taken care of financially. Or if I can’t, Mr. Turnbuckle will.”
“And that’s a reassurance indeed, sir,” Dugan said. “But I don’t plan on windin’ up dead.”
“Let’s hope for the sake of those four redheaded little ones that you’re right.”
Conrad went back inside and closed the door. It was going to make things a little more difficult, because he was determined no one else was going to lose their life because of him.
A little more difficult, yes ... but not impossible.
Conrad stayed close to his hotel room all day, leaving it only to eat lunch in the Palace’s sumptuous American Dining Room. Dugan trailed him and took a table in an unobtrusive corner where he could keep an eye on Conrad. It was likely Dugan could not afford to eat there and Conrad assumed Turnbuckle had instructed the hotel to put the bodyguard’s meal on his tab.
Conrad chose to have supper in the suite, as he had breakfast. Dugan had gone off-duty and been replaced by a short, thick individual who introduced himself as Morelli. The new bodyguard followed the waiter into the suite.
“Could be one o’ them assassins in disguise,” Morelli explained. The waiter, who by his accent was Russian, took offense at that, and Conrad shooed them both out and told them to take their squabble outside.
He ate supper and waited for full darkness to settle over the city by the bay. When it had, he took off his tweed suit, his cravat, and his white shirt. In their place he pulled on a homespun shirt and a rough brown coat and trousers of the sort working men wore. While he was downstairs for lunch he had stopped at the concierge’s desk and made arrangements to have the clothes bought and delivered to his suite that afternoon, along with a stevedore’s cap. He tugged the cap down over his fair hair and tucked the Colt behind his belt at the small of his back, where the coat would conceal it.
The Palace was as modern and up-to-date as it could be, but it didn’t yet have fire escapes outside the windows the way some hotels back east did. However, it did have decorative ledges along the exterior walls. Conrad slid open the window in his bedroom and stepped out onto the ledge. It was only about six inches wide.
Facing the brick wall, he slid his feet along the ledge toward the corner of the building. His fingers went into the cracks between the bricks and gripped tightly to take some of the strain off his toes. His suite was on the fifth floor, so there was a lot of empty air underneath him, with hard, unforgiving pavement waiting at the end of any unlucky fall. There was also a drain spout at the corner, connected to the rain gutters around the roof of the building. That was his destination.
After a few nerve-wracking minutes, he reached it. Keeping his feet on the ledge and one hand holding the wall, he pulled on the spout to test its strength. Satisfied it would hold him, he moved both hands onto it and got a good grip. Supporting himself with the drain spout, he began walking down the side of the building.
He knew it was a crazy thing to do, but he couldn’t carry out the sort of investigation he wanted to if he had one or more of Turnbuckle’s hired bodyguards watching him all the time. The trail led into the seamy district known as the Barbary Coast, and no one there was going to talk to the police. Those bodyguards looked like policemen, and some of them probably had been on the force, before going to work for Turnbuckle.
Conrad had to do it alone. It was his best chance to find out what he wanted to know, so he had run the risk of climbing out of a hotel window and down a drain spout.
He heaved a sigh of relief when the soles of his boots touched the floor of the alley next to the hotel.
Having spent time in San Francisco he knew how to get to the Barbary Coast. Because someone who knew him might see him and recognize him, he didn’t follow the alley to the front of the hotel. He went to the rear, crossed the street quickly with his cap pulled down over his face, and found another alley that took him in the right direction. He smiled faintly, confident he had gotten out of the Palace without Morelli or anyone else knowing he was gone.
Sliding a hand in his pocket, he touched the ivory token he had brought with him. With any luck, before the night was over he would know what it meant.
And he would be one step closer to finding his children.
Because he was preoccupied, as well as because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, Conrad didn’t see the hulking, shadowy figure that appeared at the mouth of the alley beside the hotel. He didn’t realize he was being watched, didn’t feel the dark, almond-shaped eyes tracking his every move as he crossed the street and entered the other alley. The figure was clad all in black and was next to invisible in the shadows.
After a moment, the follower emerged from the alley and crossed the street as well, moving so swiftly and silently despite its size anyone watching might have taken it for a trick of the eyes, not something real and substantial.
The figure entered the other alley and the darkness swallowed it completely again, as if it had never been there.
Chapter 10
The area known as the Barbary Coast had grown up during the turbulent days following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, when Argonauts by the hundreds of thousands poured into San Francisco and used it as a jumping- off point in their quest for riches. Some of them decided to stay instead of heading for the goldfields, some came back when they abandoned their dreams of finding a fortune, and many of those who were lucky enough to strike it rich returned to San Francisco intent on spending some of their newfound wealth.
Naturally, there were plenty of tinhorns, whores, and bartenders willing to take that money from them.
Gambling dens sprang up around the old Spanish plaza known as Portsmouth Square. Houses of prostitution spread along the waterfront. A man could get a drink in any of them, or in scores of other saloons, taverns, and dives.
The atmosphere in those places ranged from high-toned and luxurious to downright squalid, and sometimes you could find examples of both in the same block along Clay, Kearny, Pacific, and Grant Streets. The boundaries of the rather nebulous area people called the Barbary Coast drifted here and there with time and according to the vigilance of the local law enforcement agencies, but the core of its existence remained the same, the twin titans of Lust and Greed. They made up the foundation upon which the Barbary Coast was built.
That was where Conrad was headed. A damp chill hung in the air along the bay, and tendrils of fog crept up from the water and curled through the streets.
The only time Conrad had visited the Barbary Coast was when he was a much younger man, still in college. He and some of his wealthy classmates from back east were in San Francisco on a lark, and naturally they wanted to see the lurid denizens of the notorious area and sow some wild oats.
In those days, Conrad had been as arrogant and obnoxious as his companions, so he had gone along willingly on the expedition. They had caroused and whored all night, and they had been extremely lucky they hadn’t wound up shanghaied, bleeding and robbed in some alley, or wasting away from some pustulent disease. He had heard it said that God looks after drunkards and fools, and he and his friends had fit into both categories.
Now, of course, things were totally different.
Time and tragedy had humbled him, stripped away most of the arrogance and pretense. But he remembered how to get to the Barbary Coast, and a short time after slipping out of the Palace Hotel, he entered a saloon called the Bella Grande, which didn’t live up to its name at all. Conrad kept his eyes down and moved in a somewhat furtive manner, but in reality he was keenly studying everything around him.
He made his way across the crowded, smoky room to the bar and slid a dime onto the hardwood. “A schooner of beer,” he told the man in the dirty apron who came to take his order.
The bartender tapped the bar next to the dime. “I’ll need another of those, and a nickel besides.”
“Two bits for a schooner of beer?” Conrad protested. “What is this place, the damn Palace?”
“It’s the goin’ rate, friend,” the bartender said. “You must’ve been at sea a long time if you didn’t know that.”
Conrad shrugged, picked up the dime, and pawed around in a handful of coins he pulled from his pocket. The
