Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“He lives, damn you,” Boon hissed, and she burst through the vestibule and out the front door.

The street outside was curiously empty. Ominously so. Boon went out by inches, leading with the .44. A carriage stood still across and up the street, a lantern burning over the coachman’s perch where no coachman perched. Two black horses waited impatiently in front, geldings blowing steam out of their nostrils and occasionally stamping their hooves. I looked left, then right, and then up at the structures crowding one another with windows in their upper stories lit and faces peering back down at me.

Boon slumped her left shoulder, letting the arm dangle like meat on a hook. The wound beneath the shoulder shone wet in the light of the lantern and the windows and the moon.

I said, “We ought to find you a sawbones.”

She hushed me and swung around to her right, where a policeman sprang from the alley beside the Palace and drew down on her. Boon shot him in the head.

Another blue tunic leapt from the front door, and Boon swung the Colt at him, too. She thumbed the hammer, squeezed the trigger, and the damned thing just clicked against an empty chamber. The policeman grinned a drew a bead on her. I threw my great bulk between him and her, and I squeezed my eyes shut so that I would not have to look upon the man who killed me.

God damn San Francisco, I thought, and God damn Arthur Stanley, too. I could only hope my sacrifice would be sufficient to permit Boon to escape. If so, then my whole wretched life would not have been lived entirely in vain, from a youth wasted on hog farming to my years running from conscription, to the very many annoyances and headaches I always caused my poor, long-suffering, dear friend Boon. I never was any good and I never felt that more acutely than in that terrible, frightening moment. Let my death mean something!

And perhaps it will, but at that moment I was not to be Boon’s savior. Another fellow assumed that role, and by opening my eyes again I beheld that it was the Chinese man from the Palace. He held a crude dagger with one hand and the policeman’s hair by the other, and he opened the officer’s throat with one fluid motion that spilled a dark curtain of blood down the front of his tunic. The copper dropped and died, his killer took up the policeman’s pistol, and the Chinese man padded lightly and quickly for the carriage, his queue slapping against his back as he called back, “Come, come, come.”

We went. The man clambered up to the reins and whipped the horses into moving before my feet were off the road. Two more policemen scampered out of the alley and three from the door, and behind them all came Arthur Stanley with his head held high but his face twisted in a grimace.

“He is not dead,” I said.

The police opened fire, their bullets striking the wheels and frame of the carriage when they didn’t go wild, slamming into the street or the clustered buildings. Our curious driver shouted something that might have been Chinese and the horses fell into a trot, shaking the carriage side to side as Boon and I struggled not to topple out of the still-open door. It was all we could do not to tumble to our deaths. The best we could hope for was escape, however temporary, and that was in the hands of the complete stranger driving the coach.

“I realize he is not dead, Edward,” Boon snapped back at me.

“What did you do?”

“I struck a policeman with my gun so I could get a hold of his and shoot Stanley.”

“He didn’t look shot.”

“It was me got shot,” she said.

I did not tell her this was evident, and she did not offer any further information. Instead, I pulled the coach door shut and latched it, and the Chinese fellow drove the horses away from our pursuers until they were no longer visible to us. He did not shout again. Boon leaned back and closed her eyes, which spilled tears—from pain or sorrow, I did not know.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I guess I expected the coachman would carry us right out of town, away from the shanties and the stenches and the masts like treetops in the middle distance, cluttering the bay. Instead, we did not travel far at all, only the far side of the Barbary Coast, maybe half a mile away. Mayhap the fellow was afraid to leave the confines of that tiny area he knew well enough, but it was not for me to say. I barely understood white men and I did not know any one thing about Chinese. I never understood Boon much at all. Most times I reckoned I could not even understand myself.

He lived in a tiny, fusty room, or at least that was where we ended up, and he left us there to drive the carriage someplace else. While he was gone, it was Boon and me, and an old Chinese woman who lay so still and silent on a pallet that at first I reckoned she was dead. Besides the three of us, there was a younger woman who crouched on the floor beside a guttering candle and a young boy, maybe five or six years old. They all of them regarded us with great suspicion, which I did not mind, as I would most like have felt the same way in their shoes. We were strangers to them, disheveled and one of us leaking blood. If any of them spoke a word of English, I never knew it.

The fellow who rescued us returned late into the night, and he brought with him an older Chinaman with a long, yellow beard and his hair shaggy and only neck-length in the back, beneath his silk cap. He caught me studying it and