Ralph Compton - Bounty Hunter

The cop shrugged. “He wants you dead. It’s possible.”

Now Tone looked at the man. “No, you think it’s probable.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Tone. Let’s not sit here and build houses on it.”

Tone drained his coffee cup, then said, “I want to kill Lambert Sprague real bad.”

Langford smiled. “Oddly enough, so do I.”

“But you won’t.”

“When I gather enough evidence on him—and I will—I’ll arrest him and I’ll see him hang.”

Tone was silent and the cop said, “I really don’t want to know what you’re thinking, but I’ll ask it anyway: What the hell are you thinking?”

“I’ve decided to kill Sprague, first chance I get. It’s him or me.” He smiled. “Hey, did you see that?”

“See what?”

“My policeman’s suit just flew out the window.”

Chapter 23

At four o’clock that afternoon a thick fog had rolled in from the bay and the crowds of people walking on Pacific Street moved through the mist like gray ghosts. Cabbies allowed their horses to find their own way and the black hansoms loomed out of the gloom, side lamps glowing red as coals. The docks were invisible behind a somber curtain of fog that coiled and undulated like a Chinese dragon. The heavy air smelled of tarry ships, of green seaweed, of the sea beyond the strait and of teeming humanity.

Through this walked Tone and Langford, like everyone else along the waterfront, groping their way like blind men, relying on the feeble light pooled on the street by the gas lamps.

“Damn it, but I don’t like fog,” the cop said, irritated. “It brings out the most demented of the criminal element. Men are murdered, robbed or shanghaied, and the fog is happy to draw a veil over all of it.”

“I haven’t seen much fog,” Tone said. “But sometimes in the western lands the clouds hang so low they cover the mountains. One time in Nevada I camped in a hanging valley in the Funeral range and got caught by—”

“Police! Oh my God, get the police!”

A woman’s voice, screaming into the mist at the top of her lungs.

Langford reached into his tunic and pulled out a whistle on a chain. He blew several loud blasts, then yelled, “Where are you?”

“Police! Police!”

“She’s right ahead of us,” Tone said.

“Come on,” Langford said.

As they walked quickly through the thickening murk, the big cop continued to blow loudly on his whistle. Around them men and women emerged from the gloom, then disappeared again, phantoms in the fog.

Then, “This way, coppers! Over here.”

A shadowy figure stood at the entrance of a dark alley and beckoned Langford closer. “It could be a trap,” Tone whispered.

“I know. Keep your revolvers handy.”

Tone drew his guns and shoved them in the pockets of his peacoat.

A gray-bearded man took a step toward them. “She’s dead, ripped. In the alley.”

“You, stay around,” Langford told him.

“I ain’t goin’ nowheres,” the graybeard said. “I’m a respectable whaling man, a harpooner to trade, and I ain’t never seen nothing”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“like that.”

The feeble light in the alley came from a single gas lamp hung over a doorway, the kitchen entrance of a Chinese restaurant. But the dead woman’s injuries were terrible enough to be seen in any light.

Her throat had been severed deeply by two vicious cuts and her abdomen had been slashed open. One of her breasts had been hacked off and the other stabbed repeatedly.

Her face was twisted in terror and it was hard to tell her age. Tone guessed she was around forty, but she could have been younger. His eyes moved to the wall behind the woman’s body.

“Look at that, Langford,” he said.

The sergeant did, and whispered, “That dirty son of a bitch.”

Hastily scrawled in red chalk in block letters were the words

I’M DOWN ON WHORES AND WILL NEVER STOP RIPPING ’EM

“Everything all right, Sergeant?”

Two cops, attracted to the alley by Langford’s whistle and the press of the gawking crowd, stood at the entrance to the alley.

“No, everything’s not all right,” the sergeant snapped. “Don’t you have eyes, Johnson?”

Then the cop looked and saw what Tone and Langford were seeing. Blood drained from his face and he put out a steadying hand against the wall.

“Wait, I think I know her,” the other officer said, a young man with a pink, unlined face. He bent from the waist, peering at the body. “Yeah, that’s Annie Forbes. She’s been working the waterfront this past twelvemonth, told me she hailed from Chicago originally. Said she wanted to go back one day and walk in the wind.”

“I fancy she’s never going to walk in the wind again,” Langford said. He looked at the gray-bearded man who was standing close by. “How did you find her?”

“I was walking past the alley and heard footsteps,” the man said. “Nothing too unusual about that, but I turned to look anyway. I saw a man running toward the other end of the alley, then I noticed the dead woman.”

“Can you describe the man?”

“The Ripper?”

“Don’t call him that. Yes, damn it, him.”

The graybeard shook his head. “Too dark to see much, Sergeant.” He hesitated. “I think he was fairly small and slight, but I can’t be sure. A well-dressed gent, though. I’d swear to that.”

Langford nodded to the end of the alley. “Tone, take a look.”

Tone walked into the darkness, past the blue haze of the gaslight. Fog, thinner in the alley, drifted around him, moving aside as he passed. The ground was roughly cobbled with square blue bricks and his boots thudded, a hollow noise in the stillness. He slowed his pace, holding a .38 in his right hand.

The Ripper was probably long gone, but the man may be somewhere, lying in wait for another victim.

The alley opened up into a narrow back street, lined with crowded dwellings that were mostly sway-roofed shacks, their glassless windows covered with newspaper or sheets of cardboard torn from packaging cartons. The place reeked of overflowing outhouses, rotting garbage and abject poverty. Here the Barbary Coast’s poor lived, widows, wrinkled whores up in years and down on their luck, abusive, drunken husbands and their slatternly wives who could no longer feel any emotion, not even despair. Despite the darkness and fog, naked, dirty children playing in fetid puddles and skinny dogs with running sores were everywhere.

The stinking slum was separated from Pacific Street by only a single block, but it could have been on a different planet, or an annex of hell.

Tone shoved his gun back in his pocket. A young woman balancing a zinc washtub on her hip looked at him boldly from in front of her shack. A little girl, a thumb in her mouth, clung to her skirts and regarded Tone with wide, uninterested eyes.

“Looking for something, Mister?” The woman asked.

“Did you see a man come past here, small, well dressed?”

The woman shook her head. “Hell, we never see a well-dressed man here.” She turned to a toothless harridan who was standing close by. “You see a well-dressed gent pass this way, Peggy?”

“I never seen any gent in Pisser’s Alley.”

Both women laughed, the strident, wailing screech of the slums.

Tone smiled. “Well, thanks for your help.”

If the Ripper had come this way, he was long gone.

He turned and began to retrace his steps, but the younger woman’s voice stopped him. “Hey, Mister!”

She had set the washtub down and was holding up her skirt in both hands, her naked crotch a dark triangle in the gloom. “Fifty cents. Poke me as many times as you like.”