Dead Time

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  If he screamed, Fallon did not hear it. Fallon was backing up, watching the gut-shot Barney Drexel come at him with the pinewood that Ryker had dropped onto the flooring.

  Drexel stepped into the light that shone from the express car. Fallon saw that the prison sergeant’s eyes were glassy and his face a deathly white. His shirt and vest were soaked in blood from the bullet Josh Ryker had accidentally put in the killer’s gut. Fallon took a step back as Drexel swung out with the two-by-four.

  When Drexel swung, he slipped on his own blood that now slickened the platform. The piece of pine clattered on the railing as Drexel dropped it and staggered into the crossing that connected the two cars. His arms waved over his head as he tried to regain his balance. Fallon watched as the man danced and spun his arms like a windmill that was out of control.

  One second Barney Drexel was standing there, his eyes showing fear—not of death, for he must have known that the bullet in his stomach was a mortal wound, but the terrifying feeling of how he was going to die.

  Just like Josh Ryker had. And maybe Cole Hansen.

  Barney Drexel also disappeared in the night . . . and the clickety-clack of the wheels silenced his final screams, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Fallon stood alone on the platform, his chest heaving, his body aching, letting the whistling, chilling wind revive him. He gripped the metal railing with his left hand and dully realized that he was alone, except for one guard, one living guard, out cold on the floor in the express car.

  First, he absently massaged his knuckles while staring into the night and at the occasional sparks that the iron wheels sent skyward. Fallon had no idea where they were going or where those men who had hijacked the locomotive planned on stopping the train.

  It couldn’t be long, Fallon thought. Chances were another engine would be screaming down the rails, and a collision would not help Colonel Justice’s cause. What Fallon couldn’t figure out, though, was why they would hijack an entire train just for the money in the express car.

  Unless . . .

  He wet his lips, swallowed what moisture he could summon up in his mouth, and slid to the crossing. Ryker had left the door open to the adjoining car, and Fallon moved in that direction, careful not to slip on the blood.

  When he stepped inside, he saw the dim glow of the lantern. No one was in this car. Fallon felt certain of that, because someone would have come out during the fight—although Josh Ryker had taken a long time before he summoned up enough nerve to see what had been keeping Cole Hansen so long.

  After turning up the flame in the lantern, Fallon squinted until his eyes became used to the light.

  “Damn,” Fallon whispered.

  Two guards lay dead in a corner, one with a bullet between his eyes, the other with his throat cut, but what prompted Fallon’s curse weren’t the corpses—he had seen far too many over the past several months to be bothered by more victims of violent deaths anymore—but the cargo being carried in this car.

  Lining the wall to Fallon’s left were wooden crates piled halfway to the ceiling, and stenciled into the sides on the boxes that Fallon could see were the words:

  WINCHESTER REPEATING ARMS C°

  New Haven, Connecticut

  Stacked on Fallon’s right were other boxes, some smaller ones, a few long enough to hold dozens of rifles, but with different shipping labels: COLT’S PATENT FIRE ARMS MANUFACTURING COMPANY, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT; REMINGTON ARMS COMPANY, BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT; VOLCANIC REPEATING ARMS, NORWICH, CONNECTICUT; UNION METALLIC CARTRIDGE COMPANY, BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT; MARLIN FIREARMS COMPANY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT; HOPKINS & ALLEN ARMS COMPANY, NORWICH, CONNECTICUT; THE SHARPS RIFLE COMPANY, BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT. At the far end kegs labeled GUNPOWDER reached all the way to the ceiling in four rows.

  Four giant boxes were labeled GATLING GUN COMPANY, ORTONVILLE, MICHIGAN.

  If a man wanted to start a war . . .

  Shaking off that thought, Fallon hurried to the crates of Winchesters, but something else caught his attention.

  Stopping, Fallon knelt to pick up a newspaper. The paper was folded, but Fallon saw that it came from the Dallas Independent something-another. The crumpled paper had been folded in half. It was the headline, written in large, boldfaced capital letters, that made Fallon stop.

  TEXAS A. G.

  Fallon turned the folded paper over and felt that brutal punch to his stomach. The final word was:

  ASSASSINATED!

  He quickly started reading the story, scanning over the date and the location, getting past the overblown prose that talked about the mourning in the Texas capital and the “biggest blow to America since the callous killing of President Lincoln almost one score and two lustrums earlier . . .”

  A Dallas newspaper lamenting the loss of Abraham Lincoln. Certainly, the War Between the States was over.

  Malcolm Maxwell, the erudite and brave attorney general who had made justice for one and all, was brutally butchered—stabbed with knives and tomahawks, brained with clubs and pistol butts, and shot at least four times as the unsuspecting man was stepping out of Humphreys’s Hotel to hail a hack and be driven back to work after meeting with high-level government officials in Austin’s finest hotel.

  Fallon’s first thought was about himself. Malcolm Maxwell had the affidavit that explained that Harry Fallon, alias Harry Alexander, was not a criminal and was in fact working for the attorney general’s office through the American Detective Agency of Chicago.

  That didn’t matter, though, he quickly told himself. A brave man, a good man, a man committed to justice just as the Dallas Independent Daily Crier had declared, had been savagely murdered.

  But now Fallon knew just how completely alone he was. The operatives working with him thought he was at Hell on the Brazos. By now, they might think he had been killed. The highest-ranking government official who knew Fallon for what he truly was—and that he wasn’t a wanted man—was dead. No one in his or her right mind would call Fallon a coward for trying to save his own skin and get away. He had done his job. He had done more than his share.

  This wasn’t his fight anyway.

  “The hell it isn’t,” he said, and looked back at the newspaper.

  An Austin policeman and a hotel employee had been injured while rushing to the defense of the attorney general, but both were expected to recover from their wounds and the Texas governor had praised the men for the valiant if in-vain efforts to save Malcolm Maxwell’s life.

  A Texas Ranger also came along, firing his Colt revolver at the cowardly assassins, one of whom returned fire but the Ranger, a man the Independent Daily Crier identified as Fred Bennett, ducked behind the solidly built corner of the hotel and escaped harm.

  The Ranger, however, had seen enough to recognize one of the assassins.

  Fallon read the name aloud. “Josh Ryker.”

  He looked back at the open doorway.

  “Well, Mr. Maxwell,” Fallon said softly, “I got one of your killers for you.”

  He skimmed through the rest of the newspaper article, turning the page to read the jump.

  The two other assassins were killed by Ranger Bennett as they ran for their horses at a nearby hitching rail, but only Josh Ryker got away.

  Ryker had spent time in and out of prisons over the past several years, the reporter stated, accurately, too, after spending much of his youth as a cowboy pushing cattle to the trail’s ends in Kansas. He had been sentenced to twelve years at The Walls in Huntsville, but while being transferred to the Rusk unit, he had managed to escape. His reasons for joining in the brutal assassination were not known to the local police detectives investigating the foul crime or friends and colleagues of the late attorney general.

  Fallon turned back to the front page to make sure he had read the date accurately. It all fit, Fallon decided. Josh Ryker would have had time to get from the road to Rusk to Austin, take part in the murder of the attorney general, and train for his role in the train heist.

>   It also meant—though Fallon had never doubted that for one second—that Josh Ryker’s presence here proved that the murder of Malcolm Maxwell and the robbery of this train were connected. And the man behind the attorney general’s assassination was Colonel Josiah Jonathan Justice.

  “But who else?” Fallon asked, and finished reading the article. The attorney general left behind a grieving widow, active in the First Methodist Church of Austin, Texas, three daughters, a son, and two grandchildren. Funny, Fallon thought, he never figured Maxwell to have grandbabies. The man didn’t look that old.

  There were praises from Texas senators, Texas Rangers, a judge, the attorney general’s barber, and descendants of Sam Houston. The deputy attorney general had been selected as Maxwell’s interim replacement. Fallon read the name three times, but the new attorney general meant nothing to him.

  He started to wad up the Dallas paper and throw it against the wall, but went back to the front page and skimmed over headlines and news items, wondering if there might be any mention of Harry Alexander, even an obituary that said he was dead. He didn’t find anything, which he hadn’t truly expected. He found nothing that might have anything to do with everything that was going on in Texas, and elsewhere, right now. Nothing about The Walls in Huntsville. Nothing about detectives. Nothing about Colonel Justice.

  Now Fallon threw down the paper. He considered his options.

  He had no options. He was aboard a runaway train and this whole damned operation kept spinning out of control.

  Maybe the most important man in the operation—the man who had hired the American Detective Agency, or at the least had gotten the state to hire Sean MacGregor’s operatives—was dead. Murdered. The Dallas newspaper had gotten it right. Assassinated.

  “Justice,” Fallon whispered, “you’re a vile creature.”

  Yet he couldn’t just squat here on the floor and do nothing but curse his luck.

  Fallon had work to do, and he needed to do it fast.

  Where to start? He looked at the crates. This wasn’t just a holdup for the money next door in the express car. This armory had to be part of Justice’s scheme.

  That’s why so many of Justice’s soldiers had been trained as quartermasters—learning how to load, unload, balance weights, stuff like that.

  He stood, moved toward the crates and crates of weapons. The Winchesters were first. Fallon didn’t know exactly what to look for, but he decided to see where the guns were being shipped to. The army? It wasn’t just some rich man out West who wanted a few guns to take his equally wealthy friends hunting.

  On the smaller side of the boxes, facing the walkway between the rifle crates and the Gatling guns, he found an answer—although Fallon could not make a good guess as to what the answer meant. The closest Winchester box was being shipped to Ferguson’s Hardware, Wilsonville, Texas. If the crate had been accurately labeled, this box held .44-40 caliber Model 1873 Winchester rifles. The box above it, also filled with .44-40 rifles, was bound for Junior’s Firearms, Carson Fork, Territory of New Mexico.

  Fallon glanced at a few other crates, then quickly moved across the aisle to the closest crate containing a Gatling gun. He shot another quick look at the two dead guards and the one still unconscious. They weren’t wearing army uniforms. The label on the crate said that the first Gatling gun was bound for Major R. C. Romero, Ejército Mexicano, but the destination was the Port of Indianola, Texas, where the weapons would be shipped to the Mexican Army in Vera Cruz. Fallon drew in a breath, let it out slowly. Indianola? He remembered the newspaper editor he had met from the Texas Times in Indianola. All right, there was nothing against the law for the Gatling Gun Company of Ortonville, Michigan, to sell a weapon to a foreign power. Gatlings had been sold not only to the United States, but Russia, England, France . . . and likely many other countries. Fallon looked at the other boxes from the Gatling Gun Company, and discovered all four crates were bound for Major R. K. Concepción. R. K. . . . R. K. . . . R. K. C. . . . R. K. C.? What did that stand for? Republic of Killer Confederates?

  “Don’t be joking at a time like this,” Fallon told himself.

  Fallon snapped his fingers, which he regretted briefly because it hurt his right hand. But he had been able to snap his fingers, despite the brutalized knuckles and all the punches he had thrown.

  “Rufus K. Conley,” he said aloud. “R . . . K . . . C.”

  Rufus K. Conley, also a major, editor of the Texas Times in Indianola. Coincidence? Fallon shook his head. He didn’t think so.

  “Wait a damned minute,” Fallon whispered aloud, and he crossed the aisle. He found the crate of Winchesters—no, three crates—to be delivered to Lee’s Mercantile, Indianola, Texas, and another bound for Pickett’s Hardware & Sundries, Indianola, Texas. As he moved down the aisle and looked on the other side of the car, he found Colts bound for a gun store in Indianola—Stonewall’s, in fact—and crate of Sharps rifles going to McCulloch’s Hardware in Indianola. Kegs of powder were going to Stuart’s Hardware in Indianola, and Hampton’s Mercantile appeared to be getting ammunition and two boxes of Colt’s revolving pistols, .44-40 caliber, so the slugs would fit the Winchester repeating rifles heading to Lee’s Mercantile or Pickett’s Hardware & Sundries.

  Lee . . . Pickett . . . Stonewall . . . McCulloch . . . Stuart . . . Hampton. Names of generals who had fought for the Confederacy. Of course, in a state like Texas, or Arkansas, or other Southern states, a visitor could find a lot of businesses named after those heroes of the Lost Cause. But how many hardware stores and gun shops could a town like Indianola, all but wiped out by a pair of devastating hurricanes in the 1870s and 1880s, support? Fallon didn’t think, from what he remembered reading, that Indianola could support even a newspaper. It was a damned ghost town.

  But some gun salesman in on the eastern coast would not know that. He wouldn’t likely even give a damn because the commission—if salesmen for these companies earned a commission—on sales of this scale would buy his wife or mistress a lot of jewelry and keep him in quality brandy instead of forty-rod rotgut.

  There was also a crate of Sharps carbines bound for the Indianola marshal’s office, but the name of the marshal left Fallon uttering a soft curse under his breath: Rufus K. Conley.

  It appeared the newspaper editor of the local rag in Indianola also served as the city policeman.

  Suddenly, another thought crossed Fallon’s mind.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  He wasn’t thinking of his dead wife. He wasn’t thinking of his murdered baby daughter. He wasn’t thinking at all about revenge, which was all that had been driving him since he had gotten that awful news in Joliet a hellish eternity ago.

  Hell, he wasn’t even thinking about avenging the cowardly assassination of Malcolm Maxwell, attorney general for the state of Texas.

  Somehow, this would point to the men or the one man who was responsible for framing Fallon, for ruining his life, for wiping out Fallon’s family. Maybe that man was Chris Ehrlander. But right now, Fallon wasn’t even thinking about the lawyer from Fort Smith who was now working for Colonel Justice.

  He was thinking about the United States of America. He was thinking about all the horrible stories he had heard in Fort Smith bars, in camps out in the Indian Nations, even on those old trail drives and buffalo hunts. He had been born too late to serve in the Civil War. His mother used to tell him that he should thank God every night in his prayers that he had been born too late to “see that awful elephant,” his mother would drawl.

  As a kid, naturally, Fallon had figured that war was nothing but fun and glory, daring deeds, and waving sabers and winning battles for the good of your country and the medals some general, or maybe even the president himself, would pin on your chest before a grand gathering in the state capital or even Washington City.

  Now Fallon knew better. He had seen men with wooden legs or no legs at all. Men with eye patches. With scars. Missing fingers. With hollowed-out looks on their faces. There had been that man
in one of the buffalo camps who woke up screaming. Twice he had woken up and found his gun and fired it empty into the stars because he had not seen the Big Dipper but George Custer leading his Michigan cavalry boys in a charge against the skinner’s Confederate boys in Virginia.

  Fallon had ridden with federal marshals who had fought in the Civil War, some wearing the blue, others fighting for the South, and more than a handful of bushwhackers from Missouri and Red Legs from Kansas. Most of them never talked about the battles. The ones, Fallon learned, who bragged about all they had done during the late war, usually were liars.

  War is hell. War was hell. War would always be hell.

  So were prisons.

  Fallon wanted no part of either.

  Things were starting to add up, Fallon thought. Maybe. And if they added up to something, Fallon hadn’t quite grasped the final answer.

  The voice of American Detective Agency operative Christina Whitney rang through Fallon’s mind, drowning out the metallic noise of speeding iron wheels and the creaking of the express cars.

  “Say what you’re thinking out loud,” Christina Whitney had instructed Fallon, “whether you’re bouncing your thoughts off another operative or operatives, or just thinking out loud to hear how it sounds to you.” They had been in Alabama, not far from the piney forests of Spanish Fort, near the site of Fort Blakeley, where some Union general—Canby, if Fallon remembered right—had led his forces against starving Confederates and captured the earthworks, securing Mobile Bay for the Union.