The Wrecker Read online

  “How long would a freight train take to get from the cutoff railhead to here?”

  “Eight to ten hours.”

  “The empty freight that just came through. Did it leave the railhead after the runaway?”

  Barrett looked at his pocket watch. “No, sir. He must have been well out of there.”

  “So any train that left after the attack is still between us and them.”

  “Nowhere else for him to go. It’s single track all the way.”

  “Then he’s trapped!”

  The Wrecker had made a fatal mistake. He had boxed himself in at the end of a single-tracked line through rugged country with only one line out. All Bell had to do was intercept him. But he had to take him by surprise, ambush him, before he could jump off his train and run off into the woods.

  “Get your train moving. We’ll block him.”

  “Can’t move. We’re sidelined. We could run head-on into a southbound freight.”

  Bell pointed at the telegraph key. “Find out how many trains are between us and the railhead.”

  Barrett sat at his key and began sending slowly. “My hand’s a little muddy,” he apologized. “It’s been a while since I did this for a living.”

  Bell paced the confines of the baggage car while the key clattered out Morse code. The bulk of the open space was around the telegraph desk. Beyond was a narrow aisle between stacked trunks and boxes of provisions, cut short by Lillian’s Packard Gray Wolf, which was tied down under canvas. She had shown the car to Bell the previous night, proudly reminding him of what a man like him who loved speed already knew: the splendid racer kept setting new records at Daytona Beach.

  Barrett looked up from his key warily. The cold resolve on Bell’s face was as harsh as the icebound light in his blue eyes. “Sir, the dispatcher at Weed says he knows of one freight highballing down the line. Left the railhead after the accident.”

  “What does he mean ‘knows of’? Are there more trains on the road?”

  “Wires to the north were down in a couple of places through the night. The dispatcher can’t know for sure what moved there while the wires were out. We’ve got no protection, no way of knowing what’s coming from the north, until the wires are fixed. So we have no authority to be on the main line.”

  Of course, Bell raged inwardly. Each time the empty freight had stopped for water, the Wrecker had climbed the nearest pole and cut the telegraph wires, throwing the entire system into disarray to smooth his escape.

  “Mr. Bell, I’d like to help you, but I can’t put the lives of men in danger because I don’t know what’s coming around the next bend in the road.”

  Isaac Bell thought quickly. The Wrecker would see the smoke from the special’s locomotive miles before he would see the train itself. Even if Bell stopped their train to block the main line, the Wrecker would smell a rat when his train stopped. Plenty of time to jump off. The terrain was gentler here south of the Cascade Range, less mountainous than up the line, and a man could disappear in the woods and hike his way out.

  “How soon will that freight come through?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  Bell leveled an imperious hand at Lillian’s automobile.

  “Unload that.”

  “But Miss Lillian—”

  “Now!”

  The train crew slid open the barn doors in the side of the baggage car, laid a ramp, and rolled the Packard down it and onto the buggy road beside the track. It was a tiny machine compared to Bell’s Locomobile. Standing lightly on wide-spread airy wire wheels, the open car scarcely came up to his waist. A snug gray sheet-metal cowling over its motor formed a pointed snout. Behind the cowling was a steering wheel and a leather-backed bench seat, and little else. The cockpit was open. Below it, on either side of the chassis, bright copper tubes, arranged in seven horizontal rows, served as a radiator to cool the powerful four-cylinder motor.

  “Strap a couple of gasoline cans on the back,” Bell ordered, “and that spare wheel.”

  They quickly complied while Bell ran to his stateroom. He returned armed with a knife in his boot and his over-under two-shot derringer in the low crown of his wide-brimmed hat. Under his coat was a new pistol he had taken a shine to, a Belgian-made Browning No. 2 semiautomatic that an American gunsmith had modified to fire a .380 caliber cartridge. It was light, and quick to reload. What it lacked in stopping power it made up for with deadly accuracy.

  Lillian Hennessy came running from her private car, tugging a silk robe over her nightdress, and Bell thought fleetingly that even the consequences of passing out from three bottles of champagne looked beautiful on her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The Wrecker’s up the line. I am going to intercept him.”

  “I’ll drive you!” Eagerly, she jumped behind the steering wheel and called for the trainmen to crank her engine. Wide awake in an instant, eyes alight, she was ready for anything. But as the motor fired, Bell leashed all the power of his voice to shout, “Mrs. Comden!”

  Emma Comden came running in a dressing gown, her dark hair in a long braid and her face pale at the urgency in his voice.

  “Hold this!” he said.

  Bell circled Lillian’s slender waist in his long hands and lifted her out of the car.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted. “Put me down!”

  He thrust Lillian, kicking and shouting, into Mrs. Comden’s arms. Both women went down in a flashing tangle of bare legs.

  “I can help you!” Lillian shouted. “Aren’t we friends?”

  “I don’t bring friends to gunfights.”

  Bell leaped behind the steering wheel and sent the Gray Wolf flying up the buggy track in a cloud of dust

  “That’s my car! You’re stealing my race car!”

  “I just bought it!” he fired over his shoulder. “Send the bill to Van Dorn.” Although, strictly speaking, he thought with a last grim smile as he wrestled the low-slung car over the ruts gouged by freight wagons, once Van Dorn’s expense sheets were submitted Osgood Hennessy would end up buying his daughter’s Gray Wolf twice.

  The look over his shoulder revealed that he was trailing a dust cloud as tall and dark as a locomotive’s smoke. The Wrecker would see him coming miles away, a sight that would put the murderer on high alert.

  Bell twisted the steering wheel. The Wolf sprang off the buggy track, up the railroad embankment, and onto the rail bed. He wrenched the wheel again to force the tires over the nearest rail. Straddling it, the Wolf pounded on the crossties and ballast. It was a bone-jarring ride, though the banging and bouncing was far more predictable than the ruts in the road. And unless he punctured a tire on a loose spike, his chances of keeping the car intact at such speed were better than on rocks and ruts. He glanced back, confirming that the chief benefit of riding on the rail bed was he was no longer trailing a dust cloud like a flag.

  He raced northward on the line for a quarter of an hour.

  Suddenly, he saw a column of smoke spurting upward into the hard-blue sky. The train itself was invisible, hidden around a bend in the track that appeared to pass through a wooded valley between two hills. It was much closer than he had expected on first glimpsing the smoke. He instantly steered off the track, down the embankment, and bounced into a thicket of bare shrubs. Turning the car around in the thin cover, he watched the smoke draw nearer.

  The wet huffing of the locomotive grew audible over the insistent rumble of the Gray Wolf’s idling motor. Soon it became a loud, smacking sound, louder and louder. Then the big black engine rounded the bend, spewing smoke and hauling a long coal tender and a string of empty gondolas and boxcars. Lightly burdened and rolling easily on the slope of a downgrade, the train was moving fast for a freight.

  Bell counted fifty cars, scrutinizing each. The flatbeds looked empty. He could not tell about a couple of cattle cars. Most of the boxcars had open doors. He saw no one peering out. The last car was a faded red caboose with a windowed cupola on the roof.
/>   The second the caboose passed by, Bell gunned the Wolf’s motor and drove it out of the thicket, up the gravel embankment and onto the tracks. He fought his right-side tires over the nearest rail and opened the throttle. The Wolf tore after the train, bouncing hard on its ties. At nearly forty miles an hour, it bucked violently and swayed from side to side. Rubber squealed against steel, as the tires slammed against the rails. Bell halved the distance between him and the train. Halved it again, until he was only ten feet behind the train. Now he saw that he could not jump onto the caboose without pulling alongside the train. He slewed the car back over the rail and steered on the edge of the embankment, which was steep and narrow and studded with telegraph poles.

  He had to pull alongside the caboose, grab one of its side ladders, and jump before the race car lost speed and fell back. He overtook the train, steered alongside it. A car length ahead, he saw a telegraph pole that was set closer than the others to the rail. There was no room to squeeze between it and the train.

  10

  BELL GUNNED THE ENGINE, SEIZED THE CABOOSE’S LADDER IN his right hand, and jumped.

  His fingers slipped on the cold steel rung. He heard the Packard Wolf crash into the telegraph pole behind him. Swinging wildly from one arm, he glimpsed the Wolf tumbling down the embankment and fought with all his strength to avoid the same fate. But his arm felt as if it had been ripped out of his shoulder. The pain tore down his arm like fire. Hard as he tried to hold on, he could not stop his fingers from splaying open.

  He fell. As his boots hit the ballast, he caught the bottom rung of the ladder with his left hand. His boots dragged on the stones, threatening his precarious grip. Then he got both hands on the ladder, tucked his legs up in a tight ball, and hauled himself up, climbing hand over hand, until he could plant a boot on the rung and swing onto the rear platform of the caboose.

  He threw open the back door and took in the interior of the caboose in a swift glance. He saw a brakeman stirring a vile-smelling stewpot on a potbellied woodstove. There were tool lockers, trunks on either side with hinged tops doubling as benches and bunk beds, a toilet, a desk stuffed with waybills. A ladder led up to the cupola, the train’s crow’s nest, where the crew could observe the string of boxcars they were trailing and communicate by flag and lantern with the locomotive.

  The brakeman jumped as the door banged against the wall. He whirled around from the stove, wild-eyed. “Where the heck did you come from?”

  “Bell. Van Dorn investigator. Where’s your conductor?”

  “He went up to the locomotive when we took on water. Van Dorn, you say? The detectives?”

  Bell was already climbing the ladder into the cupola from where he could see the train cars stretching ahead. “Bring your flag! Signal the engineer to stop the train. A saboteur is riding in one of the freight cars.”

  Bell leaned his arms on the shelf in front of the windows and watched intently. Fifty cars stretched between him and the smoke-belching locomotive. He saw no one on the roofs of the boxcars, which blocked his view of the low-slung gondolas.

  The brakeman climbed up beside Bell with a flag. The stew smell was worse in the raised cupola. Or the brakeman hadn’t bathed recently. “Did you see anyone stealing a ride?” Bell asked.

  “Just one old hobo. Too crippled to walk. I didn’t have the heart to roust the poor devil.”

  “Where is he?”

  “About the middle of the train. See that green cattle car? The old man was riding in the box right ahead of it.”

  “Stop the train.”

  The brakeman stuck his flag out a side window and waved frantically. After several minutes, a head bobbed up from the locomotive cab.

  “That’s the conductor. He sees us.”

  “Wave your flag.”

  The locomotive’s chugging slowed down. Bell felt the brake shoes grind. The cars banged into one another as they filled the slack caused by the train slowed to a stop. He watched the roofs of the boxcars.

  “Soon as the train stops, I want you to run ahead and check each car. Do not engage. Just give a shout if you see anyone, then get out of the way. He’ll kill you soon as look at you.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have to send a flagman back when we stop. I’m it. In case a train’s following us, I have to wave it down. Wires are screwy today.”

  “Not before you check each car,” said Bell, drawing the Browning from his coat.

  The brakeman climbed down from the cupola. He jumped from the rear platform to the tracks and jogged alongside the train, pausing to look into each car. The engineer blew his whistle, demanding an explanation. Bell watched the rooftops and moved to either side of the cupola, to see alongside the train.

  THE WRECKER LAY ON his back in a bench locker less than ten feet from the cupola ladder, gripping a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. All night, he had worried that by setting loose the runaway gondola he had put himself in danger by trapping himself so far up the line. Fearing that railway police, goaded by Van Dorn detectives, would mob the train before it reached Weed or Dunsmuir and search it thoroughly, he had taken decisive action. During the last water stop, he had run back to the caboose and slipped inside while the crew were busy tending the locomotive and checking the journal boxes under the railcars.

  He had chosen a locker that held lanterns, reasoning that no one would open it in the daytime. If someone did, he would kill him with whichever weapon suited the moment, then spring out and kill anyone else he came across.

  He smiled grimly in the cramped, dark space. He had guessed right. And who had boarded the train but none other than Van Dorn’s chief investigator himself, the famous Isaac Bell? At worst, the Wrecker would make a complete fool out of Bell. At best, he’d shoot him between the eyes.

  THE BRAKEMAN CHECKED EVERY car, and when he reached the locomotive Bell saw him confer with the conductor, the engineer, and the fireman, who had gathered on the ground. Then the conductor and the brakeman hurried back, checking each of the fifty boxcars, cattle cars, and gondolas again. When they got to the caboose, the conductor, an older man with sharp brown eyes and a put-out expression on his lined face, said, “No saboteurs. No hobos. Nobody. The train is empty. We’ve wasted enough time here.”

  He raised his flag to signal the engineer.

  “Wait,” said Bell.

  He jumped down from the caboose and ran alongside the train, peering inside each car and each chassis underneath. Midway to the locomotive, he paused at a green cattle car that stank of mules.

  Bell whirled around and ran full tilt back toward the caboose.

  He knew that smell. It wasn’t stew. And it wasn’t an unwashed brakeman. A man who had ridden in the green cattle car that stank of mules was now hiding somewhere in the caboose.

  Bell bounded up onto the caboose’s platform, shoved through the door, flung the nearest mattress off a bench, and pulled up the hinged top. The locker held boots and yellow rain slickers. He flung open the next. It was filled with flags and light repair tools. There were two more. The conductor and the brakeman were watching curiously from the far door.

  “Get back,” Bell told them. And he opened the third bench. It contained tins of lubricating oil and kerosene for lamps. Gun in hand, he leaned in to open the last.

  “Nothing in there but lanterns,” said the brakeman.

  Bell opened it.

  The brakeman was right. The locker contained red, green, and yellow lanterns.

  Angry, baffled, wondering if the man had somehow managed to run for the trees from one side while he was watching the other, Bell stalked to the locomotive and told the engineer, “Move your train! ”

  Gradually, he calmed down. And finally he smiled, remembering something Wish Clarke had taught him: “You can’t think when you’re mad. And that goes double when you’re mad at yourself.”

  He had no doubt that the Wrecker was a capable man, even a brilliant one, but now it seemed he had somethin
g else going for him too: luck, the intangible element that could throw an investigation into chaos and prolong capture. Bell believed it was only a matter of time before they caught up with the Wrecker, but time was short—terribly short—because the Wrecker was so active. This was no ordinary bank robber. He wasn’t going to hole up in a brothel and spend his ill-gotten gains on wine and women. Even now, he would be planning his next attack. Bell was painfully aware that he still had no idea what motivated the man. But he did know that the Wrecker was not the sort of criminal who wasted time celebrating his victories.

  Twenty minutes later, Bell ordered the train stopped beside Lillian Hennessy’s special, which was still on the siding. The crew moved the freight ahead to the water tank.

  THE WRECKER WAITED UNTIL the train crew was busy taking on water. Then he dropped down from the cupola’s shelf and slipped back into his first hiding place, the lanterns locker. The next water stop, he slipped out of the caboose and back into a boxcar, as the crew would be reaching for lanterns when the sun went down.

  Ten hours later, in the dead of the night, he jumped off at a staging area at Redding. Seeing many detectives and railroad police searching trains ahead, he hid in a culvert and watched their lights bobbing in the dark.

  While he waited them out, he used the time to think about Isaac Bell’s investigation. He was tempted to mail him a letter: “Sorry we didn’t meet on the freight train.” But it wasn’t worth the joke. Don’t gloat. Let Bell think he wasn’t on that train. That he got away by some other means. He would find some better way to sow confusion.

  An empty freight rumbled out of the yard, heading south, just before first light. The Wrecker ran alongside, grabbed a ladder on the back of a boxcar, and worked his way under the car and wedged himself into the supporting framework.

  In Sacramento, he climbed out when the train halted for permission to enter the yards. He walked a mile through factories and workers’ housing to a cheap rooming house, eight blocks from the capitol building. He paid the landlady four dollars for holding his suitcase and carried it to another rooming house that he chose at random ten blocks away. He rented a room, paying in advance for a week. Midmorning, the house was empty, the lodgers away at work. He locked himself in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall, stuffed his filthy clothes in the gripsack, shaved and bathed. In his room, he pulled a top-quality blond wig over his hair and applied a similarly colored groomed beard and mustache with spirit gum. Then he dressed in a clean shirt, a four-in-hand necktie, and an expensive sack suit. He packed his bags, transferring his climbing spurs to the suitcase, and polished his boots.