Dead Man’s Hand (16 page)

Then his hostess dropped her cheongsam, and everything else vanished from view.

“Too late now,” she murmured. In her perfect nakedness, she turned and waved a hand,
whispering something in Chinese so ancient only a few of the most eminent scholars
of the Forbidden City would have understood.

Aromatic smoke swirled and danced. An unsourced sigh at once cosmetic and cosmic filled
the bedchamber. Whisked away by a zephyr, the bedsheets were replaced by new and fresh
that smelled of roses fresh plucked. As she moved toward the bed, the walls rippled
around Malone. Unbidden, he found himself starting to remove his own clothes. Given
the number of layers and the quantity of grease and other dried fluids they had absorbed,
this was a considerable process.

She did not so much lie down on the silk sheets as spread herself across them like
honey on lavosh. Utterly unabashed, she turned to face him. One hand gestured and
he found himself drawn toward her. He did not remember walking: just floating an inch
or so above the floor. Wisps of incense-laden smoke massaged his body as he traveled,
cleansing him more thoroughly than any bath, perfuming him as the Aztecs would a particularly
important sacrifice.

“You will sustain me far longer than that youngster John Barrel,” she murmured. “You
will renew me for many months, perhaps even years, until all has been used up. And
you will enjoy every moment of it.”

He felt himself rising up over the bed, over her. Then he was descending, the great
mass of him descending as gently as an autumn leaf, until he became one with her.

She howled.

* * *

Blocks away, the door of a stable stall shattered when its occupant burst through
the barrier as if it were made of cardboard. The nightwatch stable boy barely managed
to fling himself aside as Worthless turned the main doors to kindling. Pounding through
the streets, the fiery-eyed runaway scattered late night drunks and sober pedestrians
alike.

Very soon, the stallion found himself outside a singular stone structure from whose
topmost floor lamplight danced and twitched as if imbued with a life of its own. Whinnying
and rearing, sending ordinary horses stampeding in panic from where they had been
tied, Worthless stomped back and forth in front of the building. When two men managed
to get a lariat around him, one twitch of the muscular neck sent both of them flying
into a nearby water trough. Raising a rifle, a third prepared to bring the maddened
mount down. One look from his intended target caused the visiting rancher to drop
his weapon and sprint for the nearest available doorway.

In front of the furiously pacing horse, men and women were spilling from the building’s
main entrance. Though some wore few articles of clothing and others none at all, their
nakedness was not of as much concern as escaping a heretofore solid structure that
seemed on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, as they gathered themselves in the street,
a few turned to marvel at the quivering multistory building. Given the range of motion
in which the outer walls were presently engaged, it struck all as impossible that
they were not crumbling before their stunned eyes. Yet though it shivered and shook
like a gelatin mold placed atop a steam engine, the building did not collapse.

Despite the grinding and rumbling of shaken stone, another sound could be heard. It
was a roaring, a shrieking, a howling scree as if a pack of demons was being tormented
in ways unimaginable to mere human beings. It was the sound of an evil spirit being
hoisted by its own petard.

Or in this case, that of Amos Malone.

* * *

The bed, with its luscious silks and enveloping pillows and hand-wrought steel springs,
was slowly disintegrating beneath its present occupants. The room was, quite literally,
heaving in time to their synchronized movements. Locked against each other, they were
unaware of their physical surroundings. Engaged in oneness, they became the universe
while the real one disappeared. It was the totality of tao.

Beneath the immensity of Malone, the courtesan’s eyes widened.

“Not possible! It is not possible! How can you…?” He moved suddenly, a certain way,
and her eyes closed. Her nails dug at his back, much as those of an animal might dig
at the ground searching for prey. She whined, she whimpered, she threw back her head
and howled. As she did so, her mouth opened wide. Determined, resolute, Malone kept
moving even as an ethereal redness began to emerge from between her lips.

“I know the way,” he muttered even as he strove to maintain the effort. “I know the
places to touch, the moves to make. You are done in this time and place, vixen. Be
off with you, says I! Take yourself elsewhere and find another to feed upon. I’m Amos
Malone, and I’m afraid I got to hang onto all the lifeforce I’ve got. Might need it
later.” With that he thrust his hips forward as hard as he could, in a most distinctive,
ancient, and thrice-forgotten manner.

“Holy jingle,” Barrel had kept mumbling, over and over. Not being conversant with
old Mandarin, the driver’s enunciation had been only an approximation. But from the
man’s semi-coherent sputtering Malone had been able to divine the correct pronunciation—and
its true meaning.

“Huli jing!” poor Barrel had been trying to say. It was not an exclamation, but a
warning.

The courtesan’s mouth opened wider still. Wider than humanly possible. Around them,
the overheated air shuddered as the Huli jing spirit was expelled from the human woman’s
body. Hovering in the air by the head of the bed, the nine-tailed fox-shaped apparition
spun and whirled helplessly, bereft now of its human host. It snapped at him once,
barking half in anger, half in amusement, almost biting his nose. In the far corner
of the room, atop his pile of discarded clothes, Malone’s wolf’s head cap snarled,
and its eyes glowed red with fury at the sight of its hereditary enemy.

The Huli jing growled a last time, whipped its nine tails once across Malone’s face,
and was gone.

Malone collapsed.

The air in the room grew still. Walls ceased their shaking and behaved once more as
stone. Crystal ceased singing and the flames in the oil lamps calmed themselves. Outside
on the street, a manic horse quieted, huffed, and ambled over to a recently vacated
water trough to drink long, heavy, and noisily. Beneath an utterly exhausted Malone,
black eyes flickered, focused, and gazed up at him in wonder.

“Who… who are you, sir? What has happened here?” Raising her head, she regarded her
elegant if unsettled surroundings. “I remember last being sold and being put on a
ship. I remember a place, a port…”

Worn as he was, Malone still managed to muster a thoughtful response. “That would
not, by any chance, be San Francisco?”

“Yes!” A small trill of excitement underlined her words. “San Francisco, yes. I remember
being delivered and then… nothing.” Her gaze returned to him, searching his features.
“You have a dangerous face but kind eyes, sir. What will you do with me?”

Letting out a groan that shook the foundations of the building one final time, he
rolled off her. There was silence in the room for a long minute. Her expression expectant,
she eyed the mountain of man beside her but forbore from interrupting his recovery.
Then he exhaled heavily, sat up, clasped hands around knees the size of small boulders,
and looked down at her.

“If it’s all the same to you, ma’m, I’ll take you back to San Francisco. There are
good folk there o’ your own kind, folks who will find a decent place for someone like
yourself. One where you won’t have to worry about bein’ possessed. Because that’s
what you were, ma’m.” The great sweep of his beard framed a surprisingly reassuring
smile.

She looked away, neither demure nor embarrassed by her nakedness. “You call me ‘ma’m.’
My name is Meifeng.”

Malone nodded approvingly. Outside the closed window, a horse could be heard whinnying
insistently. He started to rise. A hand, strong but graceful, reached out to restrain
him.

“Before you leave to prepare for our journey, sir, I would show you my thanks for
saving me, though I have but small and inadequate means of doing so.”

“I really ought…” he began. But she was insistent, and begged him, and her dark eyes
were now filled with the kind of earnest soulfulness it had always been his misfortune
to be unable to refuse. Besides, despite all he had endured, he was always a fool
for knowledge.

After all, Meifeng does mean “beautiful wind.”

Ray Malcolm never shot first.

It ain’t that he were slow, or yellow, or no-count. Ray was a betting man, and he
bet that the man who shot first would miss. He’d been right so far. Whenever a fight
went from fists to bullets, the man who pulled his gun first was too quick with the
trigger and missed. Maybe not miss all the way—Ray had a scar on his shoulder and
a bullet still in his leg to prove that—but miss enough to not kill him.

And that was enough. Because the men who shot first needed more than one bullet, but
Ray never did.

* * *

It’s not like Ray went looking for trouble. But he
was
a betting man, and he liked his cards. And he was good at ’em. A bit too good, often
enough. And when you’re a bit too good, some people take offense. And when some people
take offense, they shoot.

Flagstaff wasn’t much of a town. Ray counted ten buildings, but one of them was a
saloon, and that was all Ray needed. He pushed open the wooden door and breathed in
the scent of rotgut, whiskey, and sawdust. With a nod to the barkeep, Ray accepted
a shot of whiskey and leaned against the bar, surveying the room. Four men and a saloon
girl grouped around the other end of the bar, talking and drinking. A few old ’uns
were playing twenty-one on a rickety wood table; not gambling, just flopping the cards
over in a bored sort of way. There were others, at the tables along the far wall,
who were taking the games much more seriously.

Ray had been known to make a living off of cards, and while it wasn’t always green
pastures, he typically made enough to be happy about it. He’d started out in Chicago,
but couldn’t abide the number of people there and progressively moved west. Ray was
in Arizona now, thinking about maybe going on to California, or maybe head south instead.
He needed to move soon, that was sure enough true. He hadn’t found any of the answers
he was seeking here.

“I told you, it t’weren’t real!” a man said on the other side of the bar. Ray looked
up. A crowd had formed around a short feller holding something up in the flat of his
hand.

The man touched whatever the thing he was holding was, and Ray saw a flicker of movement.
The saloon girl screeched and shied away, and the men roared with laughter. An older
man bought the lady a shot to ease her nerves, and she tossed it back so quickly Ray
would bet that while the barkeep charged the old man a full fifteen cents for the
liquor, there was nothing in the glass but water.

Ray left his empty on the bar and moved closer to the crowd.

“It
looks
real,” the saloon girl said, leaning over the short man’s shoulder.

“Ain’t,” the man said. He touched the thing again, and it stopped moving.

Ray finally had a good peep at the thing—a spider, about the size of a double-eagle
gold piece, all black and spindly legs. It was motionless in the man’s hand now, and
Ray could tell the man hadn’t been lying—it wasn’t a real spider. But when the man
stroked the back of it again, the spider jumped to life, scuttling over his hand and
between his fingers.

“You wanna hold it?” the short man mocked, holding the spider out to the saloon girl.

She smacked his hand, and the spider leapt from the short man’s palm right at Ray.
Ray instinctively raised his hand to protect his face, and he felt the light tickle
of the spider on his skin. Pulling his hand down, he looked at the thing. It
felt
like a real spider, but Ray could hear the faint sound of metal clacking against
metal as the spider’s legs danced along the back of his hand.

Ray hadn’t noticed how quiet the bar had gotten until he looked up and saw the short
man right in front of him.

“It’s mine,” the man said, his voice lower than when he was teasing the saloon girl.

Ray shrugged and turned his hand over so the spider dropped into the short man’s hand.

“Where’d you get that?” Ray asked.

The man looked suspiciously at him. “From an In’din,” he said finally.

“Which kind?” Ray asked.

“What you mean?”

“There’s more than one kind of Indian. Arapaho? Hopi? Ute?”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Why so curious?”

“Ain’t,” Ray said, shrugging. “I only came here for cards, anyway.”

He moved away from the bar toward one of the tables near the window, where there was
gambling. A couple of men were crowing over a faro table, but Ray steered himself
to the on-going poker game instead. It was getting on in the day, but the bar wasn’t
as crowded as it would be later. Only two men were playing, and the poorer of them
was eager to get fresh blood in on the game. Ray sat down. Opposite him, the short
feller pulled up a chair. The mechanical spider scuttled out of the man’s hand and
then froze on the edge of the table, unnaturally still.

“I ain’t never seen nothing like that before,” the man dealing cards said, his attention
half on the spider.

Ray could tell that the short man was torn: show off the spider and let everyone envy
him, or protect it and hide it away. His pride won out.

Soon, though, everyone’s attention went back to the cards. Ray bet sparingly in the
first few hands. He
was
a betting man, and he was good at what he did, and what he did was pay attention.
He had a friend—back before the War killed him, more than fifteen years ago—who would
sometimes accuse Ray of cheating. But Ray never cheated. He just watched.