He moved without thinking about it; he caught hold of the lapels of Muldauer’s Prince Albert and threw him up against the saloon wall, hard enough to send the fat man’s derby hat flying. Breath came out of Muldauer’s mouth in a surprised, frightened grunt. He slapped at Quincannon’s hands with fluttery gestures, like a woman.
“Here, here, what’s this? You can’t — ”
“Shut up,” Quincannon said. “And leave me be from now on, Muldauer. Do your drinking somewhere else. If you bother me again I’ll give you worse than this.”
He let go of the newspaperman and stepped back. Muldauer brushed and tugged at his Prince Albert; moved to pick up his derby hat from the puddled cobbles. In the outspill of lamplight from Hoolihan’s front window, his round face was pinched and outraged.
“You can’t manhandle me for no reason!” he shouted. “I won’t stand for it!” He jammed the derby down on his head and pointed a shaking finger at Quincannon. “I’ll report this incident to your superior! By God, I’ll write a story about it! See if I won’t, you… you damned flycopl”
Quincannon put his back to the man and walked away through the rain.
At Market Street he turned east again, toward the Ferry Building. The whiskey in him no longer dulled his thoughts or kept the pain at bay; the encounter with Muldauer had seen to that. Damn the fat toad. Another enemy made — and hardly the first over the past twelve months. Likely Muldauer would make good his threats to talk to Boggs, to write an exaggerated account of the incident for the News. Well, so be it. Others had reported him to Boggs, if not to the public at large, and nothing had come of it. Warnings, yes. Admonishments to mind his temper, curtail his drinking. But Boggs would never recommend dismissal from the Service, not without major provocation. A damned flycop John Quincannon was, in more ways than one, but also a damned good flycop. As good as his father had been.
Not that it mattered so much if he was given the sack — not any more. Quincannon’s work was all he had left of his life, and he pursued it doggedly; but if it were taken away from him he would feel little regret. A temporary inconvenience was all it would be, until he could find some other means of earning the price of his lodging and his liquor.
He was nearing the Embarcadero now. Ahead, the massive bulk of the Ferry Building appeared through the thin drizzle; and on either side of it, the pier sheds and the masts and steam funnels of anchored ships, like a burned-out forest silhouetted against the black sky. Quincannon turned right again on Spear Street, went along its deserted length to Folsom. The buildings here, close to the docks, were a mixture of warehouses, stores operated by ship’s chandlers and outfitters, and seamen’s rooming houses. The rooming house in which Bonniwell lived lay just ahead, close to Harrison Street and the pier at its foot.
As he walked, Quincannon kept his eye sharp for footpads. Muggings were not so common here as in the Barbary Coast, that seat of sin north of Market, but the waterfront was still a rough area at night; a man alone, particularly a man dressed in other than seaman’s garb, was fair prey — and no matter that he might be armed, as Quincannon was. But he saw no one. And heard nothing except for the foghorns on the Bay, the distant muffled throb of a piano from one of the saloons on the Embarcadero.
Bonniwell’s rooming house took shape in the darkness — a three-story firetrap made of warping wood, never painted and badly in need of carpentry work. Smears of lamplight showed at the front entrance, in three windows in the near wall. A fenced pipeyard occupied the lot on the near side, with an alleyway separating it from the rooming house; the building on the far side was a rope-and-twine chandler’s.
Movement at one of the lighted windows caught Quincannon’s attention, gave him pause. The window was on the third floor, and the movement appeared to be a struggle between two men… no, a heavy-set man half-carrying, half-dragging the limp form of a smaller man. The sash had been thrown up. Quincannon realized; the heavy-set man was bent on pushing the other one out through the opening.
Quincannon broke into a run; he knew without counting windows that the room was Bonniwell’s. But he made no move to draw the Remington double-action Navy revolver from its holster under his coat. He had not drawn it against a man since that day in Virginia City and would not again, even to save his life, unless he were in close quarters with no one else close by — and even then he could not be sure he would be able to fire it at another human being. Instead, now, he shouted as he ran; shouted a second time. The heavy-set man’s head jerked up at the cries, and Quincannon had a clear impression of a square-slabbed face topped by fiery red hair. He yelled a third time, but neither his shouts nor his presence checked the redhead’s actions.
The small man came toppling out of the window headfirst, struck the side of the building, and fell in a loose sprawl. Quincannon, at the alley mouth now, turning into it, saw the body hit the muddy ground, heard the dull breaking sound it made. He looked up again. The red-haired man was gone from the window.
Quincannon ran past where the body lay, to the rear of the alley. The redhead would not go down and out the front way, where he would properly expect to meet the person who had just witnessed his crime. He would come down the back stairs instead. There was no doubt of that in Quincannon’s mind; he knew desperate men, knew how they thought. He had been a desperate man himself more than once.
A six-foot board fence turned the alley into a dead-end. Without slowing he caught hold of the top boards and hoisted himself up and over. The rear door of the rooming house banged open just as he dropped down on the far side; the red-haired man emerged at a run, brandishing a pistol. The ground on this side of the fence was a quagmire: Quincannon’s feet slid out from under him and he went down hard in the mud. The fall saved his life, for the redhead fired twice and both bullets smacked into the boards directly behind him.
The red-haired man kept on running across the yard, into the shadow of a pepper tree. Quincannon, struggling to get his feet under him, heard thumping noises at the far boundary fence as the fugitive clambered over it. By the time he reached the fence himself, the man had vanished into the misty darkness.
Quincannon slapped mud off his hands and clothing, then returned to the alley fence. Men clogged the rooming house’s rear doorway now, peering out, talking in excited voices; he paid no attention to them. He climbed the fence again, went to where the body lay and knelt beside it.
The dead face that stared up at him, as he had known it would be, was Bonniwell’s.
Other men came cautiously into the alley, one of them carrying a lighted lantern. Quincannon identified himself, showed his Service badge, and then appropriated the lantern and used its light to examine Bonniwell. The little informant’s skull had been shattered, perhaps in the fall and perhaps in his room by some sort of blunt instrument. There was nothing in his pockets that indicated what he might have found out about the koniakers — the knowledge that had doubtless led to his murder. But there was something in his clenched right hand, something he had managed to conceal there before being struck down, something the red-haired man had overlooked.
Quincannon pried it loose with some difficulty. It was a wadded piece of butcher’s paper. Shielding it from the rain with his coat, he uncrumpled the paper and read what was written on it.
Whistling Dixon
Silver City, Idaho
Chapter 2
Early the next morning, Quincannon was the first to arrive at the Secret Service field office in the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets — one of the rare occasions that anyone had ever come in ahead of Boggs. The small, cramped room smelled of steam heat and Boggs’ Havana cigars; Quincannon opened one of the windows overlooking Mission Street to let in cold, moist air. He had taken two drinks before leaving his rooms, as was his custom every day, and he took another now from his pocket flask — a small one, to keep his thoughts sharp at the center and dull at the edges. Then he sat down at his cluttered desk.