Dead Time

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Texas.

  The training, once they had left Natchitoches, had been in the southeastern part of Texas, though. Swampy. Ticky. Humid. Snaky. More bugs than a man ought to see in his life. Not much different from Natchitoches, Louisiana. They had practiced for hours and for days and weeks on an abandoned railroad track in the thick forests, and the instructors had warned them.

  “This won’t be the same country where you’ll bring glory to your first mission. Remember that. But it doesn’t matter where you are as long as you do as you’ve been trained. Fail? Then you’ll be in hell.”

  He thought about his conversation with Christina Whitney just before all the training, all the investigations, everything was all but over and Fallon was about to take that fateful trip to The Walls.

  “Do you ever . . . ?” Fallon had paused. Christina looked up from her plate of stewed vegetables and roasted beef. “. . . Getting too involved?”

  Her head tilted, and her eyes sparkled, and Fallon blushed. “What I mean . . . ” he had started, and she laughed. It was a musical laugh, and her face radiated from the comedy. To Fallon’s surprise, he laughed a little, too, and the blush faded, and his head shook. Yet he realized he also felt something, an attraction, or at least a feeling of comfort. Christina Whitney was an operative for the American Detective Agency, but she was also a woman, a good-looking, young woman, sure of herself, and nobody to trifle with. Yet Fallon had started feeling at ease when he was around her, and Fallon had not had any feeling like that since he had first been arrested a billion years ago for a crime he had not committed.

  “I know what you mean,” she said, and pushed the plate away. She reached for the cup of hot tea, lifted it off the table, but not to her lips. She stared at the steam rising over the lip.

  “Damn Shakespeare,” she said after a long while.

  “How’s that?” Fallon asked.

  She sipped tea, set the cup back onto the saucer, and shrugged. “A thousand years ago, I was acting in a troupe in Hartford, Connecticut, home to Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe.” She shook her head, and brushed the hair back behind her shoulders. “The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.”

  Fallon grinned. “You were Juliet.”

  She laughed. “No. And I wasn’t Romeo, either, silly. I had the distinction of playing Capulet’s wife.” She saw the blank expression on Fallon’s face. “Juliet’s mother.” She affected an English accent, and her expression changed instantly. “‘Hold, take these keys, and fetch more spices, Nurse. ’”

  Fallon offered a shrug of defeat.

  Christina laughed. “Two weeks later, the Traveling Thespians of Hartford brought our performance to Washington City. After that show, which attracted all of fifteen or maybe sixteen of the finest theater patrons in our nation’s capital, someone knocked on the door to my room.” Her head shook. “It was Sean MacGregor.” She let out a little sigh. “I played Juliet’s mother all too well. Mr. MacGregor said I had a higher calling than playing in second-rate theaters for an abysmal director.”

  She sipped tea.

  “That’s how you got into the detective business.”

  “There.” She gave him a wicked grin. “You are a detective.” The expression changed, and she reached out and took his hand. “I’m sorry, Harry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  Yet the touch of her hand left Fallon’s heart racing. He swallowed and tried to still those feelings that had not taken control of him in years.

  “Call me Hank,” he told her.

  They took in a show that night in some slum of a theater called the Palacio. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Fallon couldn’t make out most of what was being said, but Christina pointed out the flaws of the actors and actresses, which were many, and what they did right. Later, as they sat on the balcony of the hotel, Christina sipping a mint julep and Fallon nursing a cup of weak coffee, she said, “You asked me a question earlier tonight and I didn’t answer you.”

  Fallon set his cup down. “I figured you figured it wasn’t any of my business.”

  “Don’t figure,” she told him. “Get your answer.”

  “All right. Consider it asked again.”

  “It’s a judgment call,” she told him. “I’m paid, you’re paid, to solve a crime, to break a case. You do whatever’s necessary. And you have to ask yourself a question. No, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions: Do I have a way out? Is this going to get me killed? If it gets me killed, is the operation still salvageable? The operation comes first. So, yes, I do worry about getting too involved.” She looked up at him, and their eyes locked.

  “I’m not worried now, Hank.”

  Fallon could not look away. They were talking about something totally different now.

  But that’s when the waiter came over and asked if they would like to pay their bill or was there anything else that he could do for them.

  Which Fallon interpreted as: We want to go home, so pay up, and get out.

  He had walked her to the room she had on the third floor of the flea-bitten hotel—on the other side of town and a long way from Washington City and her long-ago career as an actress in New England and Washington and other strongholds of culture and civilization, even if she had been playing in second-rate theatrical troupes. She had opened the door, pushed it open, and stared at him.

  Fallon felt his heart pounding, and he had utterly no clue what was going on.

  “You’re too good a man to be working for a snake like Sean MacGregor,” Christina had told him.

  “You’re too good an actress . . .” he had started.

  “No, I’m not.” She shook her head. “Maybe I am. But maybe this is my calling.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “I know,” she told him, and her eyes softened and Fallon could have sworn he saw tears welling. “I know all about you. But here’s what you have to remember, Harry. You know, I like Harry better than Hank. You look like a Harry.” She drew in a breath, let it out, and said, “This operation is the most important case MacGregor has ever had. He doesn’t deserve it. If the Texas politicians had any sense they’d have the Pinkertons working this, but that’s Texas for you. It sounds corny, Harry, but there’s truth in this. And it scares the living hell out of me. But our country is depending on us. We can’t let America down.”

  She had slipped inside her room, blew Fallon a kiss, and closed the door. The bolt had clicked, and Fallon had wished he had been drinking mint juleps and hot tea and not coffee as he found the stairs, walked down to his own floor, and opened the room he was sharing with a snoring Aaron Holderman.

  The image of Christina Whitney faded. But Fallon kept remembering her words:

  “Do I have a way out?”

  Yeah, he thought. He could get up and run for his life. He could say to hell with Sean MacGregor. But, no, he understood that wasn’t acceptable. There was no way out, not without jeopardizing the operation.

  “Is this going to get me killed?”

  Silently, a mirthless laugh came out of his throat. Most likely, he told himself. Yet that didn’t matter. What concerned him was how many innocent lives might be lost on this warm, moonless night.

  “If it gets me killed, is the operation still salvageable?”

  The answer to that one might have been what kept Fallon lying in the grass and briars next to the railroad tracks in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere. If he died taking part in this crazy train robbery, yeah, the operation would still be ongoing. Maybe Christina Whitney and even that idiot Aaron Holderman could reap rewards for the American Detective Agency. Or maybe Colonel Justice might see his insane dream come true, and a new flag rise over Texas and other states of the old Confederacy.

  “The operation comes first.”

  Fallon heard the rumbling of an approaching train.

  And he remembered, and pictured, Christina Whitney again.

  He was getting on the stagecoach that would take him to The Walls, where he would bec
ome Harry Alexander, and just before the stage pulled into the dusty station in the middle of nowhere, Christina had rushed up to him and grabbed his hand.

  “Play your part,” she had whispered. “Be Harry Alexander. But the most important thing you need to remember is to be true to yourself. Do what you think is right. Do anything you can to stay alive.” She started to pull away, seemingly embarrassed by her loss of control, but after a moment, she merely smiled, came up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. “Good luck,” she had told him, then kissed his cheek again, and, lifting the hems of her skirt, she had hurried back inside the station.

  That memory seemed to restore his shaking confidence. Something else made his resolve hardened. He needed to stay alive, to kill the lowdown rats who had, not ruined his life—for that he could accept—but had killed a woman and a little girl who had never harmed anyone. The image of Chris Ehrlander came into his vision, then that of the demented Colonel Justice. He even pictured that bastard Sean MacGregor and his blackest of hearts.

  He was about to take part in the biggest robbery the state of Texas had ever seen. All in the name of justice. And Fallon did not have a clue as to who would be helping him on this warm, dark night.

  Drawing a deep breath, Fallon remembered everything he had been trained to do. Trained by men hired by Colonel Justice, not Judge Isaac Parker, not General Robert E. Lee. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but his last moment of getting out of this insane mission had passed. Fallon was in it now.

  To the hilt.

  The train grinded to a stop at the watering station in the middle of nowhere, the sparks from the locking iron wheels lighting up the sky just inches above Fallon’s head. The wheels screeched, and the coaches ground into a slow, painful stop.

  They had covered a lot of ground from their training grounds in what was likely north and east of Houston, but they had moved at night, in coaches with the canvas windows drawn tight. Fallon figured they had started out west and turned south at some point. When the coach stopped and they got out to stretch their legs, they were told to keep their mouths shut, do their business, and don’t ask anything.

  One man didn’t. At the third stop, he asked the petite Spanish lady bringing him coffee, “What’s this place called, señora?”

  That’s when Merle came up to him and shoved a bowie knife into the man’s back, twisting the blade, pulling it out, and ramming the giant bowie between the screaming woman’s breasts.

  The driver shot the station boss as he ran from the mules he was hitching. Then he killed the dog. The boy who had been helping was shot as he tried to leap over the top post of the round pen.

  “Anybody else feels like forgetting the rules of this man’s army, now’s the time to speak up,” Merle said. “Speak up . . . and die. Cole!”

  A grizzled volunteer stepped forward.

  “Yeah?” No yes, no sir. The man looked tough.

  “Now you know why you trained for two jobs, Hansen. You take over for Bronson. Savvy?”

  “You bet.”

  Cole Hansen. Fallon remembered the name. The Texas hard case. The one who had been sentenced to a ten-year term at The Walls. Who had died of pneumonia in Huntsville—but whom a soldier had recognized taking part in the robbery of an army caravan on the way to Fort Clark four days after he was dead. Fallon hadn’t believed it when he had first heard the story. But now . . .

  “But first, torch the place,” Merle ordered Hansen and the others. “Run off the stock. Make it look like Comanches are on the prod again.” Merle cackled. “Twenty years after them bucks taken to the rez. That’ll put the fear of God in this country. Move. Damn it. Move. This operation runs like clockwork.”

  * * *

  “Clockwork,” Colonel Justice had told them. “But not like that joke goes about the man with the fifty-cent watch who’s always busy. Busy because when he’s not checking the time, he’s winding his watch. Clockwork. This is a Swiss regulator, eighteen karats, fine-tuned. Do your job. For the glory of Texas, Louisiana, and the Southern Confederacy.”

  Men stepped out of the train. Fallon heard their shouts, their demands, farts, and curses. The arm from the water tank was lowered, and water began spraying, hissing, and more noise sounded from the train just a few feet from Fallon.

  All this while Fallon counted backward from seventy-nine.

  Seventy-nine. Not one more, not two less. Seventy-nine.

  Seventy-nine-one-thousand . . . seventy-eight-one-thousand. . . seventy-seven-one-thousand . . .

  He did not think how many nights had someone watched from the distance with a pocket watch and a notepad and timed this stop. He thought of nothing but numbers.

  Thirty-two-one-thousand . . . thirty-one-one-thousand. . . thirty-one-thousand . . . twenty-nine-one thousand . . .

  He wet his lips. The arm from the water tank was being raised.

  He wondered if Justice had chosen this night because of the new moon. There was no light. Someone was urinating before getting back aboard the train. Another had struck a match. Fallon was aware just how heightened his hearing had become.

  Seven-one-thousand . . . six-one-thousand . . .

  The train hissed. The wheels screeched. The conductor waved his lantern and climbed into the back of the caboose.

  Two-one-thousand . . .

  The train began to roll forward.

  Fallon rolled underneath the tracks, reached up, and grabbed the bar that ran along the undercarriage. His feet lifted as the train began to roll, and he braced his boots against a crossbar.

  Insanity. Riding under a train for a quarter of a mile. That wasn’t far, for a man riding in the smoking car, or on a horse, or on one of those popular velocipedes everyone was calling bicycles these days. But riding in the middle of a train, inches above the speeding tracks . . . well, that was totally different.

  One slip, and Fallon could be cut in half, his entrails spreading across the crossties and iron rails to be feasted upon by buzzards and coyotes in the days to come.

  The train whistle blew.

  Fallon held on for dear life.

  Then his left hand slipped off the iron bar.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The train’s wheels began grinding again, sending sparks and earsplitting noise as Fallon’s pores let out water that felt like gallons.

  Fallon’s hand bounced off gravel and the wood of a few crossties as the train ground to a halt at the trellis over some river that Justice and his instructors had never named.

  “It’s a river,” the Colonel had said in his thick drawl and repulsive laugh. “That’s all y’all need to know.”

  The hand came up, grabbed at the bar, missed, and fell back but Fallon somehow managed to stop from hitting the speeding ground beneath him.

  Which did not mitigate the pain shooting from his knuckles, fingers, back of his hand, and even to his wrist. He didn’t think any bones had been broken. The gloves he wore had helped. But he also felt blood seeping into the deerskin gloves. And the pain raced from his banged-up fingers all the way to his elbow.

  Yet he still managed to keep hold of his life support. He did not lose his grip and fall beneath the passing iron wheels.

  He wondered if others had lost their hold, and their guts, and were lying hundreds of yards down the tracks. If someone had slipped, his screams would have been drowned out by that clicking sound of wheels on rails.

  Now the train began to crawl, and Fallon let his boots drop. The heels bounced off the stones, dust, and iron-hard wood, and just before the Baldwin engine let out a belch of steam and stopped, Fallon had dropped to the ground.

  He rolled to his right, over the rails, and down the embankment. Immediately, he sat up in the blackness of night.

  Making out the lights from the locomotive, Fallon realized everything was working just as Colonel Justice had planned. Above hissing steam and groaning metal, he could hear the conductor on the other side of the tracks barking out orders. Fallon looked toward the front of th
e engine.

  The train’s cargo was so heavy it took two engines to pull the coaches, tinder, and caboose. But here, across this narrow but deep gorge, the bridge could not support the weight of two Baldwin engines. So the first engine had been uncoupled and in a few minutes would be crossing the seventy-six-yard expanse alone. Then the next engine would pull the tinder, cars, and caboose across the trellis to be rehitched to the lead locomotive.

  Usually.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight belonged to Colonel Justice and his well-trained soldiers of the South.

  * * *

  “We do not know exactly what Justice might have planned,” Texas Attorney General Malcolm Maxwell had said. “But the key to stopping him, if these rumors are true, means that we must cut off the head of the snake.”

  “You mean . . . kill Justice?” Dan MacGregor had exclaimed.

  “I mean destroy his camp,” Maxwell had stated. “Wherever it is.”

  Stopping this train heist would not accomplish anything, Fallon understood. So he had to remain Harry Alexander. He had to commit a crime.

  As he came to his feet and hurried to the siding of the coach, Fallon suddenly felt an unnatural urge to laugh. Not that anything going on on this dark night was funny, for, indeed, Harry Fallon could soon be dead, but it suddenly struck Fallon. He had been sentenced to prison for a robbery he had never done. Now he was about to rob a train—as an operative for a national detective agency.

  His banged-up left hand gripped the iron railing, then his right, and he pulled himself onto the platform and lowered himself in the shadows as the conductor passed along the other side of the tracks.