Under a Gilded Moon(106)

From the opposite side of the room, she braced for what she knew would be her one chance as he lunged at her. One sliver of a second to let fly the knife at a moving target.

Then all at once he was coming for her, and she was drawing back her arm.

Now came a pounding on the door that stopped them both in their tracks and turned them toward it.

“Everythin’s all right in there, is it?” came a voice from the other side.

Kerry spun back first and let the knife fly.

A bloodcurdling scream from Madison Grant.

Jursey had been right: sometimes, at least, she could gig a trout in the gills.

Her eyes not leaving him, Kerry stepped swiftly to unlock the door. Moncrief, the footman, swung the door wide.

“Bloody ’ell.”

Kerry, her hair pulled wild and loose from the maid’s cap that dangled by one hairpin, marched to the opposite side of the room. She yanked her knife from the wainscoting just a hair to the right of Madison Grant’s thigh. He stood frozen in place, face drained of all color.

“You have Moncrief here to thank,” Kerry told Grant over her shoulder as she drew even with the footman. “It’s only because he showed up when he did that I aimed”—she glanced back one final time—“to miss.”





Chapter 49

In the hours after they dragged his brother away, Sal faced what had to be done. Robert and Ella Bratchett had stepped forward from the crowd to volunteer to care for Nico for the night. Sal trusted them.

But he’d also seen his brother’s face: worse than an expression of horror.

Instead, Nico’s eyes had gone blank, insensible, just as he’d looked when Sal found him after the night of lynchings. Nico’s mind had clearly moved to a place where he could not feel, could not hurt, could not panic. But also, Sal knew, he would not eat or speak. For Nico to survive, Sal would need to break out.

Leblanc caught him staring at the bars. “Plan to gnaw through those with your sharp little teeth, guinea?” He turned to Wolfe. “I’d watch that one if I were you.”

Wolfe scowled. “Like I ain’t never learned my own job.”

“Apparently, you haven’t. A murder months ago at your train station and the killer still at large—unless it’s Catalfamo, in which case I did your job for you. In fact, I can’t trust a fumbling backwater piker like you not to muff up a simple thing like keeping a watch on the Italian for the night. I’m staying here myself, Wolfe, overnight. Then transporting Catalfamo tomorrow back to New Orleans for trial.”

“Thought you said he and the others already stood trial four years ago and got off.”

Leblanc looked Sal up and down. Then shrugged. “Bringing him in’s what I was hired to do. That’s what I’m doing. ’Cause some of us know how to do our jobs. What happens to him once I get him there isn’t my concern.”

Wolfe met the prisoner’s eye but addressed the detective over his shoulder. “No. I don’t reckon it would be.”

There would be no second trial, Sal knew. From the expression on the local lawman’s face, Sal gathered Wolfe knew it, too.

Leblanc made a show of moving one of the jail’s army cots near Sal’s cell. Sullenly, Wolfe served Leblanc and himself slabs of salted venison and a clear liquid Wolfe referred to only as “home brew” before shoving a tin cup at Leblanc.

“So, little man,” Leblanc said to Wolfe as they ate, “time to show you how to do your job.”

Ramming a metal dinner tray under the metal flap at the foot of Sal’s cell door, Wolfe said nothing. But he stood there unmoving at the cell as Sal picked up the tray.

Wolfe’s eyes dropped to the tray. Sal’s followed. A tin cup of water sat there. A tin plate of venison, mostly gristle by the look of it. One metal spoon. No fork. No knife. Both of those, presumably, could be used as weapons.

But under the upturned lip of the tin plate, two long, thin nails, one bent slightly at its point.

Sal’s eyes flew up to Wolfe’s, but met his only for an instant, Wolfe already turning.

“Go the hell to sleep, Catalfamo,” Wolfe said. “God knows you’ll need it with the journey you’ve got ahead.”

Sal did not eat. But he made himself choke down the water. And made himself lie down on his cot and pull the rough wool blanket up to his chin. And lie there. For hours.

The nails might have been a trick, the setup for Wolfe’s plan to showcase a local lawman’s savvy in catching a prisoner attempting escape. But it was Sal’s only chance—so a chance worth taking, even if it earned him a bullet through the back.

He waited until after moonlight flooded his cell. Leblanc’s snore rose and fell.

Sal knew little of locks, though he’d picked one once years ago on a steamer trunk belonging to an Oxford don staying at the pensione in Florence. Sal had been quietly coached by the pensione’s old cook, who’d apparently led quite another life as a young woman. She’d murmured tips in his ear: where to hold the ice pick and the small paring knife she offered him from the kitchen. The professor, who’d lost his spectacles and his trunk keys on the first day, had tipped them both a half crown.

Now Sal worked the nails gently. He couldn’t afford to clank them inside the lock. A half hour passed as he prodded and poked with them, using the straight one as the tensioner, then gently pulling with the bent one. His back and shoulders tightened to the point of pain. Sweat poured from his face despite the chill of the brick floor and walls. Try after try after try. Nothing.