A huge pothole sent Ransom’s body over with the stretcher in back of the meat wagon. The jolt opened his wound and Ransom awoke in the stench-filled darkness. He imagined CITY FOR RANSOM
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himself in Hades itself, and rightly so for the mistakes he’d made and the bad judgment that’d gotten him killed.
His thoughts only added to the flame of punishment in this acrid, ambling elephant gut he found himself alone in.
After an initial moment of horror and acceptance of both his death and damnation, Ransom realized precisely where he lay. The same wagon that retained the charred flesh odors of Polly and Purvis before her. The back of Shanks and Gwinn’s horse-drawn death carrier. The two coroner’s men had never heard of soap and water. The interior of the wagon shut out all light and sealed in all rot.
“Get me the bloody hell out of here!” he shouted, raised up and kicked out at the boards of the wagon. He’d chosen the spot where he guessed the buckboard seat holding Shanks and Gwinn must be. He kicked again and again like a bucking angry mustang.
Each kick sent a searing pain through his side where he’d been wrapped mummy fashion by Jane, and he could feel the bandages filling with wetness—his blood.
The wagon bucked back, and Alastair was thrown into the very wall he kicked when the wagon came to a sudden halt.
Ransom lay silent, bleeding profusely, passed out on the flatbed below the overturned stretcher just as Gwinn tore open the doors, cursing.
Gwinn sucked in the acrid air without coughing, used to it. Seeing that Ransom had silenced and lay as dead as a stump, he slammed the doors closed again. Taking his squat little body back to the front, he climbed aboard and shouted to Shanks. “Hurry on before that damned maniac wakes again! He’s put a hole through the boards!” “Is he passed out for now?” Shanks needed no second telling as he lit into the horses with a whip.
“Passed out, maybe . . . maybe better than passed out.”
“Dead?”
“We can only hope.”
In the inky black rear, the patient bounced like a huge sack of potatoes with every pothole and mislaid brick.
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“Gawd forgive me,” said Shanks. “I hafta hope the bugger dies.”
“He’s never been no friend of ours,” agreed Gwinn.
After locking Waldo Denton behind bars in a cell alongside Philo Keane, Griffin Drimmer looked long and hard at the puny prisoner.
Drimmer still could not believe that this pipsqueak fellow hardly out of his teens might possibly be the infamous Phantom. However, once Ransom was lifted off him by Shanks and Gwinn, Griffin had done precisely what Alastair wanted.
He yanked the kid up off the floor, and in quick fashion began to cuff Denton to loud disagreement not only from Denton, but from the ladies.
The only saving grace was that the boy—one hand yet free—put up a fight and tried to go for Griffin’s throat when he broke loose. Then he pulled a fancy twirling move to grind about Griffin’s body in an attempt to get behind him—a concealed garrote pulled from somewhere. Griffin knew a few Far East combat moves of his own. Realizing the danger if this bony little fellow should get that wire noose around his neck, he upended a parlor table and used it to bash Denton in the temple. As a result of a final blow from Griffin’s gun slashing across Denton’s face, the supposed Phantom fell hard against a brick fireplace, knocking him senseless.
With no more resistance, over the next hour the suspect, and now assailant, was handcuffed and hauled off to the Des Plaines Street Bridewell. But by the time Griffin turned the key on Denton, his doubts had returned.
The garrote notwithstanding.
When Waldo had come to, he’d told this nonstop tale of how, seeing the success of the Phantom in bringing down his prey, he thought a garrote a good weapon for himself, and so he’d taken to carrying one at all times. “A hackman can’t be too careful these days, not with the sort running about this CITY FOR RANSOM
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city, I can tell you. I’ll tell the judge the same. You’ve gotta believe me! You’ve got the wrong man, and that crazy Alastair Ransom—may he die of his wounds, God—he oughta be brought up on charges for breaking and entering. He spoiled me with Gabby, you know. Spoiled the moment, any chance I may’ve had to please her dear, dear auntie and to impress on Gabrielle my undying love for her! But no—in charges this raging bull, shouting I’m a danger, and making mad accusations. Why, if he does live beyond the bullet that sweet Gabrielle put in him on my behalf, why then he ought to be investigated for being a madman and a maniac, and who’s to say that Ransom himself ain’t the mad Phantom?
Much time as he spends prowling the streets; seeing so much of the gutter trash, living among the rats of this city . . . the man sees shit every day until . . . until all he sees is to kill, kill, kill! What’s to say he ain’t the Phantom?” Meanwhile, Philo Keane shouted over his one-time apprentice at Griffin, “It all makes sense now! This creepy little sot here under our noses the whole bloody time! He’s the one set me up, isn’t it true, Drimmer? Didn’t he put the notion of my being the Phantom in your ear? And now he’s shifting it to Alastair! Don’t you see? Don’t you?” “I know the little rat came at me with this wire in front of witnesses, in front of his little sugar, that daughter of Tewes.”
“Then you have him dead to rights! Congratulations! Now release me the bloody hell out of here!”
“Ransom’s the one figured it out; he’s the mastermind behind the arrest.”
“And Rance, is he shot like Denton said?”
“Wounded ’bout here and here.” He indicated entry and exit wounds on his own body.
“But he’s been spared his life?”
“So far.”
“Thank God! Where is he?”
“Cook County Hospital. It’d be the morgue but for his cane—or so said the midwife who patched him up.”
“Midwife?”
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“Tewes’s sister Jane.”
“Sister? Look, how so, his cane?”
“I found the cane splintered by the bullet from a Sharps
.44, I’m afraid. Could’ve done a hell of a lot more damage had the bullet not been deflected by the bone handle of Ransom’s cane.”
“The wolf’s-head cane. I give it to him years ago. Carries it everywhere . . .” mused Philo. “That is a wonder indeed.”
“Surgeon Fenger is working on Rance as we speak, and from accounts I got over the phone, well . . . only time’ll tell if eternity wants the big man or no.”
“I gotta get over there. You’ve got my word, Drimmer.
Release me just until I can be sure Rance is all right, and I promise I’ll return.”
Drimmer’s mind raced with what Kohler might do to him in the event he should honor such a deal without either authority or formal paperwork.
“Com’on, man! What’s there to think about?” pressed Philo.
“This isn’t a Sunday school we’re running here. You think for one moment Kohler’d just let you step outta that cell on a
