Dead Man's Hand Page 2

  “But I wouldn’t be your sidekick, Wild Bill,” Josh persisted around a mouthful of pie. “I want to tell your story. Yours, and the story of the West—the wild West.”

  “It’s wild,” Bill shot back, blue eyes flicking regularly to the doors and windows, “about one minute out of every thousand or so. The rest drag by slow, all dull, boring, and hard.”

  “Not around you! I’ve already seen you kill a man,” Josh reminded him. “And one that deserved it, too. It’s plenty wild out here—at least, where you happen to be.”

  “Most men aren’t worth ten thousand dollars dead like I am. You better keep that in mind, too, kid. Lead tends to fly around me. You’d be safer back east wearing green eyeshades and squiring the ladies.”

  While they spoke, a young, unarmed cowboy at the other end of the counter recognized Bill and respectfully approached him, his hand extended. “May I touch you for luck, Wild Bill?”

  Bill shook his hand, though he also suggested to the puncher that he lean toward readiness, not luck. Josh hastily scrawled this down in a flip-back pad, and Bill laughed.

  “Words, words, words,” he muttered. “Look, Longfellow, we’re burning daylight and I’ve got an appointment near the rail yard. Good luck to you out west, son. I’ll watch for your byline.”

  Bill threw two silver dollars onto the counter, clapped on his black, broad-brimmed hat, and pushed out into the busy street again. He frowned when Josh followed him like a faithful dog.

  “All right if I tag along, Wild Bill?”

  Hickok snorted. “You hang on like a tick, don’t you? Kid, you’re a likely enough fellow. But I’m telling you, I’ve got no need for you. I travel light, and—”

  “Duck, Bill!” Josh cut in.

  Even as he spun into a doorway, Hickok swept the kid with him, then filled his right hand with a short iron.

  “Where?” Bill demanded tersely, still looking for his target. “Spot me, kid! Which one is he?”

  “It’s not a he,” Josh replied. “And you won’t need a gun. Look across the street, under the awning of the Song Bird Saloon. I recognized her right off, Wild Bill, from Ned Buntline’s descriptions. Especially the hat.”

  Bill followed Josh’s finger, then expelled a long groan. A stout young woman leaned against the tie rail out front, guzzling whiskey right from the bottle. She had a homely, careworn face and wore her greasy hair tied in a heavy knot that dangled under an immaculate gray Stetson—the only clean item she had on. A big Smith & Wesson Volcanic pistol was tucked into a bright-red sash around her waist.

  “I’ll out-drink, outfight, out-swear, and out-shoot any goddamn white man or Indian!” she roared out in a voice that could fill a canyon.

  “Calamity Jane!” Bill swore. “She’s found out I’m in Denver. Damn it all! So you know all about her, too, huh?”

  “Ain’t a man among you!” Jane roared out. “A Sioux papoose has a bigger set on him!”

  “Sure,” Josh replied eagerly. “Her real name is Martha Jane Burke. But she has sworn on oath to shoot any man who calls her Martha. Any man, that is, except the one man in the world she loves: Wild Bill Hickok. She can do it, too. Even you admit she’s the best female shootist in America outside of Annie Oakley.”

  “She is . . . when she’s sober. I just wish to God she hadn’t set her romantic sights on me.”

  But Josh could see that Bill was looking at him in a new light now, his eyes speculative.

  “Kid,” Bill said gratefully, “she hasn’t got a gun aimed at me, but you just saved my bacon. You know more about me than my mother does. Maybe you and I could strike a private treaty.”

  “You bet we could, Wild Bill! Why, man alive! We could even—”

  Bill, busy slipping down an alley now to avoid Calamity Jane, raised one hand to silence the irrepressible kid.

  “Look, slip a noose on this ‘we’ business. We aren’t becoming blood brothers, got it? And you will get rid of those damned greenhorn togs you have on. You stick out like a Kansas City fire engine. You own a gun, junior?”

  Josh shook his head. “See, my mother was raised Quaker, and I—”

  “A fine sect, kid, back in Philly. But there’s no Quakers west of Omaha—unless they’re good shots. I’ll set thee up with a barking iron later.”

  They emerged onto Silver Street, in the shadow of the huge new opera house that made Denver a cut above plain old saloon towns. But Josh also saw proof this was still the rough-and-tumble place his mother feared: An Indian lay motionless in the middle of the street. “Hep! Hep!” shouted a teamster, cracking his long whip and guiding his freight wagon around the sprawled redskin.

  Josh goggled at the sight. “Is that Indian drunk, Wild Bill?”

  “That or dead,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “Listen, kid. Men who survive out here keep their mouths shut and their eyes open. Right now I’ve got to meet a gent named Allan Pinkerton. He wants to talk with me—privately, if you catch my drift?”

  “Pinkerton! Why, he’s a detective!”

  Bill snorted. “No, he’s rich. The detectives take the risks, and that penny-pinching old Scotsman collects the fees.”

  Josh’s eyes widened with gathering excitement. Not even out here a week, and look at all the stories already!

  “That’s why you came to Denver!” Josh said. “You’re hiring on as a Pinkerton man! An operative! Ho-ly cow! What is it, Bill? Rustlers? Bank robbers? Maybe counterfeit—”

  “Damnit, kid, wouldja caulk up? For now, keep everything I’ve told you close to your vest, you savvy?”

  Josh nodded. “My word of honor.”

  “That much I’ll trust. Now get on back to the hotel and stay out of trouble. I’ll look you up later, Longfellow.”

  At first, Bill assumed Pinkerton had finally gone senile and given him the wrong directions to their meeting place.

  Meet me at the big brick dome near the train depot, Pinkerton’s telegraph had said. The one without windows.

  The only building even barely fitting that description turned out to be an icehouse for the storage of winter ice harvested from the nearby Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. But Pinkerton was indeed waiting there for his old friend from the Civil War days.

  “Jamie lad!” the old Scotsman greeted him out front, for he wanted nothing to do with the newspapers and this “Wild Bill” nonsense. “You were one of the finest scouts the Union Army ever put in the field. I could never have given General McClellan so much reconnaissance without you.”

  “Not that Gorgeous George ever did anything with it,” Bill interjected. “The man had him a brand-spanking-new Army and was afraid to get it dirty.”

  “It’s too dead to skin now, Jamie. But naturally, I thought of you when this latest lucrative assignment recently came up.”

  “Naturally,” Bill repeated scornfully. “That brogue of yours disguises a lot of bullshit, you know that? You old skinflint, what you really mean is that nobody else will take the job.”

  Pinkerton grinned through his white, bushy Burnsides. “Dinna fash yourself, lad! It’s an . . . odd assignment, granted. But quite lucrative, I’ll assure you.”

  While he spoke, Pinkerton removed a double-bitted key and unlocked a small door in the brick dome. They stooped to enter a brick-lined area lighted by a single lantern to keep down heat. Neat blocks of ice were stored between insulating layers of sawdust and cheesecloth.

  “What do you know about ice, Jamie?” Pinkerton demanded, his breath forming little ghost puffs,

  “I know it’s cold!” Wild Bill replied peevishly, slapping his arms to keep warm.

  Pinkerton chuckled as he led his friend toward a second door connecting with a smaller chamber.

  “Then you have grasped the obvious and missed the essence, I assure you. Young Hickok, I’ve quite a few years on you. I’ve seen guns go from flintlock to cap-and-ball to self-contained cartridge repeaters, and I’ve still got some years left, the Lord willing. Jamie, you’re going to see things—marvels, ladd
iebuck!— such as no man can even dream up, not even Jules Verne.”

  “Al, you always were one for talking like a book. The hell you jabbering about? It’s cold in here!”

  Pinkerton paused before the second door and nodded his head toward the ice blocks surrounding them.

  “That’s natural ice, the last of the winter batch. The only ice for hundreds of miles around. It’s expensive and already spoken for before it comes out of the mountains. There are precious few icehouses or ice pits west of the Mississippi. Bricks are expensive out here, and digging the pits even more so. They must be fully lined and at least fifty feet deep, and they require complicated grates and drains to handle melt runoff. Only a few of the wealthiest ranches have them.”

  “R-r-right,” Bill said, teeth chattering. “If you wander near a p-p-point, f-f-feel free to make it.”

  Pinkerton tossed him an old cloth coat hanging from a peg near the door. “The point, Jamie, is this: The demand for ice out here, from April through November or so, is absolutely staggering. With ice, meat can be butchered and stored, even shipped. Other perishable foods can be kept indefinitely. Drinks can be cooled, confectioners thrive, a dairy industry can take root.”

  Pinkerton keyed the lock, still talking.

  “But even more important. . . Jamie, when you rode into Denver, did you pass the big pest-house east of town?”

  Bill nodded. Pinkerton meant the huge quarantine center for the latest victims of the scarlet fever plague currently ravaging the city. Bill had smelled the stink of carbolic acid, used to sanitize the streets, even before he reached the city limits.

  “Well, once again the pest house is full. But this year the graveyard isn’t. The death rate this year is down eighty percent, Jamie! And I’m about to show you the reason why. But you mustn’t tell a soul what you’re about to see and hear. Your word?”

  Bill nodded again, curious in spite of himself. Pinkerton had one hell of a flair for the dramatic.

  “All right, then,” Pinkerton said, and the lock mechanism snicked when he turned the key. “Prepare yourself, Bill. You’ve been a soldier, a scout, a spy, a prisoner of war, a U.S. marshal. Seen the big animal again and again. But I assure you—you’ve seen nothing quite like this before in your life.”

  Chapter Three

  “But, darling! How did I ‘humiliate’ you yesterday?” Elena protested. “He is a very famous man. I was merely taken aback when I realized it was he. This Wild Bill—some say he is the most famous frontiersman in America.”

  “He says that, my love, and the fawning magpies in the press repeat it endlessly in their damnable rags!”

  “Why, Randolph! You’re jealous!”

  “Oh, hogwash! He’s nothing, I tell you, Elena. One of Bill Cody’s pasteboard cutouts, that’s all. My father knew his grandfather Otis Hickok back in Illinois—nothing but common immigrant Irish trash.”

  “Irish trash, with a deadly aim,” Elena reminded Randolph Bodmer. “As Baylis discovered.”

  Although she had her own room on another floor, as propriety required, Elena had joined her fiancé for coffee and pastry in his huge suite of rooms.

  “Even a blind hog,” he assured her, “could hit the target at that distance.”

  “Through the heart across that huge room? A target not only hidden, but as the local paper pointed out, hardly larger than a fist. That—”

  “Listen to you!” Bodmer snapped. “You have an oddly unfeminine zeal, at times, for the morbid. When I say ‘humiliate’, I’m talking about the filthy way you looked at Hickok, for all to see.

  Elena’s mother-of-pearl skin colored slightly. “‘Filthy’? A harmless admiring glance?”

  “It was a come-hither glance, Elena! Men know these things.”

  Bodmer dismissed her next protest with an impatient wave. He looked comfortable in a black-and-white striped smoking jacket with velvet lapels.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Elena, and God knows I value spirit in a woman as much as I do in a horse. But I have far more ambitious plans than simply getting rich, which I accomplished years ago. I mean to leave my mark on the West! A deep mark. That means politics. A beautiful wife can be a real asset to a politico. But if she carries on like a shameless whore of Babylon, she’ll sink him fast.”

  Anger at these words made Elena’s nostrils flare. But Bodmer slid the watch from his pocket and thumbed back the cover to check the time. Then he picked up a wallet from the nightstand beside him and removed several banknotes, handing them to Elena.

  “Be an angel now and go buy yourself a new hat or some such. I have a business meeting.”

  Elena tucked the bills into her reticule and crossed to the door, her bustle rustling. With one slim white hand on the glass doorknob, she turned and said:

  “Be careful how you accuse me. I just might sin to justify the charges! When you visited my father to ask for my hand, nothing but poetry crossed your honeyed lips. Now my father has passed on, may he rest in peace. You’ve itemized my dowry, and now I’m compared to the whore of Babylon!”

  He started to protest, but she raised a hand to stop him.

  “By law, I cannot prevent the marriage now that the banns are published. But by God’s holy law, I swear to your execrable face, Randolph, I will never share a marriage bed with a contemptible scut like you!”

  She slammed the door before Bodmer could recover from this unexpected volley. “Execrable”? He wasn’t sure he knew what it meant, but “scut” was clear enough without a dictionary.

  Well, spirited women were like thoroughbreds—high-strung and testy. He’d gentle her later with some sugar talk and nice presents. To hell with all this stewing over Hickok. Odds were good they’d never see the arrogant, puffed-up bastard again.

  Bodmer tugged a braided pull-rope near the bed, summoning a young porter dressed in red livery. He gave the youth four bits and wrote down a room number at a drifters’ boarding house near the train station.

  “Tell both of the men staying here to come see me at once,” Bodmer instructed the porter. “If they’re passed out drunk, you’ll have to knock a long time to wake them up. But don’t open the door without permission, hear me? These are very . . . nervous men.”

  While he waited, Bodmer crossed the luxurious suite and parted the draperies. Ragged clouds obscured the nearby mountain peaks. But he hardly noticed, gazing instead down into the wide, busy street. The panorama made him smile, for he was a businessman and Denver’s growth spurt lately truly amazed and delighted him. Last time he had passed through here, on his way to San Francisco, Denver had only one hotel the size of a packing crate.

  Now look! This one alone was five stories, with a huge green awning out front and even a damned paved sidewalk, the first in the West. A twelve-foot-wide swath of magnesia limestone that proved progress had arrived on the frontier. And progress, Bodmer knew, always meant profits. Especially for those smart enough to move first.

  If only, he reminded himself, he could clear the path of all that encumbered it.

  As if to underscore this point, three hard knocks sounded on the door.

  “It’s open,” Bodmer called.

  Two men entered, one white, one a copper-tinted half-breed. They both took in the textured walls, canopied bed, and gilt mirrors, maintaining that contemptuous silence of lackeys who despised the rich yet needed their patronage.

  “Big Bat, Dog Man,” Bodmer greeted them, still looking out the window. “There’s smooth whiskey in the sideboard, boys. Don’t be shy.”

  “Don’t mind if I do cut the dust,” replied the white man, Enis “Big Bat” Landry. He was large and barrel-chested, and wore the perpetual sneer of a barracks-room bully. Bodmer knew him as a good marksman but also a deadly expert with a whip. In fact, that lethal skill had Landry on the prod right now: He had bullwhipped a prominent Texan to death after the man caught Landry using a running brand to alter the rancher’s “Rocking K” brand.

  “Word’s all over town,” Landry said as
he speared the bottle out of the sideboard, “how you had words with Bill Hickok. That straight?”

  “What of it?;’

  “I’ll tell you what. He ever gives me a clear shot, I’m banking yaller boys! While he was the star-man in Abilene, Hickok killed some mouthy cowboy named Harlan Lofley. Trouble is, this mouth had a rich old man who dotes on him. Papa Lofley put up a fat reward. Now Mister Hickok don’t sleep so good nights.”

  “No?” Bodmer said. “He looked well rested to me. But listen up, both of you. Don’t get any ideas about gunning for Hickok now. You’re supposed to be in my employ as domestics, not a couple of hardened range bums. Don’t worry, you’ll have other opportunities to brace that son of a bitch. Never mind him for now. Just play along.”

  Bodmer turned from the window. “I’ve booked your spots on the train. You’ll be traveling in a third-class coach as my domestics.”

  Big Bat lowered the bottle and wiped his lips on his dirty flannel sleeve. “Third class?” he protested. “How’s come we get the crappy end of the stick? You’ll be in your own Pullman car, living like the lord of Creation.”

  Bodmer sneered at both men’s greasy, filthy clothing. “It’s called social subordination. Water seeks its own level. As does mud.”

  Big Bat scowled, but Dog Man liked this. His lips pulled back off his teeth in an eerie smile that failed to include the corners of his mouth. The whelp of a Ute mother and a Mexican father, he had eyes like hard black agates.

  Rumored to be the best shot between Santa Fe and the Dakota Country, Dog Man took his name from the days when he rode with the Southern Cheyenne renegade Roman Nose, leader of the rebellious Cheyenne Dog Soldier Society. Dog Man’s philosophy was simple: Life was a disease, and the only cure was death. Thus, he saw himself as a healer, not a killer.

  “I didn’t call you here,” Bodmer went on irritably, “to discuss your goddamned sleeping arrangements! I want to remind you to keep your eyes out for the main chance. Not only must Professor Vogel meet with a fatal accident’—but I must have enough time alone with that little Prussian pipsqueak’s machine. Time to study and diagram its internal structure before you destroy it. That’s absolutely imperative. It’s the machine I care about, not Vogel.”