Chapter Twenty-two
Rose ran back into the warehouse and quickly closed the door behind her. “There are men coming.”
Captain Hink still had his gun drawn. Pointed straight at Mr. Wicks’s head. Mr. Wicks held his gun at Hink’s belly. Apparently, they hadn’t pulled the trigger to decide who was boss yet.
“I suggest you settle real quick if you’re going to work together, or just kill each other,” Rose said. “There are men coming. Men who won’t want us to be nosing around their warehouse. Do we hide? Fight?”
“Hide,” both Hink and Wicks said simultaneously.
“Dammit,” Hink added.
Then they both offered their hands to her. Rose just rolled her eyes and jogged down the row of boxes on her own, looking for decent cover in case the men came into the warehouse and decided to put on a light.
Hink and Wicks did the same, all of them settling near one another between a stack of boxes and a boarded-up window.
“How many?” Captain Hink asked.
“I heard maybe six voices.”
“How far?” Wicks asked.
“Close. Very.”
The door opened and Rose curled down lower.
“. . .isn’t any better, I’m telling you,” one of the men said. “Hob, get the light.”
“How can you know?” another voice, this one accented with a southern sort of drawl, asked. “They aren’t like buffalo. Can’t just stand on a hill and count out the herd. Ain’t no bones left behind either. Might be we’ve done our part to kill them off. Might be this is the last night we’ll see them on the street.”
“You can’t be that dumb,” the first man said. “Until we go a full moon without someone losing their youngest, they aren’t gone. Maybe not even then. It ain’t just children they snatch. There’s crops going bad, and that bout of fever that set in last spring? Brought on by the Strange, plain and clear.”
A switch snapped, metal against metal, and gaslights caught one to the other in a line across the top of the building. Rose blinked hard to get her eyes adjusted to the bright, and hunkered down a little tighter. They’d chosen a good enough hiding place, and the men, five she could see still near the door with Hob walking back from a little farther off, didn’t seem to suspect they were anything but alone in the big building.
The men were of a height to one another, most of them wearing beards and mustaches cut trim to their faces. She’d guess them all of an age too, maybe even as old as thirty or so. They wore a mix of styles: pants in dark, heavy wool plaid, plain leather, or sturdy denim blue; boots in black polish or oiled hide. The only thing their coats and hats had in common was they all looked warm and useful in the hard weather.
But there was one other thing that they each sported—a wide-muzzled gun of some sort with a copper box attached to it, hanging at the side.
One look at that gun sent her mind spinning with possibilities. She’d never seen anything like it, and her fingers itched to figure what it was made of and why, exactly, it was modified in such a manner.
A hand reached out and pressed gently downward on her arm. She glanced up. It was Hink. He wasn’t looking at her, but crouched as he was at her side, he must have sensed her coiling up with curiosity. He must have known she was pulled by the knowing of something worse than a cat by yarn, and given too much a chance, might just walk up there and ask those men what the guns were for and how, exactly, they worked.
“Mayor says there’s an end to them,” the second man said. “Won’t need a second warehouse, and this one’s nearly full. I say there’ll be no ghosts in the night come spring.”
The men each hung their guns on wall pegs, then freed the copper boxes from the contraptions by thumbing off a couple latches and giving them a good tug.
“Want to put money on that, Sal?” one of the other men asked.
“Didn’t say I’d bet for it.”
“Here now. A man who ain’t willing to back up his opinion with money shows you exactly what his opinion’s worth.”
The men chuckled and walked off with the copper boxes, heading deeper into the warehouse, out of Rose’s sight. In a moment, a clattering of cogs and wheels and chains filled the quiet of the place as some large device was activated. After a bit, there was silence.
“Should we follow them?” Rose whispered once the racket had died down.
“No,” Hink whispered back. “We stay here.”
“We do not stay here,” Mr. Wicks said. “We investigate.”
Hink just shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how you can’t seem to understand a two-letter word, but let me try again: No.”
“As your director, I order you to follow my orders, Mr. Hink.”
Hink snorted.
Mr. Wicks scowled at him. He stood and very quietly and quickly made his way down the aisle, pausing at the end of the stack of crates and peering around the corner to where the men had wandered.
“Blasted yatterhead,” Hink whispered. He turned and gave Rose a look that said she would share the blame if Wicks got them all killed.
There was no use calling out—the other men would likely hear them. So Rose did the only thing she could think of. She pulled her gun and got ready to shoot if Wicks was discovered.
Thomas didn’t dash out from behind the crates. But it wasn’t long before the men were back, talking over more mundane market prices of buckwheat and potatoes. They crossed over to the door.
Wicks ducked down out of their line of sight as the men reconnected the copper boxes back to the guns, shouldered them, shut down the lights, then left through the same door they’d come in.
Rose’s heart thumped for a minute, maybe two, as her eyes, once again, got the hang of darkness. Then Captain Hink was on his feet, just as quiet as Wicks, but twice as large and twice as temperamental as he strode in a killing sort of way down to where Wicks sat.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hink growled.
“Gathering information.” Wicks stood, dusted his coat, and adjusted his hat, though neither looked out of place to Rose.
“They could have found us.”
“Yes. Then we would have killed them, I suppose,” he said nonplussed.
“Idiot,” Hink grumbled.
“‘Sir,’” Wicks added. “You will address me as ‘sir.’”
“When hell burns holes in my boots,” Hink said. “And not even then.”
“What exactly will convince you of my station above you, Marshal Cage?”
“Paperwork signed and sealed by the president. Don’t have that, do you?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Wicks dug in the satchel he carried, thumbed through a small stack of paper, and pulled out one clean sheet.
In the dark of the place, Rose could just make out a seal of an eagle worked up in red and blue ink.
“Will this do?” He handed the paper to Hink.
Hink took it and tipped it to the meager light slipping in through the cracks in the ceiling.
“Anyone could forge a document. There’s practically a printing press on every corner nowadays.” He shoved it back at him.
Thomas paused, looking for a moment like he might have just noticed the depths of Hink’s stubbornness.
“Yes. Well,” he said. “I want to know where they went with those copper boxes. Go and see where they put them and report back to me.”
Hink inhaled. His hand clenched into a fist.
She didn’t know if he was fighting the urge to yell at the man or just fighting the urge to fight.
“Lady said she wants to go to town,” Hink said. “Find a nice hotel and a bath. I say that’s the way I’m walking.”
“I’m sure Miss Small won’t mind one little jaunt to see what’s behind that door.” He pointed.