My Calamity Jane Read online

  She drummed her palms on the bar. Dang it, Charlie. It was rude of him to go and get himself hurt, and not by a garou, either, but by a random bunch of falling pipes. That didn’t seem right. She wondered if Charlie would have to retire now. Maybe they would all have to retire. That’d be fine by Jane. She figured this might be exactly the right time to quit garou hunting for good.

  She bit her lip. Her stomach swam with a combination of panic and good old-fashioned guilt, because in some ways she was relieved that Charlie had been injured, seeing as that meant he wasn’t here asking her questions about what had taken place at the candle factory. She touched the sore spot on her arm, wishing that it was really Charlie she felt sorry for right now, but she had her own problems to consider.

  One bite-sized problem, anyway.

  She could almost feel the infection setting in. Her chest felt tight, her skin, hot and itchy. Which made her really, really want a drink.

  “I’d muck stalls,” she offered to the barkeep. “Give me a task, and I’ll do it. Just give me a shot to wet my whistle.”

  “I’m sorry, kid,” said the barkeep. “I can’t do that.”

  “Then what are you good for?” she asked, louder than she meant to.

  The barkeep gestured to the burly man in the corner who served as the saloon’s bouncer. But before it could come to that, a well-dressed gentleman slid into the seat beside her.

  “I’ll buy the lady a drink,” he said.

  “Lady?” repeated the barkeep.

  “Lady.” Jane slapped her knee. “Ha!”

  The barkeep reluctantly poured her a shot. Jane lifted the glass and turned to her sudden benefactor to toast his generosity. And then she groaned.

  “Oh, rocks,” she grumbled. “I’m not in the mood to deal with any writers tonight.”

  The man smiled that snake-oil smile of his. “Good to see you again, Miss Calamity.”

  She threw back the whiskey. “Thanks for the drink, but I’ve got nothing to say to you, Mr. Buntline. Find another source for your fictions.”

  “Rumor has it that there was some excitement out at the old P and G factory earlier tonight,” he drawled like he hadn’t heard her. “Word is, one of your party is in a bad way. What happened?”

  How could he even know about such things? Jane had always wondered. Ned Buntline was like a bad penny—turning up every place you didn’t want or expect him.

  “Nothing interesting,” she said gruffly. “We were there, sure, because, uh, Bill wanted to get himself some high-quality candles. For the show, is all. And then Charlie had a little accident, but he’ll be fine.”

  “I see,” said Buntline.

  Jane wiped at her nose. “There was a copy of your new book lying about, now that I think of it, but I pity the fool who was endeavoring to read it, seeing as it’s a load of bull plop.” (Or so she’d heard. Jane had never actually read it herself.)

  “You were a great help to me during the writing of that book,” Buntline reminded her, “One of my best sources, in fact.”

  She frowned at her empty glass. She vaguely remembered him interviewing her, some night last year when he’d offered her money and she’d been low on scratch. She could only imagine what she’d told him. Something, she assumed, about fearsome garou and where to find them.

  “I’m writing a new book,” he continued. “This one will be called Wild Bill’s Last Trail.”

  Jane snorted. “Gosh dang. You make it sound like Bill’s dead. He was alive and kicking when I saw him not an hour ago.”

  As if on cue, the doors of the saloon swung open, and in sauntered Bill, walking that all-shoulders walk he did. Right behind him was Frank, who was smiling slightly, as if he were laughing at some secret joke. The pair went straight to the poker table.

  Buntline caught sight of them and hopped off his barstool, preparing to flee. It was no secret that Wild Bill Hickok did not get on well with writers, in general, and Ned Buntline, in particular.

  “Never trust a writer,” was one of Bill’s most well-used sayings. (Which Jane probably should have heeded before.)

  “I can pay handsomely, you know, for anything useful you could tell me,” Buntline whispered to Jane. “And who knows? Perhaps one day I’ll write a book-length feature on you.”

  Jane scoffed. “You mean a dime novel, where you make up half the stuff that happens.”

  “Oh, come now,” Buntline wheedled. “I’d always prefer to write the truth. You could set the record straight about Wild Bill, as you know him so well.”

  She turned her thoughts to Bill. He’d always been kind to her. He, unlike Charlie, didn’t seem to care about how much she cursed or spit, and he didn’t pester her to dress as a woman, but still looked after her the way he might if she were his daughter. Her own father hadn’t taken care of her nearly so well. At heart, under all the legend and gun bluster and dandiness of his attire, Wild Bill Hickok was a decent man.

  “I suppose I know him well enough,” she grunted to the pesky writer. “But first, buy me another drink.”

  Buntline nodded at the barkeep, who filled her glass again. She downed it. “What I know about Bill is none of your business.” She grinned at her own trickery. “Now scurry off before he sees you.”

  Buntline slunk away. The bite on Jane’s arm flared with pain. Her smile faded. In all the cases they’d been on, tracking rogue wolves, chasing the Pack, Bill had only ever given them one solid rule when it came to dealing with garou:

  DON’T. GET. BIT.

  She should tell him. She trusted him. But she didn’t know if she could bear to see the disappointment on the face of this man she so respected. Maybe she could tell Frank, who she also trusted, and Frank could break it to Bill gentle-like. But then what would they do?

  They’d send her away. There was no place for a garou in a group of garou hunters. Her stomach rolled at the thought of being on her own again, doing whatever she could to make do. Tears pricked at her eyes. She shook her head fiercely, as if answering some silent question.

  No. She couldn’t tell them.

  But the truth would out. Once you were bit, there was no stopping it. There was no cure for the garou. At least she had some time—a week, perhaps even two—to decide what to do.

  Another gentleman stepped up beside her at the bar.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said warmly. “I saw your show. Can I buy you a drink?”

  She nodded. The barkeep sighed and poured her another shot. Jane lifted the glass again and turned to toast the stranger, but this one wasn’t a stranger, either.

  It was the girl she’d met in the street earlier today. Miss Harris.

  She wasn’t wearing a white dress this time. She was, in fact, decked out in men’s attire—jacket, waistcoat, a pocket watch hanging from a chain, even a little brown mustache. The long pale curls were hidden under an expensive-looking hat. But she had the same glasses. The same nose. And her eyes were the same honeyed green.

  It was definitely Miss Harris.

  “Huh,” Jane said. “I must be drunker than I thought.”

  “Hello,” Miss Harris said in a lower, gruffer voice than she’d had on earlier. “I’m Edward Wheeler. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  “All right, I’ll play,” said Jane with a confused laugh, and for the second time that day, the two shook hands. “A pleasure to meet you, I guess. You saw the show? It wasn’t my best performance, but—”

  “You were marvelous. You have the best command of the bullwhip of anyone I’ve ever seen,” said Miss Harris/Mr. Wheeler. “Consider me impressed.”

  Jane’s face filled with heat. It was unsettling to hear someone say such things, as if Jane’s strangeness in this life was something to be celebrated. Her heart started thumping like a mandolin plunking a tune. Her palms got sweaty. But that could be the whiskey. Or the garou, stirring to life somewhere inside her.

  This was not a time for her to be making new friends.

  “Thank you for the drink, Miss—ter .
. .” She downed the whiskey and wiped at her mouth. “I don’t remember the name you just told me.”

  Miss Harris smiled. She made a convincing boy, Jane thought, but she smelled of lemons and laundry soap. “Wheeler. Edward Wheeler. Actually, I’m a writer,” she confessed. “I was hoping that I might interview you, if you could spare a minute or two.”

  “Ah,” said Jane dully. “Okay.”

  Miss Harris produced a small notebook and leaned toward her across the bar. “What happened tonight at P and G? It is true that there was a man arrested? A rogue garou? Is Wild Bill Hickok still a garou hunter, and if so, why?”

  Jane felt like she was going to be sick. So that’s what all the praise and flattery had been about, then. This person wanted something from her, the way everyone seemed to want something from her. A way to get to Bill.

  She shook her head. The room spun a bit. “Look, miss—I mean, mister. You want to know about Bill, he’s right over there.” She pointed to Bill at the poker table. “Ask him yourself.”

  “Oh.” Miss Harris pushed her glasses up on her nose. “I only thought that you might be more amenable to talking to me. Seeing as how we’re both—” She stopped herself and took a breath. “I recently wrote a story about the disappearance of several workers from the P and G factory, so of course I’m interested in following up.”

  “You wrote a story,” Jane repeated.

  “I’m a reporter,” said the girl. “I’m actually starting to make a name for myself.”

  “Well then, no comment,” Jane said.

  “But—”

  “I don’t talk to liars,” Jane added.

  “A liar?” the girl repeated. “I don’t know what you—”

  “I don’t pretend with people,” Jane said. “I’m not trying to fool anyone into thinking I’m something I’m not.”

  Miss Harris bit her lip, which looked odd with the mustache. Where she’d seemed so calm and collected before, now she seemed befuddled. “Of course. I understand. Miss . . . Jane . . . I’m very sorry . . . I . . . When I’m . . . this way”—she gestured vaguely to the jacket and waistcoat—“I have a job to do. I mean to be the best writer I can be. So I have to compete with—” She waved her arms around at the room full of men. “And for them to take me seriously, I find I have to—”

  She looked so distressed that Jane felt bad for calling her out.

  “I’m sorry. I get it. I guess we all wear a disguise at times, don’t we? But I’ve never been much good at it.”

  “Thank you,” said Miss Harris, sounding relieved. “I want you to know, I wasn’t pretending to like you. I do like you. I mean, I don’t really know you. Not yet, anyway. But I like what I know.”

  “Oh,” said Jane. She’d had a lot of whiskey at this point, so she couldn’t be sure, but this felt like it was suddenly turning into a Moment.

  She’d never really had a Moment, before.

  Then a man plopped into the seat on the other side of her and cleared his throat. “Hey, Jane, I’d like to buy you a drink,” he said.

  Crud. It was Jack McCall.

  “I been looking for you.” He was smiling. Again. “That was one heck of a show you put on, there.”

  “Hey there, Jack,” Jane said. “I was just sitting here talking to . . .”

  “Edward Wheeler,” the writer said. She was standing up, buttoning her coat. “I need to be going. It’s late.”

  Jane stood up, too, with the thought of walking her out, but the floor tilted like the deck of a rolling ship. She put her hand on the bar and took a few deep breaths. “Good evening to you, miss,” she said to Miss Harris. “I mean, sir.”

  “Good night,” Miss Harris said.

  Jane watched the girl walk away, disappearing with the same sort of suddenness with which she’d arrived. As she slipped out, another girl came in, this one wearing a blue dress and a determined expression. There sure were a lot of unexpected females in the bar tonight, Jane thought. The girl looked around, then lifted her chin and marched straight over to the poker table. She obviously wanted to talk to Frank, but she didn’t seem like Frank’s usual type.

  Jane sighed, suddenly exhausted. The bite on her arm started to burn. She rubbed at it.

  “Hey, are you okay?” asked Jack McCall.

  “I don’t rightly know,” said Jane.

  ELEVEN

  Frank

  To say Frank liked playing poker was to say a horse liked galloping through a big open field, or—to keep the metaphor on theme—a dog liked gnawing on bones.

  For Frank, poker was a whetstone. It sharpened his mind and honed his instincts, and if he won a bit of extra cash . . . well, the folks who played against him should just get better at the game.

  Right now, Frank was in a high-stakes hand against Heck Hotfinger. Frank’s dad was sitting to his left, his back to the wall as he mulled over his own cards, and Jane was at the bar, next to Jack McCall. Frank tried to catch her eye, but she quickly looked away—back to the glass of whiskey in front of her. Whatever was troubling her, she didn’t want to talk about it.

  The saloon door swung open and in walked Miss Mosey—the intriguing girl in the blue dress, followed closely by her chaperone, Mr. Frost. Frank didn’t know what to make of this girl. At first, he’d thought her wit and confidence charming, and George was right—she smelled wonderful, a mix of soap and gunpowder and daisies. Even from across the room, the scent tantalized him. But she didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories of people who usually sought him out. She was a girl, but not one of the flirtatious girls who found him before and after shows (the term groupie didn’t exist yet, dear reader, but it certainly didn’t apply to Annie). At no point in their conversation had she simpered or cooed. No, she’d said she was a better shot. That certainly wasn’t the first time he’d been challenged that way, but usually it came from men with something to prove.

  What was this girl trying to prove? Frank didn’t know, but he was definitely interested in finding out.

  The dealer cleared his throat. “Your turn, Butler.” By the man’s narrowed eyes, this wasn’t the first time he’d said it.

  Frank yanked his mind back to the game. “Check.”

  “Isn’t that the girl from the theater?” Bill said. “The one who wants a job?”

  “I don’t know, I barely looked at her,” Frank said as airily as possible.

  “Hmm. I thought you got a pretty good look.” The corner of Bill’s mouth turned up.

  “Yeah, well, your eyesight ain’t what it used to be.”

  The dealer turned to Hotfinger. “Action’s on you, Heck.”

  “Reckon I already knowed that,” Heck grumbled. “Check.”

  “Check,” Bill said.

  Heck put his cards down on the table and pointed at Bill. “Hey, ain’t you Wild Bill Hickok?”

  “Does that change your cards?” Bill asked.

  Heck had been at the table with Bill for a good ten minutes and he’d just now noticed he was sitting across from the most famous gunslinger in the country? Maybe Heck needed to worry about his eyesight.

  Frank glanced at his cards. One more round of betting left Frank and Heck heads-up. They were the two big stacks at the table. The rest of the players had dropped out. Everyone was waiting for Heck to make a move.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Frank saw Miss Mosey standing in the background, studying the game. When she noticed him noticing her, she flashed a smile and ventured closer to the table. “So, if you want to stay in, you have to ante,” she said under her breath.

  Frank bit his lip to keep from smiling. What was it about this girl?

  Wait, no, he was supposed to be playing the game. “Woooo,” he breathed, not loud enough for anyone else to hear. They’d laugh at him if they heard, but saying wooo always helped calm his nerves. (It was like Frank’s own personal form of meditation, which henceforth we will refer to as “the Wooo.”)

  “All in,” Heck said around his snaggletooth. Heck shoved his whol
e pile of chips into the pot.

  All in. If Frank made this call and he was wrong, he would lose all his money. It didn’t help that Miss Mosey was peering over his shoulder, studying the hand at play. Gosh, she smelled so darned good.

  “I was thinking about our conversation earlier,” she said suddenly.

  Frank jumped.

  Miss Mosey went on as though she hadn’t noticed. “Perhaps your hesitation in hiring me might come from you doubting that I, a young lady of good standing, could be seriously interested in associating myself with show business, an occupation that can have, as I’m sure you’re aware, a rather lurid reputation.” She slipped into the empty seat beside him. “I can assure you that this isn’t a problem. For my mother, maybe, but not me. In any case, I honestly believe—and I’m nothing if not honest, Mr. Butler, which you’ll come to know about me—that I should join your posse. I’m a fast learner. For example, I just learned how to play poker as I was crossing the street. I may not be exactly good at it yet, but I know what I am good at, and I’m good at shooting.”

  The dealer cleared his throat. “See here, miss. It’s not right to talk so much during a poker hand.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know there were rules about that.”

  Frank couldn’t help but smile. She did talk a lot, but he found he liked the sound of her voice. He turned his focus back to the cards. He had three sevens and a four and a two. Not the world’s best hand. (That would be a royal flush.) But three sevens was a strong hand, beaten only by a straight or a flush. Or a full house. Or four of a kind.

  Okay, so there were five types of hands that could beat him.

  “I’m buying in,” Miss Mosey announced.

  Everyone at the table looked up from their cards.

  Miss Mosey pulled some bills out of her pocketbook. Mr. Frost sat down beside her, and the dealer pushed Miss Mosey’s chips toward her.

  “Thank you,” she said, as if someone at a dinner party had passed the potatoes. “Now, can you tell me what the different colors of chips mean?”

  Frank tapped her chips. “These are ones. These are fives. They represent your money in the game.”