City of the Absent by Robert W. Walker Read Free Book Online

he was doing so now. In fact, he’d always been the first to condemn the extravagance of it all.
    Someone pointed this out to him.
    â€œI guess I don’t know what I think until I hear it come outhere!” He indicated his mouth, making the men laugh. “Or out my arse!” he added, creating more laughter.
    Still, the assembled police and firemen began slouching off now, and Alastair was left standing with a handful of Irish cops who’d agreed with him from the beginning.
    Then a shot rang out in the darkness. The cop beside Alastair fell wounded and bleeding out badly, others rushing to his aid. Ransom, meanwhile, instinctively pulled his weapon and went to his knee, aimed and fired, killing the assailant instantly: one of the drunken revelers who’d quietly returned.
    â€œDamn you, man! Damn you!” he shouted at the man he’d been forced to kill, wondering if it were a hired job or a second lunatic at work, and if a Columbian guardsman would die only because he’d stood too close to Alastair Ransom. He knew there was many a man in the city who would pay to see him as dead as Mayor Harrison this final night of the World’s Fair, not the least being his own chief and arch nemesis, Nathan Kohler. Could it’ve been a contract hit on me? he wondered.
    The shots had brought the horde of police racing back, all either shouting the name of the killed policeman, Burt Menealaus, or asking, “Who did it? Who is he?”
    No one recognized the dead shooter except for Ransom. It was the man he’d paid fifty-five cents to hail Thom’s cab. Other than that, the man was a total stranger. His turned out pockets revealed the fifty-five cents and a workman’s card proclaiming him Johnathan Noicki of the Netherlands.
    One cop in blue held a young, dead cop in brown uniform to his chest. Muttering epitaphs under his breath, this older copper, named Cantebury Nuebauer, was a German Englisher and friend to young Menealaus, a Greek. Nuebauer had beaten the odds many years ago to gain a place on the largely Irish police force, while Menealaus had held his job with the Columbian Guard for mere months. Who wanted to police a fair the size of Chicago’s?
    Nuebauer said over Menealaus, “Never a healthy idea to stand too close to Ransom.”
    â€œYou’ll think twice, then, comin’ for a drink at Muldoon’s!” shouted Ransom, stalking off. As he stormed away, he thought about it, and the truth hit him. Yes, people near him, people in his orbit, did indeed travel in danger just by association, just by standing at his shoulder, and it made him think how vulnerable he’d become since falling in love with Jane and Gabby, and then he thought: Me with my foolish thoughts of having a real family someday.
    Unsure how long Jane as the mesmerizing Dr. Tewes might be at the mayor’s home, Alastair waved down a passing cab, the sound of the horse’s hooves beating out a rhythmic cloppity-clop that went now with the quiet reigning over the Plaisance. As he climbed into the plush Fischer interior, he felt a pang of remorse at being Alastair Ransom. Laying his cane aside, grimacing with the pain in his bad leg, he thought how he’d allowed the scars of his past to determine his years since Haymarket, seven years now, and how that night obsessed him. Just a fortnight ago he had conferred with Mayor Harrison to attempt a meeting of the minds on the matter, but the mayor, like every Chicagoan, simply wanted the whole matter buried, and promised him that if he did not “get off it,” he’d find his badge and his title gone and himself on the street. The mayor would not listen to a word of Ransom’s theory that Nathan Kohler had orchestrated the entire event, making puppets of both the workers and his own fellow officers.
    â€œKohler was a beat officer then, same as you!” Harrison had lit a cigar in tandem with his shouting. “If he