And the women were often as bad, or worse, than the men. It was nothing for a man to be found in a room in a tenement house with his throat cut or floating in the river when he refused to pay for his time with one of the prostitutes that worked the area.
A sudden movement caught his attention as a man came at him out of those shadows.
His attacker was equally tall and stout, the fumes from a local pub thick in the air as he attacked and caught Brodie on the near side. Quick and experienced, the man brought up a blade.
He caught his attacker by the arm, twisted it and brought it up at a sharp angle at the man’s back.
“Ye dinna want to do this,” he snarled at him. “Drop the blade.”
The man continued to struggle. “There are others,” his attacker growled. “Ye’ll not get away!”
“I dinna want to get away. Now, drop the blade and tell me who the devil are ye, before I snap yer arm from yer shoulder?”
The man refused to answer, and Brodie yanked his arm higher. He let out a howl, then spit out a string of oaths.
“The blade!” Brodie reminded him. It clattered to the stones beside the building.
“Wot are ye called?” he demanded again.
“Me arm!” the man screamed.
“I’ll break it off and beat ye with it. Yer name!” Brodie again demanded as he kicked the man’s feet and knocked him offbalance, then spun him around and slammed him against the side of a tenement house.
“Murphy!” the man cried out, a garbled, muffled sound against the crumbling stones on the wall of the house.
“Jasper Murphy?”
There was a grudging nod as the man continued to buck against his hold.
Brodie shoved him hard against that wall, the stone darkening with blood in the flickering light from a lantern in the window above the street.
He wrestled the man around and slammed him once more against the side of the building as he brought up the revolver and pressed the tip of the barrel to the side of the man’s head.
He knew the name.
“If ye move wrong, if ye so much as twitch, there will be a bullet in yer head. Now, come along and we will call on the man ye work for.”
It was not far. The question was, had Murphy simply made a mistake, or had he been sent.
He dragged Murphy by the neck of his coat, pulled him back to his feet when he stumbled, then dragged him the rest of the way to the tavern.
When they reached the entrance, he pulled Murphy with him through the opening into the glare of light, the stench of bodies, and the cacophony of rowdy conversation with crude curses. He shoved Murphy before him, rolling him across the stained wood floor in a tangled heap of bruises and bloodied flesh.
“I’m here to see Mr. Brown,” he announced, the revolver held at the ready by his side.
“Ye can tell him that I am here for our meetin’.”
“It’s dangerous to go into certain places,” a gruff voice replied. “It could get a man killed.”
Brodie nodded. “Aye, it could.”
Four
BRODIE
“You live dangerously, my friend. Comin’here and takin’ on one of my men the way he claimed,” Brown commented as he and Brodie sat across from each other with a pint at a table in the tavern.
“Our encounter was a bit different than he spoke of,” Brodie corrected his account of the situation.
