The Bags of Tricks Affair

23 Quincannon

D. S. Nickerson made a strangled-chicken sound, his eyes crossed and bulging as he stared at the gun barrel tickling his nose. His moon face had gone as white as clabbered milk.

“Answer my question, Nickerson, and be quick about it. Where’s Gaunt?”

“I... I... I... I...”

“Where, damn you!”

“I... I... don’t know...”

Quincannon marched him backward into what was evidently his private office, shoved him into a desk chair, and then loomed over him with the Navy now pointed a half inch from his chin. “No more lies, blast you, and no more evasions. My partner has disappeared and Gaunt is surely responsible. I have no qualms about shooting him and none about shooting you or anyone else who aided and abetted him.”

Nickerson swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork on a string. “I’m not... not l-lying,” he stammered. “I’d t-tell you if I knew where he went, but I don’t, I s-swear I don’t! Please, you have to believe me—!”

“When did you last see him?”

“S-Saturday morning.”

“Where?”

“Here, when he returned my equipage.”

“What equipage?”

“Brougham. My... brougham.”

“You gave him the use of it? When?”

“Friday afternoon.”

“What did he want it for?”

“He wouldn’t say. Wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“And I suppose you handed it over to him for old time’s sake.”

“N-no, it wasn’t like that.” Nickerson swallowed again. He couldn’t seem to take his widened eyes off the Navy’s barrel, his expression that of a man gawping at a poisonous snake about to strike.

“Paid you for its use?”

“No. I... I had to do what he asked. I had no choice.”

“He threatened you?”

“Yes. Yes.” Now it was Nickerson’s head that bobbed up and down. His terrified stammer had abated; words came rushing out of him in a torrent. “He said he’d ruin me... kill me if I didn’t help him and keep my mouth shut afterward. He meant it, he’s... I think he must be insane. I was a fool to ever become involved with him. I couldn’t believe it when he showed up here, the first time I’d set eyes on him in five years. I thought I was free of him when I left New Orleans. I... I don’t know how he found out I came to San Francisco, he wouldn’t tell me that, either...”

“Did he say anything about his sister, Lady One-Eye?”

“No. I asked about her... news of her arrest in Grass Valley for shooting her husband was in the local papers, your name and your partner’s, too... but he told me to mind my own business.”

“Use of your brougham wasn’t all he wanted. What else?”

“One of my... my holdings.”

“Property holdings? Which one? Where?”

“He had no particular one in mind and he didn’t care where it was, just that it be isolated and have an empty building on it.”

“And you had such a property.”

“An old repair shop for boats in the oyster trade,” Nickerson said, “abandoned when the owner died. A white elephant I acquired for a paltry sum at a tax sale two years ago. Not a single prospective buyer since, despite my low asking price—”

“Located where?”

“The South Basin marshes. Gaunt made me drive him down there to look at it inside and out on Friday morning.”

“What condition is it in?”

“Good enough, for a derelict building. Gaunt was satisfied with it. He demanded the key to the padlock, then warned me to take the property off the market and keep it off, and to never set foot on it again. I... didn’t ask him why he wanted it. I didn’t want to know.”

“No, of course you didn’t.” But Quincannon knew, and the thought chilled him to the marrow. An abandoned boat repair shop on the marshland at the south end of the city. Isolated, freezing cold even in the daytime, no doubt rat infested. Dear sweet Jesus! “Exactly where is it located?” he demanded. “You must have a map. Point it out to me.”

Nickerson’s eyes were still on the Navy. Quincannon lowered the weapon, but kept it on full cock. The land agent pushed himself to his feet, went shakily to a draftsman’s cabinet on the wall behind the desk. From one of its deep drawers he found and extracted a map, laid it out on the desk, then backed away to give Quincannon plenty of room to examine it.

There were three marks on the South Basin side of the point, above the outermost jut of land. Quincannon knew the area, an isolated bayfront section east of the Southern Pacific right-of-way; according to the map, the nearest habitation was a sheepskin tannery half a mile or so distant. A squiggly line represented a wagon road that led to the derelict property from the closest thoroughfare, Jamestown Avenue.

“Three marks indicate three structures,” Quincannon said. “What are the other two?”

“No, two is all there is. The repair shop and a storage shed. The third mark is for dry-dock and hoist facilities. The pier behind the shop is in unsafe condition—”

“Damn the pier.”

The sharpness of the exclamation caused Nickerson to flinch again. He took another unsteady step backward.

“I’ll take the key now,” Quincannon said.

“Key?”

“Don’t be dense. The padlock key.”

“I... I don’t have it.”

“Don’t have it?”

“Gaunt didn’t return it when he returned the brougham on Saturday. When I asked him for it, he said he threw it away so I wouldn’t be tempted to go back out there...”

Anger swelled in Quincannon again. He gave vent to a blistering nine-jointed oath of such inventive ferocity not even the likes of a shanghai crimp could have matched it. The outburst caused Nickerson to cringe in terror. He took another unsteady step backward, up against the wall beside the draftsman’s cabinet.

In a near-whisper he said, stammering again, “W-what are you g-going to do now?”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Get inside that damned building if I have to batter down the walls to do it.”

“You won’t find G-Gaunt there. He—”

“I don’t expect to find him there. You’re sure you have no idea where he went after he left you on Saturday?”

“None. No, none.” Nickerson’s Adam’s apple went a-bobbing again. “What... what about me?”

“What about you?”

“You don’t intend to... to...”

“Shoot you? Not if you’ve been truthful, told me everything you know.”

“I have, I s-swear I have.”

“Then I’ll leave you to stew in your own juices.” Quincannon added, glowering malignantly, “But if I find out you lied to me, or if you tell anyone I was here, I’ll come back and give you the beating of your life. Yes, and shoot off one of your ears for good measure. Understood?”

“Uh... uh... uh... understood.”

Quincannon left the land agent cowering against the wall, hurried out of the building and upstreet to where the rented buggy was parked. It was after three o’clock now. Low-hanging clouds and streamers of fog darkened the afternoon, and a sharp wind off the bay had lowered the temperature by several degrees. Out on the marshes it would be colder still — a frigid night ahead in such an unprotected area.

He climbed up onto the seat, took up the reins and whip-flicked the roan into as fast a trot as traffic would permit.

The drive to South Basin took nearly an hour and seemed twice as long. He couldn’t maintain the headlong pace he’d have preferred for fear of exhausting the horse. Stopping en route to acquire such tools as a pry bar and sledgehammer would have wasted even more time; he would have to make do with whatever he found on the abandoned property to gain access to the shop. Sabina must not spend another night in that place.

He refused to think of what her condition might be after three days’ incarceration. When he thought at all, it was with a burning hate for Jeffrey Gaunt. Nickerson had been right: the man was insane. Only a maniac would devise and carry out such an evil trick, the torturous destruction of one woman in order to save another.

The land agent’s directions were true: Quincannon had no difficulty locating what was left of the old wagon road that led across the marshes to the point. The ruts, potholed in places, choked with weeds and grass, forced him to an even slower pace to avoid breaking an axle. As it was, the buggy jolted and rattled and he had to use the whip, something he disliked doing in normal circumstances, to keep the tired roan from balking. Low-hanging swirls of fog lowered visibility to no more than a hundred yards. Wind gusts carrying faint odors from the tannery chilled his face, twice threatened to tear the buggy’s hood loose from its fastenings.

He hunched forward as the remains of the boat-repair business finally appeared ahead, ghost shapes rising out of the mist. Sight of them increased his urgency twofold. God Almighty, what a miserable place! He flicked the whip again to quicken the horse across the remaining distance, drew rein a dozen rods from the entrance to the main building. He set the brake, jumped down, ran to the rust-flecked corrugated iron doors.

The padlock was stout and secure; one hard yank told him that. He beat on one of the door halves with his gloved fist, shouted Sabina’s name half a dozen times at the top of his voice. The noise he made shattered the cottony stillness, roused a fluttering group of shorebirds nearby, sent echoes chasing one another across the wasteland. He paused to listen, then pounded on the doors and yelled her name again. And again. And again.

There was no response from within.

Frantic now, Quincannon turned away and ran past the buggy and the blowing roan to the tumbledown shed. There was nothing inside it he could use to break the padlock, nothing at all except planks and fragments of tarpaper from its half-collapsed walls and roof. Outside again, he headed toward where the skeletal remains of hoist and dry-dock facilities jutted up out of nests of tall grass and weeds.

That was when he heard the cry in the mist.

At first he thought it was a gull or some other bird, but when it came again he jerked to a stop. Not a bird, a voice shouting his name. Then he saw the figure materialize like an apparition on the wagon ruts thirty yards away, come stumbling toward him.

Sabina!

Emotion overwhelmed him as he ran to meet her. She was both a wonderful and a ghastly sight. Her face scratched and mud flecked, her hair hanging in wet, tangled strands like black seaweed, her hands and arms raw with cuts and blisters, her slender body draped in a filthy, sodden evening cape. And she was in the grip of exhaustion; he reached her just in time to keep her from falling, held her by the arms for a moment, then embraced her as gently as the intensity of his feelings would allow. She clung to him, shivering.

“I heard you shouting,” she said in a ragged half whisper. “I was hiding when you went by in the buggy, I couldn’t see you under the hood and I thought you were Gaunt. How did you know to come here...?”

This was not the time for explanations, either his, or hers of how she’d escaped the padlocked repair shop. “Not now. You need to get out of those wet clothes, then away from here and into a doctor’s care.”

“I’m... not badly hurt.”

“The risk of pneumonia, my dear.”

Quincannon lifted her into his arms, carried her to the buggy, placed her on the seat. She protested mildly when he took off the cape, the reason being that she wore nothing else except a wet, torn, muddy undergarment, but this was not the time for modesty, either. Swiftly he shed his greatcoat and slipped it around her. “Button yourself in after you’ve removed the undergarment,” he said. “I’ll wait with my back turned until you’re ready.”

It didn’t take her long. When she called him back, he climbed up beside her and removed his hat, placed it on her head; as large as it was, it came down to eye level, covering most of her wet hair and serving as further protection from the cold. He would have given her his gloves, too, but she already had her injured hands thrust deep into the coat pockets.

He took hold of the reins. Before he started the horse moving, he slipped his other arm around her shoulders and drew her against him. “To help keep you warm,” he said.

“Yes, my dear, I know.”

Despite the dire circumstances, her words deepened the tenderness he felt for her. He had addressed her as “my dear” on countless occasions, casually and not so casually; this was the first time she had ever used that term of endearment in return.