Dead Time

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  The irony of the battle? The fight had happened just hours after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant between seven hundred and eight hundred miles away at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

  “Talking to yourself doesn’t mean you’re insane,” Christina had said with a warm smile. “It even can help you keep control of your faculties.”

  Fallon wet his lips as he studied the crates of weapons and ammunition and kegs of gunpowder.

  “The weapons are being stolen from individual stores—not the U.S. Army,” he said. “Maybe some of the stores aren’t real. The ones in Indianola, for instance. Carson Fork. Wilsonville. Maybe those are real. Probably are real.”

  He nodded. That sounded just about right. He could see how things might happen after the cargo was hauled off this train and taken, probably south of the border into Mexico.

  A businessman in Wilsonville, Texas, complains to Winchester that his order of rifles has been stolen by bandits in Texas. Winchester tells Wilsonville that as soon as it gets its money back from the express company in charge of delivering the cargo safe and sound the Wilsonville store will get its money back. Same with the outfit in Carson Fork, New Mexico Territory. Some pencil pusher with an abacus in Connecticut might take a long time before he figured out just how much money Winchester was out. Steal from the federal army and the secretary of war, and the president would spare no expense to go after the bandits. Winchester would likely hire some private detectives—maybe from the American Detective Agency but the Pinkertons if the Winchester brass had any business sense—to go after the outlaws.

  “The Mexican Army won’t care a whit about four missing Gatling guns,” Fallon said aloud, “because the Mexican Army never ordered those guns. They came from Major Rufus K. Conley of the Texas Times in Indianola.”

  He moved down the aisle again, staring at the shipping labels.

  Winchester would be out the most. Colt would be second. The others . . . ? Fallon shook his head.

  He spoke again in a quiet but controlled voice. “Remington won’t think much about losing three boxes. Same with Marlin, Hopkins & Allen, Sharps. Union Metallic makes cartridges. The gunpowder? These kegs come from various companies. Not enough for anyone other than a pesky detective or maybe a newspaper reporter to think a whole lot about it.”

  He stared at another box. “Volcanic Repeating Arms,” he said aloud. “What the hell is Volcanic Repeating Arms?” Then he remembered. “Didn’t they buy out or merge with or something like that with Smith & Wesson?” His head nodded, and he said, “That’s it. That’s Smith & Wesson. So Smith & Wesson loses two boxes of revolvers, one bound for Julian, California, the other for Prescott, Arizona. They likely won’t think a whole lot about that. Probably won’t occur to them that they lost both gun boxes on the same train.”

  But . . . ?

  Again he looked at the high stacks of Winchesters and a fair number of boxes from Colt.

  “There’s no way Colt and Winchester will dismiss losing that many guns,” he said. “That’s too big a loss for even the most idiotic of an accountant. They’d have to alert the government.” Fallon shook his head. “The Texas Rangers? The hard cases that I’ve known to ride for that group would swim from Indianola to get those guns back and kill anyone who dared try to stop them.”

  Fallon had reached the far end of the rocking railroad car. The door was barred shut. He tried to remember how many cars were ahead of him. He stupidly had not been paying that much attention, just lying on the ground, listening to the wheels as the train braked to a stop, thinking only—as he and others had been trained—to do his job, and only his job.

  Of course, he didn’t have to go through the car. He could step onto the platform, climb the iron hand-and footholds, and cross the roof. Leap into the tinder and all that coal—this train wasn’t one of those wood-burning locomotives—and . . . and then what? Could he stop the engine?

  Another lesson echoed inside his head, but this one came from Dan MacGregor and not Christina Whitney. “Know what you’re getting into, Fallon. Don’t step into a fight without knowing everything—and everything includes a way out.”

  He didn’t know how many other cars were now filled with men hired by Colonel Justice and, most likely, Major Rufus K. Conley—and who else.

  “But,” he said, “I know what’s happening in this car and the one immediately behind me.”

  He looked at the lantern before his gaze fell upon the kegs of gunpowder.

  “Destroy the guns. Without guns, Justice can’t launch his new war.”

  His stomach turned a little queasy.

  This part he didn’t want to say out loud.

  Blow up this car, and he’d kill everyone on the train, most likely, including himself. Oh, Fallon could toss the lantern from the doorway and then leap over the platform and pray for something soft to land upon. But at this rate, twenty, maybe as much as twenty-five or even thirty miles per hour, Fallon would likely break practically every bone in his body—and that’s if he didn’t bounce off the embankment and underneath the rails and be disemboweled like Ryker, Drexel, and Hansen might have been a few minutes earlier.

  From the lights he had seen when the train was pulling into the water stop, Fallon had figured that this was not just a freight but a freight-and-passenger run. Blow up the train, and more innocent people would die.

  He couldn’t uncouple the cars—even if that was possible for a man who had ridden trains but never worked them—since the engine was in reverse. Uncouple the car and the engine would still be pushing them.

  Unless . . .

  Fallon whispered to himself.

  “Unless the engine stops. The engine stops, there’s a chance these cars keep rolling. Rolling away from the passenger cars. It rolls far enough.”

  He wet his lips and massaged his right hand.

  “Far enough,” he said, “and then I can toss a lantern into the kegs of gunpowder. Blow Colonel Justice’s arsenal to kingdom come.”

  He frowned.

  “And what about you?” he asked himself. “If you don’t break your leg or neck, there’s still a probable chance that you get killed by exploding bullets, shrapnel, pieces of the train as they rain down on you.”

  He cursed and moved toward the open doorway.

  “There’s one thing you have to be aware of,” Christina had told him. “You can get killed. That’s why you don’t want to get close to anyone. You don’t want to.” She had lifted her eyes and stared at him for a long time. “Did you think about that as a lawman?”

  “You tried not to,” he had told her. “But I knew . . . my . . . wife . . . thought about it all the time. And . . . it was always there, in the back of my mind.” He had chuckled. “We always thought just like most of the outlaws we were hunting thought. They had a creed, too. We followed theirs.”

  * * *

  Fallon stepped onto the platform, his feet sticking against the drying blood, and went into the express car.

  He spoke the creed of outlaws in the Indian Nations and deputy federal marshals in Judge Parker’s court aloud.

  “If you got to die, die game.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Colonel Justice wasn’t just promising his new recruits a new Confederate States of America, he had also been offering them wealth. That’s where the money was meant to go, because Fallon didn’t believe most of the recruits were that interested in avenging perceived Yankee atrocities or reinstituting slavery. Not after almost thirty years. No, Fallon had been a federal lawman long enough and had spent more than enough time in various prisons with various criminals to know that most of them wanted only one thing.

  Money.

  Here in sacks scattered about the floor of the express car that was beginning to reek of death lay one of Colonel Josiah Jonathan Justice’s payrolls.

  He knelt beside the unconscious guard, shoved him, harder, slapped his face. Nothing. He checked to make sure the man was still alive and felt breath
on the back of his hand. But the guard remained out cold—and even had Fallon been able to rouse him, the man wouldn’t have been able to help at all.

  “Enjoy your rest,” he said, and sighed and moved toward the safe.

  Fallon strained to lift the heavy sack, gave up, and dragged the money-filled canvas bag across the floor, around the corpses, grunting. He wasn’t weak, and he doubted if the sack weighed more than seventy pounds, but a doctor employed by the American Detective Agency had warned him, and other operatives, that the human body can tolerate a finite amount of stress. Muscles can freeze up. The brain can practically go to sleep. Emotions can go in opposite extremes. Fallon’s muscles did not want to cooperate, and that right hand of his had started throbbing again.

  It didn’t matter.

  He wasn’t going to collapse on the floor. He would neither burst into tears nor drop into a heap and fall asleep. He couldn’t black out, either, for he had too much to do. Fallon glanced at the regulator clock on the wall, noted the time, and backed out of the express car onto the platform. Once the sack lay on the hard floor, Fallon pushed it to the southern side. Southern, he told himself, providing that they were traveling west. He glanced at the sky, but clouds covered the stars and the moon, if there was a moon tonight.

  Now Fallon squatted, pushed open the gate that allowed passengers to disembark from the car off the platform, and he shoved the sack into the darkness.

  How much money had he just thrown into the darkness, into the rough land? What would the express agency have to say about that? What would Sean MacGregor say when he learned what Fallon had done?

  Fallon didn’t give a tinker’s damn.

  He might not win any medals. He might be sued, fired, or thrown back into Joliet to finish his original sentence with a few years tacked on. But, by thunder, Colonel Justice wouldn’t be using this money to start another Civil War. He wouldn’t be able to pay men to kill hardworking, honest attorney generals.

  His back hurt. His thigh muscles tightened. Fallon ignored the pain and his body’s revolt and he returned into the express car.

  Another bag filled with stolen money waited. Hell, there were a lot of bags. He made note, if only mentally, of the time, and lifted another sack. This one was much lighter, for it carried only paper currency. Fallon grabbed at another sack, but missed, almost tumbled to his knees and against the cabinet of cubbyholes. He couldn’t risk falling.

  If he hit the floor, he might not be able to get back up. He found himself weaving toward the open door, and not because of the train’s wobbly movement. He was falling apart. Weariness was taking its toll, but Fallon made it out into the darkness again. He hoped the wind would revive him. Instead, it left him shivering. Fallon sucked in a deep breath, exhaled, and tightened the open end of this sack. He tightened it as best he could, knowing that wind could carry the money to Houston, Beaumont, into the Gulf of Mexico, to Louisiana, or parts unknown. He dropped it over the side and into the darkness, then without taking time to think again about all that he was doing, he stepped back into the express car.

  He remained cold and kept right on shivering. The wind did cool down the temperature outside, but this was Texas, and not just Texas but the southern part of Texas. In the late part of spring, and people knew there rarely was anything that resembled true spring in this part of the state. There was summer. There was late summer. There was Indian summer. There was no fall, not much of a winter, and spring might last a week or two before summer started again. In short, Texas was hell. But Fallon kept on trembling, feeling cold as he had felt that time in the Nations in February when the blue norther came upon him without warning and he had spent two days and three nights in a miserable cave that barely held him and maybe two thirds of his horse.

  Fallon grabbed another sack and thanked the Lord that this one was as light as the last one he had tossed off the train. He looked at the clock again, had to strain his eyes to make certain of the time. His eyes burned, and he opened his mouth and tasted salt on his tongue.

  “Damn,” he said. “I’m sweating.”

  Sick. Malaria? He’d never had that before. A bad fever? Or was this part of the body’s reaction to extreme stress?

  It didn’t matter. Fallon wiped his brow, aware of the dampness that started at his armpits and soaked both sides of his shirt down to his hips. His heart pounded. He found it difficult to get his lungs to suck in enough air.

  But he kept right on working. Doing his job. Foiling, at least temporarily, Colonel Josiah Jonathan Justice and his nefarious operation.

  He was outside again, freezing in the biting wind. He smelled smoke, saw cinders in the distance from the smokestack of the locomotive. He headed toward the railing, stopped, and turned.

  “You damned fool,” he said. “The other side. Toss the sacks on the southern side. The right side, if this isn’t south. Right meaning to my right when I come out of the door toward the engine that’s in reverse.”

  Would he remember that?

  He came to the edge and pitched the bag into the darkness.

  After wiping sweat again, fighting back a cough, and turning around, he needed to grip the exterior wall with his left hand to help him make it back into the express car.

  Fallon looked at the clock again, took five steps toward the bags filled with money, and stopped. He had already forgotten what time it was.

  Write it down, he thought, but shook his head.

  How do you explain that if Justice or Drexel or Chris Ehrlander find those times in your pocket? Just remember what time it was. And what time it was when this scheme of getting rid of the money started.

  He moved, stopped, and cursed himself again.

  Drexel? You don’t have to explain anything to Drexel. Drexel’s miles to the east. Coyotes and other critters of the night are feasting on his guts.

  He bent, took a firm grip on another sack, and heaved. The bag did not budge but almost pulled him onto the floor. Wouldn’t that have been a hell of a thing? Fallon thought.

  The whistle screamed, startling Fallon.

  He knew about signals engineers used, but he couldn’t remember what they were. Or what this signal might have meant since, unless some of Justice’s men had developed a conscience, the engineer and the fireman who had started this run were back near the trellis lying dead beside the tracks.

  Which also got Fallon thinking.

  They had blown up the bridge. No eastbound trains would be coming through until that trellis was rebuilt. No westbound engines, either. Work crews would be taking trains or handcarts, and anyone traveling from the west would be certain to notice the money sacks along the railroad company’s right-of-way. So ideally Fallon would need to have someone find that money first, someone with an honest streak. About the only person to come to mind was Christina Whitney, and Fallon had no idea where she was. Yet that was the least of his problems. If some poor Irish refugee happened upon a sack containing tens of thousands of U.S. script, or a few hundred bucks in Morgan dollars, or a tremendous amount of wealth in double eagle gold coins, so be it. This was, after all, America.

  For the time being.

  He saw the rolling cart against the wall for the first time, and cursed himself for his blindness and his failure to think everything through. Had he seen that pushcart earlier . . .

  Well, that was spilt milk. He staggered across the weaving car to the wall, grabbed the cart, and guided it and its squeaking wheels to the piles of bags filled with money. Fallon lifted those onto the cart, and now his muscles did not seem to rebel. Once he had the remaining few bags loaded, he had to summon just about his last ounce of strength to pull himself off the floor. But at least he had the cart’s handles to lean on, and though it was hard to push, he managed to get the cart to the wall next to the open door.

  From here, it would be a lot easier to get those bags thrown over the edge.

  He picked the heaviest one first, and that practically left him numb and exhausted. But he refused to quit. He co
uldn’t quit.

  He dragged the next bag to the edge, and then that damn whistle screamed again.

  It had to be a signal, but Fallon’s trainers, and more important, Josiah Jonathan Justice, had decided that men on the train with their own jobs to do had no need to learn what any whistle blasts meant. Fallon could guess. He guessed that they had to be getting close to the end of this train ride.

  They weren’t heading to San Antonio or Corpus Christi—not unless those two cities had followed Colonel Justice’s insane plan and had withdrawn from Texas and the Union.

  Indianola? The thought caused Fallon to straighten. He found more strength and got the last bags tossed off into the night. Now, all Fallon had to do was unhook the coupler and separate the last of the cars with the train. Then he could blow the ammunition and arsenal to oblivion.

  He pushed the cart away from the wall and the door, and his feet felt the stickiness of the dried blood on the platform.

  “Plan ahead,” Dan MacGregor had often told him. “Think what might happen. Think about anything that could happen.”

  Christina Whitney had added: “And have an answer for everything in case something doesn’t work out exactly how you had planned.”

  If he survived. If the arsenal wasn’t destroyed. If and if and if and if. Fallon shoved the cart farther, and then he saw the two dead guards. Well, those men were beyond caring, and if they were looking down upon Fallon from the hereafter, maybe they wouldn’t mind at all having their bodies to help with the cause. But what about the man knocked cold? He was still alive and likely didn’t want to die.

  Maybe if I put him outside, on another platform . . . Fallon swore. If he doesn’t just roll off onto the tracks and under the wheels. His head shook. Hell, let me see if I can get the cars uncoupled first.

  Remembering a crowbar over by the cabinets, Fallon walked there, bent, grabbed it, and started for the other car, the one with the gunpowder and arms that Justice planned on using for his new Southern states.