West of the Law

Chapter 12

Noon came and went but McBride saw no sign of Hack Burns in the street. It seemed that Shannon had prevailed on Trask to rein in his gunman. At least for now.

Shannon had asked for his protection, but McBride was at a loss where to start. When she was in her suite at the hotel, he was close by and could look out for her. But when she was at the Golden Garter he couldn’t camp out there night after night, watching over her.

There had to be a better way. And that better way was for Shannon to leave High Hopes with him. They could head back East, to a big city where no one would know them, get married and start a new life together.

But even as he considered that, the dark, ominous shadow of Gamble Trask cast itself over his plans.

Trask wanted Shannon for himself and he wouldn’t stand idly by and let another man take her away from him. If McBride tried to leave High Hopes with Shannon, it would have to be over Trask’s dead body. Then so be it. He’d told Marshal Clark that he planned to bring the man down. Now he’d have to make good on his boast.

He was one man against five of the best guns in the West. But no matter, the time for bragging was over. If he wanted Shannon Roark to be his wife, he had it to do.

The light slowly changed in McBride’s room. The yellow glow of day shaded into the blue of dusk and then the darkness of night. Out on the street the miners were coming in from the hills, shabby, bearded men with gnarled hands seeking whiskey and female companionship after days of backbreaking labor when injury and death came easy but gold came hard.

The reflector lamps had been lit along the boardwalk, casting long shadows of men as they passed, black, undulating shapes moving across a backdrop of orange light. There was a stillness about the night, a strange quiet that made men talk in whispers and wonder why they did. It was as though the town were holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

McBride decided it was time to investigate Trask a little further, a first, minor skirmish in his coming war with the man. He lit the lamp in the room and gingerly shaved his battered face by its dim flicker. Then he slid the Smith & Wesson into the shoulder holster, put on his hat and headed outside. He mingled, unnoticed, with the miners crowding the street and stepped into the alley beside the Golden Garter.

Shannon had said that the Chinese girls had been visiting a fortune-teller behind the saloon, but she was probably repeating what Trask had told her. If there was a fortune-teller’s shack back there, McBride was sure it was the place where the girls were held before being shipped out on an eastbound train.

Yet how was that possible? Surely the girls would wail and holler and beg passersby for help, attracting unwanted attention. Trask had to have found a way to get them to the train station without causing too much fuss.

The moon had not yet climbed into the sky and the alley was dark, pooled in shadow. Something small squeaked and scuttled at his feet as McBride passed the corner of the saloon and found himself in an open area of ground. A brewery wagon was parked to his right, its tongue raised. A few upended wooden barrels stood close by. About twenty yards ahead of him, he could make out the vague outline of a shack with a crooked tin chimney sticking through the steeply angled roof. There was no light showing in the single window to the left of the door.

On cat feet, McBride stepped closer to the shack. Laughter and loud talk drifted from the saloon and the night spread so quiet around him he could hear the click of the roulette wheel and the rattle of dice.

Above the door of the lathe and tar-paper cabin a crude, hand-painted sign proclaimed:

MADAME HUAN ~ Palmistry

McBride tried the door. It was locked. He walked around to the rear of the shack, found that there was no other entrance and returned to the door. There was no one around and he was invisible in the darkness. McBride leaned his shoulder against the door and pushed. It held firm. He pushed harder. Wood splintered and the door swung open on its rawhide hinges.

It was dark inside and the place stank. McBride took a chance on not being seen from the saloon and thumbed a match into flame. He discovered an oil lamp and lit the wick, alarmed at the amount of light that flooded into the room. If Trask or one of his men happened to be passing by . . .

He forced that thought from his mind. There might be something in the shack that would explain how Trask kept the Chinese girls quiet.

He was standing in the middle of a small room, a narrow door opposite him. The only furnishings were a rusty iron stove, a table, a chair and a cot, enough to convince anyone who glanced inside that someone lived here.

McBride guessed that there was no Madame Huan and that the shack was always locked. He doubted that the miners cared about having their palms read and never came near the place.

Swiftly crossing the room, he opened the narrow door and was immediately hit by a feral stench, the smell of the young women who had been confined there for days at a time.

He raised the lamp. Half a dozen thick posts had been driven into the dirt floor of the tiny room and from each hung a pair of iron shackles. There was a shelf to his right, with several syringes, cotton, spoons, candles, narrow leather straps and bottles laid carefully on it. Only one of the bottles still had a handwritten label, which said, Citric Acid.

Desperately McBride tried to recall the lectures he’d attended on heroin addiction. The citric acid was used to break down black tar heroin so it could be injected—he remembered that. The heroin was placed in the spoon and then the acid and a little water were added. A spoon was held over a candle flame until the heroin dissolved and afterward a tiny piece of cotton was used to soak up the liquid. The addict drew the heroin from the cotton with a syringe, hoping to filter out particles of tar and other impurities. The heroin was then injected into the arm or leg, or sometimes directly into the neck.

Injection was the cheapest method of administering opium, but it created a greater dependency on the drug and as the user’s tolerance grew, more and more was needed to get the same effect.

The Chinese girls had come from San Francisco, probably from the notorious and vicious Barbary Coast waterfront. After getting off the boat, they would have been raped repeatedly, beaten and forced to endure heroin injections. Once dependent on the drug, they would become compliant and be willing to do anything to get more.

Trask obviously controlled the young women with heroin. The drug made them obedient and docile and they could be shipped east on trains without trouble. On each trip one or two of his men must travel with the girls, a plentiful supply of heroin at the ready.

It was a neat setup and a profitable one. The girls McBride had seen herded into the alley had spent some time chained to the posts and were already gone. It was of no concern to Gamble Trask that all four would be dead within a couple of years.

Cold anger rising in him, McBride knew it was too late to help the girls who’d been here, but he would make sure Trask would never use this prison again. He lifted the oil lamp high, ready to throw it against a wall. But he never completed the motion.

A shot from the direction of the outside door hit the lamp and it shattered apart in his hand, hurling sheets of flame. Burning oil hit McBride on the shoulder and his coat flared. He threw off the smoldering coat as the dry tar-paper walls around him caught fire, surrounding him with raging cascades of flame. Smoke hung thick and black in the air as McBride lurched out of the room.

Another shot slammed, but curling clouds of smoke obscured McBride and the bullet whined past his head, buzzing like an angry hornet. He drew his gun as he stumbled toward the door. It banged shut just before he reached it, scorching tongues of fire licking at him.

McBride barged through the door, ripping it from the hinges, and ran outside. Behind him the shack was an inferno. A tangle of men was piling out the door of the Golden Garter and he thought he heard someone call his name. He did not wait to find out. Footsteps pounded off to his left and he went after them.

Away from the street it was very dark. Ahead of him the footsteps slowed and then fell silent. Crouching low, his skin crawling as he expected a bullet at any moment, McBride was alone in the night with only the stars watching him. He heard a commotion and the clank of buckets back at the saloon as men fought to put out the fire, but he kept on moving.

Counting Jim Nolan, three men had now tried to kill him and his patience had worn thin. He planned to catch up with the man ahead of him, and shoot him or beat him to a pulp with his fists. Then, as he’d done with the young cowboy, he’d deliver him back to Gamble Trask.

Lamps were lit in the stores along the street and their back windows cast rectangles of yellow light on the ground as McBride passed. A few scattered cabins and shacks also showed gleaming windows, but around them lay canyons of darkness. Off to his left, a dog barked in sudden alarm. McBride turned and stepped toward the sound, his gun ready.

A cabin lay just ahead of him and beyond it, only the inky blackness of the plains. As he got closer McBride saw the dog staring intently into the gloom. The dog started to bark again and the cabin door opened and a man in shirtsleeves came out and looked around him. Hidden by the dark, McBride stayed where he was. Finally the man called the dog inside. The animal walked to the door reluctantly, growling as its eyes continued to search the night.

After the cabin door slammed, McBride holstered his gun. It would be suicide to walk out into the dark after a man who could even now be waiting in ambush. He’d learned that lesson when he went out in the dark after the cowboy who had killed Theo. It was not an experience he cared to repeat.

A sense of defeat weighing on him, McBride made his way back behind the stores, but he stopped at a hand pump at the rear of the restaurant, his face puzzled. The pump stood in the light of a window and around it the ground was muddy. The thing that had caught McBride’s eye was a perfect footprint in the mud. He kneeled and looked closer. The only person who would pump water for the restaurant was the waitress, but she would surely have left more than one footprint. In any case this was too wide to be a woman’s print. The track was very recent and it was shallow. McBride guessed it had been left by a smallish man who could not have weighed more than 140 pounds. What intrigued McBride was that it was a shoe print, probably made by a shoe with a leather sole and heel. As far as he was aware, all of Gamble Trask’s men wore boots. Hack Burns certainly did. So did Stryker Allison and the miners who helped Trask bring in the Chinese girls.

McBride was convinced the man who’d tried to kill him at the shack and then fled had left this print. He was equally sure it wasn’t one of Trask’s men. Then who?

Unbidden, a dark memory wormed its way into his mind, of a man back in New York called Gypsy Jim O’Hara. He was nicknamed Gypsy not because he was a Romany but for his swarthy skin and black eyes and hair.

O’Hara was a contract killer, an ice-cold assassin without conscience who was suspected of at least two dozen murders. Inspector Byrnes had many times tried to bring O’Hara to justice, but the man always had a cast-iron alibi and walked free. He also enjoyed the protection of gangsters like Sean Donovan who appreciated his deadly skills and provided him with the best lawyers money could buy.

Jim O’Hara was a small, compact man with the flat, soulless eyes of a basilisk. Extremely vain, he always dressed in the height of fashion and a shoe-shine was part of his morning ritual. He was good with a revolver but would use a shotgun or knife as the occasion demanded. O’Hara was a bad enemy, relentless in pursuit, merciless at the kill, a man to be reckoned with.

McBride stood and looked around him. Away from the glare of the streetlamps the stars were visible, the sky a spangled roof over the world that gradually melted in the distance and became one with the violet darkness of the plain. The coyotes were talking to the night birds and the prairie wind was asleep. Nothing moved among the brooding shadows but hidden things that skittered and screeched and hunted their own kind.

The air smelled of dust and heat as McBride stood, head bent in thought.

Gypsy Jim here in High Hopes? That was impossible. The man was a sewer rat who would never leave the suffocating brick canyons and swarming, filthy alleys of the city. Yet Byrnes had warned him that Donovan’s reach was long. Was O’Hara here—hunting him?

It was not so improbable as it sounded. Many crooked New York cops were on Sean Donovan’s payroll. Could it be that McBride’s message to Byrnes had been intercepted, the envelope steamed open and the letter read? Pay O’Hara enough money and he’d track a man all the way into hell.

McBride shook his head. He was thinking like an old lady who hears a rustle in every bush. His dread of Gypsy Jim was based on a single shoe print that could have been left by anybody, a gambler maybe, or a member of the town’s broad-clothed citizenry.

He breathed deep, fighting his own overwrought imagination. But the thought lingered, nagging at him like a bad toothache. He had a copper’s instinct for danger and now it was telling him to be wary, that the danger he sensed was very close and getting closer.

He would go on the assumption that Gypsy Jim was in High Hopes, at least until he learned differently. McBride took no joy in that conclusion. It brought him only a great deal of worry.

The shack was still a blazing inferno as McBride walked along the street to the hotel. He smiled when he saw that Trask had organized a bucket brigade. The man was running around in a panic, barking orders to miners who were throwing water on the back wall and roof of the saloon. Fire was always a hazard in a wooden town, and sparks from the burning shack could easily set the Golden Garter alight.

Trask had good cause to be panicked and that pleased McBride mightily. To his relief he saw Shannon standing outside on the boardwalk, a shawl around her shoulders. She saw him, smiled and waved, then went back inside.

McBride lit the lamp in his room and grieved mightily for his lost coat. It had cost him ten dollars at Aaron Goldberg’s Clothing Emporium for Gents back in New York and he doubted if he’d find another quite so fine.

He stepped to the window and looked outside. The fire had died down and the bucket brigade had disbanded. There was no sign of Trask.

He heard a soft knock at his door and smiled. Shannon had come to pay him a visit. He stepped to the door and opened it wide, his smile quickly fading as he saw the small, compact man in the doorway—a man who held a gun aimed right at his belly.