrus, the detective sergeants and I’d driven the first night of the case), we eventually reached the heart of Duster country, making sure to cut over west of Hudson Street itself as we approached the gang’s headquarters. Coming back around on Horatio Street, El Niño and I picked a likely building on the west side of Hudson that would give us a good view of what was happening in and around the gang’s filthy but fashionable dive; then we got into the building’s backyard by way of an old loading alley. I picked the lock of the back door, and in a few minutes we’d made it up onto the rooftop, where we quickly moved over to crouch down behind the little wall what rose up at the front of the thing.

It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, and the only signs of life at the Dusters’ were a few slummers leaving the place. These well-dressed types were obviously wound up on burny and hadn’t yet gotten their fill of rolling around in the muck of the gang’s violent, earthy life: but the big Duster who was pushing them out made it pretty clear that the “hosts” themselves’d had enough of entertaining such people and wanted some rest. This was good news for us, as it provided some time to figure how we were going to get a message inside to Kat and find out if Libby Hatch was in fact in the place. Obviously, I couldn’t go in and start asking questions; and if El Niño tried there was always the chance that Libby would catch sight of him provided she was there. The quickest way to attend to the problem seemed to be for me to head down to Frankie’s joint and find Kat’s pal Betty: she could enter the Dusters’ without much trouble and get the lay of things. El Niño, in the meantime, would stay on the rooftop, and if Libby Hatch appeared and tried to make good her escape, he’d set himself to following, making a move against her only if he could be sure of getting Ana Linares away safely.

So it was back down onto the street for me, where I hailed the first hansom what came into sight. The driver of the rig was just starting his day after retrieving his horse from a stable a couple of blocks away, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get him to drive to Frankie’s place on Worth Street for any amount of money. It wasn’t a neighborhood what cabbies operated in, unless they were looking to get robbed and probably killed; so I directed the mug to the nearest destination I could think of what I figured he’d be willing to take on: old Boss Tweed’s court house just north of City Hall. The court house wasn’t but a few blocks from Frankie’s (though those few might as well have been fifty, considering the change in scenery what took over as you traveled them), but I’d managed to time my trip just so’s it collided with the morning rush: I gave the cabbie every tip I knew about taking side streets and staying off the main routes, but it still took a frustrating amount of time to get downtown.

Morning was never a happy time to find yourself entering a joint like Frankie’s, and that day was no exception. It being summer, there were kids lying “asleep”-or, to put it plain, hammered unconscious by the foul brew what Frankie served up at his bar-all over the street outside; and them what were awake were busy throwing up into the gutter and moaning like they were ready to die. Stepping over bodies and every kind of human waste as I made my way down into the dive, I was at least relieved to hear that all was quiet in the dog-and-rat pit; in fact, there wasn’t a soul awake inside the joint except the bartender, a tough-looking Italian kid of about fifteen with a very nasty scar along the side of his face, one what seemed to glow angrily even in the darkness of that black, dirty hole.

I asked him if Frankie was around, only to be told that “the boss” was asleep in one of the back rooms-with, as my luck would have it, Betty. I told the barkeep I needed to have a few words with Betty, to which the kid just shook his head, saying that Frankie’d left word he didn’t want anybody disturbing either of them. Knowing I couldn’t let this stand in my way, I started to carefully let my eyes drift around the room, studying the kids and trying to figure out if one of them was carrying a sap of some kind. There was one boy toward the back of the room-he couldn’t’ve been more than ten-who had a telltale leather handle hanging out of his pants pocket; and being as he was lying with his head on a table in a pool of his own vomit, I didn’t figure as he’d give me much of a hard time about borrowing his weapon. So I just made straight for the little doorway what led to the “bedrooms” in the back, with the bartender moving fast behind me and starting to curse. But I got to the sleeping kid’s sap before the bartender got to me, and in about three seconds my pursuer had a nice lump on his head to go with the scar on his face, and was lying on the floor.

A quick check of the back rooms revealed that Frankie and Betty were out cold in one of the last little pens, and I got the girl up and dragged her out to the bar, where I managed to find some water to splash on her face. She produced a three-inch knife pretty quick, at that, having no idea what in the hell was going on; and it was only quick wits and quicker reflexes what prevented me from getting the blade in my gut. Once she saw it was me she put the knife away, though her mood didn’t improve much; but when I told her what the situation was regarding Kat she tried hard to get herself pulled together, and then agreed to come with me and be part of our plan-after, of course, I offered her a few bucks. Friendship was friendship, for a girl like that, but money was also money, and if there was a chance to combine the two, well, there wasn’t anybody what would’ve criticized her for it.

Walking as quick as Betty could manage, we got back over to the Tweed court house, hailed another hansom, and headed back up to Hudson Street: “Hudson Street Hospital,” was what I told the driver, again to make him feel more secure about the ride. The hospital was close to the Dusters’ joint, and by the time we reached the little medical facility Betty had managed to get herself more alert by blowing some burny what she had in her ratty little bag. I didn’t even try to lecture her or stop her-my lookout was Kat, just then-but it wasn’t ever what you’d call a heartening thing to see a girl so young beating her body up with that vicious white powder, especially in the morning. Still, it helped her face the idea of going into the Dusters’ with a little more courage, so that by the time I left her and raced back up onto the rooftop where El Niño was still positioned, I had good reason to think that the plan would be successful.

This outlook was reinforced when the aborigine reported that he had, in fact, laid eyes on Libby Hatch: she’d appeared very briefly just after I left, to flag down a passing milk wagon. She hadn’t looked any too pleased about being up and attending to what were pretty obviously baby Ana’s needs at that early hour, but the fact that she’d headed back inside seemed to indicate that, at least for the moment, she wasn’t contemplating any drastic move. Not that there was any real reason for her to yet: she knew that it would take time for the Doctor and the others to catch up with her, and that even when they did they’d have to relate what’d happened to the cops and then convince somebody at headquarters on Mulberry Street to raid the Dusters’ headquarters: not the kind of thing any cop or squad of cops in their right minds were likely to undertake without one hell of a lot of persuading. But just knowing where the woman and the baby were was cause for some satisfaction.

Less encouraging was the fact that Betty came back out of the Dusters’ in just fifteen minutes, looking confused, disappointed-and not a little concerned. I whistled to her from our high perch, then directed her to meet me around the corner, at the mouth of the trucking alley. There she told me a story what was peculiar, to say the least: Libby Hatch had arrived at the Dusters’ at just past three that morning, and had immediately locked herself away in Goo Goo Knox’s chamber with Ana Linares. Kat, true to her word to Mr. Moore, had right away gone upstairs, and talked her way into Knox’s room by asking Goo Goo if she could be any help with the baby. But Libby’d remembered only too well that Kat was a friend of mine, and she’d flown into a rage, saying that Kat was a spy whose real purpose was to steal Ana away and bring the law after her. Now, Goo Goo would ordinarily have solved this problem by having Kat taken over to the river, killed, and thrown in; but at that point Ding Dong-as much, I figured, out of a desire to save face in the gang as out of any true concern for Kat-had stepped in, saying that nobody was going to do away with one of his girls without his say-so. Knox and Ding Dong had then gotten into a hell of a scrape, one what’d apparently been very entertaining to all those slummers we’d seen. At first Kat’d joined in the fight, trying to defend Ding Dong; but after about half an hour Libby herself, with that unpredictability what we’d all come to know so well (and what usually didn’t indicate anything good), had put a stop to the battle by saying that she’d be satisfied if Kat would just get out of the joint. This Kat’d done, removing herself exactly as far as the nearest corner. I figured this meant that Kat’d intended to keep right on watching things from outside the place, so’s she’d be able to tell whichever of our party came back to the city first (she’d have been able to figure out that we wouldn’t be far behind Libby) where our adversary’d got to, if she’d left the building, and whether or not she still had the baby with her.

But then, for some reason what nobody inside the dive could figure, Kat’d suddenly disappeared, not long before El Niño and I’d arrived on the scene. Betty’d tried to find out if anybody had any idea where she might’ve gone; she even went so far as to have a conversation with Ding Dong, who, while nursing his bruises and cuts, said he didn’t much know nor care where “the little hellcat” was. Kat’s sudden disappearance was the most disturbing part of the story, being as, though she was at least safely out of Libby Hatch’s direct reach, there was every chance Knox’d found out that she was lurking around and had dispatched somebody to take care of her. On top of that, if Kat’d been safe, there were only a few joints where she probably would’ve gone, and Frankie’s was at the top of that very short list. Obviously, she hadn’t turned up there. On the other hand, it was August, and though the hot, heavy sky had been threatening a thunderstorm all morning, it hadn’t broken yet-Kat could’ve been hiding out in any of the city’s parks or the dozens of other outdoor havens what were available to kids on the run during the warm months. So, since things were quiet inside the Dusters’ for the time being, I decided to assume that Kat was okay and lying low somewhere: I’d make a quick round of some of the more obvious hiding spots downtown, and then check with those acquaintances of mine-including Hickie the Hun-who might’ve already seen her, or could reasonably be expected to catch sight of her during the day.

I gave Betty the telephone number of the Doctor’s house before letting her go back to Frankie’s, and made her promise to call and keep calling if Kat should turn up. Then I went back up onto the rooftop to tell El Niño what my plan was. I knew he’d want to stay right where he was and keep watching the Dusters’, just in case Libby did make a move, so I also gave him the Doctor’s telephone number, though I warned him that I wasn’t likely to show up at the house for at least another hour or two. But in the event that Libby did get out and get moving, I told him to stay close to her and to keep trying to report. Then, figuring that the aborigine was broke, I handed over half of the cash what Mr. Moore’d given me, and finally started out on my search.

The first and most nerve-racking part of this job was a quick trip over to the Hudson waterfront to see if anybody’d noticed a struggle going on that morning or if any bodies’d been spotted in the water. I talked to a few gangs of longshoremen as I worked my way down as far as the Cunard pier, but none of them’d heard of any trouble. I even ran into my old pal Nosy, who was, as usual, poking around in the midst of all the early morning debarking and unloading what was going on, and he likewise said he hadn’t seen Kat nor heard about any violence on the waterfront. This news, like the information I’d gotten from Betty, had the effect of both reassuring me and making me even more nervous about where Kat could’ve gone or what she might be doing. More than anything else, one question stuck in my head: Why had Libby Hatch been willing to let Kat walk away, instead of insisting that she share the fate what’d befallen the poor, dumb guard Henry, and maybe Mr. Picton, too? Of all Libby’s many complicated characteristics, mercy didn’t seem one what made an appearance all that often, especially not where her own safety and schemes were concerned. Why had she let Kat go?

Working my way downtown and through my old neighborhood, stopping in at half a dozen other kid dives what weren’t much different from Frankie’s, I continued to find no trace of Kat. Hickie was over at the Fulton Fish Market, cramming a morning swim in before the coming storm unloaded on the city, and he told me that he’d been working a string of houses on the West Side with a collection of our old pals the night before. They hadn’t made their way home ’til early in the morning, and they’d stopped off for a few pails of beer at a dive on Bleecker Street on their way. But he, too, hadn’t seen or heard anything of Kat, a fact what seemed to be cause for hope: if something had happened to her, word would’ve gotten around our circuit pretty fast. But where in the hell was the girl?

Another swing past Frankie’s (where the Italian kid I’d laid out was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen) finally gave me the beginnings of an answer: when Betty’d gotten back from giving me a hand at the Dusters’, she’d found Kat waiting for her. Kat had, it seemed, been feeling very poorly, which was why she’d left off watching the Dusters’ place: a severe pain in her stomach and gut had struck her, a mysterious ailment what neither she nor Betty could identify or ease. On hearing that I was back in town, Kat’d decided to head on up to the Doctor’s house and wait for me, since, as she’d told Betty, I could lay hands on some medicine what was especially useful for the kind of trouble she was in (meaning the Doctor’s supply of paregoric). Betty’d wanted to go with Kat, who was starting to vomit pretty violently by the time she left; but Frankie was still angry at her for leaving that morning, and so Kat’d had to set out on her own, and was probably at Seventeenth Street now.

I ran back over toward City Hall Park to hire a cab, picturing in my mind Kat all huddled up where she’d hidden once before, in among the hedges what ran along the border of the Doctor’s front yard. She’d looked pretty awful then, and what with Betty’s strange report I didn’t expect her to appear much better when I found her this time: her sudden exit from the Dusters’ probably indicated another lack of burny, from which she was now feeling the effects. We’d have to repeat the treatment what’d helped her the last time around, though it would cost me another lecture from the Doctor; but at least I’d be able to help her once I got her into the house.

I found her just where I’d figured to, balled up like a newborn kitten in among the greenery to the side of the front yard, wearing the dress she always did in summer: an old, light job that showed off the curves what were still forming in her young body. She was asleep, clutching her bag tight to her stomach and breathing in quick little gasps. There were a couple of pools of vomit-really not much more than bile, given that she’d been retching for so long-lying on the ground behind her curled back, and her face was the color of old ashes. Big charcoal-colored circles had formed under her eyes, and as I took her hand I noted that her fingernails were starting to turn a strange and disturbing sort of color, like they’d been stepped on.

Even I could see that she was much sicker than she’d been last time.

As I wiped a few sweat-drenched strands of blond hair out of Kat’s face, I noted that her skin was strangely cool to the touch; and when I tried to get her to wake up, it took a good minute of gently slapping her palms and calling her name to do the job. As soon as she started to come around she grabbed at her gut especially hard, then retched again, bringing up nothing at all this time. Her head swaying as I helped her to sit up, she seemed to have trouble focusing her blue eyes.

“Stevie…” she breathed, falling against my chest. “Oh, God, I’ve got a awful pain in my gut…”

“I know,” I said, trying to pull her up so’s I could get her inside. “Betty told me. How long you been without the burny, Kat?”

She shook her head as much as she could, which wasn’t but a little. “It ain’t that. I’ve got a whole tin of the stuff, and I been blowing it all morning. This is something else…” As she stood up, the pain in her midsection seemed to ease a little bit, and she looked up to really see my face for the first time. “Well,” she whispered, with a small smile, “I ain’t generally at my best when we see each other, am I?”

I smiled back at her as best I could, and brushed some more hair out of her face. “You’ll be fine. Just got to get you inside and fixed up.”

She tightened her grip on my shirt, looking very worried and maybe a little ashamed. “I tried, Stevie-I told your friend Mr. Moore I’d look out for the kid, and I really did try, but the pain got so bad-”

“It’s okay, Kat,” I said, holding on to her tighter. “You done good-we got somebody else watching the place now. Somebody Libby won’t be able to get away from.”

“Yeah, but will he be able to get away from her, Stevie?” Kat said hoarsely.

“Won’t need to,” I answered. “This mug’s different, Kat-he can match her play for play.”

Nodding and then stumbling a little as I pulled her toward the front door, Kat tried to swallow: an action what appeared to give her a lot of difficulty. “He must be good, then,” she said, coughing some. “ ’Cause I’ll tell you, Stevie-that woman is the end of the damned world…”

Taking out my key, I opened the front door and guided Kat into the warm, stale air of the house. Just as soon as we’d reached the bottom of the staircase, she doubled over again, vomiting up some yellow bile and then screaming once in agony. But the shrieking itself seemed to call for more strength than she had, and as she fell out of my arms to sit on one of the stairs she just began to weep quietly.

“Stevie,” she managed to say, as I sat next to her and held her tight, “I know you ain’t supposed to, and I don’t want you to get in no trouble-”

I’d forgotten all about the paregoric. “Right,” I said, leaning her against the stairway wall and then standing up to head for the Doctor’s consulting room. “You wait here, I’ll get the stuff.”

As I tried to move down the hall, I felt her clinging to one of my hands, like if she let go I might never come back. Turning around, I saw tears still streaming down her terribly pale face. She was staring at me in a way what sort of seemed like she’d never really seen me before. “I ain’t never deserved your being so good to me,” she whispered; and something in the words made me rush back to her for a second and hold her as tight as I thought she could stand.

“You pipe down with that,” I said, trying hard to keep my own eyes dry. Maybe it was the long night catching up with me; maybe it was the awful thing what had happened to Mr. Picton; and maybe it was fearful joy at hearing her actually admit to some kind of a deep and pure connection between us at a moment when she was in such desperate pain; whatever the explanation, the thought of losing her just then was the worst thing I could imagine. “You’re gonna be fine,” I went on, drying her face with my sleeve and looking deep into those blue eyes. “We got through this once, didn’t we? And we will again. But this time,” I added with a smile, “after we do, I’m putting you on the damned train myself-and you are getting out of this town.”

She nodded once, then looked down. “Maybe-maybe you’ll come with me, even, hunh?” she said.

Having no idea at all what I was saying, I just whispered, “Yeah. Maybe.”

Looking a little ashamed, Kat mumbled, “I never meant to go back to him, Stevie. But I didn’t hear nothing from my aunt, and I didn’t know what to-”

“Forget that,” I said. “All we gotta worry about right now’s getting you better.”

And then I bolted off into the Doctor’s consulting room to fetch the big bottle of paregoric, what I proceeded to liberally dose Kat with. She didn’t complain at all about the taste, knowing the good effect it’d had on her cramping the last time around; but her problem with swallowing only seemed to be getting worse, and it wasn’t easy for her to get the stuff down. Once she had, though, it appeared to take hold of her pretty quick, easing her pain up enough so that she could stand back up, put one arm around my neck, and start moving up the stairs. But the effect turned out to be temporary: we’d only gotten to the third floor of the house before she doubled over and screamed again, this time in a way what made me afraid to move her much farther. We were just outside the door to the Doctor’s bedroom, and I decided the best thing would be to take her in and get her laid down on his big four-poster bed.

“No!” Kat gasped, as I half carried her along. “No, Stevie, I can’t! It’s his bed, he’ll skin you!”

“Kat,” I answered, laying her out on top of the thin, deep blue spread what covered the bed, “how many times you gotta be wrong about the man before you get it? He ain’t that way.” As her head sank into the Doctor’s big mountain of soft goose-down pillows, I glanced around the room for something to cover her with, eventually catching sight of a comforter covered in green-and-silver Chinese satin what was folded up on a divan by the window. “Here,” I said, spreading the thing over her. “You got to keep warm and let the medicine go to work.”

Even with all her pain, Kat managed to pull the comforter up so’s she could rub the satin against her cheek. “He’s got nice things,” she mumbled. “Genuine satin-hot as the air gets, it still stays so cool… How come that is, Stevie?”

I crouched down on my knees next to the bed and touched her forehead, smiling. “I don’t know. Them Chinamen got tricks.” She winced once more, and I held up the paregoric bottle. “You wanna see if you can get some more down?”

“Yeah,” she said; but, try as she might, she just couldn’t swallow more than a little of the stuff, and finally she gave up trying. Writhing around with her hands on her stomach, she cried out again, then started to gnash her teeth in a frightful way.

It was beginning to occur to me that this might not be something what was going to pass with a dose of paregoric; and so, telling Kat to try to hold on, I ran into the Doctor’s study and opened his book of addresses and telephone numbers, eventually finding the listing for Dr. Osborne, a good-hearted colleague of the Doctor’s what I knew lived nearby, and who’d often done us good turns when somebody in the house was hurt or sick. Racing down to the telephone outside the kitchen, I got hold of an operator and had her connect me; but the maid at Dr. Osborne’s said that he’d gone off to do his rounds at St. Luke’s Hospital and wasn’t expected back for a couple of hours. I told the woman to have him telephone as soon as he returned, and then I went back up to the bedroom again. Breathing a big sigh of a relief when I saw that Kat’s painful spasms seemed to have passed, at least for the moment, I went to kneel by the bed again, and took her cold left hand in both of mine.

She turned her head over and smiled at me. “I heard you down there. Trying to get me a doctor…”

“He’ll come in a little bit,” I answered with a nod. Then I joked quietly, “Figure you can make it that long?”

Kat nodded. “I’ll make it a lot longer than that, Stevie Taggert,” she whispered, still smiling. “You watch.” Glancing around the room, Kat took in a deep, sudden breath. “I ain’t never had a doctor tend to me. And I sure ain’t never had no satin comforter. Feels nice…” Then she lost the smile, and for a minute I got scared that the pain was coming back; but it was only curiosity that filled her face. “Stevie-one thing I never asked you…”

“Yeah, Kat?”

“How come? I mean, you looking out for me all this time?”

I gripped her hand tighter. “That don’t sound like the girl with the big plans what I know,” I said. “How can I expect you to hire me as a servant if I ain’t nice to you now?”

She picked up her right hand and weakly slapped at my arm. “I’m serious,” she said. “Why, Stevie?”

“Ask Dr. Kreizler when he gets here. He’s full of explanations.”

“I’m askin’ you. Why?”

I just shook my head and shrugged a little bit, then turned my face down to look at her hand. “ ’Cause. I care about you, that’s why.”

“Maybe,” she breathed, “maybe you even love me some, hunh?”

I shrugged again. “Yeah. Maybe I even do.”

I looked up when she put a finger gently to my face. “Well,” she said, her mouth playing at a frown but then smiling gently, “it ain’t gonna kill you to say it, you know…” Then she turned toward the window, her blue eyes catching the gray light of the cloud-filled sky. “So Stevie Taggert loves me, maybe,” she whispered, in what you might call amazement. “What do you know about that …?”

The windows shook a little as the storm’s first clap of thunder finally boomed over the city. Kat didn’t seem to hear it, though; with those last words she’d drifted off to sleep, a sign, I figured, that the paregoric had finally taken real hold. Keeping my two hands on her one, tight enough to feel the blood pulsing through her wrist, I lay my head down on the satin comforter and waited for Dr. Osborne to call…

But what woke me wasn’t the telephone. It was the gentle but firm touch of Dr. Kreizler, prying my fingers off of Kat’s dead hand.