On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  Old Red helped her to her feet, then backed away quickly.

  “Best fetch the conductor,” he said to no one in particular. “We got a body on the tracks.”

  He hustled past me out the door—which was probably wise given the murderous glares being directed his way by our fellow passengers.

  “I hope you won’t mind my asking, Mr. Holmes—,” someone said, and I spotted Miss Caveo crawling out from under a mortified porter, “but is your brother entirely sane?”

  “Miss, if he’s nuts, then it’s contagious—cuz I saw that body, too.” And I hurried off after Old Red.

  He was already marching down the tracks, having opened a side gate in the railing and dropped to the ground. By the time I caught up to him, we were halfway to the body.

  It was full-on dusk now, and the shadows around us seemed to grow longer with each step we took, swallowing up the smears of blood splattered on the rails and ties and sand. Dr. Watson himself had written of this place once, in A Study in Scarlet, and I couldn’t take issue with his description of “the Great Alkali Plain”: It was “an arid and repulsive desert,” a “region of desolation and silence.” Indeed, there wasn’t a sound to be heard beyond that of our own footfalls, and I could easily have believed we were the only living creatures within a hundred miles.

  There was certainly no life left in the man we soon came upon.

  “Looks like he was a short feller, even with a head on his shoulders,” Old Red said as we stopped by the body. “Powerful, though. Them muscles practically pop out of his shirt. And that’s denim he’s wearin’. He was a workin’ man … but not a cowpoke or a farmer. Got store-bought lace-ups on his feet, not boots. Scuffed, but not muddy.”

  We’d practically sprinted to the corpse, but my brother seemed in no way winded as he rattled off his deductions. It was as if the chance to detectify was some kind of miracle cure—Holmes’s Genuine All-Natural Anti-Collywobble Elixir—and to look at my brother you’d never have guessed this was a man with puke still on his breath.

  He turned and gazed off to the east. The sky there was a purple-black wall, featureless save for a few dim pinpricks—the first stars of a nightfall rushing to overtake us.

  The head was nowhere in sight.

  When my brother turned around again, he locked eyes on something behind me.

  “Bring lanterns!” he called to a small party approaching us from the Pacific Express. “We got some huntin’ to do!”

  After a brief consultation, one of the men—even from a distance I could see it was a tallish porter, probably Samuel—ran back toward the train. His three companions continued toward us. As they drew closer, I could make out who they were: the conductor, the engineer, and Burl Lockhart.

  “Any of your bunch makes a move for the train, you’ll have holes in your heads quick as lightnin’!” Lockhart shouted, bringing up his .44 and thumbing back the hammer.

  “Ain’t no ‘bunch’ here, Mr. Custos!” I yelled back. “Just two fellers with heads and one without—and not a one of us is packin’ iron!”

  The conductor was a big man who pumped his arms fast as he walked, and he looked for all the world like a locomotive chugging down the tracks, indifferent to what or who might be run over.

  “Which one of you pulled the bell cord?” he barked at us.

  “That’d be me,” Gustav answered coolly. “Saw a body”—he nodded at the corpse—“this body—by the tracks. Saw the head, too. Came out from under the train and went bouncin’ Lord knows where.”

  “Oh,” Lockhart mumbled, chagrined, as he and his companions came to a stop a few yards away. He lowered his gun. “It’s you.”

  In addition to possessing the world’s worst false mustache, the old Pinkerton apparently had him some pretty crappy eyes, too.

  “You know these men, Lockhart?” the conductor asked.

  Old Red and I exchanged a quick glance: So Lockhart wasn’t “incognito” anymore.

  “Couple of drovers,” Lockhart said. “Wanna be lawmen.”

  “What we are,” Gustav said, addressing himself to the conductor as he fished out his badge, “is agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police.”

  My brother clearly imagined this revelation would buy him some respect. What he got instead was a roll of the eyes.

  “Crowe’s Folly blesses us again,” the conductor groaned. “I wondered how trail trash like you could afford the Pacific Express.”

  The engineer was equally unimpressed. “Shit,” he said, and he leaned over and spat in the dirt just as Samuel came hurrying up with two lit lanterns.

  “Pussyfooters,” the conductor explained, jerking his head at us.

  “Well, well” was all Samuel said. Whatever his opinion of railroad police, he was keeping it to himself.

  Gustav took one of the lanterns, and I helped him eyeball the scrub and sand on the north side of the tracks while Lockhart, Samuel, and the conductor moved down the south side. The engineer stayed rooted in place on the roadbed, muttering bitterly as the rest of us walked away slowly, heads down.

  “Didn’t see a thing from the cab. Must’ve been lying on the tracks. If he was alive when we hit him, well”—the engineer spat again, having to lean quite a ways forward to get the tobacco juice beyond the round curve of his boulderlike belly—“screw him. Man wants to die, he oughta just throw himself off a cliff and spare other folks a lot of bother. Could have been a hobo riding the blinds or the rods, I suppose. Slipped, fell. If so”—once again he spat—“serves the dumb bastard right.”

  All this callous grousing within literal spitting distance of a man’s carcass got under my skin, and I was about to turn around and question just who the dumb bastard was around here when Gustav pointed at a low patch of brush to our left.

  “There.”

  He lifted his lantern high, and the shadows around us shifted and shrank, revealing something round and moist up ahead.

  “We found him!” I called out.

  Samuel, Lockhart, and the conductor crossed the roadbed and joined us just as Old Red went down on his haunches and brought his lantern in close. The head was facedown in the sand, and all I could see of it was curly, black hair ripped away here and there to offer glimpses of glistening bone and brain. My brother stretched out his hand and rolled the head over, and we found ourselves looking into a young man’s face, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

  Which was exactly how I looked, for I’d seen this face before—and not just when it was bouncing from beneath the train. It belonged to the railroader I’d chatted with briefly back at Union Station, the one who’d told me to appreciate the magnificence of the Pacific Express before it was buried under dust and soot.

  “Christ Almighty!” Samuel gasped. “Joe!”

  “Joe?” Lockhart said.

  The conductor turned his back on the gruesome sight and hunched over, clutching his knees.

  “Pe-zul-lo,” he panted, obviously struggling to keep his last meal from joining Gustav’s in the sands of the Great Salt Desert. “Our baggageman.”

  The engineer finally unstuck himself and took a few uncertain steps toward us. “Wiltrout … did you just say that’s … ?” He stopped next to the body. “This is Joe Pezullo?”

  The conductor nodded weakly.

  “So he wasn’t lyin’ on the rails,” my brother said. “He was on the train.”

  The conductor—“Wiltrout,” apparently—nodded again. “Riding in the baggage car.”

  What little light there was dimmed by half—Old Red had spun around and started back toward the Express, taking his lantern with him. Lockhart and I lit out after him, leaving Wiltrout, Samuel, and the engineer to reunite their compadre’s head with his body.

  When we reached the tail end of the train, we had to zigzag our way through a throng: Twenty or thirty male passengers had come outside to gawk. They pelted us with questions as we passed—“What’s happening?” and “Is that really a body?” and “Are you robbing us?”—but we answered
only with shouts of “Make way!” and “Comin’ through!” There was no escaping the crowd, though, and a string of men trailed us like baby ducks waddling after their momma.

  “Get back inside, you damned idjits!” Lockhart shouted over his shoulder. But everybody seemed to assume the “damned idjits” referred to everyone else, and no one broke off the chase.

  When we finally reached the baggage car, we found the side door pushed all the way back, leaving an opening at least six feet across and seven feet high—more than enough space for a man to tumble through.

  “Now how’d the engineer miss that when he walked to the back of the train?” Lockhart asked.

  “Must’ve come down the other side,” I suggested. I turned toward Gustav, assuming he’d want to weigh in, but my brother had already moved on to other questions.

  “Kip,” he said, and only then did I realize our young news butcher was amongst the mob behind us. “You know Joe Pezullo? The baggageman?”

  “Sure. He’s a friend of mine.” Kip started to move closer to the baggage car—and froze midstep. “Oh, jeez. That’s Joe back there on the tracks, ain’t it?”

  Old Red stuck his lantern up into the car and moved it this way and that, its light playing over stacks of boxes, trunks, and bags—and a bottle sitting upright on the floor, uncorked and half-filled with amber liquid.

  “Pezullo a drinkin’ man?” my brother asked.

  “I … I don’t know,” the news butch stammered, his voice quiet and quivery.

  Gustav was staring at the bottle, Lockhart was using his .44 to menace shadows inside the car, and the passengers present simply stood around gawping like they were watching a sideshow geek tear into a chicken. Which left it to me to walk over and place a comforting hand on Kip’s slender shoulder. He looked into my eyes, his own glistening in the dim light of the lantern, and nodded silent thanks.

  “Hey!” a muffled voice cried out from somewhere nearby. “What’s going on out there?”

  “Now who in the hell is that?” Old Red asked, swinging his lantern around.

  Lockhart pointed at the next car up. “It’s comin’ from the express car. Must be the Wells Fargo man.”

  “I think his name’s Morrison,” Kip said with a hint of a sniffle.

  “Is there a door between the baggage car and the express car?” Gustav asked him.

  “No, they ain’t—,” the kid began.

  “Talk to me!” Morrison called to us again. “Who’s out there?”

  The panic in the fellow’s voice was plain to hear—and easy to understand, given how many express messengers have been blown straight through the pearly gates by bandito dynamite the past few years. Unfortunately, a card in the crowd decided it was time to lighten the mood, and he called out a reply before a straight-thinking man could.

  “It’s me—Jesse James, back from the dead! And I’m here with my pals the Give-’em-Hell Boys!”

  “Who said that?” Lockhart bellowed, turning on our audience and waving his gun. “So help me, I’ll blow the fool’s goddamn head off!”

  Not wishing to see mortal harm done to even so irritating an acquaintance as Chester Q. Horner—for it had been the drummer’s voice that had answered Morrison—I started to move between Lockhart and the crowd. But I’d barely taken two steps when there was a blast behind me, and my hat whipped off my head and sailed into the darkness. Within seconds, every man there had a face full of sand as we all went diving for cover.

  “Don’t come any closer!” Morrison hollered. “I’m armed!”

  “We know!” I shouted back. I was sprawled on my belly, and I peeked up to see where the gunfire had come from.

  There were two barred openings, too small to be called windows, beside the express car’s side door. Pointing out of one was the barrel of a rifle.

  “Don’t shoot, Morrison!” Lockhart shouted. “We ain’t outlaws! That was just some asshole’s idea of a joke!”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “It’s me, Mr. Morrison! Kip Hickey!” the kid called out. “Trust me! We ain’t bein’ robbed!”

  “They might have a gun to your head! They might be making you say that!”

  “But they’re not!” Kip yelled back.

  “But they might be!”

  “But they’re not!”

  “But they might be!”

  As the debate raged on, I peeked around to see what had become of my brother. He’d found the safest spot of all: underneath the train, directly below the baggage car door. He still had the lantern with him, and its light created eerie, oily shadows amongst the bars and boards beneath the Pacific Express.

  A long, lumpy silhouette stood out from all the rest. It was stretched out on some of the rods under the car, behind Old Red. I blinked my eyes, hoping they’d come to their senses, but they insisted on seeing what they saw: the outline of a man.

  “Holy shit, Gustav … I think there’s another body stuck up under there.”

  But I was wrong. It wasn’t a corpse. It was a living, breathing man, and he dropped down onto the tracks before my brother could turn around.

  Nine

  EL NUMERO UNO

  Or, A Crowned Sovereign Lands in a Royal Mess

  There was a thud, and Gustav came flying out from under the train. His lantern spun from his grip, throwing wild flashes of light into the night before cracking Lockhart full on in the face. It was only by a miracle the lamp didn’t bust open and cover the Pinkerton in burning oil, lighting up his head like the tip of a six-foot match.

  “Ow!” howled Lockhart.

  “What was that?” yelled Morrison.

  “Somebody kicked me,” grumbled Old Red.

  “There’s a man under the train!” hollered I.

  Bang! said Morrison’s rifle.

  “Eyaaah!” screamed just about everybody else.

  The only person who didn’t have anything to say was whoever’d put the boot to my brother. With the lantern doused, all I could see of him was a hunched, shuffling shape, but it was clear where that shape was headed—over to the other side of the train. Once he got out from beneath the car, he’d have no trouble losing himself in the desert’s black expanse.

  “There he goes!” I shouted. “Stop him!”

  Nobody near me was in any position to give chase, however, as a fellow’s hardly at his speediest when he’s flat on his stomach with his hands over his head. So Lockhart opted to do his chasing with a bullet, raising his .44 and pointing it at the underside of the car—and more or less at me.

  Not only was I uncomfortably close to the line of fire, I wouldn’t have trusted the old Pinkerton’s aim at high noon, let alone in the dark of night. And even if he did manage to miss me, there was plenty of metal nearby—wheels, rails, rods—that could easily ricochet his shot through the wrong skull.

  “Uhhh, Mr. Lockhart—,” I began.

  But there was no time for talk. Gustav was closer to him, and he simply reached out and twisted the gun from the man’s grip.

  Lockhart gaped at him a moment before his shock gave way to fury.

  “You stupid son of a—”

  He was interrupted by an oof and a heavy thump from the other side of the train.

  “Hey!” I called into the blackness. “Is somebody over there? Did you catch him?”

  “I got him,” a deep voice replied. “What’s goin’ on over there?”

  “The express messenger’s takin’ potshots at us!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Morrison! It’s Bedford! The fireman! Get your finger off the trigger ’fore you hurt somebody!”

  “But we’re being robbed!” Morrison yelled back. “Aren’t we?”

  “This ain’t no robbery! A circus is what it is! Now just get ahold of yourself, would you?”

  “Well … alright,” Morrison said weakly. “But I’m still not opening the door.”

  The rifle slowly slid back into its slot and disappeared.

  As the men scattered around outside beg
an pushing themselves to their feet, an unexpected sound arose with them: laughter. The passengers were just gray outlines there in the gloom, but I’d seen them well enough on the train. They were tradesmen and merchants, comfortable men headed home to comfortable lives. No wonder they were chuckling and chattering like it was intermission at a Wild West show. This was a show to them. They hadn’t seen enough death to know better.

  I suppose a gunfight would’ve been the perfect capper to the evening as far as they were concerned, and Burl Lockhart seemed ready to oblige. He snatched his gun back from my brother as the both of them stood up.

  “Don’t you ever get in my way again.”

  He stepped even closer to Gustav, literally going toe-to-toe with him. The blow he’d taken from the lantern had knocked his mustache so askew, one end was practically poking him in the eye, yet there was nothing even remotely funny about it—not if you could see the bitter scowl on his bony face.

  “Fine,” Old Red said. “Next time you wanna do a damn fool thing, I’ll just stand aside and let you.”

  “Why, you cocky little—”

  “Say, fellers,” I said, somehow managing to squeeze my not insubstantial bulk between them, “let’s go see who that was under the train, huh?”

  I turned to drag Gustav away, but there was no need. A party with another lantern was rounding the locomotive, and both Lockhart and Old Red hurried toward the light, moving side by side like a couple thoroughbreds in a dead heat.

  It was Wiltrout, the conductor, with the lantern. Behind him was the engineer and a muscle-bound Negro in soot-stained overalls—the train’s fireman, by the look of him. But it wasn’t a coal shovel the Negro was hefting now. He was dragging along a heavily bearded fellow in clothes so tattered it looked like he’d dressed himself in old mops. The tramp tried to dig in his heels, yet that didn’t slow the Negro one jot, and the man’s flap-soled shoes merely plowed up twin furrows in the sand.