On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  Gustav and I dashed up the aisle, pushing our way past dazed passengers with Miss Caveo and Lockhart and Chan on our heels. The door at the end of the vestibule was still locked, but Samuel appeared from the men’s washroom and produced his passkey, and soon we were rushing into the baggage compartment.

  We found the body flat on its back, lifeless eyes staring up at the gunsmoke that roiled above it like a sky full of dark clouds.

  Fourteen

  SUSIE CREEK

  Or, The Pacific Express Returns to the Scene of the Crime

  Chan rushed in and knelt down beside the body, but it was clear there was nothing any doctor on earth could do: The king was dead.

  El Numero Uno had two bullets in him—one in his gut, one in his heart. He was still tied to the chair, which had pitched over backward when the slugs struck.

  Chan stretched out his fingers and gently closed the hobo’s eyes.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Why’d they have to go and do a thing like that?”

  “You think those sons of bitches need a reason to kill?” Lockhart snapped.

  “They had ’em a reason,” Gustav said, his gaze sweeping over the floor, the walls, the luggage, everything. “We just don’t know it yet.”

  “Maybe he overheard something about the gang’s plans,” Miss Caveo suggested. “Or the location of their hideout.”

  I moved to block her view of the body. I’d come to admire her backbone, but that didn’t mean I was the kind of lout who’d let her get an eyeful of a murdered man.

  “I don’t think this is a fittin’ place for a lady just now.”

  “And I don’t think this is the time to worry about what’s ‘fitting,’” Miss Caveo replied.

  She had a point—which did nothing to change anyone’s mind.

  “Samuel,” my brother said, “could you help the passengers settle down in the Pullman.”

  “You, too. Out,” Lockhart said, pulling the Chinaman up by the arm. “Anything happens to you, it’ll be my hide.”

  Both Chan and Miss Caveo started to protest, but Samuel got to work quick, stretching out his long arms and steering them toward the door as skillfully as a top hand working a herd.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” the porter bellowed over their heads at the leering passengers crowded into the vestibule. “On behalf of the Southern Pacific Railroad, I would like to offer every one of you a complimentary restorative from the dinin’ car. I can take your orders as soon as you return to your berths. We have brandy, whiskey, beer, wine, port, sherry …”

  The gaggle of gawkers began drifting away, and with a minimum of shooing Samuel was able to clear off the last reluctant stragglers—a frustrated Chan and a fuming Miss Caveo—and get the door shut.

  When I turned around again, Lockhart was scooping something bulky up off the floor: my gunbelt. The side door was open wide, and the old Pinkerton strapped my holster around his nightshirt as he headed toward it.

  “Pardon me, Mr. Lockhart, but that’s my—”

  “Quiet!” Lockhart barked, not bothering to follow his own order. “Someone’s movin’ around out there!” He drew my Colt and pointed it out at the darkness, the barrel bobbing and weaving in his quivery grip.

  Old Red grabbed his own gunbelt and took up a position across from Lockhart.

  “There’s somebody there, alright,” he said, squinting out at what was, to my eyes, a wall of solid black.

  “Easy, fellers,” I said. “Best keep your trigger fingers loose till we know what’s become of Kip.”

  If anything, Lockhart’s finger curled tighter.

  “You don’t have to tell ol’ Burl Lockhart how to handle this kinda thing! I know what I’m doin’!”

  He thumbed back the hammer.

  “Give us a holler if you’re out there, Kip!” I yelled, stepping up beside Lockhart—the better to make a grab for my gun should it become necessary.

  My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark outside, and I could make out the lay of the land—mostly brush and rocky bluffs sweeping upward to distant mountains. Off to the left things swept downward, though, into a creekbed, and it was there that I caught sight of someone creeping closer to the train.

  “It’s me!” Kip called out. “I’m alright!”

  Lockhart sagged, weighed down by what seemed like disappointment. He’d been more anxious to see Barson and Welsh dead than our news butch alive.

  “Come on back to the train!” I shouted. “We’ll keep you covered!”

  As Kip made a dash for the baggage car, another voice called out, this one from the car ahead of us.

  “Don’t worry—they’re all gone! I held them off!”

  It was Morrison, the jumpy Wells Fargo messenger who’d nearly blown out our candles the last time the train had stopped.

  “Good work, Morrison!” a gruff voice replied from the opposite direction, down toward the Pullman cars. “It’s a relief to know that rifle of yours is good for something other than shooting the hats off passengers.”

  “Sounds like Wiltrout,” I said.

  “Where the hell has he been?” Lockhart grumbled.

  Kip and the conductor appeared at the side door from opposite directions, and a moment later the engineer and the fireman showed up, as well. Gustav, Lockhart, and I hopped down to the ground to join them.

  “Why’d we stop?” Wiltrout asked. “A barricade?”

  “That’s right,” said Bedford, the Negro fireman. “Not much of one, though—just a few boards propped up with rocks. Won’t take us long to clear off.”

  “Recognize where we are?” the engineer asked Wiltrout, nodding at the gully nearby. “Susie Creek. That’s right where they stopped you last time, ain’t it?” He leaned forward and spat out a viscous brown-black stream of tobacco juice. “It’s a wonder Barson and Welsh don’t just build a station here for you, Captain.”

  “Clear the tracks,” the conductor snapped back, his glare and voluminous chin whiskers giving him the appearance of a billy goat about to butt. “I want this train highballing to Carlin within ten minutes.”

  “Hold on,” Gustav said as the engineer and fireman walked away. They didn’t even slow down. “We got questions to chew over ’fore we go into town.”

  “Such as what, for instance?” Lockhart asked.

  Old Red described the crate we’d found with the loosened side panel—and the bloodied brick.

  “So what are you saying?” Wiltrout asked when he was done. “You think one of the robbers was loaded on the train in a box?”

  He couldn’t have looked less convinced if Gustav had told him there’d been a stowaway in the conductor’s own underpants.

  “I don’t see how else it makes sense,” my brother said. “That’s why Pezullo’s dead. He found one of the gang crated up.”

  “Look,” Lockhart cut in, using the word the way men do when they’re about to explain something they think shouldn’t need explaining. “Before they got on the train, Welsh and Barson had been on horseback. That was plain from the trail dust on ’em. Same goes for that grubby little prick who put a gun on the butch here. None of ’em came out of any crate.”

  Gustav nodded slowly, looking at Lockhart for the first time with something approaching respect. But he’d staked out a theory, and he wasn’t going to give it up so easy.

  He turned to Kip. “How many men did you see out there?”

  The kid had returned from the shadows tousled and tense, and I’d watched him struggle to smooth his features into a mask of cool, grim purpose such as the men around him wore. He hadn’t entirely succeeded, and Old Red’s question rekindled a flicker of panic in his eyes.

  “I … I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look. The one who took me off the train … he threw me down and told me to keep my eyes shut.” The news butch gave an apologetic—and humiliated—shrug. “So … that’s what I did.”

  “Them fellers weren’t foolin’ around, Kip,” I assured him. “You did right.”

  Both Lockhart an
d my brother looked like they begged to differ, but they had the decency not to do so out loud.

  “Here’s the thing,” Gustav pressed on. “If that stowaway found himself another hidin’ place after Pezullo opened his crate, who’s to say he’s not still aboard? And once we go on into town, it’ll be easy as pie for him to slip off and—”

  Wiltrout stopped my brother with a raised hand and an exasperated shake of the head. “Before I listen to anything more you have to say, I want to see this mystery box of yours.”

  “Fine.”

  Old Red hoisted himself back into the baggage car. He headed off into the piles of luggage looking steadier than he had in quite some time, the rubber in his legs hardened back into bone.

  “Here,” he said once we’d all followed him to the gloomy corner with the crate.

  The panel he and I had pulled out earlier was leaning so snug against the side of the box you couldn’t even tell we’d ever touched it. Gustav reached out for it.

  “The brick with the blood on it’s in—”

  Old Red sputtered into silence, a calliope running out of steam midtune. His fingers had come flying off the crate when he’d given it a tug. The front panel hadn’t budged.

  He tried again, grabbing the edge and pulling on it hard.

  Nothing happened. The crate was sealed up tight.

  Fifteen

  THE SCOUT

  Or, We Get off the Train Again—and Almost End Up Beneath It

  “Which are you, ‘Holmes’—a fraud or a fruitcake?” Lockhart asked my brother.

  Before Gustav could answer, the Pinkerton swiped a gnarled hand at him like he was swatting at a fly.

  “Aw, forget it. I don’t even give a shit.”

  The lanky old lawman whirled around so fast the bottom of his nightshirt flew up to an almost indecent height, and he trudged off muttering about “goddamned muddleheaded amateurs.”

  Wiltrout didn’t look any happier.

  “I’ve got an express to get to station and sixty-six passengers on the verge of hysteria—I don’t have time for this bullshit.” He grabbed Kip by the shoulder and spun him around roughly. “Gather up your gewgaws and come with me. Half price on everything till the last passenger’s asleep, understand?”

  “They must’ve sealed the box up again!” Old Red shouted as the conductor herded Kip away. “You can’t wait two minutes while we open it?”

  “For you, I wouldn’t wait another second,” Wiltrout said without looking back or slowing down. “I don’t know what you two are up to, but you’re through!”

  A door squeaked open and banged shut. Lockhart, Wiltrout, and Kip were gone.

  “We ain’t through,” Gustav growled.

  “Really? That looked kinda ‘through’ to me,” I said. “I mean, Jesus, Brother—they didn’t even believe us.”

  “We’ll make ’em believe.”

  Old Red turned and glared hatefully at the crate as if he expected it to apologize. After looking it up and down a moment, he rolled his eyes and moaned like a constipated mule.

  “Ohhhh, for Christ’s sake! Would you look at that?”

  I peered at the box and saw … a box.

  “I don’t see nothin’.”

  “Exactly,” Gustav said. “It’s kinda like that ‘dog in the nighttime’ from the ‘Silver Blaze’ case. Sometimes it ain’t what’s there. It’s what ain’t there.”

  Only then did I see the same nothing Old Red saw.

  The writing on the crate—THIS END UP—was gone. The scratches along the edges, too.

  “Surely, that ain’t a new box,” I said.

  “Surely.”

  Old Red pointed down. There were scratches aplenty on the floor—among them an arc of deep, fresh gouges that hadn’t been there an hour before.

  Someone had simply swiveled the crate around so the front panel faced the wall.

  “Here we go again,” I sighed.

  Gustav stepped back and drew his Peacemaker. “Alright in there! We got guns and they’re pointed right at you! Don’t try anything stupid, now!”

  He gave me a nod, and I grabbed the box and slowly spun it around. The panel we’d loosened earlier had been reattached, but the job had been done with such sloppy haste I didn’t even need the crowbar to pry it off this time.

  Once again, the only stowaways we found were of the baked-red-clay variety. But something was different this time: The brick with the blood on it was gone.

  “So,” I said, “the Give-’em-Hell Boys stopped the train so they could sneak back here, spin around a box, and borrow a brick?”

  Old Red did a spin of his own, whirling on his heel and darting off.

  “Somebody’s been coverin’ his tracks,” he said, his voice fading fast as he wound his way through the baggage. “That brick was the only proof we had that Pezullo was murdered.”

  “Well, there ain’t nothin’ we can do about it now,” I said as I ambled after him. “It’d be mighty easy to just toss that brick out into the desert, and we don’t have time to—”

  I heard a dull thud from up ahead.

  “Gustav?”

  There was no answer.

  I spurred myself to a sprint. When I reached the front of the compartment, I was alone (if standing over a dead hobo tied to a chair can be said to be “alone”). My brother was gone.

  “Gustav?”

  “Out here!”

  I moved to the side door and spotted a dark shape scurrying around low to the ground about fifty feet from the train. It was either the world’s biggest coyote or Old Red zigzagging through the darkness bent over at the waist.

  “What do you think you’re doin’? The train’s gonna leave any second!” My nose was still tender and swollen from the pasting it had taken earlier, and with each hollered word I could feel it pumping up bigger, like the rubber wheel on a velocipede. Yet I couldn’t resist adding, “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

  “Gotta do a scout while I can,” Old Red answered, staring straight down. “Might come across that brick or some other—”

  He’d been making quick, jagged turns every few steps, but suddenly he came to a dead stop and picked something off a clump of sagebrush.

  “Hel-lo!”

  “It’s gonna be ‘good-bye’ if you don’t get your ass over here!”

  “He’s right—you need to get back aboard fast!” added Morrison, the Wells Fargo man. Apparently, he’d been watching my brother’s weaving, lurching search from his perch inside the express car. “Once we’re moving this time, the engineer won’t even stop for the bell cord!”

  “Listen to the man, Brother! Come on!”

  “Oh, hold your water,” Gustav said. “I still gotta check that creekbed yonder for—”

  The rest of his words were swallowed by a tremendous, chuffing grunt from the engine. The train heaved forward—and I spilled outward, tumbling through the door into the desert.

  There are worse ways to break a fall than landing in sand. Unfortunately, one of them is landing on an engorged, blood-clotted nose. Which is exactly what I did.

  I let out a screech that made the blast of the engine whistle seem as soothing as the cooing of a dove. And when my watering eyes regained their focus, I had even more to howl about: the huge steel wheels rolling past just inches from my face. I spun away and staggered to my feet, ignoring as best I could the pain exploding in my brain like fireworks. I had a train to catch.

  It took me just a dozen wobbly strides to draw even with the baggage car. But “even” and “inside” are two very different things. The side door was a good three feet off the ground, and it was moving faster by the second while I was already slowing down.

  I had to jump for it—quick. So I did.

  I landed half-in, half-off the train. If I fell now, I’d be ground into two hundred pounds of chuck before I could so much as scream. I flailed about desperately for purchase, and my fingers caught hold of something moist but firm. I pulled hard.

  When I fina
lly managed to clamber up into the car, I found myself eyeball to vacant, staring eyeball with El Numero Uno: I’d hauled myself inside by grabbing hold of the rough, bloody fabric of his coat.

  “Ooooottoooo!”

  I whirled around and spotted a pair of hands clamped to the lowest edge of the door—Gustav was being towed beside the train, his feet dragging so close to the wheels they could be plucked off clean any second. I bent out as far as I dared, took hold of his wrists, and pulled with all I had.

  Fortunately, I’ve had plenty, and I was able to swing my brother up and in like I was tossing a bale of hay. He landed a few feet away, rolling to a stop against the coffins.

  “You alright?” I asked him.

  He sat up and panted a few words I couldn’t make out, so I pushed the side door closed, muffling the clacking of the train and the howling of the wind. “Come again?”

  “I said ‘dandy.’ And ‘thanks.’”

  “My pleasure … though not really. You just about gave me a coronary.”

  Old Red nodded, chagrined. “I just about gave myself one.”

  I started looking for something to cover up El Numero Uno. It didn’t seem right, us chatting away with his glassy eyes on us.

  “Well, I sure hope it was worth it,” I said as I shrouded the King of the Hoboes under a newspaper I found in Pezullo’s desk.

  “Oh, it was worth it, alright. If I hadn’t gone out there, I wouldn’t have found this.”

  Gustav stuffed a hand into one of his pockets and tugged out what seemed to be a tiny porcelain bowl. It looked more like a dainty teacup than anything you’d dump a ladleful of oatmeal into, only it had no handle. What it did have, I noticed after reaching down to take it, was a ring of dense indigo patterns, almost like checkerboard, running along the inner lip. A thin branch with delicate leaves was painted on the side.

  “Pretty,” I said, handing the bowl back to my brother. “And pretty peculiar.”

  “Oh, you ain’t even seen peculiar yet.”

  Old Red reached into another pocket and produced what looked like a small patch of sheepskin, the wool still attached. It was golden yellow, though—far brighter than any fleece I’d ever seen.