On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Alright. Let’s see …”

  My brother furrowed his brow and rubbed a hand over his mustache, looking less like a prisoner facing a firing squad than a man in a general store who can’t remember what brand of talcum the little woman told him to buy. Even with the Grim Reaper set to take a swipe at us, he couldn’t resist an opportunity to deducify.

  “That business with your passkey bein’ stolen,” he said. “That was bullshit. A distraction. Something to get us settin’ our sights on the passengers instead of the crew.”

  Kip nodded and gave the Colt another twirl.

  “Later, when the Give-’em-Hell Boys took you ‘hostage,’ that was your chance to tell ’em where Lockhart and me and my brother was,” Gustav went on. “And you told ’em about Pezullo and the crate, too. So that’s when the plan got switched around.”

  The kid nodded again, his gaze locked on my brother. I searched for the nerve to make a run at him—and found I didn’t have it. It would have taken five or six strides to reach him, while his finger needed to move less than an inch to put a bullet in my belly.

  Old Red went on theorizing.

  “Chan you had to get rid of cuz he was so fixed on checkin’ his old Chinese thingamabobs. If he saw someone had monkeyed with the coffins, it’d cause trouble. So you … lured him back here somehow?”

  My brother sent a hand smacking into his own forehead. “Oh, hell! I would’ve seen it if this damn train hadn’t been rattlin’ my brain. Your berth’s right above Wiltrout’s! When Chan came back and said, ‘Please,’ he was talkin’ to you!”

  Kip’s smirk broadened into a sneering grin. He was actually enjoying himself, entranced by the chance to hear his own crimes repeated back to him, spun out like a tale from a detective magazine.

  “He asked me to come up to the vestibule for a private chat,” he explained. “Offered me ten bucks to let him into the baggage car. I can’t believe he offered Wiltrout twenty! Guess he figured he could get a news butch for half price. If I’d said no, he probably would’ve offered Samuel five.”

  He waggled his eyebrows and chuckled at his own joke like we were customers he could still jolly into buying a bag of lemon drops.

  “You were right about what happened once we were in here—I pasted him with the whiskey bottle. It didn’t outright kill him, but then again it didn’t have to. I was able to roll him out over a trestle in the middle of nowhere. He’s food for river fish now.”

  The kid laughed. “It’s funny, ain’t it? The Chink brings along a coffin with no body, and now he’s a body with no coffin!”

  He was so tickled by his own cleverness—not just with joke-telling, but killing—I think he actually believed we’d laugh, too. And I almost couldn’t blame him, the way my brother had been chitchatting with him, the two of them nattering away like old women comparing recipes for rhubarb pie.

  For Gustav, it had been a matter of nailing down the how of it all. But it was an entirely different question that was eating at me.

  “Christ, Kip,” I said, “why? All this death … for what? Do you hate the railroad that much? Or are you just in it for the money?”

  “You’re askin’ me why?” Instead of wilting, the grin on Kip’s narrow face grew even wider. “I would’ve thought you two would understand more than anybody. I’m livin’ what I used to just read about. I mean, I come from a little town so boring it’s big news if the damn sun comes up in the morning! And now here I am, part of something big, something wild. And I am havin’ the time of my life!”

  The train jostled and took on a markedly steeper pitch—so much so that I feared the door would slide open on its own. My brother and I stumbled into each other, and even when I managed to get my feet planted, Gustav kept leaning into me, his knees wobbling.

  “When the Give-’em-Hell Boys robbed the Express back in May, I wasn’t scared. I was thrilled!” the kid went on, too wrapped up in his tale—A Kip Hickey Adventure—to let our stumblings slow him down. His skinny arm must have been growing as tired as Old Red’s legs, for he propped his elbows on his knees and took to gripping the gun in both hands. “I slipped outside when they were leavin’—nearly got myself shot! And I got down on my knees and I begged Augie and Mike to take me with ’em. But they were smart. They came up with a plan. And now, I’m a bona fide Give-’em-Hell Boy!”

  “And killer,” I said.

  “Hey, I don’t give two shits about the Chinaman, but I wasn’t happy about doin’ in Joe. And when I set that snake on you two, I actually felt pretty guilty … for a couple minutes. Then I was just pissed it didn’t work.” His shoulders twitched ever so slightly—a wee little shrug from arms that were growing weary under the weight of four pounds of shooting iron. “Oh, well. Better late than never.”

  The Colt’s barrel had begun to sag, but now the kid brought it up again and pointed it at me.

  “You can’t get rid of us that easy, Kip,” Old Red said, straightening up and taking a step to his left—putting himself between me and the gun. “We’re bein’ watched. You come outta here without us, it’s gonna be seen.”

  Kip snorted. “Oh, I already know about her. Saw her whisperin’ with Jefferson Powless when you two got sent off to pick daisies or whatever.”

  “‘Her’?” I asked.

  “Miss Caveo,” Gustav said.

  “Cutest damn spotter I ever spotted!” Kip crowed. “Makes sense, I guess. A sweetie like that … men drop their guard, go all tenderhearted.” He leered at me. “And softheaded. Yeah, I reckon she’ll come in right handy when the time comes.”

  I almost made a run at the little rat right then and there. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  Kip sighed and rolled his eyes. “Shit—what do you expect me to do? Talk you through the whole damn thing? Maybe playact all the different parts for you?”

  “Why not?” Old Red asked, sounding like this was a perfectly reasonable request to make of a fellow who should’ve shot you five minutes before.

  Light flickered behind Kip, off to his right, and I glanced at it just as the news butch was distracted by something to our left.

  There was light in the car’s little windows again. We were out of the snowshed.

  “I’m sorry, boys,” Kip said, and I heard a genuine regret in his voice that told me with a cold certainty that our extra five minutes were over. “I ain’t got time for more talk. And neither do—”

  I twisted to my left and threw the side door open, creating a wall of blinding-bright light behind us. Kip squeezed his eyes shut and looked away just long enough for me to grab Gustav’s coat and drag him with me as I leapt from the train.

  I heard the sharp crack of a gunshot, but I was too discombobulated to fret about whether Old Red or I might be hit. A blur of brown and gray and green—otherwise known as the ground—was rushing at me at God knows what speed.

  Who had time to worry about bullets? The fall would probably kill us.

  Thirty-three

  DIE

  Or, Gustav and I Take a Tumble and Nearly Crap Out

  I fell just long enough to think, Lord, if you’re gonna kill me, could you do me a favor and make it quick? Then I hit—hard.

  My left side slammed into grass and gravel and clods of dirt. Then it was my right side smacking into the sod. Then my back. Then my left side came down again. And so on.

  I was tumbling like dice, and there was nothing I could do but ride the roll through. As I spun along, it was my head I worried about, mostly: While I might have brains to spare compared to some folks, I don’t have so much that I could leave half dashed out against a rock without it slowing me down a mite.

  Fortunately, when I finally came to a stop, my brains (as well as my bones and other vital innards) remained where I prefer them—inside my body. I was lying on my side on a gently sloping embankment, my face pointed at the tracks winding down the mountain. For all of two seconds, I could see the Pacific Express hurtling away. Then it dipped out of sight, and soon even the sou
nd of it was gone.

  “Otto? Otto!”

  “Hey, Brother,” I croaked. “You alright?”

  “Nope … but I’m breathin’.”

  I gave myself one more roll, wincing as pebbles and turf mashed into my tenderized flesh. Gustav was stretched out about twenty yards away, his head pointed down the slope, his boots toward the tracks.

  “How you doin’?” he asked.

  “Remarkably well for a dead man. I am dead, ain’t I?”

  Old Red grunted. “You’re alive.”

  “Oh … that’s a relief.”

  I heaved out a big sigh—and quickly resolved not to do it again anytime soon. My ribs were so sore I would’ve avoided breathing altogether if I could’ve gotten away with it. The thing to do was just lie there till I felt well enough to get up. A week or two would probably suffice.

  But then suddenly I was sitting bolt upright, and as much as the movement pained me, it was blotted out by an entirely different kind of hurt.

  “Diana!”

  “I know, Otto.”

  “That crazy kid … Sweet Jesus, who knows what he’ll do?”

  “I know, Otto.”

  “And here we are stranded in the middle of nowhere!”

  “Otto!” My brother was still lying flat, but he craned his head up so I could see into his eyes. “I … know.”

  He wasn’t just telling me to stop my squawking. He was making me a promise: We ain’t gonna take this lying down.

  And to show he meant it, he started to hoist himself off his back. By the time he took his first step up the slope, I was heading up, too, having somehow convinced my body that it was capable of the climb no matter what those whiny, goldbricking legs might be saying about turned ankles and busted kneecaps and such.

  Old Red and I joined up at the top of the hill and made a survey of our surroundings. What we saw was a whole lot of big, beautiful nothing. On the other side of the tracks was a short stretch of plateau ending in a drop-off so sudden you could go from walking on rock to plummeting through cloud with a single step. Beyond that was emptiness and, in the distance, pine-studded peaks identical to the one we were stranded on. In between must have been a mighty deep gorge, but we weren’t close enough to the edge to see it.

  Up the tracks, back toward Summit, were craggy bluffs and trees. Down the tracks, toward the Sacramento Valley, were more craggy bluffs and more trees—and, snaking through them somewhere, the Pacific Express.

  “We got two choices,” Gustav said. “Climb up to Summit, send a telegraph ahead of the Express, and hope we ain’t too late. Or make our way down to God knows where and do God knows what.”

  I turned to get another look up the mountainside. The incline was so steep the tracks almost looked like a ladder into the sky. The way the train had come charging down from Summit, we must have covered at least twenty miles by the time Old Red and I made our unofficial whistle-stop. I tried calculating how long it would take my aching legs to get the rest of me back up to town, but gave up when the answer pushed over from hours into days.

  “No,” I said. “We ain’t got no choice at all.”

  And down we went.

  We stuck close to the tracks so as to be within easy hailing range of any other trains that might pass by. But the only things we had the opportunity to hail were rocks, pine trees, and the occasional slow-circling hawk. Other than that, it was just us.

  “I can’t stop thinkin’ about Miss Caveo,” I said as I limped along like a ranch hand fresh-tossed from a bronco’s back.

  “Me, too,” Old Red replied. But it wasn’t concern I saw on his face so much as confusion.

  “You’re just tryin’ to figure how you missed it for so long,” I said, the words coming out with more edge than I’d intended. “Her bein’ on the S.P. payroll like us.”

  “It’s … disappointin’, I don’t deny it. I had a hunch she was an S.P. agent after Summit, but I should’ve put it together sooner.” Gustav turned his face toward me, and looking into his eyes straight on I could see a weight dragging on him I hadn’t noticed before. “But don’t think it’s just wounded pride that’s on my mind. I’m worried for her, same as you. Only consolation is the lady’s got smarts and backbone both.”

  “I’d feel better if it was a gun she had.”

  “Yeah. But don’t forget how she hauled your ass outta the fire back in Carlin. That wasn’t gunplay—just quick thinkin’.”

  “I guess she was tippin’ her hand a tad there, wasn’t she?” A little smile almost flickered to life on my face, but I snuffed it out fast. There’d be no smiling till I knew Miss Caveo was safe. “So what other clues were there?”

  Old Red looked away and shook his head, clearly wondering how his brother Helen Keller could fail to see so many clues. But he managed to swallow his usual vinegar and just spit out the facts.

  “When we saw her watchin’ Horner and Mrs. Kier playin’ rummy in the observation car, you noticed the old lady stackin’ the deck, right? Dealin’ seconds and all that cardsharp stuff?”

  Actually, I hadn’t, but I was in no mood to admit it.

  “It was plain as day,” I said.

  “Well, once the ‘points’ started turnin’ into big dollars, Miss Caveo stepped in with a wink and a grin and whisked that chucklehead Horner away. When we came bargin’ in, I’m sure she was tellin’ him, ‘Mister, you’re gettin’ yourself rooked.’”

  I felt that little tickle of a grin again, though my expression remained grim. It was gratifying to learn that Miss Caveo and Horner’s powwowing had been business, not pleasure, but now was hardly the time to jump up and click my heels.

  “Then not ten minutes later we pull into Summit,” Old Red went on, “and there’s Jeff Powless at the station—and the lady bolts on us. Obviously, the man knew her, and she didn’t want him lettin’ it slip. She’d been keepin’ an eye on us, I’ll wager, and she was supposed to keep at it a bit longer.”

  “Keepin’ an eye on us?”

  “Sure. We’re new fellers, hired out of the blue. First train we step on gets stuck up? Of course, the S.P.’s gonna be suspicious. Back in Carlin, Miss Caveo said she was sending a wire to her family, remember? I reckon that message went to Crowe and Powless. They probably told her to ride herd on us, quietlike. Only, I figure Miss Caveo don’t think we’re crooked herself. When we left Summit, Powless seemed to almost trust us, and Wiltrout griped about our ‘friends in high places.’”

  “Yeah, I see it now. Miss Caveo must’ve talked to Powless after we got shuffled off on that fool’s errand. She put in a good word for us.”

  Gustav nodded. “There was other clues, too. Colonel Crowe made the arrangements for Lockhart and Chan’s berths as well as ours, and she was right in between us … in the perfect spot to keep tabs on all of us. And then there’s that S.P. manual you—”

  My brother staggered to a stop like he had brakes and someone had just yanked the bell cord.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at a large, blocky, gray rock at the bottom of a butte about a quarter mile down the track.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Old Red sighed. “Look, dammit. You know—with your eyes?”

  I looked again—and realized that the boulder wasn’t just blocky but perfectly square. And it wasn’t the steel gray of stone but the drab, dusty gray of sun-bleached boards.

  It was, in other words, not a boulder at all. It was a shack.

  “Come on!” I shouted, and off I went, pounding down the hillside despite my knees’ pleas for mercy.

  It didn’t take long for the clomping footfalls behind me to fade away, and I knew I’d pulled ahead of my brother a good distance. I didn’t slow down or look back, though. Something told me that shack was our only hope, and I had to know now if it offered deliverance or our final defeat.

  “Hey! Hey, anyone there?” I hollered. “We got us an emergency! Hey!”

  But no one answered, and as I came huffing and puffing up to the shack, it was easy to se
e why: There was a bolt and padlock on the door. No one was there.

  I gave the door such a kick the thin, rotted-out wood splintered around my foot.

  “Goddamn it!”

  “Tool shed … for linemen … I reckon,” Gustav panted as he hop-skipped his last few steps down the hill.

  I gave the door another taste of boot leather.

  “Goddamn!”

  The Lord rewarded my blasphemy by steering my toe to a stronger board in the door, and this time the wood held firm while it was my foot that seemed to shatter.

  “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch piece-of-shit bastard!”

  “Yeah,” Gustav said, “that just about sums it up.” And he spat out a curse of his own and started around toward the back of the shack.

  “We should finish bustin’ through that door,” I said as I hobbled after him.

  “A w w w , you’re just mad at it.”

  “No. There might be something in that shed that could help us.”

  “Like what? A spare train?”

  For the second time within the span of five minutes, Old Red slammed to a halt as sudden as the one you’d get walking smack into the side of a barn. Only this time I was hustling along behind him, so I walked smack into him. After some stumbling and (on my part) grumbling, I noticed what had my brother so frozen up—only it had the opposite effect on me.

  “Well, would you look at that?” I cried, whooping and jumping straight up in the air. “A spare train!”

  Thirty-four

  THE AMLINGMEYER EXPRESS

  Or, Things Truly Start to Go Downhill Fast

  Of course, there was no mighty locomotive awaiting us amidst the scrubby knots of grass and loose shale behind the shack. What we actually found looked more like a stable door on wheels with a couple bent-up shovels stuck on top.

  A handcar, the railroad men call it. To judge by the rust on the wheels, gears, and arms, this one hadn’t seen service since around the time Noah started loading his ark.

  I hurried over and got a grip underneath it, and after some grunting and sweating, I managed to heft the wheels on one side a good half foot off the ground. The thing was heavy, but not immovable.