The Wrecker Page 6

  Fourteen-year-old Billy couldn’t believe his amazing luck to be riding in a locomotive. He’d been mooning over trains rumbling past his house his whole life and been up all night excited about this trip. But he had never dreamed he could actually ride up front in the cab. Mr. Patrick wore a striped cap just like you saw in pictures and was the surest, calmest man Billy had ever seen. He had explained what he was doing every step of the way, as he sounded two long blasts on the whistle and started the train moving again.

  “We’re off, Billy! I’m dropping the Johnson bar to full forward. All the way forward to go ahead, all the way back for reverse. We can go just as fast backward as forward.”

  Patrick gripped a long, horizontal bar. “Now I’m opening the throttle, sending steam to the cylinders to turn the drive wheels, and I’m opening the sand valve to get adhesion on the rails. Now I’m pulling back on the throttle so we don’t start too fast. You feel her bite and not slipping?”

  Billy had nodded eagerly. She had picked up speed smooth as silk as Patrick began notching out the throttle.

  Now rolling toward Glendale on the last few miles before Los Angeles, blowing the whistle at grade crossings, Patrick told the awestruck boy, “You’ll never drive a finer locomotive. She’s a good steamer and rides easy.”

  The fireman, Zeke Taggert, who had been steadily shoveling coal into the roaring firebox, banged the door shut and sat down to catch his breath. He was a big man, black and greasy, and stunk of sweat. “Billy?” he boomed in a huge voice. “See this here glass?” Taggert tapped a gauge. “It’s the most important window on the train. It shows the water level in the boiler. Too low, the crown sheet heats up and melts, and, BOOM!, blows us all to kingdom come!”

  “Don’t pay him no mind, Billy,” Patrick said. “It’s Zeke’s job to be make sure we’ve got plenty in the boiler. We’ve got a tender full of water right behind us.”

  “How come the throttle’s in the middle?” asked Billy.

  “It sits in the middle when we’re rolling. Right now, that’s all we need to be steaming at sixty miles an hour. Shove her forward, we’d be doing a hundred twenty.”

  The engineer winked at Uncle Bill. “The throttle lever also helps us steer her around tight bends. Zeke, do you see any curves coming up?”

  “Trestle just ahead, Rufus. Tight bend turning out of it.”

  “You take her, son.”

  “What?”

  “Steer her around the curve. Quick, now! Grab hold. Poke your head out here and look.”

  Billy took the throttle in his left hand and leaned out the window the same way the engineer had.

  The throttle was hot, pulsing in his hand like it was alive. The beam of the locomotive headlight gleamed along the rails. Billy saw the trestle coming up. It looked very narrow.

  “Just a light touch,” Rufus Patrick cautioned with another wink at the men. “Hardly need to move it at all. Easy. Easy. Yep, you’re getting the hang of it. But you gotta get her right down the middle. It’s a mighty tight fit.”

  Zeke and Uncle Bob exchanged grins.

  “Look out, now. Yep, you’re doing fine. Just ease her—”

  “What’s that up ahead, Mr. Patrick?”

  Rufus Patrick looked where the boy was pointing.

  The beam of the locomotive headlight was throwing shadows and reflections from the ironwork in the trestle, which made it hard to see. Probably just a shadow. Suddenly, the headlight glinted on something strange.

  “What the—?” In the company of a child, Patrick automatically switched cusswords to “blue blazes.”

  It was a hooked hunk of metal reaching up from the right rail like a hand from a shallow grave.

  “Hit the air!” Patrick yelled to the fireman.

  Zeke threw himself on the air-brake lever and yanked it with all this might. The train slowed so violently, it seemed to hit a wall. But only for a moment. An instant later, the weight of ten fully loaded passenger cars and a tender filled with tons of coal and water hurled the locomotive forward.

  Patrick clapped his own experienced hand on the air brake. He worked the brakes with the fine touch of a clockmaker and eased the Johnson bar into reverse. The great drive wheels spun, screeching in a blaze of fiery sparks, shaving slivers of steel from the rails. The brakes and the reversing drivers decelerated the speeding Coast Line Limited. But it was too late. The high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 was already screaming through the trestle, bearing down on the hook, still making forty miles per hour. Patrick could only pray that the wedge-shaped pilot, the so-called cowcatcher that swept along the tracks in front of the locomotive, would sweep it aside before it caught the engine truck’s front axle.

  Instead, the iron hook that the Wrecker had bolted to the loosened rail latched onto the pilot with a death grip. It tore loose the rail ahead of the front wheels on the right side of the one-hundred-eighty-six-thousand-pound locomotive. Her massive drive wheels crashed onto the ties, bouncing on wood and ballast at forty miles an hour.

  The speed, the weight, and the relentless momentum crushed the edge of the bed and ground the ties to splinters. The wheels dropped into air, and, still racing forward, the engine began to careen onto its side, dragging its tender with it. The tender pulled the baggage car over the edge, and the baggage car dragged the first passenger car with it before the coupling to the second passenger car broke free.

  Then, almost miraculously, the locomotive seemed to right itself. But it was a brief respite. Shoved by the weight of the tender and cars, it twisted and turned and skidded down the embankment, sliding until it smashed its mangled pilot and headlight into the rock-hard bottom of the dry riverbed.

  It stopped at last, tilted at a steep angle, with its nose down and its trailing truck in the air. The water in the tightly sealed boiler, which was superheated to three hundred eighty degrees, spilled forward, off the red-hot crown plate, which was at the back of the boiler.

  “Get out!” roared the engineer. “Get out before she blows!”

  Bill was sprawled unconscious against the firebox. Little Billy was sitting dazed on the footplate, holding his head. Blood was pouring through his fingers.

  Zeke, like Patrick, had braced for the impact and not been hurt badly.

  “Grab Bill,” Patrick told Zeke, who was a powerful man. “I’ve got the boy.”

  Patrick slung Billy under his arm like a gunnysack and jumped for the ground. Zeke draped Bill Wright over his shoulder, leaped from the engine, and hit the steep gravel slope running. Patrick stumbled with the boy. Zeke grabbed Patrick with his free arm and kept him upright. The crashing sounds had ceased abruptly. In the comparative quiet, they could hear injured passengers screaming in the first car, which was crumpled open like Christmas wrapping paper.

  “Run!”

  The coal fire that Zeke Taggert had shoveled so hard to feed was still raging under the locomotive’s crown plate. Burning fiercely to maintain the twenty-two hundred degrees necessary to boil two thousand gallons of water, it continued to heat the steel. But with no water above it to absorb the heat, the temperature of the steel soared from its normal six hundred degrees to the fire’s twenty-two hundred. At that temperature, the half-inch-thick plate softened like butter in a skillet.

  Two-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch steam pressure inside the boiler was fourteen times ordinary air pressure outside. It took only seconds for the captive steam to exploit the sudden weakness and burst a hole in the crown plate.

  Even as the steam escaped, two thousand gallons of water pressure-cooked to three hundred eighty degrees also turned to steam the instant it came in contact with the chill Glendale air. Its volume multiplied by a thousand six hundred times. In a flash, two thousand gallons of water vaporized into three million gallons of steam. Trapped inside the 4-4-2 Atlantic’s boiler, it expanded outward with a concussive roar that exploded the steel locomotive into a million small pieces of shrapnel.

  Billy and his uncle never knew what hit them. Nor did the Wells Fargo
Express messenger in the baggage car, nor three friends who had been playing draw poker in the front of the derailed Pullman. But Zeke Taggert and Rufus Patrick, who understood the cause and nature of the nightmarish forces gathering like a tornado, actually felt the unspeakable pain of scalding steam for a tenth of a second, before the explosion ended all they knew forever.

  WITH A CLANG OF cast iron on stone and the crackle of splintering ash, the Kalamazoo Velocipede tumbled down the railroad embankment.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Jack Douglas, ninety-two, was so old he’d started out as an Indian fighter protecting the first western railroad’s right of way. The company kept him on out of rare sentiment and let him act as a sort of night watchman patrolling the quiet Glendale rail yard with a heavy single-action Colt .44 on his hip. He reached for it with a veined and bony hand and began sliding it with practiced ease from its oiled holster.

  The Wrecker lunged with shocking swiftness. His thrust was so efficient that it would have caught a man his own age flat-footed. The watchman never had a chance. The telescoping sword was in his throat and out again before he crumpled to the ground.

  The Wrecker looked down at the body in disgust. Of all the ridiculous things to go wrong. Jumped by an old geezer who should have been in bed hours ago. He shrugged and said, half aloud, with a smile, “Waste not, want not.” Pulling a poster from his coat pocket, he crushed it into a ball. Then he knelt beside the body, forced open the dead hand, and closed the fingers around the crumpled paper.

  Dark and empty streets led to where the Southern Pacific rails crossed the narrow tracks of the Los Angeles & Glendale Electric Railway. The big green streetcars of the interurban passenger line did not run after midnight. Instead, taking advantage of inexpensive electricity purchased in bulk at night, the railway carried freight. Keeping a sharp eye for police, the Wrecker hopped aboard a car filled with milk cans and fresh carrots bound for Los Angeles.

  It was growing light when he jumped off in the city and made his way across East Second Street. The dome of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s Moorish-style La Grande Station was silhouetted against a lurid red dawn. He retrieved a suitcase from the luggage room and changed out of his dusty clothes in the men’s room. Then he boarded the Santa Fe’s flyer to Albuquerque and sat down to a breakfast of steak and eggs and fresh-baked rolls in a dining car set with silver and china.

  As the flyer’s locomotive gathered way, the imperious conductor of the express passenger train came through, demanding, “Tickets, gents.”

  Affecting the brusque attitude of a man who traveled regularly for business, the Wrecker did not bother to look up from his Los Angeles Times, which allowed him to keep his face down, concealing his features, as he wiped his fingers on a fine linen napkin and fished out his wallet.

  “You’ve cut your finger!” said the conductor, staring at a bright red bloodstain on the napkin.

  “Stropping my razor,” said the Wrecker, still not looking up from his newspaper while cursing again the drunken blacksmith he wished he had killed.

  6

  IT WAS STILL THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN ISAAC BELL bounded off the train before it stopped rolling onto the waterfront terminal on Oakland Mole. This was the end of the line for westbound passengers, a mile-long arm of rock that the Southern Pacific Railroad had built into San Francisco Bay. The pier reached another mile into the bay to deliver freight trains to seagoing vessels and boxcar floats to the city, but passengers transferred here to their ferry.

  Bell ran for the ferry, scanning the bustling terminal for Lori March, the old farm woman from whom he always bought flowers. Nestled in the bottom of his watch pocket was a small, flat key to Marion Morgan’s apartment.

  Drowsy newsboys with seeds in their hair from the hay barges where they slept were crying in shrill voices “Extra! Extra!” and waving special editions of every newspaper printed in San Francisco.

  The first headline to rivet Isaac Bell’s eye stopped him dead.

  TRAIN WRECKERS DITCH COAST LINE

  LIMITED AT GLENDALE

  Bell felt as if he’d taken a bowie knife in the stomach. Glendale was seven hundred miles from the Cascades Cutoff.

  “Mr. Bell, sir? Mr. Bell?”

  Right behind the newsboy was an operative from Van Dorn’s San Francisco office. He didn’t look much older than the kid hawking the papers. His brown hair was pillow-flattened against his head, and he had a sleep wrinkle still creasing his cheek. But his bright blue eyes were wide with excitement.

  “I’m Dashwood, Mr. Bell. San Francisco office. Mr. Bronson left me in charge when he took everyone to Sacramento. They won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “What do you know about the Limited?”

  “I just spoke with the railway police supervisor here in Oakland. It looks like they dynamited the locomotive, blew it right off the tracks.”

  “How many killed?”

  “Six, so far. Fifty injured. Some missing.”

  “When’s the next train to Los Angeles?”

  “There’s a flyer leaving in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be on it. Telephone the Los Angeles office. Tell them I said to get to the wreck and don’t let anyone touch anything. Including the police.”

  Young Dashwood leaned in close, as if to impart information not privy to the newsboys, and whispered, “The police think the train wrecker was killed in the explosion.”

  “What?”

  “A union agitator named William Wright. Obviously, a radical.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody.”

  Isaac Bell cast a cold eye on the kaleidoscope of headlines that the newsboys were brandishing.

  DEED OF DASTARDS

  DEATH LIST SWELLS. TWENTY LIVES LOST

  TRAIN WRECKERS DYNAMITE LOCOMOTIVE

  EXPRESS PLUNGES INTO RIVERBED

  He suspected that the closest to actual fact was EXPRESS PLUNGES INTO RIVERBED. How it happened was speculation. How could they possibly know the death toll of a wreck that happened just hours ago, five hundred miles away? He was not surprised that the lurid headline DEATH LIST SWELLS. TWENTY LIVES LOST was splashed on a newspaper owned by yellow journalist Preston Whiteway, a man who never let facts get in the way of sales. Marion Morgan had just started to work as the assistant to the editor of his San Francisco Inquirer.

  “Dashwood! What’s your given name?”

  “Jimmy—James.”

  “O.K., James. Here’s what I want you to do. Find out everything about Mr. William Wright that ‘everybody’ doesn’t know. What union does he belong to? Is he an official of that union? What have the police arrested him for? What are his grievances? Who are his associates?” Staring down at the smaller man, he fixed James Dashwood in a powerful gaze. “Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s vital that we know whether he worked alone or with a gang. You have my authority to call on every Van Dorn operative you need to help you. Wire your report to me care of the Southern Pacific’s Burbank station. I’ll read it when I get off the train.”

  As the Los Angeles flyer steamed from the piers, the fog was thick, and Isaac Bell looked in vain for the electric lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay. He checked his watch that the train had departed on time. When he returned the watch to its pocket, he felt the brass key that shared the same space. He had planned to surprise Marion with a middle-of the-night visit. Instead, he was the one surprised. Badly surprised. The Wrecker’s reach extended much further than he had presumed. And more innocent people had died.

  THE SHARP SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA noonday sun illuminated wreckage unlike any Isaac Bell had ever seen. The front of the Coast Line Limited’s locomotive stood pitched forward, intact, at a steep angle in a dry riverbed at the bottom of the railroad embankment. The cowcatcher in the ground and the headlight and smokestack were readily identifiable. Behind them, where the rest of locomotive should be, all that remained was a crazy spi
derweb of boiler tubes, scores of pipes twisted at every angle imaginable. Some ninety tons of steel boiler, brick firebox, cab, pistons, and drive wheels had disappeared.

  “Close shave for the passengers,” said the director of maintenance and operations for Southern Pacific, who was showing Bell around. He was a portly, potbellied man in a sober three-piece suit, and he seemed genuinely surprised that the death toll had not been much higher than the now-confirmed seven. The passengers had already been taken to Los Angeles on a relief train. The Southern Pacific’s special hospital car stood unused on the main line, its doctor and nurse with little to do but bandage the occasional cut suffered by the track crews repairing the damage to reopen the line.

  “Nine of the cars held to the rails,” the director explained. “The tender and baggage car shielded them from the full force of the explosion.”

  Bell could see how they had deflected the shock wave and the flying debris. The tender, with its cargo spilled from its demolished sides, looked more like a coal pile than rolling stock. The baggage car was riddled as if it had been shelled by artillery. But he saw none of the singeing associated with an explosion of dynamite.

  “Dynamite never blew a locomotive like that.”

  “Of course not. You’re looking at the effects of a boiler explosion. Water sloshed forward when she tipped and the crown sheet failed.”

  “So she derailed first?”

  “Appears she did.”

  Bell fixed him with a cold stare. “A passenger reported she was running very fast and hitting the curves hard.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Are you sure? She was running late.”

  “I knew Rufus Patrick. Safest engineer on the line.”

  “Then why’d she leave the tracks?”

  “She had help from that son of a bitch unionist.”

  Bell said, “Show me where she left the tracks.”

  The director led Bell to the point where the track stopped on one side. Past the missing rail was a line of splintered ties and a deep rut through the ballast where the drive wheels had scattered the crushed stone.