SixteenThe smell of the slaughterhouse hit the back of his throat with such force it was all Sebastian could do not to gag. He was standing outside a rambling, dilapidated dwelling — it could barely be called a house — set in the midst of the railroad workshops, tanneries, opium dens, the gambling stews and brothels of Lower I Street. So this was the shore on which his old Civil War buddy Burton Purdy, one of the wiliest company quartermasters he’d ever known, had washed up.
His heart lurched as he contemplated his surroundings. The ramshackle building where he’d been told Burton lived with his family was a rabbit warren of dereliction. The eastern end sagged several feet below the western, as if its foundations were sinking into the muddy shores of China Slough, a stretch of water notori
