Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (27 page)

He reached for his .45, and unholstered it.
He pointed it into the sky and fired twice.

CRACK!

CRACK!

That got them to shut up at last. A cushion
of space opened up around him as the people backed away.

"Good lord in heaven," he bellowed. "Now, I
repeat my previous inquiry. Just what in the hell is going on
here?"

The crowd before him parted, and a
schoolmarmish woman in a floor-length grey dress drew a beelined
for him.

"Ah-hah!" she exclaimed. "The devil's agent
presents himself at last."

"Now, just waitaminute—what?"

"You swear allegiance to money that is
stained brackish with crude oil, Errol Lyman White," she said.
"Stolen. Crude. Oil. And the good people of Bridgetown have
awakened to that fact."

White's eyes went wide. "The good people
of—What? Who are you to speak for Bridgetown? I have never laid
eyes upon you, Ms.—"

"Carlyle," she said. "Jane Carlyle, Socialist
Labor Party of America."

"I see," White replied.

"The working people of Bridgetown have
expressed solidarity with the SLPA, and, in turn, me. So that is
who I am to speak for them, Sheriff. It's my job."

"And the rest of your friends back there?"
White asked, gesturing to the other unfamiliar faces. "Did you all
come in on the morning train, or—?"

A number of concerning
facts have come to our attention," Carlyle went on. "For one, the
collusion between the mayor's office and
you
," she said, digging her index
finger into his jacket's soft leather.

"Hey," White said, moving her finger aside
with his own. "That 'collusion' is called the rule of law," he
said. "Efforts to make a dying community prosperous again.
Bridgetown did nothing illegal or improper. Every owner who agreed
to sell their land was compensated," he said. "Fairly," he
added.

"I'm sure," Carlyle said, pointed. "We shall
see."

White didn't like the
open-endedness of her statement. Were they planning to sue the
city? Sue
him
?

He shook these thoughts from his mind. She'd
almost succeeded in distracting him from his objective. "Now I need
you to back away, Ms. Carlyle, and clear this crowd you've got
fulminatin.' I'm here on official police business, and I need to
get through."

Carlyle turned to her supporters, probably to
make a big, mocking face. White began to push past her, and maybe
he caught the length of her dress on his shoe. Or maybe she faked
it. Either way, he was pretty sure she exaggerated her resulting
tumble. It got her crowd going, though. They looked at him with
daggers in their eyes, and again pushed in towards him.

"Hey! Hey!" White shouted. "Back away."

He raised his gun into the air again, and
fired once more. "The next time won't be a warning shot," he barked
at the activists. "Now get the fuck out of my town."

With that, White moved through the crowd as
easily as Moses through the Red Sea. A few minutes more, and
Clayburn's saloon was just up ahead.

He stepped foot over the barrier to the vice
quarter. It was invisible, of course, an informal line drawn in the
earth. To an outsider standing here, as he was, at ten in the
morning, it was unlikely they'd even know they were in the red
light district. The buildings looked the same on either side of the
line. The dirt was the same dirt; the air the same air. But on the
eastern side of the line, the drink was more potent, the girls'
plunging necklines more enticing, the opium haze more
intoxicating.

For a lawmen, this place was anathema. And
yet he could never hope to shut it down. It had been a key part of
Bridgetown's economy for as long as there had been a Bridgetown.
Long ago, before the coal mines had given up their last blackened
breath, the workers had come to here out of necessity. They needed
those releases to cope with the conditions of their working lives.
Even White had to admit that. But now? As Bridgetown set about its
great quest to remake itself as a place of invention and
manufacture, White could only hope it would wither and fall away in
time. In his days as sheriff, he'd seen its unyielding hunger for
flesh and blood consume man and woman alike, in ways as different
as they were similiar.

He came upon the entrance to the saloon. The
red door was propped open with a doorstop. Rubberneckers were
gossiping out front, and White caught just enough of what they were
saying to know they were talking about the dead man inside.

It dawned on them that the local sheriff was
fast approaching. Their slack postures straightened and more than
one of them tipped their hat in his direction. White tipped back,
though it was a courtesy more than anything. He could scarcely
fathom the lowly prospects of any man sidling up to the bar before
noon. He couldn't wait for Wayne Cole's factory to open—maybe then
a few of these fellows would have something to keep their hands
busy besides a glass of beer.

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim
light inside the saloon, but the sweetwood scent of cigar hit him
right away, distributed evenly by the languid belt-driven fans
overhead. The hardwood was covered by a sea of spent peanut shells
that stretched back to the rear of the room. In the middle of that
sea, a white blanket with blood seeping through it covered a body.
A pair of muddy boots stuck out one end.

White huffed a hot
breath.
Let's get to work.

"Colonel," a voice called just to his left.
Harry Broadburn, his chief deputy. Harry was an imposing man. Tall,
broad, with an aquiline nose and dark features courtesy his Navajo
mother. His right hand wore a collection of turquoise that White
had seen leave its mark on more than one troublemaker's jaw. Yet
Harry was a man of reason and order; he was a natural successor to
White. Maybe he'd be the one to get the sheriff's jacket after he
hung up his hat for the last time.

"How're we looking, Harry?"

"Fellow under the sheet was Marty Fitzgerald.
Local who came into town last year with his family looking for
work. Had been laying bricks at the Cole factory," Harry said in a
low hush. "It was an argument that got heated. You know old Earl
McInnis?"

"Earl McInnis," White repeated, sounding it
out in an attempt to conjure an identity.

"Drunk with one leg," Harry helpfully added.
He pointed his thumb back over his shoulder discretely.

White leaned to see behind Harry's head.
McInnis sat at the bar, wearing a hangdog expression of fear and,
perhaps, confusion.

"McInnis?" White blurted in
surprise. "
He
killed someone? He looks about as dangerous as a newborn
piglet."

"Tell me about it," Harry said. "We already
got a statement, but you can talk to him yourself if you'd
like."

"Harry, I'm just curious enough that I will."
He gave his deputy a little nod and walked over to McInnis, whose
bushy eyebrows quivered. White could smell the whisky on his breath
from six feet away.

"Morning, Earl," he said.

"Sheriff," McInnis responded.

White sat down at the stool next to Earl. "My
deputy told me he already got a statement from you, but would you
mind telling me what happened again, while I'm here?"

"The knife came out right quick," McInnis
said, his eyes looking past White in a thousand-yard stare. "'Fore
I knew what I'd done, he was on the ground and bleeding."

"What did he do to make you take your knife
out?"

"My knife?" McInnis asked, furrowing his
brows. "Not my knife, Sheriff. Marty's knife. I suppose I may be
short a leg, but I'm still quick with my hands. Turned it around on
him. Old trick that's saved my hide once before."

"I see," White said. What made him attack
you?

McInnis took a deep breath, and searched his
addled mind for the right place to begin. "You know that moving
picture show that came into town last week, all lit up?"

"How could I forget? Damn near the whole
town's been talking about it."

"Yessir," McInnis said, "An' Marty more than
anyone. Marty hated it! He hates the Lotus Boys, hates that new
Cole brother, hates them all! Calls 'em un-American, he did. Says
every penny he earns he owes to Mr. Cole and that company. Says
without the factory, this place would be a graveyard."

"And you disagree?"

"Sheriff," McInnis said, looking to do an
eggshell dance around the issue, "I'm sure that everything you do,
you do because it's your job."

"I'm a big man, Earl," White replied. "I can
take a little criticism. It's important to me I know what the
people of Bridgetown are thinking. So tell me the truth."

"I think it's a goddamn tragedy what's
happened to this place," McInnis blurted. "We used to be a
community of farmers, of miners! Of men who set out into the great
wide West to forge their own livelihoods, their own destinies. And
now we've been bought out by industry, by tyranny. We're just a
bunch'a wage-slaves without a deed to our names. We'll all be
choking on the exhaust of our own smokestacks." The words sounded
prepared, as though McInnis was parroting something he'd read in a
political pamphlet. The effect was a bit chilling, for it suggested
to White that McInnis was tapping into something deeper. Channeling
a hive mind opposition that White was just beginning to
recognize.

A long pause followed, and McInnis looked
like a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. "I told
Marty as much, and, well, you can see what happened."

White looked over at the body under the
sheet. With great care, the coroner and his assistant slid a gurney
under it and lifted it up. They transported the body out through
the front door and around the corner, as onlookers watched.

This Fitzgerald fellow had walked in here
just a few hours ago, looking to have a drink and, presumably, go
to work. He would have been at Wayne's factory by now. White
wondered what was going to happen to Fitzgerald's wife and
children. Maybe as sheriff, he could talk Wayne into offering some
kind of settlement to see that they were taken care of.

"Well, Earl, I appreciate your candor," White
said. He did mean it. "I just hope things settle down around here.
I don't appreciate folk stirring up trouble in my town. I worry
that tragedies like this one are going to keep happening."

"Amen," McInnis said.

"And, Earl?"

"Yessir?"

White wanted to tell McInnis he ought to
think twice about spending all day sitting in here drinking. But
the old man just looked so pathetic, still shaking with anger and
confusion and fear—and he was still minus the one leg. "Nevermind,"
White said with a tip of his hat.

As he turned away from McInnis, he caught the
eye of Clayburn, behind the bar. White regarded the
ghoulish-looking, bald-headed saloon owner with the reticence he
would hold for a neighbor's noisy dog. He had no realistic designs
of forcing him out, but his continued presence in Bridgetown was a
kind of low-level thorn in White's side.

"A word," White said to him.

"Sure," Clayburn answered. He was polishing a
shot glass with a rag, and White didn't think he'd ever seen him do
anything but.

"Are you planning on opening back up right
away?" White asked.

"Opening up?"

"Yes. Resuming business."

"Well, Sheriff, I never closed. I'm open
right now. Could I get you a drink?"

White resisted the urge to snarl. "You have a
problem here, Mr. Clayburn, which I think you ought to
address."

Clayburn stopped his absentminded dishrag
handiwork. He set the glass down on the counter, and slung the rag
over his shoulder. "And what problem would that be, Sheriff?"

"A problem of outsider clientele. Gangsters,
dressed in black, from the hills beyond town."

"There's nothing wrong with my clientele,"
Clayburn shot back. "They pay up and play fair. I'm not gonna tell
any man who walks in here with good money and a civil disposition
that he can't have a drink."

White nodded, making a sour face. "Know that
there's an infestation of termites in this town," he said. "And
that I'm going to be cleaning house." He rapped his knuckles twice
on the bartop, and began to turn from the counter. "Good day,
Mr.—"

He stopped mid-stream, his eyes fixated on
what he saw at the rear of the saloon.

That
door
.

A wave of rememberance washed over him, from
his spine to his extremities.

"What is it?" Clayburn asked.

"That—that door," White said, pointing with a
finger that suddenly seemed quite bony. "Where does it go?"

Clayburn was even more irritated. "The
basement." Another moment passed, and when White didn't say
anything, the bartender added: "Would you like me to show it to
you?"

The sheriff couldn't pin
down what it was that troubled him so, other than a sense of
recognition that attached that door and whatever lay beyond it to
something
unknown
, but known all the same.

"No, no," he told the bartender. "That won't
be necessary."

"Very well," Clayburn said, breathing heavy
through his nose.

"Good day," White added, and turned on his
heels to head out the door.

Any other day, any other moment, and White
would have been compelled to go through that door. To find what lay
beyond. But in this moment, whatever it signified seemed too
monumental to tackle all at once. He promised himself he'd come
back.

White cut north through the red light
district, then west, in order to avoid the crowd still
demonstrating on Main Street. In truth, he ought to have been
there, making sure a riot didn't break out. But he had a more
pressing investigation to attend to, one of a more personal sort.
He could trust Harry and his other men to make sure Ms. Carlyle and
her troupe stayed civil.