The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [73]
"You must wire him immediately," said Doyle.
"Why?"
"Doyle is suggesting that your father's gone to Chicago to visit Rabbi Brachman," said Sparks, coming out of his fog.
"Yes, of course, that would be possible, wouldn't it?" said Stern, suddenly hopeful.
And preferable to a number of the other alternatives, thought Doyle.
"Do you have the other book I asked for?" asked Sparks.
"Yes, it's right here," said Stern. He lifted a book similar in size and design to the Gerona Zohar from a cabinet and onto the table beside the original. "A copy of the Zohar, nearly indistinguishable, but this is a fairly recent re-creation: Only a scholar could tell them apart."
"You might want to have a look at this," said Innes, who had wandered away from the table to the window.
"What is it, Innes?" said Doyle.
"Not sure, but I'd say there's at least twenty of them."
An instant later they were at the window, looking down at the street.
The two toughs outside had multiplied tenfold, and a dozen more were pouring down the block to join them.
"Street gang," said Sparks.
One of the gang looked up, saw the four men outlined in the window, pointed at them and whistled sharply.
At his signal, the gang rushed across the pavement, toward the doors of the tenement.
chapter 7
The hunt for the murdering Chinaman started poorly and went downhill fast. Troops mustered from the Territorial Prison at Yuma told anyone willing to listen that they were a lot handier dealing with criminals who were already behind bars, with their dependable tendency to stay put. What this mob knew about chasing fugitives you could print on the back of a postage stamp. Nor were they exactly at their spit-and-polish best when the call came in to rush down to the rail yard at five in the morning since most of them had been out drinking themselves comatose until two.
The railroad bulls and Pinkerton men who had lived through the Yuma Yards Massacre—as it inevitably came to be known, frontier journalism being what it was—were so consumed with shock, grief, or blinding rage that pulling them into a cohesive militia unit would have been beyond any officer less commanding than Robert E. Lee. That was certainly no description anyone had ever tried to hang on Sheriff Tommy Butterfield.
Sheriff Tommy was the most senior local lawman at the scene that morning. He spent the first ten minutes after he saw the carnage throwing up and the next fifteen wandering around in a daze. Wasn't as if Tommy added to the confusion rampaging through the camp; it's just that at a moment when these men needed a leader to pull them together, Tommy's passivity allowed the vigilante impulse to spin out of control and fracture into a dozen squabbling splinter groups, each with their own ideas about how to find this killer. Tommy had been elected sheriff on a peace platform—the territory was looking toward statehood, working to clean up its image in order to attract some serious money—and this soft-bellied, fat-headed political hack who'd never shot a man, even in anger, was a lot more adept at getting people to like him than he was at telling them what to do.
It didn't help that no two surviving witnesses could agree on a single characteristic of the man responsible, aside from the fact that he carried a sword, and that was hard to swallow even with one leg and two severed heads on the ground. Why would anybody in this day and age carry a sword when with the helpful hand of modern technology you could ventilate a man's lungs from a quarter mile away?
Neither could anyone confirm in which direction the maniac had made his escape, which left them with eight compass points to argue about. The bums could have filled in some blanks for them, particularly Denver Bob Hobbes, but figuring wisely that when the powers that be got around to handing out the blame for this they'd be on top of the list, the hobos were busy making tracks in those same eight directions.
But somebody somewhere heard somebody else say that the killer was a Chinaman, and when that