On the Wrong Track (28 page)

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Authors: Steve Hockensmith

BOOK: On the Wrong Track
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“I still haven’t seen any proof that Kip’s mixed up in anything,” the conductor said.
“You better pray you
don’t
see any proof the next few minutes,” I shot back. “Cuz till we find the lady—”
“Take cover,”
Lockhart snapped. He pressed himself against the baggage car and waved for us to do the same.
After a few seconds of fumbling, we got ourselves lined up one-two-three-four-five along the train.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Lockhart.
“The express car door,” he said. “It’s open.”
I leaned out around him and took a look. The door couldn’t have been ajar more than a crack: You couldn’t see the opening from where we were at all. What you
could
see was a thin, dark line running from the door down to the ground—a trickle of crimson liquid.
It was like taking a pair of spurs to the side. I bolted without even thinking about it.
“Otto, wait!” my brother shouted, but there was no pulling the reins on me. Seconds later I was pushing the express car side door wide, ready to blast Kip to hell as he stood giggling over Miss Caveo’s lifeless body.
Yet all I found was poor Milford Morrison, loyal Wells Fargo man, facedown in a puddle of his own blood. He’d been gagged with his vest, his hands tied behind his back with twine knotted so tight his fingers had turned purple. His head was a gore-splattered tureen, the back open bowl-style to offer a full serving of shattered bone and pulpy meat.
“It’s Morrison,” I told Old Red, who was limping after me with Samuel serving as his new crutch. “Got his brains beat out.”
I leaned into the car (careful to avoid smearing myself with blood) and saw a desk, slots for sorting letters and packages, a safe, and an unmade cot in the corner. What I didn’t see—and Morrison could have used, apparently—was a broom: The floor was covered with a layer of dust so thick the messenger had left tracks all around the car like footprints in the snow.
“No sign of Kip,” I reported. “Other than the body, I mean.”
“Still fresh,” Lockhart said coolly as he stepped up beside me. “Ain’t been dead more than fifteen minutes.”
“Morrison … dead?” Wiltrout muttered hoarsely. He stayed rooted in place even as the rest of us gathered by the express car, and I knew for sure then that all his bullying was just paint slapped over the yellow streak down his back.
“It don’t make sense,” Samuel said. “Why would the kid kill Morrison?”
“I sure would like to ask the little bastard,” I said, turning away from the car. “He’s gotta be around …”
My words trailed off as I caught sight of my brother. His eyes were as big and round as a couple fried eggs—and not because he was looking at Morrison’s cracked-eggshell skull.
Gustav was staring at the man’s
hands
.
“Goddamn my stupidity,” he whispered.
He leaned forward for a peep inside the car, and some terrible realization drained what little remained of the color in his face. His next words were shouts directed at no one in particular.
“The engineer!
Why ain’t we seen the engineer?
”
Lockhart took a few quick steps away from the express car, angling for a better look at the locomotive.
“You don’t think the kid’s crazy enough to try—?” he started to say.
“Stop!” a voice cried out.
Up ahead, a dark shape dropped from the engine cab. It was a husky man in overalls, covered in soot—the train’s replacement fireman. The second he hit the ground, he started jogging toward us, his hands in the air.
“Stay back!” he said, his voice quivery with fear. “Stay back or I’m dead!”
Beyond him, another figure appeared, leaning out of the cab. He had a gun in his hand and a grin on his face.
“And he ain’t the only one!” Kip called to us, and he leveled his iron and pulled the trigger.
Whether he was aiming at the fireman’s back or our fronts, I don’t know. But it was Samuel he hit, sending the porter spinning into my
brother with an ugly splotch of red on his snow-white jacket. They fell together, landing side by side on the rocky sod.
The rest of us hit the dirt, too, diving for cover just as the engine grunted and heaved forward.
The Pacific Express was leaving without us.
BURL LOCKHART’S DAY
Or, The Train Falls Apart As the Last Pieces of the Puzzle Come Together
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Everyone was bellowing something
—curses, questions, commands, screams—and then it was all drowned out by another blast of gunfire.
“—stealing the express car and the baggage car!” Wiltrout was yelling when I could hear something as puny as words again. “They’re leaving the sleepers!”
I looked back at the Pullmans and saw that Wiltrout was right—they weren’t going anywhere. The locomotive was pulling away with just the tender and the express and baggage cars in tow.
“Goddammit!” Lockhart roared. “While we were playin’ hide-and-seek, that sneaky little shit was uncouplin’ the passenger cars!”
“
Vaya con Dios,
assholes!” Kip called from his perch on the engine cab, and he punctuated his farewell with yet another potshot at us.
We all buried our faces in the grass again. I peeked up just as the baggage car rolled past me.
I jumped up and set after it.
“Otto, wait,” I heard my brother say. “It ain’t—!” And then his
words were blotted out by the ear-pounding clatter of the car I was chasing.
There was no time to turn back and ask him to repeat himself. The kid’s wild lead slinging had actually given me a chance—but it wouldn’t last long. Shooting off a gun kicks up a considerable cloud of scorched powder, and that (combined with the black puffs blowing back from the smokestack) would hide me as I made my dash for the train. Maybe.
By the time I drew up next to the door, the smoke was already starting to clear. I had to jump—
quick
—or I’d soon run headlong into a bullet.
And then a hand was there, reaching down from above like it belonged to God Himself. It was bony and brittle looking, yet surprisingly steely when I grabbed hold and made my leap. I felt a jerk on my arm, and then my knees were settling on wood and the hand let go.
“Thanks … Mr. Lockhart,” I wheezed, gasping for breath on all fours like a winded dog. “I didn’t … even know you’d … made it.”
“I might be stewed half the time and old
all
the time, but I ain’t forgotten how to run just yet,” the Pinkerton said. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them the way some fellows do before they sit down to a steak dinner. “Now—two grown men oughta be more than a match for one runty pup. The kid’ll be distracted, what with the engineer and the lady to keep an eye on. So our only problem’s gonna be gettin’ up there to him.”
“And makin’ sure the hostages don’t get hurt,” I added.
“Yeah, that, too,” Lockhart said dismissively, as if hostages were a niggling detail he expected to take care of itself. “So … you wanna see how a bandit stopped a train back in ol’ Burl Lockhart’s day?”
I was dimly aware of some reason to pause, to ponder. But with my heart pounding and the car rocking and the wind ruffling my hair with its ghostly cold fingers—and, most of all, with Miss Caveo still in jeopardy, so far as I knew—I wasn’t going to slow down and deduce it through. Momentum isn’t just for trains: People get carried along by it, too.
“Mr. Lockhart, seems to me this
is
your day,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
Plan,
it turned out, would be a charitable description for the course of action Lockhart proposed.
Suicidal stunt
hits closer to the mark. Lockhart had his own phrase for it:
the blind-baggage hop.
An old long-rider trick, he said, was to hitch a ride in the blind baggage—the space between the tender and the express car—then climb over the coal and pull a gun on the engine crew. Of course, I pointed out that we weren’t
in
the blind baggage, but Lockhart thought that was easy enough to fix. We’d just climb atop the baggage car, jump to the express car, and drop down into the tender from there.
It was crazy, but there was a strong argument in its favor: It was our only choice.
The best way to get onto the roof was to squeeze out one of the small windows toward the back of the car, then use the sill as a stepladder to clamber up. I went first, being the taller of the two of us and hence the more likely to reach the roof.
Just as I came to the most dangerous part of my climb—the moment when I had to draw a foot up and actually try to stand in the windowsill—I felt a sudden, unexpected pressure on my legs.
Lockhart had grabbed hold of me by the shins.
The old man could tip me over as easy as shaking out a sheet, and my mind raced back to Gustav’s shout as I’d sprinted after the train. “It ain’t—!” were the last words I’d heard. Was this what he’d been trying to warn me about?
It ain’t a good idea to let Lockhart talk you into squirmin’ through a window—cuz he’ll shove you out and splatter what little brains you got!
I’d like to say it was coolheaded, Holmes-style logic that got me through. It was really just panic. In a frenzy of fear, I kicked away Lockhart’s hands, got my heels on the sill, and shoved myself upward. A stovepipe was sticking through the roof nearby, and I grabbed hold of it and swung myself up with all my might.
I made it. I lay there a moment, facedown, letting myself breath a
deep sigh of relief. I almost laughed, thinking how I’d spooked. Lockhart had been trying to steady me, that’s all. Why would he help me onto the train only to turn around and hurl me off?
I couldn’t let go of my unease, though. My brother
had
been trying to warn me about something, I could feel it. But I couldn’t
think
it—not lying there spread-eagled on top of a speeding train.
Lockhart was surprisingly easy to haul up: The lean old man was so light it felt like he’d blow away in the wind if he didn’t have Aunt Pauline to anchor him. Once he was up top, we crept forward with slow, cautious steps, our guns drawn. The whole train had taken on a tilt again, the angle growing steadily steeper as the tracks edged closer to a sheer drop-off to our left. Before long, the incline was so sharp it seemed like we could slide all the way to the cowcatcher like kids sledding down a snow-covered hill.
But there were still jumps to make—from the baggage car to the express car, then from there to the tender. Lockhart went first, soaring over to the express car as graceful as an eagle in flight … before landing with all the grace of a moose dropped from a hot-air balloon. He tripped, stumbled, and went rolling toward the edge of the roof. Before I knew it, my hold on his gunbelt was the only thing keeping him from spinning over the side—I’d made the jump without even thinking about it.
“Thanks, Big Red,” Lockhart said as I helped him from a sprawl back into a crouch. “It would have been mighty disappointin’ to go and get myself killed before I could go and get myself killed.”
He turned toward the front of the train. Up ahead, the smokestack spewed out clouds of black that blew back fast into our faces. Through the smoke, I could just barely make out the tracks as they curved into a long spiral that clung to the mountainside like the stripe running down a barber’s pole.
“Well, this is it,” Lockhart said. “Can’t dawdle now—not with a snowshed comin’ along any minute to scrape us offa here. So let’s move Indian-style, single file. Most likely Kip won’t be lookin’ for us, but just in case, we don’t want both our heads poked up like a couple tin cans on a fence.”
I nodded and turned to go, taking point, but Lockhart reached out and grabbed my arm. When I looked back at him, he brought up Aunt Pauline and gave her a little shake.
“Ladies first.”
“You sure?”
The old Pinkerton grinned, flashing me gap-spaced rows of crooked teeth as gray as headstones.
“Son … ol’ Burl Lockhart was
born
sure.”
He crept away in a bent-backed stoop. As I waddled after him, I tried to picture what he’d see when he reached the end of the express car. Aside from a little smoke in his eyes, he should have a good view down into the tender and engine cab.
Where would the kid be? How would he have his hostages lined up? Could he keep an eye on them while watching out for the likes of us?
I figured I knew the answer to that last question: He sure as hell could. After all, he’d managed to kill Morrison, uncouple the passenger cars, and get a gun on the engine crew, all while dragging Miss Caveo around as his prisoner. Anyone who could do all that by himself could do just about anything.
Or could he?
I’d spent the last few minutes ducking, running, jumping, climbing,
reacting
. Everything but thinking. And now that I paused to let a thought linger, I reacted again—by stopping cold, dread running down my spine like a trickle of ice water.
“Mr. Lockhart,
wait,
” I whispered.
I don’t even know if he heard me. He’d already reached the edge of the car and was poking his head up for a look at Kip … who was free to just stand there waiting for him, because he didn’t have to keep watch on his prisoners at all.
“Shit! There he is! Up there!” I heard Kip screech, and I knew the rest of it now—the warning my brother had given me one second too late.
It ain’t just Kip
.
He’s got help
.

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