The doctor removed Fallon’s hand from the bandage and checked underneath the wrapping.
“Any dizziness?” he asked.
Fallon considered shaking his head, but decided against it and answered tightly, “No.”
“Double vision?”
“No.” To add sir would have hurt too much.
“You might have a concussion, but probably not. But you will have a headache for a while.” The doctor stepped back.
Fallon stared at him. “What happened?”
The white-haired cadaverous man shrugged. “Jealousy. Someone heard about the commutation of your life sentence into a ten-year vacation. At least, that’s the best guess of the warden and our illustrious guards.”
Fallon chanced a nod of the head. It wasn’t as awful as he had feared. “Who did it?”
The doctor shrugged. “Funny thing is that no one saw it. One bloke told Barney Drexel, our lovely sergeant, that you must have hit your head on one of the machines.”
“That must’ve been what happened,” Fallon said. He tried to remember the faces of the inmates by the carding machine. He could picture only blurs. The same happened when he wanted to summon up the face of the man who had asked for a light, but that was when the lights went out. His memory was usually excellent at recalling faces, the colors of horses, the clothing of men—such traits helped when you were a federal lawman. They also came in handy when you were serving a lengthy sentence at a hellhole like Joliet, Yuma, Jefferson City, and now Huntsville. But whatever had been used to slam against his skull had wiped out whatever he had noticed at the woolen mill.
He touched the knot on his head again.
“They’re going to really hate you now, Alexander.”
Fallon looked closely at the doctor, who had moved to his desk and was scribbling something on a yellow sheet of paper. With his back still to Fallon, the doctor said, “I’m detailing you for special duty, Mr. Alexander. Do a good job today and I might even be persuaded to recommend you for one of our outside camps.”
Straightening, Fallon realized that his head didn’t hurt so much anymore.
“How’s that?”
The doctor kept writing. “Surely, Mr. Alexander, you are aware of the penitentiary’s outside-labor programs.”
Oh yes. Fallon probably knew more about that policy than the good doctor did for it had been drilled into his brain for weeks upon weeks with Christina Whitney, Dan MacGregor, Aaron Holderman, and the state’s attorney general.
“Which camp?” Fallon asked.
The doctor did not answer that question. “Mind you,” the doctor said as he ripped the paper from the pad, folded it, stuck it in the pocket of his white jacket, and turned to face Fallon. “I have no say in this matter. That’s up to Superintendent Wilkinson and the penitentiary board. I’m just a paid sawbones, and not paid a whole lot.”
The penitentiary board. Fallon pursed his lips. That’s something else no one had considered during all the planning. The penitentiary board also had a say in who got released to farms. He had to remember—if this head would let him remember—to get word to Aaron Holderman to get the names of those board members as soon as possible. The American Detective Agency could assign some operatives to check out the character and trustworthiness of those board members along with those serving on the parole board.
“Well, I should thank you . . . Doctor . . . ?” He looked into the doctor’s eyes. In all their conversations, and visits to the prison infirmary, he had never learned the physician’s name.
“Abel Crouch,” the old man said. “That’s Crouch with a C. Not Grouch with a G.” He smiled.
“Thanks, Dr. Crouch,” Fallon said.
The smile turned into a flat line of thin lips. “But your first trip beyond our red bricks shall not be fun.” His white head nodded to the far corner.
When Fallon turned, he saw the coffin.
“You and our other pallbearers, rather, gravediggers, shall be escorted by guards to Peckerwood Hill. There you shall inter another unfortunate colleague of yours whose head did not prove as hard as yours, Mr. Alexander.”
“Who is it?” Fallon asked, though he doubted if he would know the dead man.
“Juanito Gomez,” Doc Crouch answered. “During your short stay here, you added to his scars, and he added to yours. Luckily, you were here with me, sleeping a deep sleep, when poor Gomez hit his head against a rock or hammer or wall or nightstick.”
Juanito. A bitter taste coated Fallon’s tongue. The burly brute of a Mexican.
“Don’t fret over that Mexican, Alexander,” Doc Crouch said. “He wasn’t getting out of here ever. Now he is. His suffering is over. He has a new life. A new land. A new adventure.”
Shaking his head, Fallon let out a sigh.
Dr. Crouch moved to the office door, opened it, and called out something to the guards, but Fallon paid little attention. He eased his way off the bed.
Five inmates entered the infirmary from the hallway. None were convicts that Fallon recognized. Two black men, one with white hair, the other completely bald. They were muscular but lean. A small Celestial man, eyes looking at his feet, way too small and brittle to be working a shovel and pickax to dig a grave or even carry the coffin of a man the size of the late Juanito Gomez. And two white men, one who coughed like a lunger and was so deathly pale that it struck Fallon that the next convict to be buried at Peckerwood Hill would be this young, dying man. The other white man was about Fallon’s size and age, except he didn’t have a bandage wrapped around his head.
Fallon decided to take his off, but Doc Crouch stopped him. “I wouldn’t yet, Alexander. Leave it on for at least a day. Doctor’s orders.”
So Fallon grabbed his cap and watched the guards fill the doorway. Two of them, a graybeard and a redhead, both holding Winchester lever-action shotguns. The shotguns had thirty-inch barrels, twelve gauge, maybe ten. If the shells were filled with buckshot, those weapons would be a fine deterrent if any of the gravediggers had escape on their mind.
Out of the infirmary and into the hallway marched the prisoners, Fallon in the center on the right, each of the six pallbearers gripping one side of the coffin with one hand, except the Chinese con, who used both hands and shuffled his feet. Both guards followed the procession down the stairs and onto the prison ground.
Only a handful of inmates were outside in the yard of The Walls. They kept their distance but could not take their eyes off this cortege. Fallon could understand how they felt. He had seen enough men die in prison, had been made to dig more than one grave, and he remembered how he felt each time. It reminded you of your own mortality and the fear that no one would claim your body, that you would march to the gate of eternity in the one thing worse than a pauper’s field. You’ d rest till Judgment Day in a prison boneyard.
They went through the double doors and found themselves breathing free air with The Walls towering behind them, and a mule-drawn wagon in front. Two other guards, armed with Winchester rifles, waited.
After sliding the coffin onto the back of the rickety old vehicle, the prisoners began climbing into the back, finding a place to sit on either side of Juanito Gomez’s shabby coffin. Apparently, they had performed burial duty before.
When Fallon started to climb into the wagon, a rough hand pulled him down and spun him around, irritating Fallon’s already aching head. He stared into the dark face of Aaron Holderman.
“Just a minute, you!” the operative and ex-convict said. His breath stank of coffee and tobacco. Holderman’s right hand ran along the bandage wrapping Fallon’s head.
“For God’s sake,” the older guard said, “he ain’t hidin’ a file underneath Doc’s wrappings.”
“I don’t trust this hombre,” Holderman said. “He’s gotten into nothin’ but trouble since he come here.”
Holderman’s hand hurt. Fallon grimaced, even though his knees might buckle, but then he felt the big cur’s free hand as it ran to Fallon’s side and dropped something heavy i
nto Fallon’s trousers pocket.
“Watch your arse,” Holderman whispered, and he shoved Fallon back toward the wagon. “Get in, Alexander!” Holderman snapped, raising his voice and spitting at his side. “Dig the grave deep, boys.” Holderman backed away.
Fallon climbed into the wagon, his head still aching from Holderman’s rock-hard palm and fingers and those nails that hadn’t been clipped in weeks.
Shovels and picks just behind the driver’s bench clattered as the wagon pulled away, driven by another guard who carried no weapon. The two men with shotguns swung into waiting, saddled horses and followed, cradling the shotguns over their saddle horns.
Peckerwood Hill, the prison cemetery, lay about a mile from The Walls, but that was a long mile.
The wagon loafed its noisy way to one of Huntsville’s main streets and eased through town. Fallon kept his head down, but his eyes saw the passersby on the boardwalk as they paused, but only briefly, to stare, gawk, and point while whispering to a companion or looking stern-faced. No one showed pity. No one expressed sympathy. Most funeral processions would have men remove their hats, stop their horses or wagons, and maybe even bow a head now and then. Fallon figured that the residents had seen enough of these funerals so they just went about their business. It wasn’t like some friend or relative had died. It was just another convict, unfit for society, being carted off because nobody loved him enough to take him home. Or maybe they just couldn’t afford a funeral, so they let the state of Texas cover all the expenses.
Expenses. Fallon felt like spitting. A cheap coffin, free gravediggers, and a cross to be put over the grave.
The wagon lurched, and the tools rattled, and Fallon gently fingered his head. Then angered by the callousness of everything, the lack of humanity, Fallon pulled off his bandage, wadded it up, and tossed it beside the coffin.
Twenty-two acres stretched between Sycamore and Sixteenth streets that had been started as the prison cemetery by mistake, although a few years earlier the land had finally been deeded over to the state by some businessmen in town. Well, it wasn’t like anyone was going to want to build a hotel or home on these acres anymore. This wasn’t the hard-packed desert of Yuma. Fallon’s feet sank deep into the grass and dead leaves as he and his men carried the tools to find a likely spot.
“Dig the grave first,” the younger guard with the shotgun said. “Then we’ll plant your pard.”
It looked more like a swamp than a graveyard as the wagon stopped, the driver set the brake, and stepped down. The gravediggers would have to cut through the underbrush to get the final resting hole for Juanito Gomez started. Vines had already wrapped around some of the older wooden crosses. Others had rotted. Fallon doubted if anyone really knew where any prisoner had been buried or how many graves had been dug here in pushing forty years.
Fallon had a pickax. The other white inmate nodded at the ground. It was as good a place as any, Fallon decided, and lifted the pickax over his shoulder and head, and brought the tool into the damp earth.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Humidity had settled over Huntsville, and the pine trees and thick vegetation surrounding the cemetery made the air heavy. After fifteen minutes, Fallon’s shirt stuck to his soaking, stinking skin. One of the black men spelled him, and Fallon stepped away from the hole in the ground and toward the pail of water the guards had brought. Quite generous of them, Fallon thought, as he watched the two armed prison employees and the wagon driver as they rested in the shade near the grave of some Indian who had committed suicide by jumping off the prison balcony decades ago.
Fallon reached inside his trousers pocket and pulled out the makings of a cigarette. If he kept this up, he might even develop a taste for smoking. He rolled the cigarette like he had been smoking for years, licked the paper, and offered the paper and makings to the Chinese, who stared up with ancient eyes and shook his head. Fallon returned the tobacco and paper to his pocket. This time, he felt the coldness of iron. He traced along the wooden grip, walnut perhaps, or maybe rosewood, which was inset in the metal frame, more rectangular than curved. The fingers came up to the metal. No hammer. Down the barrels, less than three and a half inches, slipping over the tiny blade of a sight, and then feeling the opening of the barrels. Four barrels. Finally, he came to the steel ring trigger. Leaving the sack of Bull Durham next to the derringer, Fallon found the book of matches and retrieved it to light his cigarette.
If you ride long enough for Judge Isaac Parker’s court, you see just about every kind of gun sold on the frontier. Fallon did not have to see the derringer to know what it was. He could identify it by touch.
A Remington-Elliot .32. Four barrels. It wouldn’t do Fallon much good from a distance, but up close it could do a heap of damage, and then leave Fallon with a weapon to crack over somebody’s head—not that twelve ounces of blue steel was the same as a billy club.
He thought about the hideaway pistol Aaron Holderman had deposited in Fallon’s trousers pocket. Never had Fallon trusted Holderman, who deserved no trust. So why had the detective given Fallon a derringer and a warning? Maybe it was because this was the American Detective Agency’s biggest chance at fame and glory. Fallon couldn’t guess. He took a few drags on the cigarette, then offered it to one of the black gravediggers before going back to work.
Once they cut through the roots, the digging got a little easier. Eventually, when the pail of water was all but empty, the older of the shotgun-wielding guards came over to inspect the progress.
“Looks deep enough to me,” the guard said.
“It ain’t near six feet deep yet, boss,” said one of the black men.
The guard shrugged. “Muddy as this place is, soft as the ground gets, and as often as the damned boneyard floods, the coffin will sink. Gomez wasn’t the littlest convict in The Walls.”
No one felt like arguing with a guard with a ten-gauge repeating shotgun. They gathered their tools and lazily marched back to the wagon to exchange pickaxes and shovels for a heavy pine coffin.
Again, Fallon took a position in the center of the heavy coffin. The Chinese man grabbed the front with both hands, and the lunger brought up the rear with the two black men and the other white man on the other side. The coffin was heavy, heavier than expected. Juanito Gomez had been a leviathan, but Fallon did not think he weighed this much. They walked, leaving the three prison employees at the wagon.
When they reached the pit they had dug for the deceased, Fallon guessed why the guard had said to stop digging. There was no need to lower poor Juanito Gomez into the grave with heavy ropes. They just dropped the casket into the pit. It shuddered and sank a few inches into the soft ground. Maybe the guard had been right, Fallon thought. Maybe it would sink until it reached the six-foot mark. Or go all the way to hell.
The consumptive spit onto the coffin and glanced across the boneyard. “That’s strange,” he said in a dry, rasping voice.
“What?” asked the bald Negro.
“Ain’t no preacher here,” the man said, turned his head, and coughed.
“Maybe he wasn’t no believer,” said the other black man.
“Ashes to ashes,” said the healthy white man. “Let’s cover the greaser and get back inside The Walls.”
“What’s your damned hurry?” said the lunger.
“Because it’s stinking hot out here.”
Fallon grabbed a shovel, worked in a load of thickening sod, and dropped it into the hole.
“Won’t take long to fill,” said the older black man. “That’s one good thing about it.”
The lunger wiped his lips. “Still strange,” he said. “Sixth time I’ve pulled this duty, and the superintendent always had a preacher come by. Once the sky pilot brought his daughter, and she sang something real sweet.”
“I’ll sing and preach if you just shut up and help us cover this peckerwood,” said the other black inmate.
Despite the complaining, sweating, and lackadaisical work with shovels, the grave was soon covered. Th
e lunger looked around once more for a parson, or maybe a sweet girl to sing a hymn or two, but the guards were heading for their horses, and the other employee was climbing into the wagon.
“Let’s go!” called out the red-bearded guard.
Those were the last audible words over the next few minutes that felt like six lifetimes.
Hearing the first shot, Fallon instinctively dived to his left. He hit the ground, rolled over a grave, and came up behind a tree that offered shade to the nearest dead. By now, the gunfire sounded like a Gatling gun. Quickly he pulled the pepperbox .32 from his pocket, slipped his finger inside the trigger ring, and looked.
Fallon swore.
The guards lay dead, pinned underneath their horses, one of which kicked in agonizing death throes. The wagon had overturned on its side, the two wheels spinning in the air, while the old mule bolted back toward Huntsville. Fallon could make out a figure facedown in the high grass. That had to be the driver. The figure did not move at all. One of the black men was running toward the woods, leaping over graves, until a gunshot caught him in the small of his back, and he landed, wiping out three or four rotting crosses before rolling on his back and lying still.
The lunger and the Chinese man had showed the most sense. They had moved back to the grave of Juanito Gomez, taking advantage of the mound of dirt over the fresh grave, dirt that would not settle for quite a while or at least until the next thundershower. The other black man gripped a cross that he must have hoped would protect him from a bullet. It didn’t. A bullet splintered the base of the cross and reduced the man’s gleaming bald head into something that resembled a busted melon.
“C’mon!” a voice called from the brush at the far end of the grave. “Make a run for it and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
Dead Time Page 10
