Kincaid trailed his fingers across the sketch. “I think he looks like me.”
“Arrest this man!” laughed Ken Bloom.
“He does,” said Congdon. “Sort of. This fellow has chiseled features. So does the Senator. Look at the cleft in the chin. You’ve got one of those too, Charles. I heard a bunch of damned fool women in Washington squawking like hens that you look like a matinee idol.”
“My ears aren’t that big, are they?”
“ No.”
“That’s a relief,” said Kincaid. “I can’t be a matinee idol with big ears.”
Bell laughed. “My boss warned us, ‘Don’t arrest any ugly mugs.”’
Curiously, he looked from the sketch to the Senator and back to the sketch. There was a similarity in the high brow. The ears were definitely different. Both the suspect in the sketch and the Senator had intelligent faces with strong features. So did a lot of men, as Joseph Van Dorn had pointed out. Where the Senator and the suspect diverged, in addition to ear size, was the penetrating gaze. The man who had struck the lumberjack with a crowbar looked harder and filled with purpose. It was hardly surprising that he had looked intense to the man he was attacking. But Kincaid did not seem driven by purpose. Even at the height of their betting duel, Kincaid had struck him as essentially self-satisfied and self-indulgent, more the servant of the powerful than powerful himself. Although, Bell reminded himself, he had wondered earlier whether Kincaid playing the fool was an act.
“Well,” said Kincaid, “if we see this fellow, we’ll nab him for you.
“If you do, stay out of his way and call for reinforcements,” Bell said soberly. “He is poison.”
“All right, I’m off to bed. Long day. Good night, Mr. Bell,” Kincaid said cordially. “Interesting playing cards with you.”
“Expensive, too,” said Judge Congdon. “What are you going to do with all those winnings, Mr. Bell?”
“I’m going to buy my fiancée a mansion.”
“Where?”
“San Francisco. Up on Nob Hill.”
“How many survived the earthquake?”
“The one I’m thinking of was built to stand for a thousand years. The only trouble is, it might hold ghosts for my fiancée. It belonged to her former employer, who turned out to be a depraved bank robber and murderer.”
“In my experience,” Congdon chuckled, “the best way to make a woman comfortable in a previous woman’s house is to hand her a stick of dynamite and instruct her to enjoy the process of redecorating. I’ve done it repeatedly. Works like a charm. That might apply to former employers, too.”
Charles Kincaid rose and said good night all around. Then he asked, casually, almost mockingly, “Whatever happened to the depraved bank robber and murderer?”
Isaac Bell looked the Senator in the eye until the Senator dropped his gaze. Only then did the tall detective say, “I ran him to ground, Senator. He won’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Kincaid responded with a hearty laugh. “The famous Van Dorn motto: ‘We never give up.”’
“Never,” said Bell.
Senator Kincaid, Judge Congdon, and the others drifted off to bed, leaving Bell and Kenny Bloom alone in the observation car. Half an hour later, the train began to slow. Here and there, a light shone in the black night. The outskirts of the town of Rawlins took shape. The Overland Limited trundled through dimly lit streets.
THE WRECKER GAUGED THE train’s speed from the platform at the end of the Pullman car that housed his stateroom. Bell’s sketch had shaken him far more than his enormous losses at poker. The money meant nothing in the long run, because he would soon be richer than Congdon, Bloom, and Moser combined. But the sketch represented a rare piece of bad luck. Someone had seen his face and described him to an artist. Fortunately, they’d got his ears wrong. And thank God for the resemblance to the movie star. But he could not count on those lucky breaks confusing Isaac Bell for much longer.
He jumped from the slowing train, and set out to explore the dark streets. He had to work fast. The stop was scheduled for only thirty minutes, and he didn’t know Rawlins. But there was a pattern to railroad towns, and he believed the flow of luck that had moved against him tonight was shifting his way. For one thing, Isaac Bell’s guard was down. The detective was exhilarated by his great fortune at the card table. And it was likely that among the telegraph messages waiting at the depot would be tragic news from Ogden that would throw him for a loop.
He found what he was looking for within minutes, tracing the sound of a piano to a saloon, which was still going strong even though it was well past midnight. He didn’t push through the swinging doors but instead filled his hand with a fat wad of money and circled the saloon by plunging fearlessly down side and back alleys. Bright lights from the second story revealed the dance hall and gambling casino, duller lights the cribs of the attached brothel. The sheriff, bribed to ignore the illegal operations, wouldn’t venture near their doors. Bouncers were hired, therefore, to keep the peace and discourage robbers. And there they were.
Two broken-nosed, bare-knuckle boxers of the type that competed at rodeos and Elk halls were smoking cigarettes on the plank steps that led upstairs. They eyed him with increasing interest as he approached unsteadily. Twenty feet from the steps, he stumbled and reached out to the wall to catch his balance. His hand touched the rough wood precisely where a shaft of light spilled down from above and illuminated the cash he was holding. The two stood up, exchanged glances, and flicked out their cigarettes.
The Wrecker reeled drunkenly away, lurching into the dark toward the open door of a livery stable. He saw another gleam of exchanged glances, as the bouncers’ luck seemed to get better and better. The drunk with the roll of dinero was making it easy for them to relieve him of it in private.
He got inside the stable ahead of them and swiftly chose a spot where light from next door spilled through a window. They came after him, the lead bouncer pulling a sap from his pocket. The Wrecker kicked his feet out from under him. The surprise was complete, and he fell to the hoof-beaten straw. His partner, comprehending that the Wrecker was not as drunk as they had supposed, raised his powerful fists.
The Wrecker went down on one knee, drew his knife from his boot, flicked his wrist. The blade leaped to its full length, the tip touching the bouncer’s throat. With his other hand, the Wrecker pressed his derringer to the temple of the man fallen in the straw. For a moment, the only sound was the piano in the distance and the bouncers’ hard, startled breath.
“Relax, gentlemen,” said the Wrecker. “It’s a business proposition. I will pay you ten thousand dollars to kill a passenger on the Overland Limited. You have twenty minutes before it leaves the station.”
The bouncers had no objection to killing a man for ten thousand dollars. The Wrecker could have bought them for five. But they were practical men.
“How do we get him off the train?”
“He is a protector of the innocent,” said the Wrecker. “He will come to the rescue of someone in danger—a damsel in distress, for example. Would such be available?”
They looked across the alley. A red brakeman’s lantern hung in a window. “For two dollars, she’ll be available.”
THE OVERLAND LIMITED had come to a stop with a metallic shriek of brake shoes and the clank of couplings in the narrow pool of electric light beside the low brick Rawlins Depot. Most of her passengers were asleep in their beds. The few who were not stepped onto the platform to stretch their legs only to retreat from the stink of alkali springs mingled with coal smoke. The train crew changed engines while provisions, newspapers, and telegrams came aboard.
The porter, the former slave Jonathan, approached Isaac Bell in the deserted observation car, where the detective was contentedly sprawled on a couch reminiscing with Kenneth Bloom about their days in the circus.
“Telegram from Ogden, Mr. Bell.”
Bell tipped the old man a thousand dollars.
“That’s all right, Jonathan,??
? he said, laughing. “I got lucky tonight. The least I can do is share the wealth. Excuse me a moment, Ken.” He turned away to read the wire.
His face turned cold even as hot tears burned his eyes.
“You all right, Isaac?” asked Ken.
“No,” he choked out, and stepped onto the rear platform to try to fill his lungs with the acrid-smelling air. Though it was the middle of the night, a shunt engine was moving freight cars about the yards. Bloom followed him out.
“What happened?”
“Weber and Fields ...”
“Vaudeville? What are you talking about?”
All Isaac Bell could say was, “My old friends.” He crumpled the telegram in his fist, and whispered to himself, “Last thing I told them was to watch their step. I told them the Wrecker is poison.”
“Who?” asked Bloom.
Bell turned terrible eyes on him, and Bloom retreated hastily into the observation car.
Bell smoothed the telegraph flat and read it again. Their bodies had been found in an alley, two blocks from the office. They must have spotted the Wrecker and tailed him. It was hard to believe that a single man could have taken both veteran detectives down. But Wally had not been well. Maybe it had slowed him. As chief investigator, as the man responsible for the safety of his operatives, he should have replaced him—should have taken a vulnerable man out of danger.
Bell’s head felt like it would explode, it was so filled with pain and fury. For what felt like a very long time, he could not think. Then, gradually, it struck him that Wally and Mack had left him a dying legacy. The man they had tailed must have looked enough like the man in the lumberjack’s sketch to raise their suspicions. Otherwise, why would they have followed him into an alley? That he had turned on them and killed them proved that the sketch of the Wrecker was accurate, no matter how much it reminded people of a matinee idol.
The fresh locomotive hooted the go-ahead signal. Bell, gripping the platform handrail, tears streaming down his face, was so lost in his heartsick thoughts that he barely heard the whistle. When the train started moving, he grew vaguely aware that the crossties appeared to slide behind the observation car as it rolled out of the station and passed under the last electric light in the station yard.
A woman screamed.
Bell looked up. He saw her running down the tracks like she was trying to catch the accelerating train. Her white dress seemed to glow in the night, backlit as it was by the distance light. A man was lumbering after her, a hulking shape, who caught her in his arms and cut off her scream with a hand clapped over her mouth and forced her to the roadbed under the weight of his body.
Bell exploded into motion. He leaped over the railing and hit the ties running, pumping his legs as fast as he could. But the train was moving too fast, and he lost his balance. He tucked into a tight ball, shielded his face with his hands, hit the ties, and rolled between the rails as the train raced away at thirty miles an hour.
Bell rolled over a switch and stopped suddenly against a signal post. He jumped to his feet and ran to help the woman. The man had one hand around her throat and was ramming at her dress with the other.
“Let her go!” Bell shouted.
The man sprang to his feet.
“Get lost,” he told the woman.
“Pay me!” she demanded, thrusting out her hand. He slapped money in it. She cast Bell a blank look and walked back toward the distant depot. The man pretending to attack her turned on Bell, hurling punches like a prizefighter.
Staring in disbelief at the red light on the back of the Overland Limited disappearing into the night, Bell automatically ducked the man’s heavy blows and they passed harmlessly over his shoulder. Then a rock-hard fist slammed into the back of his head.
THE WRECKER WATCHED FROM the rear platform of the Overland Limited as the train picked up speed. The red light on the back of the observation car shone on the rails. Three stick figures growing smaller by the moment were silhouetted against the glow of the Rawlins rail yards. Two appeared stationary. The third bounced back and forth between them.
“Good-bye, Mr. Bell. Don’t forget to ‘hammer back.”’
18
THERE WERE TWO OF THEM.
The punch from behind flung Bell reeling at the first boxer, who gave him a shot to the jaw. The blow spun him like a top. The second boxer was waiting with a fist that knocked the detective clean off his feet.
Bell hit the ballast with his shoulder and rolled across splintery ties and banged into one of the rails. The cold steel made a pillow for his head, as he looked up, trying to focus on what was happening to him. Seconds ago, he had been standing on the rear platform of a first-class, all-stateroom train. Then he’d run to rescue a woman not needing rescuing. Now two bare-knuckle prizefighters were hurling punches at him.
They circled, blocking any thought of escape.
A quarter mile down the tracks, the busy depot switch engine stopped on a siding and cast the long glow of its headlamp down the rails, illuminating Bell and his attackers enough so that they could see one another but not enough, Bell knew, to be seen by anyone who might intervene.
In the light of the distant headlamp, he saw that they were big men, not as tall as him but each outweighing him handily. He could tell by their stance that they were professionals. Light on their feet, they knew how to throw a punch, knew where to hit the body to inflict the most damage, knew every dirty trick in the book. He could tell by their cold expressions to expect no mercy.
“On your feet, boyo. Stand up and take it like a man.”
They backed up to allow him room, so confident were they of their skills and the fact that they outnumbered him two to one.
Bell shook his head to clear it and gathered his legs under him. He was a trained boxer. He knew how to take a punch. He knew how to slip a punch. He knew how to throw punches in lightning combinations. But they outnumbered him, and they knew their business, too.
The first man poised to charge, eyes gleaming, fists held low in the brawling stance of bare-knuckle champion John L. Sullivan. The second man held his hands higher in the style of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, the only man who had ever knocked Sullivan out. He would be the one to look out for, Corbett being a scientific boxer as opposed to a fighter. This man’s left hand and shoulder were protecting his jaw, just like Corbett would. His right, guarding his stomach, was a sledgehammer held in reserve.
Bell stood up.
Corbett stepped back.
Sullivan charged.
Their strategy, Bell saw, was simple and would be brutally effective. While Sullivan attacked from the front, Corbett would stand by to slam Bell back whenever Bell staggered out of range. If Bell lasted long enough to tire out Sullivan, Corbett would take his place and start fresh.
Bell’s two-shot derringer was in his hat, which was hanging in his stateroom. His pistol was on the train too, steaming toward Cheyenne. He was dressed in the evening attire in which he had dined and played poker: tuxedo jacket, pleated dress shirt with diamond studs, silk bow tie. Only his footwear, polished black boots, largely concealed by his trouser legs, instead of patent leather dancing pumps, might have caused a discerning maitre d’ not to seat him at the best table in a restaurant.
Sullivan threw a roundhouse right. Bell ducked. The fist whizzed over his head, and Sullivan, thrown off balance, stumbled past. As he did, Bell hit him twice, once in his rock-hard stomach, which had absolutely no effect, then on the side of his face, which made him shout in anger.
Corbett laughed, harshly. “A scientific fighter,” he mocked. “Where’d you learn to box, sonny? Harvard?”
“Yale,” said Bell.
“Well, here’s one for Boola Boola.” Corbett feinted with his right and delivered a sharp left to Bell’s ribs. Even though Bell had managed to move away, it was like getting hit by a locomotive. He tumbled to the ground with a searing pain in his side. Sullivan ran over to kick him in the head. Bell twisted frantically, and the hobnailed boot a
imed at his face ripped the shoulder of his dinner jacket.
Two on one was no time for Marquess of Queensberry rules. He scooped a heavy piece of ballast from the rail bed as he rolled to his feet.
“Did I mention I also studied in Chicago?” he asked, “On the West Side.”
He threw the stone with all his strength into Corbett’s face.
Corbett cried out in pain and clutched his eye. Bell had expected to stagger him, if not take him right out of the fight. But Corbett was very fast. He had ducked quickly enough to dodge the stone’s full force. He lowered his hand from his eye, wiped the blood on the front of his shirt, and closed his hand into a fist again.
“That’ll cost you, college. There’s quick ways to die and slow ways to die, and you just earned a slow way.”
Corbett circled, one fist high, the other low, one eye dark, the other glaring malevolently. He threw several jabs—four, five, six—contrived to calculate, by Bell’s reactions, just how good he was and where his weaknesses lay. Suddenly, he came at Bell with a quick one-two, a left and a right, designed to soften him for a heavier blow.
Bell slipped both punches. But Sullivan charged from the side and landed a hard fist across Bell’s mouth that knocked him down again.
Bell tasted salt in his mouth. He sat up, shaking his head. Blood ran down his face, over his lips. The switch engine light gleamed on his teeth.
“He’s smiling,” Sullivan said to Corbett. “Is he loco?”
“Punch-drunk. I hit him harder than I thought.”
“Hey, college, what’s the joke?”
“Get in there, finish him off.”
“Then what?”
“Leave him on the track. It’ll look like a train killed him.”
Bell’s smile grew wider.
A bloody nose at last, he thought. Wally and Mack, old friends, I must be closer to catching the Wrecker than I know.
The Wrecker had gotten on at Ogden after all. He had laid low, waiting for his chance, while Bell ate dinner, played cards, and hosted a victory party in the observation car. Then the Wrecker had jumped off at Rawlins to hire these two to kill him.