“But,” I whispered, “how would we—where—”
“It is no great difficulty,” El Niño said. “You and I, we are people who know the ways of such things.”
I gave the matter a few seconds’ consideration. “They’d be expecting us to try to get on a train,” I thought out loud. “So they’d try to stop us at the station. We could steal a horse from the stables, ride to Troy, and catch an express from there—”
The aborigine put a firm hand to my shoulder. “Yes. You see, Señorito Stevie, it is for you and I to do this thing. It is we who know the way of it.”
Taking two or three heavy breaths to try to calm the pounding in my chest brought on by the possible death of Mr. Picton and the definite danger that Kat had suddenly been placed in, I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “There’s just one thing …”
Going to the staircase doorway, I made a little hissing sound in Mr. Moore’s direction. I had to do it two or three times before I got his attention, and then finally he turned.
“Mr. Moore!” I whispered; then I urged him over with a wave of my hands.
Moving slowly and keeping his eyes locked on Mr. Picton, he joined us in the staircase. “What is it, Stevie?”
“Mr. Moore,” I said, shuffling in my anxiousness, “I’ve—we’ve—we’re going. Now.”
That got his attention, and he turned his tear-stained face to me fully. “What do you mean?”
“She’s got a long lead,” I answered. “The rest of you have to take care of Mr. Picton and clear things with the sheriff. By the time all that happens …”
Mr. Moore pondered that for a second, then grabbed another quick look at Mr. Picton. “But what can you—” Turning back to us and looking down, he suddenly caught sight of El Nino’s kris. When he did, his face filled with darkness—but not disapproval. “How will you go?”
“We’ll manage,” I answered. “But we’ll need a little bit of a start.”
Looking to his blood-soaked friend again, Mr. Moore reached into his pocket and pulled out his billfold. “You’ll need money, too,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“You’ll help us?” I said, a slight tremble of relief coursing through me.
Mr. Moore nodded once. “Kreizler’ll have my guts for garters,” he whispered. “But it’s the only way.” He forked over a wad of bills, everything he had, then put one hand on my shoulder and the other on El Nino’s. “Don’t tell me how you’ll get there—I can’t reveal what I don’t know. And watch yourselves. We’ll follow as soon as we can. As soon as—”
“I know,” I said. “And tell the Doctor—” I glanced into the room once more to look at the man who’d done so much for me in my life, and who I was now defying. “Tell the Doctor I’m sorry …”
“I know,” Mr. Moore answered. “Don’t worry—and don’t waste any more time. Just go, and do what you have to.” He gave me a hard, meaningful stare. “Go, Stevepipe…”
Then he turned and went back to the others, while El Niño and I quietly but quickly took to the stone steps, moving with the practiced skill of two people who’d spent many years mastering the art of stealth.
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 A.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 t
o 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 you 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.