Текст книги "The Wrecker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

“Well, now,” soothed Van Dorn.

Hennessy cut him off. “You asked about a deadline. I’m the one on a deadline. And no railroad man still alive can finish the Cascades Cutoff but me. The new fellows just don’t have it in them. They’ll run the trains on time, but only on track I laid.”

“Bookkeepers,” Mrs. Comden said, “do not build empires.” Something about her attempt to comfort him made Hennessy roar. He yanked the blueprint of the Cascade Canyon Bridge down from the ceiling. “The finest bridge in the West is almost complete,” he shouted. “But it goes nowhere until my cutoff line connects. But what do I find when I get back here, having left highly paid detectives on guard? Another god-awful week lost rebuilding what I’ve already built. My hands are spooked, afraid to work. Two brakemen and a master roundhouse mechanic dead. Four rock miners burned. Yard foreman laid up with a split skull. And a lumberjack in a coma.”

Bell exchanged a quick glance with Van Dorn.

“What was a lumberjack doing in the railroad-construction yard? Your mill is high up the mountain.”

“Who the hell knows?” Hennessy exploded. “And I doubt he’ll wake up to tell us.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Ask Lillian … No, you can‘t, dammit. I sent her to New York to sweet-talk those lowdown bankers.”

Bell turned on his heel and hurried off the private car to the field hospital the company had set up in a Pullman. He found the burned miners swathed in white dressings, and a bandaged yard foreman yelling he was cured, dammit to hell, just turn him loose, he had a railroad to fix. But no lumberjack.

“His friends carried him off,” said the doctor.

“Why?”

“No one asked my permission. I was eating supper.”

“Was he awake?”

“Sometimes.”

Bell ran to the yard superintendent’s office, where he had made friends with the dispatcher and the chief clerk, who kept enormous amounts of information at his fingertips. The chief clerk said, “I heard they moved him down to the town somewhere.”

“What’s his name?”

“Don Albert.”

Bell borrowed a horse from the railway police stable and urged the animal at a quick clip to the boomtown that had sprung up behind the railhead. It was down in a hollow, a temporary city of tents, shacks, and abandoned freight cars outfitted to house the saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses that served the construction crews. Midweek, midafternoon, the narrow dirt streets were deserted, as if the occupants were catching their breath before the next payday Saturday night.

Bell poked his head into a dingy saloon. The barkeep, presiding over planks resting on whiskey barrels, looked up morosely from a week-old Sacramento newspaper. “Where,” Bell asked him, “do the lumberjacks hang out?”

“The Double Eagle, just down the street. But you won’t find any there now. They’re sawing crossties up the mountain. Working double shifts to get ‘em down before it snows.”

Bell thanked him and headed for the Double Eagle, a battered boxcar off the trucks. A painted sign on the roof depicted a red eagle with wings spread and they had found a set of swinging doors somewhere. As in the previous saloon, the only occupant was a barkeep, as morose as the last. He brightened when Bell tossed a coin on his plank.

“What’ll you have, mister?”

“I’m looking for the lumberjack who got hurt in the accident. Don Albert.”

“I heard he’s in a coma.”

“I heard he wakes up now and then,” said Bell. “Where can I find him?”

“Are you a cinder dick?”

“Do I look like a cinder dick?”

“I don’t know, mister. They’ve been swarming around here like flies on a carcass.” He sized Bell up again and came to a decision. “There’s an old lady in a shack tending him down by the creek. Follow the ruts down to the water, you can’t miss it.”

Leaving his horse where he had tied it, Bell descended to the creek, which by the smell wafting up the slope served as the town’s sewer. He passed an ancient Central Pacific boxcar that had once been painted yellow. From one of the holes cut in the side that served as windows, a young woman with a runny nose called, “You found it, handsome. This is the spot you’re looking for.”

“Thank you, no,” Bell answered politely.

“Honey, you’ll find nothing down there better than this.”

“I’m looking for the lady taking care of the lumberjack who got hurt?”

“Mister, she’s retired.”

Bell kept walking until he came to a row of rickety shacks hammered out of wood from packing crates. Here and there were stenciled their original contents. SPIKES. COTTON WOOL. PICK HANDLES. OVERALLS.

Outside of one marked PIANO ROLLS, he saw an old woman sitting on an overturned bucket, holding her head in her hands. Her hair was white. Her clothing, a cotton dress with a shawl around her shoulders, was too thin for the cold damp rising from the fetid creek. She saw him coming and jumped up with an expression of terror.

“He’s not here!” she cried.

“Who? Take it easy, ma‘am. I won’t hurt you.”

“Donny!” she yelled. “The law’s come.”

Bell said, “I’m not the law. I-”

“Donny! Run!”

Out of the shack stormed a six-foot-five lumberjack. He had an enormous walrus mustache that drooped below his grizzled chin, long greasy hair, and a bowie knife in his fist.

“Are you Don Albert?” asked Bell.

“Donny’s my cousin,” said the lumberjack. “You better run while you can, mister. This is family.”

Concerned that Don Albert was belting out the back door, Bell reached for his hat and brought his hand down filled with his .44 derringer. “I enjoy a knife fight as much as the next man, but right now I haven’t the time. Drop it!”

The lumberjack did not blink. Instead, he backed up four fast steps and pulled a second, shorter knife that had no handle. “Want to bet I can throw this more accurate than you can shoot that snub nose?” he asked.

“I’m not a gambler,” said Bell, whipped his new Browning from his coat, and shot the bowie knife out of the lumberjack’s hand. The lumberjack gave a howl of pain and stared in disbelief at his shiny knife spinning through the sunlight. Bell said, “I can always hit a bowie, but that short one you’re holding I’m not sure. So, just to be on the safe side, I’m going plug your hand instead.”

The lumberjack dropped his throwing knife.

“Where is Don Albert?” Bell asked.

“Don’t bother him, mister. He’s hurt bad.”

“If he’s hurt bad, he should be in the hospital.”

“Cain’t be in the hospital.”

“Why?”

“The cinder dicks’ll blame him for the runaway.”

“Why?”

“He was on it.”

“On it?” Bell echoed. “Do you expect me to believe he survived a mile-a-minute crash?”

“Yes, sir. ‘Cause he did.”

“Donny’s got a head like a cannonball,” said the old woman.

Bell pried the story, step-by-step, out of the lumberjack and the old woman, who turned out to be Don Albert’s mother. Albert had been sleeping off an innocent drunk on the gondola when he interrupted the man who set the gondola rolling. The man had bashed him in the head with a crowbar.

“Skull like pig iron,” the lumberjack assured Bell, and Don’s mother agreed. Tearfully, she explained that every time Don had opened his eyes in the hospital, a railroad dick would shout at him. “Donny was afraid to tell them about the man who bashed him.”

“Why?” Bell asked.

“He reckoned they wouldn’t believe him, so he pretended to be hurt worse than he was. I told Cousin John here. And he rounded up his friends to carry Donny off when the doctor was eating his supper.”

Bell assured her that he would make sure the railroad police didn’t bother her son. “I’m a Van Dorn investigator, ma‘am. They’re under my command. I’ll tell them to leave you be.” At last, he persuaded her to take him into the shack.

“Donny? There’s a man to see you.”

Bell sat on a crate beside the plank bed where the bandage-swathed Don Albert was sleeping on a straw mattress. He was a big man, bigger than his cousin, with a large moon of a face, a mustache like his cousin‘s, and enormous, work-splintered hands. His mother rubbed the back of his hand and he began to stir.

“Donny? There’s a man to see you.”

He regarded Bell through murky eyes, which cleared up as they came into focus. When he was fully awake, they were an intense stony blue, which spoke of fierce intelligence. Bell’s interest quickened. Not only was the man not in a state of coma, he seemed the sort who might have made a sharp observer. And he was the only man Bell knew of who had been within just a few feet of the Wrecker and was still alive.

“How are you feeling?” Bell asked.

“Head hurts.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Don Albert laughed, then winced at the pain it caused him.

“I understand a fellow bashed you one.”

Albert nodded slowly. “With a crowbar, I believe. Least, that’s what it felt like. Iron, not wood. Sure didn’t feel like an ax handle.”

Bell nodded. Don Albert spoke as a man who had been slugged by at least one ax handle in his life, which would not be that unusual for a lumberjack. “Did you happen to see his face?”

Albert glanced at his cousin and then his mother.

She said, “Mr. Bell says he’ll tell the cinder dicks to lay off.”

“He’s a straight shooter,” said John.

Don Albert nodded, wincing again as movement resonated through his head. “Yeah, I saw his face.”

“It was night,” said Bell.

“Stars on the hill are like searchlights. I had no campfire down there on the car, nothing to blind my eyes. Yeah, I could see him. Also, I was looking down at him-I was up on top of the ties-and he looked up into the starlight when I spoke, so I seen his face clear.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“Surprised as hell. Plumb ready to jump out of his skin. He wasn’t expecting company.”

This was almost too good to be true, thought Bell, excitement rising. “Can you describe him?”

“Clean-shaven fellow, no beard, miner’s cap on his head. Hair was probably black. Big ears. Sharp nose. Eyes wide-set. Couldn’t see their color. It wasn’t that bright. Narrow cheeks-I mean, a little sunken. Wide mouth, sort of like yours, excepting the mustache.”

Bell was not accustomed to witnesses itemizing specifics so readily. Ordinarily, it took listening closely and asking many subtle questions to elicit such detail. But the lumberjack had the memory of a newspaper reporter. Or an artist. Which gave Bell an idea. “If I could bring you a sketch artist, could you tell him what you saw while he draws it on paper?”

“I’ll draw him for you.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Donny’s a good drawer,” said his mother.

Bell looked dubiously at Albert’s rough hands. His fingers were as thick as sausages and ribbed with calluses. But being an artist would explain the lumberjack’s recollection for detail. Again Bell thought, What an astonishing break. Too good to be true.

“Get me pencil and paper,” said Don Albert. “I know how to draw.”

Bell gave him his pocket notebook and a pencil. With astonishingly quick, deft strokes, the powerful hands sketched a handsome face with chiseled features. Bell studied it carefully, hopes sinking. Too good to be true indeed.

Concealing his disappointment, he patted the injured giant lightly on the shoulder. “Thank you, partner. That’s a big help. Now do one of me.”

“You?”

“Could you draw my picture?” Bell asked. It was a simple test of the giant’s powers of observation

“Well, sure.” Again the thick fingers flew. A few minutes later, Bell held it to the light. “It’s almost like looking in the mirror. You really draw what you see, don’t you?”

“Why the hell else do it?”

“Thank you very much, Donny. You rest easy, now.” He pressed several gold pieces into the old woman’s hand, two hundred dollars, enough to carry them through the winter, hurried back to where he had tied his horse, and rode uphill to the construction yard. He found Joseph Van Dorn pacing outside Hennessy’s railcar, smoking a cigar.

“Well?”

“The lumberjack is an artist,” said Bell. “He saw the Wrecker. He drew me a face.” He opened his notebook and showed Van Dorn the first drawing. “Do you recognize this man?”

“Of course.” growled Van Dorn. “Don’t you?”

“Broncho Billy Anderson.”

“The actor.”

“That poor devil must have seen him in The Great Train Robbery.”

The Great Train Robberywas a gripping motion picture of several years back. After shooting up the train, the outlaws made their get-away on the locomotive, which they uncoupled and rode to their horses waiting up the line, pursued by a posse. There were few people in America who had not seen it at least once.

“I will never forget the first time I saw that motion picture,” said Van Dorn. “I was in New York City in the Hammerstein’s Vaudeville at Forty-second and Broadway. It was the kind of theater where they ran a picture between the acts. When the picture started, we all got up as usual to walk out for a smoke or a drink. But then a few turned back to look at it, and then slowly everyone took his seat again as the picture went on. Mesmerizing … I’d seen the play back in the nineties. But the picture was better.”

“As I recall,” Bell said, “Broncho Billy played several different parts.”

“I heard that he’s traveling the West on his own train now, making pictures.”

“Yes,” said Bell. “Broncho Billy has started up his own picture studio.”

“Don’t suppose that leaves him much time to wreck railroads,” Van Dorn said drily. “Which leaves us nowhere.”

“Not quite nowhere,” said Bell.

Van Dorn looked incredulous. “Our lumberjack recalls a famous actor whose image in a moving picture stuck in what’s left of his head.”

“Look at this. I tested him to see how accurate he is.” He showed Van Dorn the sketch of himself.

“Son of a gun. That’s pretty good. He drew this?”

“While I was sitting there. He can really draw faces as they are.”

“Not entirely. He’s got your ears all wrong. And he gave you a cleft in your chin just like Broncho Billy’s. Yours is a scar, not a cleft.”

“He’s not perfect, but he’s pretty close. Besides, Marion says it looks like a cleft.”

“Marion is prejudiced, you lucky devil. The point is, our lumberjack could have seen any one of Broncho Billy’s pictures. Or he might have seen him on the stage somewhere.”

“But, either way, we know what the Wrecker looks like.”

“Are you suggesting that he actually looks like Broncho Billy’s twin?”

“More like a cousin.” Detail by detail, Bell pointed out the features of the lumberjack’s sketch. “Not his twin. But if the Wrecker’s face jogged the lumberjack’s memory of Broncho Billy, then we are looking for a man who has a similar broad high brow, a cleft chin, a penetrating gaze, an intelligent face with strong features, and big ears. Not Broncho Billy’s twin, exactly. But I would say that the Wrecker looks more in general like a matinee idol.”

Van Dorn puffed angrily on his cigar. “Am I to instruct my detectives not to arrest ugly mugs?”

Isaac Bell pushed back, demanding his boss see the possibilities. The more he thought about it, the more he felt they were on to something. “How old do you suppose this fellow is?”

Van Dorn scowled at the drawing. “Anywhere from his late twenties to early forties.”

“We are looking for a handsome man somewhere in his late twenties, thirties, or early forties. We’ll print copies of this. Take it around, show it to the hobos. Show it to stationmasters and ticket clerks wherever he might have fled on a train. Anyone who might have seen him.”

“So far that’s no one. No one alive anyway. Except for your Michelangelo lumberjack.”

Bell said, “I’m still betting on the machinist or the blacksmith who drilled that hole in the Glendale hook.”

“Sanders’s boys might hit it lucky,” Van Dorn agreed. “It’s been in the newspapers enough, and, God knows, I’ve made it clear to him that his soft berth in Los Angeles is at risk of a transfer to Missoula, Montana. Failing that, maybe someone will see the Wrecker next time and survive the experience. And we do know there will be a next time.”

“There will be a next time,” Bell agreed grimly. “Unless we stop him first.”

12

THE HOBO JUNGLE OUTSIDE OGDEN FILLED A THINLY WOODED spot between the railroad tracks and a stream that provided clean water for drinking and washing. It was one of the largest jungles in the country-nine rail lines converging in one place offered a steady flow of freight trains steaming night and day in every direction-and growing larger every day. As the Panic put factories out of business, more and more men rode the rails to find work. Their hats marked them as newcomers. City men’s derbies outnumbered miners’ caps and range riders’ J.B.s these days. There was even a sprinkling of trilbies and homburgs worn by former men of means who had never dreamed they would be down-and-out.

A thousand hobos were hurrying to finish cleanup before dark. They scrubbed laundry and cookpots in cans of boiling water, hung laundered clothes on ropes and tree limbs and set pots upside down on rocks to dry. When night fell, they kicked dirt on their fires and sat back to eat meager meals in the dark.

Campfires would have been welcomed. Northern Utah was cold in November, and snow flurries had blown repeatedly over the camp. Five thousand feet above sea level, it was exposed to westerly gales off nearby Great Salt Lake and easterly gusts tumbling down from the Wasatch Mountains. But the railroad bulls from the Ogden yards had raided the jungle with pistols and billy clubs three nights in a row to convince the burgeoning population to move on. No one wanted them back for the fourth, so it was no night for campfires. They ate in silence, worrying about the bulls and fearing winter.

A hobo jungle, like any town or city, had neighborhoods whose boundaries were clear in the residents’ minds. Some areas were friendly, some safer than others. Downstream, farthest from the tracks, where the creek veered to join the Weber River, was a section best visited armed. There, the rules of live and let live gave way to take or be taken.

The Wrecker headed there fearlessly. He was at home in outlaw land. Yet even he loosened the knife in his boot and moved his pistol from a deep pocket of his canvas coat to his waistband, where he could draw it quickly. Despite the absence of campfires, it was not entirely dark. The trains huffing constantly by pierced the night with their headlights, and the thin snow cover reflected the golden glow from the windows of passenger cars. A string of bright Pullmans started past, slowing for the nearby town, and by its light the Wrecker saw a hunched shadow shivering beside a tree, both hands in pockets.

“Sharpton,” he called in a harsh voice, and Sharpton answered, “Right here, mister.”

“Put your hands where I can see them,” commanded the Wrecker.

Sharpton obeyed, partly because the Wrecker was paying money for service and partly out of fear. A bank and train robber who had served time in the penitentiary, Pete Sharpton knew a dangerous hombre when he met one. He had never seen his face. They had only met once before, when the Wrecker had tracked Sharpton down and braced him in the alley behind the livery stable where he rented a room. But he had been on the wrong side of the law his entire life and knew they did not come more deadly than this one.

“Did you find your man?” the Wrecker asked.

“He’ll do the job for a thousand dollars,” Sharpton answered.

“Give him five hundred down. Make him come back for the second half after he has done the job.”

“What’s to keep him from running off with the first five hundred? Found money, no risk.”

“What will prevent him will be his clear understanding that you will hunt him down and kill him. Can you make that clear to him?”

Sharpton chuckled in the dark. “Oh yes. Besides, he’s not that tough anymore. He’ll do as he’s told.”

“Take this,” said the Wrecker.

Sharpton felt the package with his fingers. “This isn’t money.”

“You’ll have the money in a minute. This is the fuse I want him to use.”

“You mind me asking why?”

“Not at all,” the Wrecker said easily. “This looks exactly like a fast fuse. It would fool even an experienced safecracker. Do I assume correctly that yours is experienced?”

“Blowing safes and express cars his whole life.”

“As I asked for. Despite its appearance, this is actually a slow fuse. When he lights it, it will take longer to detonate the dynamite than he’s calculated.”

“If it takes too long, it will blow up the train instead of just blocking the tracks.”

“Does that pose difficulties for you, Sharpton?”

“I’m just saying what’ll happen,” Sharpton said hastily. “If you want to blow up the train instead of just rob it, well I guess that’s none of my business. You’re paying the bill.”

The Wrecker pressed a second package into Sharpton’s hand. “Here is three thousand dollars. Two thousand for you, a thousand for your man. You can’t count it in the dark. You’ll have to trust me.”

13

THE LUMBERJACK’S DRAWING OF THE WRECKER PAID OFF IN five days.

A sharp-eyed Southern Pacific ticket clerk in Sacramento recalled selling an Ogden, Utah, ticket to a man who looked like the man that Don Albert had drawn. Even though his customer had a beard, and his hair was almost as blond as Isaac Bell‘s, there was something similar in the face, the clerk insisted.

Bell interviewed him personally to ascertain that the clerk was not another fan of The Great Train Robbery,and was impressed enough to order operatives to canvass the train crews on the Ogden flyer.

They hit pay dirt in Reno, Nevada. One of the flyer’s conductors, a resident of Reno, recalled the passenger too and agreed it could have been the man in the drawing, though he pointed out the difference in hair color.

Bell raced to Nevada, ran him down at his home, and asked casually, as if only making conversation, whether the conductor had seen the The Great Train Robbery.He planned to, the conductor answered, the next time it showed at the vaudeville house. His missus had been pestering him to take her for a year.

From Reno, Bell caught an overnight express to Ogden, and had dinner as the train climbed through the Trinity Mountains. He sent telegrams when it stopped at Lovelock and received several replies when it stopped at Imlay, and he finally fell asleep in a comfortable Pullman as it steamed across Nevada. The wires awaiting him at Montello, just before they crossed the Utah border, had nothing new to report.

Nearing Ogden, midday, the train sped across Great Salt Lake on the long redwood trestles of the Lucin Cutoff. Osgood Hennessy had spent eight million dollars and clear-cut miles of Oregon forest to build the new, level route between Lucin and Ogden. It shortened the Sacramento-Ogden trip by two hours and dismayed Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, his rivals on the southern and northern routes. At the point where Bell was so close to the rail-junction city that he could see the snowcapped peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to Ogden’s east, his train ground to a halt.

The tracks were blocked six miles ahead, the conductor told him.

An explosion had derailed the westbound Sacramento Limited.

BELL JUMPED TO THE ground and ran alongside the train to the front end. The engineer and fireman had dismounted from their locomotive and were standing on the ballast, rolling cigarettes. Bell showed them his Van Dorn identification, and ordered, “Get me as close to the wreck as you can.”

“Sorry, Mr. Detective, I take my orders from the dispatcher.”

Bell’s derringer appeared in his hand suddenly. Two dark muzzles yawned at the engineer. “This is a matter of life and death, starting with yours,” said Bell. He pointed at the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive, and said, “Move this train to the wreck and don’t stop until you hit debris!”

“You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood,” said the fireman.

“The hell he wouldn‘t,” said the engineer, shifting his gaze nervously from the derringer to the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. “Get up there and shovel coal.”

The locomotive, a big 4-6-2, steamed six miles before a brakeman with a red flag stopped them where the tracks disappeared in a large hole in the ballast. Just beyond the hole, six Pullmans, a baggage car, and a tender lay on their sides. Bell dismounted from the locomotive and strode through the wreckage. “How many hurt?” he asked the railroad official who was pointed out to him as the wreck master.

“Thirty-five. Four seriously.”

“Dead?”

“None. They were lucky. The bastard blew the rail a minute early. The engineer had time to reduce his speed.”

“Strange,” said Bell. “His attacks have always been so precisely timed.”

“Well, this’ll be his last. We got him.”

“What? Where is he?”

“Sheriff caught him in Ogden. Lucky for him. Passengers tried to lynch him. He got away, but then one of them spotted him later, hiding in a stable.”

Bell found a locomotive on the other side of the wreck to run him into Union Depot.

The jailhouse was situated in Ogden’s mansard-roofed City Hall a block from the railroad station. Two top Van Dorn agents were there ahead of him, the older Weber-and-Fields duo of Mack Fulton and Wally Kisley. Neither was cracking jokes. In fact, both men looked glum.

“Where is he?” Bell demanded.

“It’s not him,” said Fulton wearily. He seemed exhausted, Bell thought, and for the first time he wondered if Mack should be considering retirement. Always lean, his face was shrunken as a cadaver’s.

“Not who blew the train?”

“Oh, he blew the train all right,” said Kisley, whose trademark three-piece checkerboard suit was caked with dust. Wally looked as tired as Mack but not ill. “Only he’s not the Wrecker. Go ahead, you take a crack at him.”

“You’ll have a better chance of getting him to talk. He sure as hell won’t admit a word to us.”

“Why would he talk to me?”

“Old friend of yours,” Fulton explained cryptically. He and Kisley were both twenty years older than Bell, celebrated veterans and friends, who were free to say whatever popped in their heads even though Bell was boss of the Wrecker investigation.

“I’d knock it out of him,” said the sheriff. “But your boys said to wait for you, and the railroad company tells me Van Dorn calls the tune. Damned foolishness, in my opinion. But no one’s asking my opinion.”

Bell strode into the room where they had the prisoner manacled to a table affixed solidly to the stone floor. An “old friend,” to be sure, the prisoner was Jake Dunn, a safecracker. On the end of the table was a neat, banded stack of crisp five-dollar bills, five hundred dollars’ worth, according to the sheriff, clearly payment for services rendered. Bell’s first grim thought was that now the Wrecker was hiring accomplices to do his murderous work for him. Which means he could strike anywhere and be long gone before the strike happened.

“Jake, what in blazes have you gotten mixed up in this time?”

“Hello, Mr. Bell. Haven’t seen you since you sent me to San Quentin.”

Bell sat quietly and looked him over. San Quentin had not been kind to the safecracker. He looked twenty years older, a hollow shell of the hard case he had been. His hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to imagine him setting a charge without detonating it accidentally. Relieved at first to see a familiar face, Dunn shriveled now under Bell’s gaze.

“Blowing Wells Fargo safes is robbery, Jake. Wrecking passenger trains is murder. The man who paid you that money has killed innocent people by the dozen.”

“I didn’t know we were wrecking the train.”

“You didn’t know that blowing the rails out from under a speeding train would cause a wreck?” Bell said in disbelief, his face dark with disgust. “What did you think would happen?”

The prisoner hung his head.

“Jake! What did you think would happen?”

“You gotta believe me, Mr. Bell. He told me to blow the rail so the train would stop so they could hit the express car. I didn’t know he was gonna put her on the ground.”

“What do you mean? You’re the one who lit the fuse.”

“He switched fuses on me. I thought I was lighting a fast fuse that would detonate the charge in time for the train to stop. Instead, it burned slow. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Mr. Bell. It was burning so slow the train was going to run right over the charge. I tried to stop it.”

Bell stared at him coldly.

“That’s how they caught me, Mr. Bell. I ran after it, trying to stomp it out. Too late. They saw me, and after she hit the ground they lit out after me like I was the guy who shot McKinley.”

“Jake, you’ve got the hangman’s rope around your neck and one way to get it loose. Take me to the man who paid you this money.”

Jake Dunn shook his head violently. He looked, Bell thought, frantic as a wolf with a leg caught in a trap. But no, not a wolf. There was no raw power in him, no nobility. Truth be told, Dunn looked like a mongrel dog that had fallen for bait left for bigger game.

“Where is he, Jake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why are you lying to me, Jake?”

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

“You wrecked a train, Jake. You’re damned lucky you didn’t kill anybody. If they don’t hang you, they’ll put you in the penitentiary for the rest of your life.”

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

Bell changed tactics abruptly.

“How’d you happen to get out of prison so soon, Jake? What did you serve, three years? Why’d they let you go?”

Jake regarded Bell with eyes that were suddenly wide open and guileless. “I got the cancer.”

Bell was taken aback. He had no truck with lawbreakers, but a killing disease reduced a criminal to just an ordinary man. Jake Dunn was no innocent, but he was quite suddenly a victim who would suffer pain and fear and despair. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t realize.”

“I guess they figured to set me loose to die on my own. I needed the money. That’s how I took this job.”

“Jake, you were always a craftsman, never a killer. Why are you covering for a killer?” Bell pressed.

Jake answered in a hoarse whisper. “He’s in the livery stable on Twenty-fourth, across the tracks.”

Bell snapped his fingers. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton rushed to his side. “Twenty-fourth Street,” said Bell. “Livery stable. Cover it, station the sheriff’s deputies on the outer perimeter, and wait for me.”

Jake looked up. “He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Bell.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I went back to get my second half of the money, I found him upstairs, in one of the rooms they rent out.”

“Found him? What do you mean, dead?”