by Jake Logan
“Excuse me,” she said automatically. Then she looked up into Calhoun’s grinning face.
“You thinkin’ on leavin’ me behind?”
“How’d you—?”
“I went out a window. I’ve had a bit of experience doin’ that,” he said. “It occurred to me I didn’t have any money, and you don’t strike me as the sort to pay a gentleman’s bill for him.” He leered at her, forcing Molly to unconsciously put her hand to her neckline and pull up the blouse.
“I was only stepping out for a breath of fresh air.”
“Fresh air,” he said sarcastically. Calhoun took a deep breath, then coughed. “Nothing but smoke in the air. And dead fish stink blowin’ in from the docks. Reminds me of St. Louis.”
“You would have left me behind,” she said.
“Reckon we understand each other. Let’s go on over to Turner’s and get this done with.” He rested his hand on the butt of his pistol, which was thrust into a linen sash.
Molly wished she had her derringer in hand, but she hadn’t been able to do anything more than verify that she still carried it since she had shot Swain. At least, on a public street with traffic passing by all around, Calhoun wasn’t as likely to shoot her like a dog.
“Very well,” she said, taking Calhoun’s arm as if he es corted her. “I’m ready to become fabulously wealthy.” As they walked off, Molly felt how tense Calhoun was. Her mind raced trying to find a new way of cutting Calhoun out so she would be sole winner of Colonel Turner’s race.
“We’re ahead of everyone else,” Calhoun said. “We got here first.”
“Do you know that for certain?”
“Look at the newspapers. Any of the racers that went south after Jubilee Junction are stranded out there. More than one railroad went belly up right after the race started.” Calhoun stopped and pointed to an article in the Alta California being sold by a street urchin. Calhoun pushed the boy away when he demanded a nickel for the paper.
“So you think only the northern train route was good?”
“I know it. And we were ahead of all the others.”
“You killed some of them, too,” Molly said.
Calhoun laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. He walked faster, forcing her to almost run to keep up.
“There’s the office,” Calhoun said as they entered Union Square.
“It doesn’t look too active. I expected reporters to cover the first of the racers.” Molly pursed her lips as she thought of other freight offices along the way and how they had been undermanned or even still waiting to open. The colonel was no one’s fool. He would have offices at the start and finish of his race booming with business so the reporters would be sure his company was already successful.
Calhoun muttered under his breath as he pushed ahead of Molly to get into the office. She hung back to open her purse and take out the derringer, just to be safe.
“We’re here to claim the prize money,” Calhoun said gruffly.
The clerk looked up with a disgusted look on his face.
“You and ’bout everyone else,” he said.
“What’s that?” Molly cried out in surprise. “We’re not the first?”
“Who got here before us?” Calhoun reached over the counter and grabbed the clerk’s shirt and pulled him closer. “What son of a bitch beat us here?”
“N-nobody in the race,” the clerk said.
Molly moved to the side, and saw that the clerk had been rifling the desks and had a pile of the most valuable items.
“You don’t work here,” she accused. “You’re a sneak thief!” Molly knew instantly she was right from the way the blood drained from the man’s face.
“They all left an hour back. Nobody works here anymore. I . . . I’m an accountant next door, and I figured I could take what I needed. Th-they owed me money and never paid up!”
“What’d they owe you for?” Calhoun shook the man and twisted his grip to tighten the shirt on the captive man’s throat, choking him until he went from white to bright red.
“Accounting. I’m an accountant,” the man gasped out. “If they owe you money, take something. Th-that’s what I’m doing!”
“You lying sack of shit,” Calhoun said. “Where’s the gold?”
“Gold? There’s no gold. Nobody’s been paid in a week. That’s why they upped and left.” The rest of the man’s babbling answer died in a gurgle as Calhoun squeezed even more on the scrawny throat.
“Sid, no,” Molly said. “He’s telling the truth. Look at him. Would he lie to a real man like you?”
“Hell, no. He doesn’t have the balls.”
“Not like you,” Molly said to soothe him more. If she wanted the prize money, she had to keep Calhoun from killing the only source of information they had. “Why don’t you look around to be certain? There’s a back room where they must have a vault.”
“Yeah, I see it.” Calhoun dropped the accountant, kicked through a low gate dividing the public space from the office, and marched into the back room.
“Thanks, lady. You saved my—” The accountant went pale again when he found himself staring down the barrel of her derringer.
“I’ll ask once. Answer me truthfully and you can go. Lie and you’ll wish my intemperate companion was still strangling you. Was there gold here?”
“I don’t know. Honest!”
“You don’t know anything about a cross-country race to publicize the new company?”
“No!” He cowered away from her. “I’m not lying. On my mother’s grave, I’m not!”
“One last question. Who was the office manager and where can I find him?”
“Will Cassidy’s his name. He . . . he—I don’t know where you can find him!”
Molly cocked the derringer. The accountant closed his eyes as he waited to die with the .44 bullet in his skull. She decided not to waste a bullet when she heard Calhoun roaring like a gored bull in the back room about the vault being looted. She backed away and left the office. A quick look around Union Square was all it took for her to find her next destination. Molly ran, holding up her skirt to keep from tripping. She had to get out of sight as quickly as possible if she wanted to lose Calhoun. He was no longer useful to her.
She rounded the corner and followed the signs to the livery stable. Hardly slowing, she slipped between the partly open doors, and into the barn to see a man rummaging through a tool bin. He looked up. The guilty expression on his face told Molly he didn’t belong there. He was as much a thief as the accountant back at the Turner Haulage Company office.
“You work for the freight company, don’t you?” She saw the man was more likely to be a clerk than a stable hand, so it wasn’t much of a leap in logic.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I wanted to send some freight back East, to St. Louis,” she said. “The office was closed. Are you out of business?”
“Damned right we are, lady. The colonel hadn’t paid us all month so we took—so we took off.” He held a crowbar in his hand.
“We?”
“All the people working at the freight company. He had the nerve to come here personally and tell us to keep on working and that he’d pay us after the race.”
“After the race,” she said. “Colonel Turner is in San Francisco? Did he take the fifty-thousand-dollar prize?”
“He tried, but we beat him to it.” The clerk turned and held the crowbar like a club now. “You’re one of them in the race, aren’t you? You think you’re going to get rich. You’re not. The gold’s all gone.”
“Is it now?” She came closer, ignoring the way he threatened her with the metal bar. “Let me think this through. You took the gold—the prize—as your pay, but something is keeping you from getting it? What might that be?”
“It’s in a vault. It’ll take a lot of work to pry off the lock to get into the gold.”
“You and the rest in the office stole the gold?”
“Not the rest,” the man said, his eyes droppin
g to Molly’s cleavage. “Just me. I drove off with it.”
“Drove off?”
“The vault’s in the back of the biggest freight wagon the colonel has. Must weigh two tons, and it’s all steel.”
Molly moved closer still, and rested her fingers on the man’s cheek and stroked slowly, letting a single finger touch his chin before her hand moved to his chest and worked down to his heaving belly. She turned slightly and ran her hand lower yet, and felt him standing at attention.
“We can be a team, you and I.”
“Why?”
“I can offer you things beyond your wildest dreams.”
“That much gold can buy me all that,” the clerk said.
“Why buy what you can get for free—when you can get it all willingly?” She kissed him lightly on the lips as she squeezed the bulge at his crotch. “Maybe you’d like me to do it the other way around?”
“What do you mean?”
Molly slipped her hand from his crotch, thrust a finger into his mouth, and pulled it out slowly as she dropped to her knees. She unfastened his fly and began kissing what rushed out. It took only a few minutes before the clerk was babbling about where he had hidden the wagon with the steel vault in it.
“Show me,” she said, standing and wiping her lips. “I can do ever so much more for you.”
“More?”
“I can open the lock on the vault without you having to exert yourself.”
“I should save my strength for more, huh?”
“Definitely,” she said, licking her lips. It took all her restraint to keep from laughing at how easily she had seduced the man and gotten him to accept her as a partner in his theft.
“Out back. Come on.”
Molly slid her derringer free as she followed the man. She wasn’t too surprised when she spotted two bodies hastily dumped behind the woodpile. The clerk wouldn’t share with his coworkers and had killed them to get the gold.
“There it is.”
Molly stared at the wagon. She had expected a strongbox. She had not expected a bank on wheels. Even knowing the vault weighed a couple tons didn’t prepare her for the size of the huge box.
“It’s got foot-thick walls. The key unlocks the door, but the lock itself is buried behind steel plates. I was going to pry off the front and yank out the mechanism, but if you’ve got the key, there won’t be any need to go to that trouble.”
She looked around, her eyes passing quickly over the evidence of the clerk’s murderous ways.
“Not here,” she said. “Where can we drive this and open it in private?”
“I know a place down the peninsula,” he said. “I’ll get the team.”
As he went for the sturdy draft horses, Molly studied the lock. She wanted to begin trying the keys in her purse to see if any opened the lock. She had a dozen, but that meant any of the thirty-eight gold keys that she didn’t have might be the true way in. Until she had a chance to find out if she carried the right key—and there was only a one chance in four that she did—she needed the clerk to provide the muscle to force open the vault.
Still, the urge was almost overwhelming to try just one key.
“Ready. Come on. I’m anxious to get rich and . . .” His voice trailed off.
Molly joined him on the hard driver’s seat and smiled winningly.
“I’m anxious to get rich, too. And to feel your strong body alongside mine in a bed. What’s the most luxurious hotel in San Francisco? Never mind,” she said before he could name one. Let him fantasize. “We’ll try them all.”
“With champagne?”
“Only the best. Gran Monopole?”
“I suppose that’ll do,” he said. From the way he answered, Molly knew he had no idea. “I’ll drink it out of your belly button while you’re layin’ back naked on the bed. How’d you like that?”
Molly giggled like a schoolgirl and snuggled close to the clerk, glad she had her derringer close at hand. They rattled and clanked through the San Francisco streets heading south. Within an hour, they reached sparsely populated farm-land. The clerk took a rutted road toward the ocean, and finally yanked back hard on the reins, bringing the rig to a halt. The gunmetal gray Pacific Ocean crashed against rocks twenty feet below, and a stiff breeze caused Molly to work constantly to keep her hair from her eyes.
“You ready to be rich?” the clerk asked.
Molly was. She let him help her down, and then forced herself not to hurry as she walked to the rear of the wagon. Reaching into her purse, she felt the outline of the keys—and her pistol. She pulled out a handkerchief she had used to wrap the keys.
“Here,” she said, handing the keys to the clerk. “You deserve the honor of trying.”
“And if one doesn’t open the lock, I get to rip off the door,” he said.
“Go on,” she urged. “The suspense is killing me.”
She stepped to one side to watch as he tried one after another of the dozen keys.
“Damn, that doesn’t work. Doesn’t even fit into the lock.” The clerk threw the key away and tried the second. As he worked, Molly grew more apprehensive. Then he cried out in triumph. “It fits! The other wouldn’t even go into the lock, but this one fits!”
Molly drew her derringer and fired. The bullet entered the back of the man’s head and drove him forward into the vault door. The sick crunch as bone hit metal was smoothed by a gust of wind and the pounding surf below. He recoiled, sat down, and then bonelessly slid from the back of the wagon.
Molly stepped over the body and climbed into the wagon bed. She took a deep breath and tried to quiet her racing heart.
“I’ve done it. I’m rich!”
She put her fingers on the key, trying to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. It would go in the lock but not turn. The next thing she knew a bullet smashed into the back of her head just as the key dropped from the lock. She died as quickly and surely as the clerk had.
26
“We’re too late. I know we’re too late,” Zoe said over and over, until Slocum wanted to gag her with his bedraggled bandanna. “We took too long getting to the railhead, and now they’ve beat us.”
“Aren’t you interested in writing their story?” Slocum asked. He stepped out into the brisk San Francisco morning and shivered from the cold wind blowing off the Bay. The sky was clear, which he counted as a blessing. Too many times he had been in this town and never seen anything but gray fog clinging tenaciously to the streets. Having a cloudless blue sky above made him believe all would be well.
“Of course I am,” she said hotly. “But it’s the principle of the matter that grates on my sensibilities. You should win the prize, not someone else. Look at all we’ve been through!”
Slocum noted how she changed back and forth between mentioning him as the one who should win and then including herself.
“We’re not far from the freight office. Not more than a fifteen-minute walk,” he said. “If we go there straightaway, we can find if we’re first or if someone else has won.” He touched the keys in his pocket, not damning himself this time for such a display. He traced over the jagged edges that would turn tumblers and open the strongbox. Even if others had reached the office first, that didn’t mean they had opened the box.
He frowned as he remembered the last bit of doggerel in the instructions. “The box rolls like Turner Freight.” That didn’t make any sense, but they would find out when they reached the freight office.
Zoe chattered like a magpie the entire distance, and paid scant attention to what Slocum saw right away from a block off. The Turner Haulage Company office was deserted. When he reached the door, he prodded it open with the toe of his boot, his hand on the butt of his six-gun. The office was dimly lit and papers had been strewn all about. The only sound that he heard from within was the soft scurrying of a rat moving from one room to the next.
“We’re too late,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Zoe said, going in and looking around. “What happen
ed?”
“If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police,” came a tremulous voice from behind him. Slocum glanced over his shoulder and saw a frightened little man wearing a green eyeshade like a bank teller, with cuff protectors spotted with ink.
“You work here?” Slocum asked. “The lady’d like to know what happened to everyone.”
“Gone, all gone. The owner of the business told them he had gone bankrupt, and they wouldn’t be paid. They turned ugly and . . . and did this.”
“Really?” Slocum saw the man knew more than he was letting on. Some of the pilfering had probably been done by his ink-stained fingers.
Seeing Slocum’s intense gaze, the man averted his eyes and muttered, “They owed me for my work. They weren’t going to pay. The colonel himself said as much to me, and they owed me for a month’s accounting.”
“Colonel Turner was here in person?” Zoe pulled her notebook out and wet the tip of her pencil to make better marks. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“What about the race?” Slocum asked, cutting through the likely questions Zoe would ask. The man was on the brink of bolting. Slocum had seen the same look in the eyes of a deer before it leaped into the woods to take refuge from a hunter.
“The race, the race. Is that all any of you people are interested in?”
“What others have asked?” Zoe elbowed Slocum out of the way, and he let her. Her questions might soothe the accountant since it had become increasingly obvious that Slocum might just shoot him in the leg to get what he wanted to know.
“Not two hours ago. Another man and a woman.” The man swallowed hard.
“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Slocum asked.
“Never seen a woman purtier, and I been over at the Bella Union a great deal and seen women from France.”
“Yes, of course,” Zoe said, her lips pursed in distaste. “What did Miss Ibbotson say?”
“That her name? The owlhoot with her tried to strangle me.”
