Regulator, chapter 3

"No two chases are exactly alike, but all hunters share a common advantage: preparation."

So the annoying poker player was just a cover for Charlie, who turns out to be a Pinkerton man who, when last we saw him, was chasing Collum Geary.

by Frank Spring

‘Regulars’ featured prominently in Dusanka’s morning daydreams, when her plans and visions swirled together and she could smell the kranjska klobasa and dumplings in her kitchen and heard the shuffling feet of the many loyal customers who were as much a part of her imagined future as a plentiful bank account of her own. 

They were also vital to her present - regulars, she had learned, being a whore’s bread and butter. Tim had quickly become one of these, which Dusanka appreciated because he was the only one she had at present, and was perfectly fine as regulars went, neither violent nor tedious, quick to pay in full, and fastidiously clean.

Never laugh at anything other than a trick’s jokes, and always give them at least a smile. Never argue, but never strongly agree unless prompted (lest the trick think you had ideas of your own). Never talk about yourself. Never ask a trick specific questions about his business (this she’d learned from a friend who’d tried to make conversation with a trick and gotten a broken cheekbone for her trouble). These dictates, amended as necessary, kept Dusanka intact through her process up from the plains.

Never propose an exclusive arrangement with a regular, another friend said. These relationships were more common than Dusanka would have thought, though she’d never had one herself. They could last years, sometimes, with the whore becoming effectively a kept woman. But it must be the regular’s idea; they’ll feel hustled otherwise, and god knows what the consequences might be. When a regular is ready, he’ll bring it up, Dusanka’s friend had told her, total possession having always been an option in his mind.

Until then, there’s no such thing as exclusivity. Any trick who wants that must pay for it.

Dusanka had been half-asleep leaning against an upstairs wall when the roughneck lightly took her hand. It was a few days into Collum and Tim’s run, and couldn’t have been more than the roughneck’s second or third day; she hadn’t tracked his arrival as carefully as she should have. 

Nor should she have been dozing upright. It was bad practice; you needed to look interested, available. But she hadn’t been well.

She was careful about drinking whiskey, having seen altogether too many people bogged down by drink, rakia in her childhood, whiskey since she’d left Whitaker’s, people clamped in place as surely as an animal in a trap and in just as much agony, and she would not be one of them. 

But sometimes the absurd impossibility of her dreams was too close to bear. It sat on the bridge of her nose, the only thing she could see, and she would do anything to push it off, to get space to breathe again. 

She had already been in this busted place for longer than she’d wanted. She’d made a mistake staying here, and she would have to pay for it; the cost of picking up and relocating and restarting would be more than the money she’d made since she’d arrived. Profit was independence; with money, she could take a cooking or cleaning gig at her next port of call. Without it, it would be an arrangement like this, or worse. Most of them were worse. She was making money with Tim, finally, but he’d be moving on, she knew. She didn’t know what she’d say if he asked her to go with him. If he asked.

When the choice between bad and worse settled on her nose, all she could see, choking the air, she drank whiskey to push it off. Sometimes it was gone when she woke up. Sometimes it was bigger.

The roughneck led her down the hall; she cast an anxious glance behind her. 

“He’s asleep,” the roughneck said quietly, and she opened the door to her room.

He was sitting next to her bureau when she turned back to him after unbuttoning her blouse, and she gave a small gasp at the two uneven stacks of money beside him. Either was more than she’d charge for anything she’d ever consider doing; hell, anything she’d ever heard of.

“It’s alright,” he said, his gaze steady. “You can do yourself back up.”

She did, slowly, waiting.

He tapped the smaller stack. “You’ve already earned this one,” he said. “It’s for your time, and for no one ever knowing we did anything in here but fuck.”

The creak of old wood; the clatter of glasses from downstairs.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She sat on the bed. “Euphala.”

“Not that one.”

She paused, and opened her mouth again.

“Not that one either,” he said evenly.

A distant, boisterous curse; muffled laughter.

“Dusanka.”

He nodded and tapped the larger stack of money. “How long have they been here, and where are they going?”

She stood again, went to the window. “Who is asking?”

“Does it matter?”

“They’ll kill me.” 

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

“Just for talking to you,” she sighed. “You know that.”

He nodded. “Well then you’d better tell me something good.”

She shook her head. “Too much.”

“Then tell me you don’t know.”

She looked away.

“Or, shit, tell me anything,” he said. “Whatever comes to your head. Tell me they’ve got a boat waiting to take them down river next week, or they’re headed for Atlanta on Sunday. Anything that comes to mind. Then take this money, and when I’m gone go straight to Geary and tell him all about me. I don’t know what would happen then, but I’ll bet it’d be exciting.”

Dusanka suddenly felt very tired. “Say whatever else you’re going to.”

“Fair enough. Tell them whatever they like, but if they kill me, the people I work for will have questions - questions for you. Because they have your description, and now, they have your name. Names. And you can’t run from these people.”

“There is no choice here,” Dusanka said bitterly.

“Sure there is. You can choose not to take this money,” replied the roughneck, tapping the larger stack, “and tell me you don’t know anything.”

“And hope you kill them because if you fail, your people will find me?”

“I’m actually planning to arrest them, but yeah, that’s the size of it.”

“They don’t tell me about their business.”

“I wouldn’t expect them to,” the roughneck said, “but if you don’t know anything, why are we still talking?” He stood. “Where are they going?”

Never laugh, except at a joke. Never argue. Never talk about yourself. Never propose an exclusive arrangement to a regular. Never ask specific questions about business. 

She’d followed the rules, and still she had the answer, delivered in her own doorway. 

“There’s whores in Louisville,” she murmured.

“Thank you.”

“I think you have killed me,” she said. 

He stood, pushed the two stacks of money on the desk together, and left.

**

No two chases are exactly alike, but all hunters share a common advantage: preparation. If they know which way their quarry is likely to run - to Louisville, say - they can scout in advance. They can find shortcuts.

Collum Geary had what he assumed was an insurmountable lead in failing light. Imagine, then, his distress when his pursuer suddenly burst out of the undergrowth onto the road not twenty paces behind him.

So great was his confusion that he not only reached for his pistol, presently still lying in the mud of the saloon pissoir, but looked down in surprise at the vacancy at his hip when he came up empty. Something whistled past his ear, and for a moment he could only conclude that his pursuer was a desperately lazy son of a bitch who was happy enough to arrest a man in the pisser but content to kill him outright if it would spare a pleasant, if rather frantic, ride in the countryside.

Shooting a man off horseback is hard work in any circumstances; it is extremely difficult if the man weaves his horse hither and thither across the road, and Geary was fixing to do just that when he heard the same - not whistle, it wasn’t that, he realized with a jolt of horror, it was a low whoosh, and the lasso dropped over his shoulders and jerked him from his horse.

When he was in a position to take stock of the situation, Geary, naturally an optimist in spite of his ancestry, had something to feel good about: it was just possible that he hadn’t broken any essential bones. Beyond that, he had to admit that the situation was grim. 

“Let me go,” he shouted, or, more accurately, coughed and spluttered.

“Come again?” Charlie asked.

“Let me go. What’ll it take for you to let me go?” Geary demanded.

“Oh, that. Afraid that isn’t really an option,” Charlie explained. “But we can do this an easier way. Come nice and I’ll let you out of this rope.”

“Agreed.”

The rope went slack, and Collum moved like lightning to slip it from his shoulders.

Or such was his intention. A man who’s been forcibly dropped from a horse must invariably move more slowly than he needs to if he’s going to get one over on an adversary who knows pretty well what he’s up to. The rope tightened before Geary could slip it, and Charlie Antrim chucked his horse up to a brisk trot.

Geary took the occasion of his failure to spend a few moments alone with his thoughts, reviewing, as a man might in such circumstances, his varied and colorful sexual history to determine if he’d ever been so comprehensively fucked. His musing was interrupted by a collision with a rock or a tree root or perhaps a goddamn bear trap, at any rate something larger and sharper than he would have liked.

“Alright, god damn you,” he called in a strangled voice, and received no response.

“Alright,” he insisted. “You got me.”

“I know,” replied Charlie, and urged his mount to a canter.

Collum, now regularly buffeted by what must have been a curated collection of the hardest and most jagged objects in western Kentucky, abandoned negotiation and contented himself with a series of shouted observations on Charlie’s character and parentage, as well as reflections on what he, Collum, would do to the sonofabitch when he finally got this rope off him. He was just moving on to a more or less fanciful discourse on the nature of his many, many nearby friends - loyal and violent in equal measure - when he struck a rock with such force that his breath caught in throat and he felt something in him that should not have cracked crack.

It was at that point that the cold, sickening truth seeped into him: he could, very likely would, die on this road. Filthy, battered beyond recognition, in intolerable pain, and nothing he could say or do would change that. He was suddenly very tired indeed. Collum Geary closed his eyes, and breathed while he could.

**

“Can you stand?”

“Fuck off,” Collum muttered, determined to get some sleep. But some other part of his mind shook itself awake, and he opened his eyes to find he was lying still. Charlie Antrim towered above him on his horse.

“Can you stand?” Charlie repeated. “Have you hit your head?”

Collum gingerly felt his skull.

“I wouldn’t say so,” he said, and coughed painfully.

“You want to try to get up?”

“I’ll come quietly, I swear it.”

Charlie dismounted, manacles in hand. “You couldn’t run if you tried.”

Subscribe to The Experiment to keep up with future chapters of Regulator. Check out Frank Spring’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” For legal reasons, I want to make clear that Frank Spring owns the rights to Regulator, free and clear. Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.

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