Well, sit yerself down there, fella. How 'bout a nice glass of cold beer? Something to take the sting outa Big Mario's fist?"
Ryan didn't care for the bartender's knowing look. He scowled at him while he struggled for how he should reply. Would something about his speech give him away? Did he really need to say anything at all? He needed to get out of this place. He needed to find Hope.
The Sweet Lash? Ryan thought in rising amazement. Wasn't that the name of the south-side restaurant and nightclub that his nemesis Jim Donahue owned in the twenty-first century? And hadn't he read in the Tribune at the time of the nightclub's opening a few years back that the establishment had once been the home of a late-nineteenth-century brothel?
Despite his eagerness to find Hope, Ryan couldn't help but look around him in wonder.
He quickly saw, however, that the Sweet Lash hardly warranted awe. Neither did the rancid, mildew odor that filled his nose. The room was large—perhaps a hundred by seventy feet—and contained a multitude of round tables and chairs. Four gas chandeliers with red lampshades cast as many shadows in the dim room as it did lurid light. Ryan realized that one of the dark corners contained a piano because someone started plunking out a raucous tune on the keys.
There were several raised platforms. The ones at the side of the room were cordoned off with frayed and dirty, gold velvet ropes. The floor consisted of some sort of black substance of unknown origin but had a slight give to it beneath Ryan's shoes. He suspected it might be solid earth and grime pressed down into solidity by thousands of hard leather soles.
Either that, or the wooden floor had long ago been covered by years of dirt, spittle, sweat and God only knew what other types of human and animal excretions.
The bartender obviously took note of Ryan's preoccupation.
"Yeah, maybe ya got a right to look down yer nose at me, fella. Beer won't do the trick, will it? No, sir, whiskey's yer only hope if yer climbing in the ring with Big Mario, friend. Ah, here we go. Doors have opened. Yer audience arrives."
Ryan glanced over to see dozens upon dozens of boisterous, black-suited men swarm into the room, their faces alight with excitement. A few of them had women draped on their arms. It struck Ryan as comical to see the manner in which the males ogled the prostitutes and then joked with their companions, almost as though they followed a socially prescribed script for brothel behavior. Despite their relatively low-cut gowns, their heavily painted faces and the brassy color of their hair, the women didn't look all that racy to Ryan's twenty-first-century eyes.
"I'd hoped you were going to take part in the Slip and Whip. That's why I came tonight, you know, Molly," one mustachioed man told the woman on his arm suggestively as they passed Ryan.
"I never do the Slip and Whip on the night of a Big Mario match. I know that fight and the gambling is the real reason you boys showed up here tonight," Molly sulked.
"Molly, m'dear, you malign me. I'd forsake all to see you again with the reins in your hand and your"—Molly shrieked dramatically and giggled when her suitor swatted her bottom—"gleaming promises at me from the stage."
"And there's the man who'll pay ya," the bartender spoke in an undertone to Ryan as the couple passed out of hearing. "Here's yerman, Jack!" the bartender called out more loudly to a large man
Standing at the end of the bar whose girth strained at the fabric of a pristine white suit.
"Big Mario's latest meal."
Jack paused and wiped what very much looked like blood off his hands onto a white cloth resting at the end of the bar. When he was finished he flashed a shark like grin. Ryan should have been bedazzled by the hundreds of diamonds flashing on rings that encircled every single one of the man's sausage-like fingers.
Instead he was preoccupied by another unexpected reality.
"Jim Donahue" he muttered incredulously.
"What's that ya said?" the bartender asked quietly, obviously to shield Ryan's ignorance from the immense presence of the man at the other end of the bar. "That's the owner of the Sweet Lash, the owner of the whole Levee District, if the truth be told. Don't ya know, fool? That man's none other than Diamond Jack Fletcher."
Ryan nodded numbly. The bartender could say whatever he wanted. Some things a guy knew just like he'd known he'd do whatever it took to come after Hope Stillwater. No matter what the bartender said, the man who currently stood at the end of the bar giving Ryan a cold, appraising once-over while he gnawed on the end of a soggy cigar was most definitely other than just Diamond Jack Fletcher.
In Ryan's time, the rotten spirit that currently inhabited Diamond Jack animated the flesh of the man Ramiro and he had been working to put behind bars for the past year.
Diamond Jack and Jim Donahue were one and the same soul.
***
Tacky.
That was the first fuzzy thought Hope had when she pried open her eyelids and found herself staring at scarlet velvet curtains surrounding a large alcove. She lay on a four-poster bed that had been tucked inside the alcove. Little gold pom-poms dangled off the mullioned fabric of the curtains. The gold-and-scarlet material clashed awfully with the worn green-and-blue wallpaper featuring sea creatures and bare-breasted mermaids.
Hope shifted her gaze around the room, wary to move her head for some reason. For a long moment she stared uncomprehendingly at a photograph hanging on the wall framed in gold leaf. It featured a nude young woman looking over her shoulder coyly. A single red rose sprouted from the crack of her bottom.
The framed photograph brought the strangeness of her situation home at last.
"What in the—"
She gasped as pain lanced through her head. She'd tried to rise from her supine position only to be stopped abruptly by the stabbing pain. For a full minute she remained very still, eyes clamped shut, perspiring profusely, deathly afraid to move lest she experience that unbearable sensation yet again.