William S. Burroughs (18 page)

Kim took a carriage
to the outskirts of town. He got out and strolled by his rooming
house, very debonair, with his sword cane, the flexible Toledo blade
razor-sharp on both edges for slash or thrust, his Colt
38
nestled in a tailor-made shoulder holster, a backup
five-shot
22
revolver with a one-inch
barrel in a leather-lined vest pocket. He couldn't spot a stakeout.
Maybe they fell for the diversion ticket to Albuquerque he had
bought, making sure the clerk would remember. But sooner or later
they would pick up his trail. Old Man Bickford had five of
Pinker-ton's best on Kim's ass around the clock.

Kim was headed for
Salt Chunk Mary's place down by the tracks...solid red brick
two-story house, slate roof, lead gutters...Train whistles cross a
distant sky.

Salt Chunk Mary,
mother of the Johnson Family. She keeps a pot of pork and beans and a
blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then
you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen
table. She names a price. She doesn't name another. Mary could say
"no" quicker than any woman Kim ever knew and none of her
no's ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar but nobody
thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought
and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens
by or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-oughts into your
soft and tenders.

Mary held Kim in
high regard.

"Hello,"
she said. "Heard you was back in town."

Kim brought out a
pint of sour-mash bourbon and Mary put two tumblers on the table.
They each drank half a tumbler in one swallow.

"The Kid is
down on his luck," she said. "Stay away. It rubs off."

"He should
quit," Kim said. "He should quit and sell something."

"He won't."

No, Kim thought, not
with that mark on him he won't.

"I hear Smiler
went down."

She drained the
tumbler and nodded.

"Young thieves
like that think they have a license to steal. Then they get a
sickener. Scares a lot of them straight. What did he draw?"

"A dime."

"That's a
sickener all right."

They drank in
silence for ten minutes.

"Joe Varland is
dead
...
Railroad cop tagged him
..."

"Well,"
Kim said, "the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away...
"

"What could be
fairer'n that?"

They finished the
whiskey. She put a plate of pork and beans with homemade bread on the
table. Kim would later taste superb bean casseroles in Marseilles and
Montreal but none of them could touch Salt Chunk Mary's.

They were drinking
coffee out of chipped blue mugs.

"Got something
for you." Kim laid out six diamonds on the table. Mary looked at
each stone with her jeweler's glass.

"Twenty-eight
hundred."

Kim knew he could
probably do better in New York but he needed the money right then and
Mary's goodwill counted for a lot.

"Done."

She got the money
out of the cookie jar and handed it to him, wrapped up the diamonds
and put them in her pocket.

"Who's over at
the Cemetery?" Kim asked.

Kim called his
rooming house "the Cemetery" because the manager was a
character known as Joe the Dead. Kim's place was a hideout for
Johnsons with an impeccable reputation, most of them recommended by
Salt Chunk Mary
...
con men bank
robbers
...
jewel thieves
...
high
class of people.

Kim didn't take much
risk, since Denver at the time was a "closed city." You
only operate with police protection and payoffs. Kim paid so
much a month. He threw some weight in Denver. He knew some
politicians and a few cops. The cops called him "the Professor"
since Kim's knowledge of weapons was encyclopedic. He could
always tune into any cop.

"Jones was
there last week."

Jones was a bank
robber. He was a short, rather plump waxy-faced man with a mustache,
who looked like the groom on a wedding cake. He would walk into a
bank with his gang, a ninety-pound Liz known as Sawed-off Annie with
a twelve-gauge sawed-off, and two French-Canadian kids, and say his
piece.

"Everybody
please put your hands up high."

It was the sweetest
voice any cashier ever heard. He became known as "the
Bandit with the Sweet Voice." But when he said "Hands up
high," you better believe it.

Jones confided in
Kim that when he killed someone he got "a terrible gloating
feeling." Said with that sugary voice of his, it gave Kim a
chill. It's a feeling in the back of the neck, rather pleasant
actually, accompanied by a drop in temperature that always gives
notice of a strong psychic presence. Jones was creepy but he paid
well...

The last thing that
Kim could ever do in this life or any other was con. He held con men
and politicians in the same basic lack of esteem. So the news
that the Morning Glory Kid was currently staying at the Cemetery
elicited from him an unenthusiastic grunt. The Morning Glory Kid
worried him a bit. He knew that big-time con artists like that often
keep some piece of information up their sleeves to buy their way out.
Of course the Kid had nothing on Kim except Kim renting him a room,
but watch that fucker, he thought.

Kim remembered the
first time he hit Salt Chunk Mary. Ten years ago.

"Smiler sent
me."

She gave him a long
cool appraising look.

"Come in, kid."

She put a plate of
salt chunk on the table with bread. Kim ate like a hungry cat. She
brought two mugs of coffee. "What you got for me, kid?"

He laid the rings
and pendants out on the table. It was a good score for a kid.

She named a fair
price.

He said "Done"
and she paid him.

Mary looked over
Kim's slim willowy young good looks.

"You'd have a
tough time in stir, kid."

"Don't aim to
go there."

She nodded..."It
happens. Some people just aren't meant to do time. Usually they quit
and do well legitimate."

"That's what I
aim to do."

And now he was doing
it. They both knew this was the last time Kim would ever lay any ice
on Mary's kitchen table. "Stop by anytime you're in town."

While waiting for
Councillor Graywood to arrive from New York, Kim renewed his contacts
with the Johnson Family. He was already a well-known and respected
figure. He ran the Cemetery and he also ran a country place
outside Saint Louis where favored Johnsons could rest, hide out and
outfit themselves.

Kim was clean. Just
that one shot in Black Hawk for the past six months. So he could
enjoy kicking the gong around. If you've got a needle habit or an
eating habit you can smoke all day and never get fixed. A very small
amount of morphine passes over with the smoke. Most of it stays in
the ash. So you have to come to the pipe clean. Kim liked the
ritual
—
the peanut-oil lamp, the
deft fingers of the young Chinese as he toasts the pill, rolling it
against the pipe bowl, the black smoke pulled deep into the lungs
with no rasp to it soothes you all the way down as the junk feeling
comes on slow with the third pipe.

Kim didn't need a
bodyguard but he needed good backup. He selected two of the best. Boy
Jones had worked with Jones the bank robber. Thin and lithe as a cat,
with a deadly dazzling smile. He could use any weapon like an
extension of his arm. He was a juggler and he could toss knives and
saps around, and was a sleight-of-hand artist. He could pull a rabbit
out of a hat and shoot through it. And what he could do with
nunchakus and weighted chains was like a sorcerer's apprentice. You
couldn't believe one person was doing it.

Marbles was a trick
shot with a carnival. He could put out a candle, split cards, and get
six shots in a playing card at fifteen feet in two-fifths of a second
and he could really throw a knife. Kim had been impressed by the
tremendous force of a thrown knife
—
it
will go two inches into oak, and a strong man thrusting with all his
might could hardly do a half-inch. But you have to estimate the
distance on the overhand throw. Marbles could do it at any distance.
He had such a smooth way of doing things. Smoothest draw Kim ever
saw, like flexible marble. Marbles was a Greek statue come to life,
with golden curls forming a tight casque around his head, eyes pale
as alabaster, with glinting black pupils...

Kim put them right
on his payroll and outfitted them with conservative dark clothes,
like young executives. They made a rather unnerving trio and passed
themselves off as brothers.

Guy Graywood arrived
from New York. He had found just the place. A bank building on the
Bowery. Maps rolled out on the table. Graywood is a tall slim
ash-blond man with a cool, incisive manner. He is a lawyer and an
accountant, occupying much the same position in the Johnson Family as
a Mafia
consigliere.
He is in charge of all business and legal
arrangements and is consulted on all plans including assassinations.
He is himself an expert assassin, having taken the Carsons
Weapons course, but he doesn't make a big thing of it.

It is time to check
out the Cemetery accounts. Joe the Dead, who runs the Cemetery, owes
his life to Kim.

Kim's Uncle Waring
once told him that if you have saved someone's life he will try to
kill you. Hmmm. Kim was sure of Joe's loyalty and honesty. Joe
wouldn't steal a dime and Kim knew it...

Well he'd saved
Joe's life in his
professional
capacity and that made a
difference. It was shortly after Kim got his license from the
correspondence school and set himself up in the practice of
medicine. He specialized in police bullets and such illegal injuries.
When they brought Joe in, his left hand was gone at the wrist, the
clothing burned off the left side of his body above the waist, and
third-degree burns on the upper torso and neck. The left eye was
luckily intact...The tourniquet had slipped and he was bleeding
heavily. The numbness that follows trauma is just wearing off and the
groans starting, pushed out from the stomach, a totally inhuman
sound, once you hear it you will remember that sound and what it
means.

The same rock-steady
hands, cool nerve, and timing that made Kim deadly in a gunfight also
make him an excellent practicing surgeon. In one glance he has
established a priority of moves...Morphine first or the other moves
might be too late. He draws off three quarter-grains into a syringe
from a bottle with rubber top and injects it. As he puts down the
syringe he is already reaching for the tourniquet to tighten
it...Quickly puts some ligatures on the larger veins
...
then
makes a massive saline injection into the vein of the right
arm
...
cleans the burned area with
disinfecting solutions and applies a thick paste of tea leaves...It
was touch and go. At one point Joe's vital signs were zero, and Kim
massaged the heart. Finally the heart pumps again...One wrong move in
the series and it wouldn't have started again.

The deciding factor
was Kim's decision to administer morphine
before
stopping
the hemorrhage
...
another split second of
that pain would have meant shock, circulatory collapse, and death.

Joe recovered but he
could never look at nitro again. He had brought back strange powers
from the frontiers of death. He could often foretell events. He had a
stump on his left wrist that could accommodate various tools and
weapons.

His precognitive
gift stands him and his in good stead. Once a stranger walks into the
hotel
...
Joe takes one look, comes up with a
sawed-off, and blows the stranger's face off. Stranger was on the way
to kill Joe and Kim.
..

"I didn't like
his face," Joe said.

"Missed your
calling," Kim told him. "Should have been a plastic
surgeon."

Joe the Dead was
saved from death by morphine, and morphine remained the only thing
holding him to life. It was as if Joe's entire body, his being, had
been amputated and reduced to a receptacle for pain. Hideously
scarred, blind in one eye, he gave off a dry, scorched smell, like
burnt plastic and rotten oranges. He had constructed and installed an
artificial nose, with gold wires connected to his odor centers, and a
radio set for smell-waves, with a range of several hundred yards. Not
only was his sense of smell acute, it was also selective. He could
smell smells that no one else had ever dreamed, and these smells had
a logic, a meaning, a language. He could smell death on others, and
could predict the time and manner of death. Death casts many shadows,
and they all have their special smells.