Ax & Spade: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 1)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  Kamp pulled his boots on, left the slaughterhouse and walked down the path and onto the road, going straight in the direction of George Richter’s house. He carried the pistol he’d taken from the chemist, a Colt Pocket Revolver. He went to Richter’s front door as he did the night Jonas and Rachel Bauer were murdered and started banging.

  He said, “Richter! Richter!” He pounded on the door a few more times. A bleary-eyed George Richter swung the door open.

  “Kamp?”

  He pushed his way in and closed the door behind him.

  “Sit down, George.” Richter backed up slowly and took a seat in a chair in the front room. “Where’s your man, Hugh Arndt?”

  “Why, I don’t know. What’s the—”

  “Where’s he supposed to be right now? Where is he?”

  The color rose in George Richter’s face. “Ach, I don’t know where he is. I let him go two weeks ago.”

  “Let him go?”

  “Fired him.”

  “Why?”

  Richter boomed, “None of your goddamned business! I sent him away, and he left.” Richter’s eyes went to the shotgun propped next to the entrance to the kitchen. Kamp pulled the Colt from his pocket and pointed it at Richter.

  Richter said, “Are you out of your goddamned geisht?”

  “Show me where he lived, George. And don’t go near that gun.” Richter got to his feet and went back out the front door, grumbling.

  Richter said, “You know I stood up for you after that rotten business with that fiend Knecht, after the way you acted so dumb. Well, not no more. Not no more.”

  “Where’d he stay, George?”

  “Christ! I’m taking you there.” Kamp followed Richter to the carriage house and walked up the stairs.

  Richter said, “Now, don’t get all shnarrich. I’m just going to open the door to this room. This is where Hugh lived.”

  Kamp pressed the barrel to the back of Richter’s neck as Richter opened the door. Richter stepped into the room, and he followed. The room was empty.

  Richter turned around and said, “Happy now?”

  KAMP RAN to the house of John and Charlotte Fogel and went straight for the back door. Through the kitchen window, he saw Charlotte Fogel cooking breakfast. One of the younger Bauer girls was helping her. He didn’t see Nyx. Kamp rapped on the back door and waited until Charlotte Fogel answered. When she saw him at the door, she stiffened and gave him a tense smile.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Fogel. May I see Nyx, please?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know. She’s sleeping.”

  “Is John here?”

  “Yes, well, no.”

  “Which?”

  “He’s working.”

  “Mrs. Fogel, I need to talk to Nyx immediately. Please wake her up. Hurry.”

  “Well, I just don’t—”

  Kamp rushed past Charlotte Fogel and bounded up the stairs to the second floor. He opened each bedroom door until he found Nyx. She was sleeping on her stomach, face turned to the side and obscured by her hair.

  “Nyx! Nyx!”

  She rolled slowly onto her back and rubbed her forehead. “Oh, you’re back. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Nyx, I have to talk to you. Listen.”

  “Hang on. I’m naked.”

  Kamp stepped out of the room and closed the door. He heard someone come in the front door downstairs and then a man’s voice. John Fogel. He could hear Charlotte Fogel talking excitedly and then John Fogel called up the stairs. “Kamp, I need you to come down once. Kamp!”

  Nyx said, “All right, I’m dressed.”

  Kamp heard John Fogel’s heavy boots on the stairs. Fogel said, “You daresn’t talk to her!”

  He went back in Nyx’s room and locked the door behind him. He turned to look at Nyx, who had a bemused expression.

  She said, “Boy, you just got here, an’ you’re already in trouble with old man Fogel.”

  “Nyx, I figured it all out. I figured out what they wanted from your father, what they were looking for in your house.”

  John Fogel banged on the bedroom door. “Open this door! Nadine, are you all right?”

  “What?”

  “A list of names. Where’s the locket?”

  “Locket?”

  “Your mother’s silver locket. The one she was wearing when it happened. I saw you wearing it one day. Did you ever look inside it?”

  “No.”

  Fogel shouted, “Open this goddamned door!”

  Nyx focused on him. “I didn’t want to wear it anymore. I hid it in our old house.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Nyx said, “Wait.” She dove under the bed and pulled out the Sharps and a black canvas haversack. When she stood up and nodded at him, he opened the door and pushed past John Fogel with Nyx following immediately behind. They scrambled down the stairs and out of the house.

  He knew George Richter would have had time by now to tell whoever he was going to tell that Kamp was in the neighborhood. Someone would soon be looking for him. Kamp and Nyx jogged the road to house where Jonas and Rachel Bauer had lived. As they reached the front yard, they heard hoof beats on the road.

  Kamp said, “They’re coming.”

  Nyx said, “Back door.”

  Kamp watched the road as he ran around the back of the house. A dray wagon stopped in front of the house. Three men jumped out running with pistols drawn. Nyx went in the back door of the house with Kamp following. Once inside, he looked for the lock on the door. It was gone.

  Nyx said, “No lock here, either. And none on the cellar doors.”

  He looked for a way to block the door and found nothing. He said, “Where’s the locket?”

  “Down there.” She motioned to the cellar.

  “Show me.”

  Nyx ran for the cellar. Kamp walked backward, pistol pointed toward the back door. When he reached the top of the cellar stairs, he pulled the cellar door closed behind him and hustled down into the darkness. He heard footsteps on the kitchen floor, and then a man’s voice.

  “We don’t want to hurt either one of you, 'specially not that girl!”

  Another man said, “Yah, ’specially not her.” Kamp heard the men searching the rooms upstairs.

  He called to Nyx, “Did you find it?”

  “Not yet. It’s too dark.”

  Kamp felt along the floor for the punt gun and found it. Then he popped open a can of powder and poured a considerable amount down the barrel. He took Shaw’s handkerchief from his pocket, tore it in two and stuffed one half of it in the muzzle, then he poured in two pounds of shot.

  The man yelled again, “Why don’t you send that girl out, and then we can talk.”

  Nyx screamed, “Why don’t you shove it up your ass!”

  Kamp stuffed the other half of the handkerchief in the muzzle and packed it as tight as it would go. The cellar door swung open, and sunlight spilled down the stairs. Kamp dragged the punt gun across the floor and realized he had no way to point the massive weapon up the stairs. He scrambled back across the floor and found the chest that held the personal effects of Jonas and Rachel Bauer. Kamp slid the chest next to the gun. He looked up the cellar stairs and saw a man looking back at him. It was the same man he’d seen with the chemist. Kamp ducked back into the darkness.

  The man said, “You won’t escape. And you don’t need to. People just want this to stop. If you’re reasonable, we won’t hand you over to the mob.”

  Kamp propped the barrel of the punt gun on the chest. He felt Nyx crawl beside him.

  She said, “I found it. The locket.”

  “Cover your ears, and watch the bulkhead.”

  Nyx pressed her palms tightly against her head. Kamp watched the stairs.

  The man came running down the stairs, firing his pistol with the second man following right behind. At the same moment, the bulkhead doors swung open and the third man jumped down into the cellar.

  Kamp w
aited until he could see both men on the stairs and then fired the punt gun, which erupted with a colossal bang. The blast took off the first man’s legs, and the rest of him toppled to the bottom of the stairs, eyes staring straight up. The second man was hit in both shins and fell into the cellar as well. Kamp grabbed Nyx’s wrist, and they stepped over the bodies. The second man grabbed Nyx by the ankle. She gave him a kick to the face, ran up the stairs and out the front door. The man who’d come in through the bulkhead doors did not emerge from the house. Nyx ran for the wagon.

  Kamp called to her, “They’ll be on the road,” and he jumped down into the brambles. A train whistle sounded. “We’ll catch out.”

  Nyx followed him, and they ran for the tracks. He looked back and saw the third man leaving in the wagon. Kamp and Nyx jogged alongside the tracks as the train reached them.

  “DO IT JUST LIKE ME.” As he ran, Kamp waited for an open boxcar to appear. When it did, he leapt for the grab bar and caught it square with his left hand. His arm wailed with pain, but Kamp hung on, lifting his left foot onto the step. From there, he let himself glide into the car.

  “Now you.”

  Nyx threw the Sharps and the haversack into the car and repeated his moves, albeit more gracefully than Kamp. She landed in the boxcar on her feet.

  Nyx said, “Were those the guys?”

  “Which guys?”

  “The guys who killed my parents.”

  “No. Nyx, where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The locket. Open it.”

  “Right, right.” Nyx took it from her pocket and opened it. It held a small, folded piece of paper. “Son of a bitch, so there it is.” She unfolded it.

  Kamp said, “Kunkle either wrote it and gave it to your father, or your father made his own copy. Read it.”

  Nyx squinted at the paper. “It says, ‘FOR W.G.,O.V., J.M., J.S.’”

  “Anything else?”

  “At the bottom it says, ‘Only 4’ in quotation marks.”

  He stared up at the ceiling of the boxcar. “That could mean there’s only four guys in the group, or he only got four of the names.”

  Nyx said, “Well, who are they?”

  “Walker Gray, Joseph Moore and James Shelter. Those are the guys that run the companies. Iron, railroad, shipping.”

  “But not coal.”

  Kamp said, “Yah, why?”

  “Well, you said these guys killed those miners. But they had nothing to do with coal mining.”

  “You’re right. But Roy Kunkle knew who they were.”

  Nyx said, “Who’s O.V.?”

  “The chemist.”

  Kamp reflected on the implications of the list and whether it proved anything. It proved that someone wrote it and that the initials corresponded to what he already knew, or at least suspected. It was a credible link between what had happened to Roy Kunkle, then to Jonas and Rachel Bauer, and then to Daniel Knecht. The document itself provided no details, no context, no explanation of the meaning of the initials. But if one understood the components of the tale, the list was the central cohesive element, the linchpin. Given everything else Kamp knew, the list was evidence. As for “Only 4,” he felt certain it meant that Kunkle was told only four of the names in the Order but probably the most important four. There were others. Perhaps there wasn’t time to get the other names. Perhaps the informant, the rat squirrel, didn’t know any others, though he knew there were more. The Judge, for example, wasn’t on the list. Kamp felt a small measure of relief, but he knew the absence of the Judge’s name meant nothing with respect to whether and to what extent the Judge was involved. For that matter, Kamp knew his understanding of the letters and their meaning was a story, too, one of several he could imagine.

  Nyx handed the paper to him and said, “So these are the men who did it, the guys who killed my parents.”

  “They’re responsible, but they didn’t actually do it, no.”

  “Who did?”

  “That guy Hugh Arndt. George Richter’s man.”

  “Why aren’t we going after him?”

  “I looked for him. I couldn’t find him. He left Richter’s. He’s gone.”

  The train click-clacked back and forth on the tracks, and Kamp lay down on his back, while Nyx watched the trees going by. They continued over the bridge and toward the Third Street Station.

  He sat up and said, “When the train stops, jump off. Don’t look around. Just run.” They scanned the yard as the train eased to a halt. Nyx hopped from the boxcar, and Kamp clambered down after her. She took the rifle and the haversack, and he held the pistol.

  He said, “Follow me.” He cut down a series of alleys until he reached the back door at the shop of the druggist E. Wyles. He tried the doorknob and then banged on the door.

  “Emma! Emma! Let us in!”

  The door swung open, and there was E. Wyles herself, hair tied back and wearing her white blouse. She motioned for them to come in, and when they did, she embraced Nyx and said to Kamp, “Whatever you’re doing, you better finish it.”

  “Yah, yah, I know. People are looking for me.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Emma, I need you to look out for Nyx for a while.”

  Nyx said, “As if I need anyone to—”

  “She’s safe here.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  KAMP SHUT THE DOOR behind him and ran down the alley. He hustled the few blocks between E. Wyles’ shop and the impressive headquarters of Native Iron, a tall brick and glass building overlooking the ironworks. He walked in the front door, went straight for the stairwell and began climbing. He walked up the stairs until he reached the door at the top. Kamp emerged into a carpeted hallway that led to heavy oak double doors. He walked to the doors and tried one of the brass handles. Locked. He removed his hat, put the pistol in his belt and rapped lightly on the door.

  A woman opened the door, smiled and said, “May I help you?”

  Kamp said, “Yes, may I see Joseph Moore, please?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Moore is busy right now.”

  She moved to close the door, but Kamp stopped it with his hand. “Mr. Moore wants to speak with me. He does.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Moore does not wish to speak with you.”

  “Please let him know I’m here. Police business.”

  The woman took in a sharp breath and stiffened her neck. “May I have your name, please?”

  “Kamp.”

  “And your first name?”

  “Please tell him I’m here.”

  The woman closed the door and locked it. A few moments later the door opened again, and Kamp stood face to face with Joseph Moore, outfitted smartly in a grey flannel three-piece suit and silk tie, minus the jacket.

  Moore said, “Good afternoon. Pardon my informality. Warm weather. Follow me, please.”

  He turned on his heel and walked back into a large, wood paneled office that took up half the floor, including the corner that directly overlooked the iron-making operation. Kamp followed him in.

  Moore said, “Thank you, Margaret. That will be all,” and he took a seat on the edge of his massive wood desk and crossed his right leg over his left. He gestured for Kamp to sit down as well, then said, “I appreciate that you took the time to visit, though I admit I thought I’d see you sooner.”

  Kamp remained standing and said, “How’s that?” He scanned the office, looking at the pictures on the walls. He took a long look at a large painting, depicting a battle.

  Moore said, “Magnificent, isn’t it? The British fighting the Indians in the Seven Years’ War. Men talk about competition in business. That right there is real competition, the kind businessmen know nothing about. You’ve tasted war. You understand.”

  “Why did you think I’d be here sooner?”

  Moore uncrossed his legs and put both feet solidly on the floor. “I’d heard you were diligent and tenacious. I also heard your theory about that situation with that poor fellow and his wi
fe, what was his name, Boyer?”

  “Bauer.”

  “Yes, Bauer. I heard you decided to investigate the matter as if it were part of a conspiracy. Very shrewd. That takes a certain kind of mind.”

  “You ought to know. It was part of your plan.”

  Moore held out his hands, palms up. “Why would I do such a thing? Why? I’ve already been blessed by the good lord far beyond what any man deserves. Why would I want to harm anyone?”

  “Your man Otto told me he reported to you. He said that you ordered him to set off the explosion that killed those men in the mine. And that you ordered him to kill Silas Ownby.”

  Moore shook his head. “Such a shame. Though I did mean to thank you for the work you did there.”

  Kamp raised his eyebrows.

  Moore continued, “Otto seemed like a good man and a loyal employee. A brilliant man, a genius, but as it turned out, a malicious one. I should have paid closer attention, but I chose to see the best in him. I’m grateful that you stopped him when you did, although I’m heartbroken that he destroyed so many lives before you apprehended him. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve done the community a great service. You’re a hero. At least he won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was informed that he perished from his injuries in the hospital. It was you who shot him, correct? Yes, well, in any case it’s over and done with. And regardless of what he may have said and what you may believe, I have no quarrel with you. I hope we can go hunting, together. Someday.”

  Kamp said, “I’m compiling a report. I’ll file it with the county and state attorneys. In it, I’ll provide all the information I know. Every detail, outlining the existence of the Fraternal Order of the Raven and its members. Including this.” He took the coin out of his pocket and held it up.

  Moore smiled and said, “Ah, you found a coin, one of the first ones we made, I believe. Brilliant. We plan to make many, many more. We’ll change the design, though. That one’s just a first stab, really. We’ll strike plenty for the celebration. They’ll commemorate the creation of the most important enterprise this nation has ever seen, Black Feather Consolidated. As for your report, I admire the enthusiasm you’ve brought to your investigation, and I understand you must report everything, as you see fit. Thank you for your service to the community. Incidentally, I’ve spoken with my associate at the railroad, Walker Gray. You remember him. He is in complete agreement with me. We value and esteem your efforts.”