Dead Time

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  He tried to remember the time on the clock when he had started pitching the money into the dark night. If the train was making twenty miles an hour, they’d cover a mile in about three minutes or so.

  He didn’t trust Holderman, but Holderman had slipped him that derringer that had come in mighty handy when those thugs ambushed the burial party at Peckerwood Hill. Holderman did seem incredibly loyal to Sean MacGregor, another greedy, untrustworthy villain. Fallon didn’t know how much money he had tossed off the train, but banks, companies expecting payrolls, remittance men expecting money from abroad, and other assorted individuals, some of them hardworking and many of them honest, would want a chance at getting that loot back.

  “Seven miles,” he whispered, “maybe six. No more than eight.” He made it seem harder to load the case of Colt revolvers atop a box of rifles. “That’s when it started. Last sack was dropped maybe a mile, could be two. That’s the last drop.”

  “How many sacks?” Holderman asked.

  They moved back to the end of the wagon to take one more load.

  Fallon laughed. “I honestly don’t have a clue.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When the wagons were pointed south on the other side of the tracks, General Justice ordered that the locomotive be fired up and sent to Laredo with a full throttle. “In case,” Justice said with a laugh, “they have somehow received word and are sending a posse on the next eastbound.”

  Fallon was about to climb into the seat of the wagon hauling the Gatling guns when Justice called out his name. Fallon dropped back to the ground and saw that General Justice had moved off the covered wagon and into an expensive-looking phaeton, pulled by a matched set of fine horses. The horses, to no surprise, were gray.

  “You’ll do me the honor of riding with me, suh,” Justice called out, and Fallon found his hat and limped over to the buggy.

  “I’ll drive,” the lunatic said with a glint in his eye. “I cannot say that you have earned my trust to hand you a whip.”

  “I’d prefer that you drive, too,” Fallon said as he walked around the black phaeton and climbed into the passenger’s side. “Since you know where we’re bound, General.”

  After leaning back into the comfortable leather seat, Fallon swallowed and glanced at the backseat. Some traveling cases, maps, books, and a case of brandy. On Justice’s lap lay a LeMat revolver, one of those nine-shot pistols that, by adjusting the striking mechanism, could also fire a large shotgun bore. A handful of cavalry officers had favored that weapon during the war, but Fallon had rarely come across one during his career as a deputy federal marshal in the Indian Nations.

  “Move out!” Justice ordered. “Mr. Merle. Lead the way.”

  Merle pulled out ahead, leading a posse of cavalrymen—or at least outlaws in the formation of a cavalry unit. A few outriders took off ahead, and the wagons fell into a line behind Justice’s buggy. Fallon noticed the last of the horse soldiers following the last wagon, and each wagon had at least four armed guards—three in the back and one next to the driver.

  But other wagons, loaded with sandstone, moved off toward Laredo, or north, and east. So did several horsemen.

  “A diversion,” Justice said with a slight chuckle. “The lawmen leading the posse will be confused. They’ll have to send some of its posse in the other three directions. Brilliant strategy on my part, don’t you think?”

  Fallon nodded his approval. Brilliant? Not quite. With the Mexican border maybe a mile from the railroad tracks, no lawman in his right mind would think the bandits would flee anywhere but the Rio Grande— especially with a set of tracks—more wagons, more horses—pointed south. Fallon wondered if any of Justice’s junior officers had argued with his plan. He doubted it. On the other hand, two men on each wagon, five riders on horseback with each party, that was twenty-one men Justice didn’t have with him.

  Reduces the odds for me, Fallon thought, and grinned, but it did not last for long.

  “What are you thinking?” Justice asked.

  “That the law could catch those men,” Fallon lied. His mind was preoccupied with the thought about the wagons and riders riding east.

  “They won’t talk,” Justice said. “Word has gotten around about what happens to men who talk. You were there. Have you forgotten?”

  The image of the woman being stabbed through her heart sickened Fallon.

  “But they could be held in jail,” Fallon said.

  “Habeas corpus, my friend,” Justice said.

  “Which often gets ignored by frontier lawmen,” Fallon said. “I have firsthand experience on that matter, General.” Of course, Fallon’s experience came from being a deputy marshal and not an outlaw.

  “I am not worried. What’s twenty men to me?”

  Fallon did a quick count of heads. No, he decided. Justice wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack the great state of Texas and the sovereign ground of the United States of America with a force this size. There had to be more, many more, soldiers waiting for them on the other side of the Rio Grande. Maybe Justice was sacrificing those twenty-one. Or maybe they were off to murder more men like Malcolm Maxwell.

  But that patrol riding along the rails to the east presented a big problem to Fallon’s future. In about a mile or so, they’d undoubtedly come across the last bags of money Fallon had pitched out of the express car. Which they might keep for themselves, or they might tell their commander. They could miss it, but if they did not turn north or south, they’d soon discover more money—and eventually, by now, the vultures would be circling over some dead men.

  “How’s your head?” General Justice had to shout out over the noise of hooves, wheels, and heavy cargo traveling across the hard, sunbaked sandstone.

  “It hurts,” Fallon said.

  “Then reach behind me and open one of those bottles.”

  Fallon obeyed, and read the label: COURVOISIER & CURLIER FRÈRES. It was a cognac, and the vintage was 1851. The bottle, and the brandy inside, were older than Harry Fallon.

  “Open it,” the General ordered.

  “I don’t drink,” Fallon reminded him.

  “But I do,” the man said in that thick Southern drawl. “You’ll find a corkscrew in the kit at your feet.”

  “Glasses?” Fallon asked after he had the bottle opened.

  “There’s no manservant to wash the dishes, my boy,” Justice said, pushed the reins into his left hand, and held out his right.

  Fallon handed him the bottle and watched the madman gulp down a few swallows. Then Justice offered Fallon a swig.

  “No thanks,” Fallon said, and remembered to add: “General.”

  Fallon studied the country. Flat. Hot. He saw several birds, but this was spring, practically summer. Doves and warblers he recognized. A few others, he had never seen the likes of before. The jays down here were green, not blue. It was too hot by then to see many four-legged critters, though Fallon caught glimpses of a few jackrabbits in the shade trees. Not that there were many trees here, for this would be what old cowhands had called the Texas brush country. Prickly pear lined the sides of the road, but what Fallon saw mostly were thornscrub, some mesquite, and soap brush. Stuff that would stick you if you weren’t careful.

  “That’s a shame about Drexel,” Justice said.

  Trying to trip me up, Fallon figured, catch me in a lie. Give himself a reason to empty the canister in that shotgun barrel on his pistol.

  “I’ll meet up with him one of these days if I’m lucky,” Fallon said without looking at Justice. “And he won’t be so lucky.”

  “That was a lot of money,” Justice said.

  Fallon shrugged. “Two bucks is a lot of money to me, General.”

  Justice again offered the bottle of old cognac to Fallon, who shook his head. Smiling, the cotton and sugarcane king again took a swing and set the bottle between his legs, near the big pistol, and used both hands now on the reins.

  “What did you think of Drexel?”

  Fallon shrugged.
“I wasn’t inside The Walls to learn enough about him, other than he was a low-down swine.”

  “You would not trust him?”

  Now it was Fallon’s turn to smile. “He was a guard, General. I was a convict.”

  “And Major Hansen?”

  “I never met him, sir.”

  “How about Ryker?”

  Fallon shrugged. “We didn’t see eye to eye.”

  “Yes. From what I understand, you two clashed the day you got to prison.”

  Now Fallon felt uncomfortable, but he hid those emotions. Ryker had been out of The Walls, allegedly transferred to the prison in Rusk, but had escaped. Fallon knew how much work Justice put into training his men, and Ryker had been trained well enough to murder Malcolm Maxwell in the center of the capital city of Texas, and get away. Get away when another employee of Justice had also been trained and sent to Austin to kill the assassins after they had murdered their target. But how much had Ryker told Justice about Fallon? Anything?

  “We got into a tussle,” Fallon said.

  “Over any particular reason?”

  Fallon shrugged. “I never got a chance to ask him. Drexel put me in the sweatbox right after the fight.”

  The General grabbed the whip and lashed out above the far-side gray horse’s ear. The buggy picked up a bit of speed and turned off the road.

  “But I still used Ryker, Mr. Alexander,” Justice said. “I figured if he proved himself good enough to escape the situation in Austin—and make it back to where he had been instructed to return—well, then maybe he was a man to be trusted after all.”

  Fallon smiled. “And where did that get you, General?”

  He saw the face pale, the eyes flame in anger, and Justice’s knuckles turn white as his hand gripped the handle of the whip tightly. But Justice made no other move, no comment, and the LeMat still bounced along his lap, but somehow never clanged against the neck of the bottle of 1851 cognac. The buggy dipped between more mesquite, and Fallon saw the murky waters of the Rio Grande. He leaned back in the seat.

  “You are impressed, Mr. Alexander,” Justice said as the grin returned and his composure moved from anger to pleasure.

  “This is what they called a pontoon bridge,” Fallon guessed. “Isn’t that what it is, General?” It had taken him a moment to recover and remember to add the rank the crazy leader appreciated. “I heard some men talk about using them in the war.”

  “Indeed,” Justice said. “Cumberland pontoons, as they were called, helped those damned Yankees win the war. Rosecrans used them first, and then General Thomas, commanding the Army of the Cumberland, took Rosecrans’s idea and improved on it. Sherman, that fire-crazy demon, laid them across the Etowah River and marched to the sea, the devil.

  “But this is not a Yankee invention, suh. The first pontoon bridge dates to the eleventh century B.C., in China. If you were to read Herodotus, you would know that the Greeks used them, as did the Persians. And now they will allow the New Confederate Army for Justice to escape.”

  Men lined both sides of the banks, and the wooden bridge looked anything but steady.

  “Don’t fear you will drown, Mr. Alexander,” Justice said. “They are lightweight, but the Yankees designed a fine bridge. Strong enough to support artillery pulled by horses and wagons loaded for a four-month winter campaign. They are easy to build, easy to transport, and get us across the river safely and in a timely manner.”

  The men were saluting as the horses touched the wooden bridge first.

  “It beats getting wet, doesn’t it, Mr. Alexander?” The madman lashed out with the whip, and moments later, the phaeton was on Mexican soil. “Getting across the bridge in Laredo would have been a battle that would have done my army no good,” Justice said. “We would have won, of course, but the cost would have been high. We’d have to fight through the Yankees and the lawmen in that miserable patch of filth, and once we were in Mexico, the damned dictator Porfirio Díaz would have tried to kick us out. His army is commanded by lunatics and morons fill its ranks, but I wish to avoid violence at all costs.”

  Fallon felt the gall rising in his mouth. He remembered the dead man at the sugarcane field being carted off to be dumped in the swamp. The woman the butcher named Merle had killed, along with several other innocent people—and even one of Justice’s own men simply for asking an innocent question. And all those dead men on that train.

  “The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Army will be watching every river crossing they know of, Harry.” So he was Harry now. Pretty soon Fallon would be Hank.

  Only my friends call me Hank.

  “None is here,” he said as he pulled hard on the reins to stop the buggy, and then set the brake and turned around to watch his army, his plunderers, cross the portable folding bridge from Texas to Mexico. It was, Fallon had to concede, one impressive sight.

  “The river here is usually impassable,” Justice said. “Quicksand. Deep pits. But our only concern is getting poked by mesquite. There is a canyon three miles ahead. We will camp there, let our men recover, rest, then light out before the moon rises. We will be guided to our camp. And then begin preparations for our next mission. The invasion of Texas.” He found the cognac and drank greedily.

  “You have to be guided . . . ?” Fallon started.

  “I detest this wretched country, Harry.” Justice wiped his lips. “But it is easy to find friends in Texas, especially since I hang my hat, mostly, in Louisiana. These greasers hate Texans. So I have promised them they can have their country back, at least to the Nueces River, once I have reclaimed what is rightfully mine.”

  Fallon sat back in his seat. The more General Justice talked, the madder he sounded. A stark raving lunatic.

  “Ah, I admire promptness in a man.” He pointed the bottle of 1851 cognac ahead, and Fallon turned to see a burly Mexican loping over the ridge on a pinto pony. The rider came into view, and Fallon felt his stomach twist some more.

  “Bueno. Amigo. It es muy grande to see you again.”

  Juanito Gomez reined in his horse and stuck out a beefy paw. Fallon made himself smile and accepted the firm grip.

  “It’s good to see you, too, Juanito,” Fallon said. “I haven’t seen you since we buried you at Peckerwood Hill.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Juanito Gomez let out a throaty roar of approval as he pulled away his hand and offered a weak salute at General Justice. He fired out words in Spanish, too fast, too accented for Fallon to understand any of it, but Josiah Justice wasn’t anywhere close to being fluent. Fallon quickly realized that Gomez was speaking Spanish just to annoy the General.

  “That is an old Mexican greeting,” Gomez said. “You have done well with your mission, I see.”

  “Well enough,” Justice said.

  “And the money?”

  Justice lifted the cognac to Fallon. “Pass this to your friend, Private Alexander,” he said, dropping the friendliness now that others were in earshot. “Señor Gomez, I trust you to lead us to our sanctuary. We will discuss payment upon arrival.”

  “Bueno,” Gomez said. “Vámanos, muchachos.”

  * * *

  Juanito Gomez had chosen an excellent hiding spot. The path was so hard, it would take an Apache to follow the trail, and mesquite covered the entranceway into the canyon—only the thorny mesquite brush could be moved, and was being moved, by men who emerged from the canyon after Merle rode up, dismounted, slipped through the brush, and found the others.

  With heavy gloves and heavy coats, a dozen men pulled up the trees that had been chopped, and the wagons and horses proceeded into the canyon.

  “Always do the unexpected,” Justice told Fallon. “The mesquite will deter most investigations, whilst those who know this country will remember that Saqueo Cañon is a box canyon. Only a fool would camp there when he is being pursued.” He nodded at the corkscrew and Fallon lifted it off the floor and found another bottle of 1851 cognac.

  “Or a genius,” Justice concluded.

>   When the last of the men made it into the canyon, the diggers replanted the mesquite, which fit in with the clumps of that thorny brush that climbed up the canyon walls. Probably the mesquite would eventually have grown to cover the path, or maybe it had, and that was what Justice’s men had cut down. Anyway, it would look natural enough if Texas Rangers or lawmen who did not know the area disobeyed international law and crossed the river in pursuit. None would expect wagons to have made it through that thorny forest. The Mexican officials wouldn’t likely want to rip their sleeves and their skin looking for weapons and money that had been stolen from norteamericanos.

  The cut mesquite eventually would wither and die, but by then, Justice’s army would be moving to another camp.

  To no one’s surprise, the camp that night was cold. No fires. No hot food. No liquor. Just water and guards on double duty. Fallon was a servant, opening bottles of cognac for Justice, Merle, Bennett, and Juanito Gomez. He studied the canyon walls, but knew he had no chance of escape. The next day, after lounging around the canyon until dusk, Fallon hitched the grays to the buggy and again served as Justice’s driver. The General was in a foul mood, but six bottles of thirty-plus-year-old cognac with a supper of tinned caviar and cans of peaches and tomatoes likely produced a wicked, wicked hangover.

  At night, Juanito Gomez and a handful of Mexican bandits guided the wagon train across the Mexican desert. They rode east for two days, keeping a steady but not backbreaking pace.

  * * *

  “How are you doing, amigo?” Juanito Gomez asked as Fallon once again hitched the gray horses to the phaeton.

  Fallon looked at the burly Mexican and shrugged.

  “The General, he wastes your talents, my friend. You are a fighter. Not a chauffeur.”

  Fallon nodded at the buggy’s roof. “I’m out of the sun,” he said.

  After a hearty laugh, the bandit slapped Fallon’s shoulder. “It will take more than a roof, I fear, to keep a bullet out of your head.” He made the sign of the cross. “Out of all our heads.”