The Wrecker ib-2

  A hobo jungle, like any town or city, had neighborhoods whose boundaries were clear in the residents’ minds. Some areas were friendly, some safer than others. Downstream, farthest from the tracks, where the creek veered to join the Weber River, was a section best visited armed. There, the rules of live and let live gave way to take or be taken.

  The Wrecker headed there fearlessly. He was at home in outlaw land. Yet even he loosened the knife in his boot and moved his pistol from a deep pocket of his canvas coat to his waistband, where he could draw it quickly. Despite the absence of campfires, it was not entirely dark. The trains huffing constantly by pierced the night with their headlights, and the thin snow cover reflected the golden glow from the windows of passenger cars. A string of bright Pullmans started past, slowing for the nearby town, and by its light the Wrecker saw a hunched shadow shivering beside a tree, both hands in pockets.

  “Sharpton,” he called in a harsh voice, and Sharpton answered, “Right here, mister.”

  “Put your hands where I can see them,” commanded the Wrecker.

  Sharpton obeyed, partly because the Wrecker was paying money for service and partly out of fear. A bank and train robber who had served time in the penitentiary, Pete Sharpton knew a dangerous hombre when he met one. He had never seen his face. They had only met once before, when the Wrecker had tracked Sharpton down and braced him in the alley behind the livery stable where he rented a room. But he had been on the wrong side of the law his entire life and knew they did not come more deadly than this one.

  “Did you find your man?” the Wrecker asked.

  “He’ll do the job for a thousand dollars,” Sharpton answered.

  “Give him five hundred down. Make him come back for the second half after he has done the job.”

  “What’s to keep him from running off with the first five hundred? Found money, no risk.”

  “What will prevent him will be his clear understanding that you will hunt him down and kill him. Can you make that clear to him?”

  Sharpton chuckled in the dark. “Oh yes. Besides, he’s not that tough anymore. He’ll do as he’s told.”

  “Take this,” said the Wrecker.

  Sharpton felt the package with his fingers. “This isn’t money.”

  “You’ll have the money in a minute. This is the fuse I want him to use.”

  “You mind me asking why?”

  “Not at all,” the Wrecker said easily. “This looks exactly like a fast fuse. It would fool even an experienced safecracker. Do I assume correctly that yours is experienced?”

  “Blowing safes and express cars his whole life.”

  “As I asked for. Despite its appearance, this is actually a slow fuse. When he lights it, it will take longer to detonate the dynamite than he’s calculated.”

  “If it takes too long, it will blow up the train instead of just blocking the tracks.”

  “Does that pose difficulties for you, Sharpton?”

  “I’m just saying what’ll happen,” Sharpton said hastily. “If you want to blow up the train instead of just rob it, well I guess that’s none of my business. You’re paying the bill.”

  The Wrecker pressed a second package into Sharpton’s hand. “Here is three thousand dollars. Two thousand for you, a thousand for your man. You can’t count it in the dark. You’ll have to trust me.”

  13

  THE LUMBERJACK’S DRAWING OF THE WRECKER PAID OFF IN five days.

  A sharp-eyed Southern Pacific ticket clerk in Sacramento recalled selling an Ogden, Utah, ticket to a man who looked like the man that Don Albert had drawn. Even though his customer had a beard, and his hair was almost as blond as Isaac Bell‘s, there was something similar in the face, the clerk insisted.

  Bell interviewed him personally to ascertain that the clerk was not another fan of The Great Train Robbery, and was impressed enough to order operatives to canvass the train crews on the Ogden flyer.

  They hit pay dirt in Reno, Nevada. One of the flyer’s conductors, a resident of Reno, recalled the passenger too and agreed it could have been the man in the drawing, though he pointed out the difference in hair color.

  Bell raced to Nevada, ran him down at his home, and asked casually, as if only making conversation, whether the conductor had seen the The Great Train Robbery. He planned to, the conductor answered, the next time it showed at the vaudeville house. His missus had been pestering him to take her for a year.

  From Reno, Bell caught an overnight express to Ogden, and had dinner as the train climbed through the Trinity Mountains. He sent telegrams when it stopped at Lovelock and received several replies when it stopped at Imlay, and he finally fell asleep in a comfortable Pullman as it steamed across Nevada. The wires awaiting him at Montello, just before they crossed the Utah border, had nothing new to report.

  Nearing Ogden, midday, the train sped across Great Salt Lake on the long redwood trestles of the Lucin Cutoff. Osgood Hennessy had spent eight million dollars and clear-cut miles of Oregon forest to build the new, level route between Lucin and Ogden. It shortened the Sacramento-Ogden trip by two hours and dismayed Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, his rivals on the southern and northern routes. At the point where Bell was so close to the rail-junction city that he could see the snowcapped peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to Ogden’s east, his train ground to a halt.

  The tracks were blocked six miles ahead, the conductor told him.

  An explosion had derailed the westbound Sacramento Limited.

  BELL JUMPED TO THE ground and ran alongside the train to the front end. The engineer and fireman had dismounted from their locomotive and were standing on the ballast, rolling cigarettes. Bell showed them his Van Dorn identification, and ordered, “Get me as close to the wreck as you can.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Detective, I take my orders from the dispatcher.”

  Bell’s derringer appeared in his hand suddenly. Two dark muzzles yawned at the engineer. “This is a matter of life and death, starting with yours,” said Bell. He pointed at the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive, and said, “Move this train to the wreck and don’t stop until you hit debris!”

  “You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood,” said the fireman.

  “The hell he wouldn‘t,” said the engineer, shifting his gaze nervously from the derringer to the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. “Get up there and shovel coal.”

  The locomotive, a big 4-6-2, steamed six miles before a brakeman with a red flag stopped them where the tracks disappeared in a large hole in the ballast. Just beyond the hole, six Pullmans, a baggage car, and a tender lay on their sides. Bell dismounted from the locomotive and strode through the wreckage. “How many hurt?” he asked the railroad official who was pointed out to him as the wreck master.

  “Thirty-five. Four seriously.”

  “Dead?”

  “None. They were lucky. The bastard blew the rail a minute early. The engineer had time to reduce his speed.”

  “Strange,” said Bell. “His attacks have always been so precisely timed.”

  “Well, this’ll be his last. We got him.”

  “What? Where is he?”

  “Sheriff caught him in Ogden. Lucky for him. Passengers tried to lynch him. He got away, but then one of them spotted him later, hiding in a stable.”

  Bell found a locomotive on the other side of the wreck to run him into Union Depot.

  The jailhouse was situated in Ogden’s mansard-roofed City Hall a block from the railroad station. Two top Van Dorn agents were there ahead of him, the older Weber-and-Fields duo of Mack Fulton and Wally Kisley. Neither was cracking jokes. In fact, both men looked glum.

  “Where is he?” Bell demanded.

  “It’s not him,” said Fulton wearily. He seemed exhausted, Bell thought, and for the first time he wondered if Mack should be considering retirement. Always lean, his face was shrunken as a cadaver’s.

  “Not who blew the train?”

  “Oh, he blew the train all right,” said Kisley, whose
trademark three-piece checkerboard suit was caked with dust. Wally looked as tired as Mack but not ill. “Only he’s not the Wrecker. Go ahead, you take a crack at him.”

  “You’ll have a better chance of getting him to talk. He sure as hell won’t admit a word to us.”

  “Why would he talk to me?”

  “Old friend of yours,” Fulton explained cryptically. He and Kisley were both twenty years older than Bell, celebrated veterans and friends, who were free to say whatever popped in their heads even though Bell was boss of the Wrecker investigation.

  “I’d knock it out of him,” said the sheriff. “But your boys said to wait for you, and the railroad company tells me Van Dorn calls the tune. Damned foolishness, in my opinion. But no one’s asking my opinion.”

  Bell strode into the room where they had the prisoner manacled to a table affixed solidly to the stone floor. An “old friend,” to be sure, the prisoner was Jake Dunn, a safecracker. On the end of the table was a neat, banded stack of crisp five-dollar bills, five hundred dollars’ worth, according to the sheriff, clearly payment for services rendered. Bell’s first grim thought was that now the Wrecker was hiring accomplices to do his murderous work for him. Which means he could strike anywhere and be long gone before the strike happened.

  “Jake, what in blazes have you gotten mixed up in this time?”

  “Hello, Mr. Bell. Haven’t seen you since you sent me to San Quentin.”

  Bell sat quietly and looked him over. San Quentin had not been kind to the safecracker. He looked twenty years older, a hollow shell of the hard case he had been. His hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to imagine him setting a charge without detonating it accidentally. Relieved at first to see a familiar face, Dunn shriveled now under Bell’s gaze.

  “Blowing Wells Fargo safes is robbery, Jake. Wrecking passenger trains is murder. The man who paid you that money has killed innocent people by the dozen.”

  “I didn’t know we were wrecking the train.”

  “You didn’t know that blowing the rails out from under a speeding train would cause a wreck?” Bell said in disbelief, his face dark with disgust. “What did you think would happen?”

  The prisoner hung his head.

  “Jake! What did you think would happen?”

  “You gotta believe me, Mr. Bell. He told me to blow the rail so the train would stop so they could hit the express car. I didn’t know he was gonna put her on the ground.”

  “What do you mean? You’re the one who lit the fuse.”

  “He switched fuses on me. I thought I was lighting a fast fuse that would detonate the charge in time for the train to stop. Instead, it burned slow. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Mr. Bell. It was burning so slow the train was going to run right over the charge. I tried to stop it.”

  Bell stared at him coldly.

  “That’s how they caught me, Mr. Bell. I ran after it, trying to stomp it out. Too late. They saw me, and after she hit the ground they lit out after me like I was the guy who shot McKinley.”

  “Jake, you’ve got the hangman’s rope around your neck and one way to get it loose. Take me to the man who paid you this money.”

  Jake Dunn shook his head violently. He looked, Bell thought, frantic as a wolf with a leg caught in a trap. But no, not a wolf. There was no raw power in him, no nobility. Truth be told, Dunn looked like a mongrel dog that had fallen for bait left for bigger game.

  “Where is he, Jake?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why are you lying to me, Jake?”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  “You wrecked a train, Jake. You’re damned lucky you didn’t kill anybody. If they don’t hang you, they’ll put you in the penitentiary for the rest of your life.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Bell changed tactics abruptly.

  “How’d you happen to get out of prison so soon, Jake? What did you serve, three years? Why’d they let you go?”

  Jake regarded Bell with eyes that were suddenly wide open and guileless. “I got the cancer.”

  Bell was taken aback. He had no truck with lawbreakers, but a killing disease reduced a criminal to just an ordinary man. Jake Dunn was no innocent, but he was quite suddenly a victim who would suffer pain and fear and despair. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t realize.”

  “I guess they figured to set me loose to die on my own. I needed the money. That’s how I took this job.”

  “Jake, you were always a craftsman, never a killer. Why are you covering for a killer?” Bell pressed.

  Jake answered in a hoarse whisper. “He’s in the livery stable on Twenty-fourth, across the tracks.”

  Bell snapped his fingers. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton rushed to his side. “Twenty-fourth Street,” said Bell. “Livery stable. Cover it, station the sheriff’s deputies on the outer perimeter, and wait for me.”

  Jake looked up. “He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Bell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I went back to get my second half of the money, I found him upstairs, in one of the rooms they rent out.”

  “Found him? What do you mean, dead?”

  “Slit his throat. I was afraid to tell-they’d pin that on me, too.”

  “Slit his throat?” Bell demanded. “Or stabbed?”

  Jake ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Stabbed, I guess.”

  “Did you see a knife?”

  “No.”

  “Was he run through? Did the wound exit the back of his neck?”

  “I didn’t stick around to examine him close, Mr. Bell. Like I said, I knew they’d blame me.”

  “Get over there,” Bell told Kisley and Fulton. “Sheriff, would you send a doctor? See if he can reckon what killed him and how long he’s been dead.”

  “Where will you be, Isaac?”

  Another dead end, thought Bell. The Wrecker wasn’t just lucky, he made his own luck. “Railroad station,” he answered without a lot of hope. “See if any ticket clerks recall selling him a ticket out of here.”

  He took copies of the lumberjack’s drawing to Union Depot, a multigabled, two-story building with a tall clock tower, and queried the clerks. Then, driven in a Ford by a railway police official through tree-lined neighborhoods of cottages with jigsaw woodwork, he visited the homes of clerks and supervisors who were off work that day. Bell showed the drawing to each man, and when the man did not recognize the face, Bell showed him an altered version with a beard. No one recognized either face.

  How did the Wrecker get out of Ogden? Bell wondered.

  The answer was easy. The city was served by nine different railroads. Hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers passed through it every day. By now, the Wrecker had to know that the Van Dorn Agency was hunting him. Which meant he would choose his targets more carefully when it came to preparing his escapes.

  Bell enlisted Van Dorn agents from the Ogden office to canvass hotels, on the odd chance that the Wrecker had stayed in the junction city. No front-desk clerk recognized either drawing. At the Broom, an expensive, three-story brick hotel, the proprietor of the cigar store thought he might have served a customer who looked like the picture with the beard. A waitress in the ice-cream parlor remembered a man who looked like the clean-shaven version. He had stuck in her mind because he was so handsome. But she had seen him only once, and that was three days ago.

  Kisley and Fulton caught up with Bell in the spartan Van Dorn office, one large room on the wrong side of Twenty-fifth Street, which was a wide boulevard divided by electric-streetcar tracks. The side of the street that served the legitimate needs of railroad passengers using the station was lined with restaurants, tailors, barbers, soda fountains, ice-cream parlors, and a Chinese laundry, each shaded by a colorful awning. Van Dorn’s side housed saloons, rooming houses, gambling casinos, and hotels fronting for brothels.

  The office had a bare floor, ancient furniture, and a single window. Decoration consisted of wanted posters, the newest being th
e two freshly printed versions of the lumberjack’s drawing of the Wrecker, with and without the beard, noted by the sharp-eyed Southern Pacific ticket clerk in Sacramento.

  Kisley and Fulton had regained their spirits, though Fulton appeared exhausted.

  “Clearly,” Wally remarked, “the boss doesn’t waste money on office space in Ogden.”

  “Or furnishings,” Mack added. “That desk looks like it arrived by wagon train.”

  “Perhaps it’s the neighborhood that appeals, located within spitting distance of Union Depot.”

  “And spitting they are, on our sidewalk.”

  Continuing in Weber-and-Fields mode, they went to the window and pointed down at the crowded sidewalk. “Perceive Mr. Van Dorn’s genius. The view from this window can be used to instruct apprentice detectives in the nature of crime in all its varieties.”

  “Come here, young Isaac, gaze down upon our neighboring saloons, brothels, and opium dens. Observe potential customers down on their luck earning the price of a drink or a woman by panhandling. Or, failing to kindle charity, sticking up citizens in that alley.”

  “Note there, a mustachioed fop luring the gullible with shell games on a folding table.”

  “And look at those out-of-work hard-rock miners dressed in rags, pretending to sleep on the pavement outside that saloon while actually laying in wait for drunks to roll.”

  “How long was the man dead?” Bell asked.

  “Better part of a day, Doc thinks. You were right about the stabbing. A narrow blade straight through his neck. Just like Wish and the Glendale yard bull.”

  “So if the Wrecker killed him, he could not have left Ogden before last night. But no one saw him buy a ticket.”

  “Plenty of freights in and out,” ventured Wally.

  “He is covering mighty long distances in a short time to rely on stealing rides on freights,” said Mack.