“Damn you, Harry! What’s become of her?”
Stratemeyer merely lifted his chin, and Ransom followed his eyes upward. Above, caught on an exposed daggerlike protrusion of steel pipe—part of the upstairs plumbing—her body dangled: a charred disfigured doll, and ghastliest of all, she was headless.
Ransom went to his knees, bellowing like a wounded CITY FOR RANSOM
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beast. All of the hurt, all of the pain she must have felt, he screamed out in her name.
Stratemeyer called for some of his men to escort Alastair out of the devastation.
When Stratemeyer felt confident that Ransom had been put in a cab and sent home, he went around the bar and stooped below the bedsprings to reach in for the other part of the woman he’d only known as Polly Pete, the woman Ransom had made a reputation on with his winnings as a gambler. Harry’d never heard her called anything else. He wondered about the name Merielle. Guessed it Polly’s nick-name, else the one given her at birth by parents, whoever they were . . . wherever they might be . . . if even alive.
One thing he knew was to treat Polly’s body with all the respect of a queen, Alastair Ransom’s queen. He knew not to assume anything, knew to pass this along to the medical chaps who’d ultimately take her in their care, knew not to willy-nilly bury the remains in Potter’s Field, not without consulting Ransom.
An assistant rushed to Stratemeyer’s opened arms with a large paper sack to receive the head. This done, Harry pointed to the dangling corpse overhead. “Somebody get a ladder against that wall! Determine if it’ll hold! And confound it all . . . if God willing, snatch that poor woman down.” “Sir, if I may volunteer for that duty,” replied Rodney McKeon. “Alastair Ransom’s been a good friend, sir.”
Harry concurred, nodding firmly, thinking Ransom had done so much for so many. He dropped his gaze and jerked his head to hide a creeping tear. “That man doesn’t deserve this.”
“Some bastard’s taken her head off,” muttered another fireman.
McKeon added, “Yaaa . . . looks the same bastard as did the others, but this time . . .” He paused to bring home his point. “This time, he’s gone too far.”
Harry said, “And he’s not goin’ to get away with it, not after Ransom finds his wits.”
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ROBERT W. WALKER
Alastair Ransom hadn’t gone home in the cab they put him into; instead, he wound up at Muldoon’s, unsure how he’d arrived here. He pounded on the door, demanding he be served, until Muldoon pulled it wide. Muldoon argued the law that shut taverns down on any given Saturday midnight not to reopen until Monday noon. Ransom pushed past the giant Muldoon, who snatched out a blackjack and slammed it into Alastair’s head, knowing he had the law on his side.
This just as Mike O’Malley’d arrived.
O’Malley arrested Muldoon for assaulting an officer, and Ransom was taken into custody for a drunk and disorderly, orders of Chief Kohler himself, and ignobly thrown into the drunk tank. With no beds left, they laid him out on the floor, unconscious.
Muldoon was booked for battery on a police official and told his court date would come round when it came around, despite his continual plea: “I was trying to uphold the drinking laws put forth by authorities!” It fell on deaf ears. Muldoon’s use of the sap to the back of Ransom’s head had caused a concussion, and saps were as illegal as drinking on Sunday—which actually changed from one week to the next, depending upon the level of graft. In fact, the drinking laws proved as mercurial as the tides.
“He knows the rules but chose to break ’em! I pay good money to run a business, and this is how you treat me?”
complained Muldoon, his gigantean features terrifying even through the bars.
“You daft fool, Muldoon! Have ya no sense? That’s Alastair Ransom you knocked cold, and he has friends all over Chicago.”
“I know who he is, but he pushed into my establishment shouting orders!”
“Have you not heard the news, man?”
“What news?”
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“Christ man, why news of a blackhearted bastard who’s going about the city cutting off heads!”
“Every day it’s all I hear!”
“About this morning’s victim! Found in the fire on Clark Street?”
“What’s it to me?”
“It was Ransom’s Polly who was murrr-durrr-ed, man!”
It finally hit Muldoon, sinking into the thick walls of his head. “So he decides he’ll take it out on me, does he?”
“He needed a drink, and he needed it badly, and you ought’ve given it up.”
“It’s me license I worry about.”
“Aye . . . like every merchant in this city.”
“You coppers don’t make it easy on a man, the way you scratch honest earnings!”
“Honest is it? Your place is a bloody front for every vice known to—”
“—and now they got fees for this, and fees for that, and soon it’ll come to having to pay a fee to keep a rooster in your own bloody yard!”
“Dare you now swear at your jailor?”
“Look . . . is Ransom going to be OK?”
“I dunno. Moans a bit now and again; still outta his head.
Didja have to hit him so hard?”
“I didn’t want that man getting up after I hit ’im, for sure.”
“Well . . . you succeeded . . . least till he comes to. Best think of selling your place and getting out.”
“Ne’er saw a copper so liked by other coppers.”
“He’s a good man, a noble man to be sure.”
“And I suppose, O’Malley, you’re one of his henchmen?”
Mike O’Malley grimaced at Muldoon. “I shoulda beaned you!”
“All right . . . I should’ve thought before I swung on ’im.”
“Inspector Ransom’s done more for police and the personal safety of every cop in this city than all the captains, and all the chiefs, and all the commissioners, and all the mayors combined.”
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“And I grounded him.”
“And you won’t hear the last of it with me or many another copper, I can guarantee you, Muldoon.”
“What’re you saying? Huh?”
“I’ll say no more.”
“That if he’s to die, God forbid, that . . . that my time’s truly up here?”
Michael Shaun O’Malley only turned the key and walked from the lockup, saying not another word.
CHAPTER 16
Griffin Drimmer stumbled amid still smoldering ashes of the fire that’d killed Alastair Ransom’s only dream.
Alastair had confided in a word here and there that he had found someone special, someone he’d spoken about in connection with the word future, someone who, as he put it, might help him put away all his ghosts. Someone he thought he might devote all the rest of his life to, and in doing so, he could let go of the past, let go of the horror of Haymarket and the lingering questions and suspicions, to end his years-long quest after the phantoms of another time.