Last Train from Perdition

by Robert McCammon

  “Two of you,” said the man who sat behind a desk that seemed as broad as a Nebraska cornfield. “I expected only yourself, Mr. Lawson.”

  “My associate travels with me,” was the response. “Pardon my not telling you that in the return letter.”

  “Is she good with a gun?”

  “I am,” Ann said, and the note in her voice told him he ought to believe it.

  Lawson said, “I hope that gunplay will not be the first requirement for this job. I prefer it to be the last.”

  “As do I,” answered R. Robertson Cavanaugh, “but where I will ask you to go, you’ll need bullets, a steady aim and a cool head.”

  “Ah.” Lawson offered a thin smile. “A destination I’ve already visited.”

  A silence stretched. Lawson might have thrown his Eye into the head of R. Robertson Cavanaugh to learn everything in a few seconds, but the silence itself spoke. The heaviness of it said that this was a man who was careful in his dealings with people, that he probably did not trust people very much nor necessarily like them, and that he had secrets he wished to keep close to his chest. He was a gambler also, for he had gambled that Trevor Lawson would come all this way by train from New Orleans simply from a letter that already had Lawson’s business card in it.

  It was a plain white card, this one a little smudged around the edges revealing that it was no youngster. Beneath Lawson’s name and the address of the Hotel Sanctuaire was the line All Matters Handled. And below that: I Travel By Night.

  The letter itself had been brief, written in blue ink by a strong hand: A very personal matter. See me in Omaha, 8 p.m. 10th December. R. Robertson Cavanaugh Mining And Investments office, 1220 3rd Street. Discretion of course.

  Signed, Cavanaugh.

  The gambler’s hand had been aided by the inclusion of a banker’s check for one thousand dollars and a series of railroad tickets for sleeping car service on connecting lines that would get Lawson to Omaha on the appointed day. Lawson had not failed to note that the tickets were all for night trains.

  It had been a small matter to pay for Ann’s tickets for her own berths in the sleeping cars, and then a slightly larger matter to gird himself for a long trip that might yet put him within reach of one of his most furious enemies, the sun.

  “There’s a key in the lock,” Cavanaugh said. “Turn it.”

  Ann did. “Sit.” It was spoken like a command. There was only one chair before the desk. “Another chair in the corner. Drag it over. I wasn’t expecting a woman.”

  “And here you have a lady,” Ann said. She lifted her chin slightly in a little display of fire. Lawson thought she’d earned the right, as she’d seen sights that would drive R. Robertson Cavanaugh gobbling mad and cause him to cast what appeared to be a barrel-chested bulk diving out the canvas-shaded window behind him. Lawson started for the extra chair, but Ann said, “I’ll get it,” and was already tending to the task.

  He couldn’t help but admire her. She had followed him from the swamp and been with him on several jobs for clients. Hers were the eyes that could bear the steely heat of the sun. They were as black as charcoal and fixed with an intense purpose that could frighten even a vampire. For the month of October she’d gone back to her name of Annie Remington and done a stretch of trick-shot shows for the Remington Company. But, alas, though her aim was ever true her heart was no longer in such displays, and as Lawson worried They could attack and take her at any time, and They would either tear her to pieces or turn her or use her in some hideous way best not dwelled upon, he was glad she’d moved into a room in the Sanctuaire on the floor just above his.

  After all, she had no home to go back to. She would never go back to that house, where the flies made so merry.

  Ann was twenty-four years old, she was tall and lithe and had light brown hair that fell about her shoulders. She was wearing a dark purple jockey’s cap, a style she favored. Her chin was firm and square and her nose was sharp and tilted up at the tip. She was a very attractive woman, if one was attracted to a female who could blow a bullet hole through the eye of the King of Diamonds while it was on the fly. She was good and she knew it, and therefore of immense value to Trevor Lawson.

  When the two visitors from New Orleans had removed their coats and settled in their chairs, R. Robertson Cavanaugh folded a pair of big-knuckled hands on the green blotter that sat like a small island upon a golden sea of wheat-toned wood. He wore a black suit and a black stringtie over a plain white shirt. His large head was bald, his ears prominent as if pushed forward to gather every whisper in the finest parlors and lowest dives of Omaha. He had a black beard shot through with gray, his eyebrows being all gray set as thickets above a pair of deep-set brown eyes that held no warmth nor charity, but rather only chill and caution. His nose and mouth were small for such a large face, adding to the impression of a human battering-ram.

  He was not one to waste time on pleasantries or small talk. “Do you have any idea who I am?” The question was directed to Lawson.

  “I would’ve made inquiries, but as you made a point of discretion I did not.”

  “That’s good. Two years ago you helped the brother of a friend of mine. A preacher in Oklahoma kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl from his congregation. He went raving-mad and thought she was the rebirth of the Virgin Mary. He was trying to get her to Mexico to start a new religion with her as his bride. My friend’s brother is the one who paid you, he was—still is—the town’s bank president. It was more self-promotion than civic duty, but it’s seemed to solidify his position there. Do you recall?”

  “I do.” A complication had been that Preacher Shine in his own past life had been known as Handsome Harry Ravenwing, a killer of note who with a sawed-off shotgun had sent to their otherworldly rewards eight men, two women, a little boy and a federal marshal’s horse in a robbery and murder spree from Arizona to Texas. Preacher Shine had still been carrying the shotgun when Lawson had caught up with he and the laudanum-dazed young girl in the cactus-stubbled nighttime badlands just on the Texas side of the border. The girl had been returned relatively unharmed to her father, while Preacher Shine alias Harry Ravenwing had flown away with a .44 bullet between his eyes. A mad dog on a holy mission could not be brought in tame on a leash. Lawson particularly was challenged on that job because of the large distances he had to ride on his horse Phoenix, under the threat of sunlight, but even two years ago he could dare at least the dawn and dusk more comfortably than at present.

  “I got your card a roundabout way,” Cavanaugh went on. “Needless to say, I didn’t spill any beans to my friend except to say I needed the help of a professional.”

  Lawson was about to say I am here, but he corrected himself before it was spoken. “We are here. What’s the nature of your problem?”

  “I’m a rich man,” said Cavanaugh. “A well-connected man.”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “I have aspirations and a solid foundation of loyal customers and supporters. In fact I am in the process of conversations that might direct me to the United States Senate in the near future.”

  “Congratulations,” said Ann with a bit of an edge to it. Cavanaugh paid her no attention. He kept his small dark eyes focused on the vampire sitting across the desk from him.

  “You’re very pallid, sir,” came the remark that Lawson had expected. “Even in this light. May I ask…are you ill? Is that the reason you travel only by—”

  “I have a skin condition that sunlight affects. My eyes also are afflicted. But you can be sure I—we—are able to get the job done.”

  “If history is truthful, then I have no reservations on that account.”

  History was indeed truthful, Lawson thought. No ifs there. He knew what he looked like: lean and rawboned, pale as a New York accountant, a tracery of blue veins at his temples carrying the strange ichor of the vampiric tribe, clean-shaven because he no longer had to shave—a result of his condition—and blonde hair combed back from a high forehead and left shaggy at the
neck. Likewise, he no longer needed the clippers of a barber’s shop. His blue eyes were intense and clear, though sometimes he thought that a mirror could catch the spark of red embers in their pupils, though this image was fleeting and it might have been his imagination only. He had been called handsome by the wife he had left behind and by the female creature who in a blur of red had gone for his throat and afterward whispered with crusted lips at his ear, I’m going to make you my finest creation.

  Trevor Lawson appeared to be a man of about thirty but that counting of years no longer mattered after April of 1862 at the battle of Shiloh. In human years he was fifty-four. In the counting of the vampiric span he was yet a child.

  Though an angry child who sought not so much revenge as the freedom to live and die as a human being.

  “I didn’t want us to be disturbed tonight,” Cavanaugh said. “I doubt there are many out because of the weather, but I take no chances that someone I know might see a light here and come up for a visit. As I say, I am well-connected.”

  “And secretive,” said Lawson. “There must be a compelling reason.”

  Cavanaugh nodded. “My wife and I have three sons. One is a lawyer here, another works in the land trade business in San Francisco. It is my third son, the youngest, who is in need of your services just as much as I.”

  Neither Lawson nor Ann spoke; they waited for the rest of it.

  “Eric was rebellious,” the rich man of Omaha went on. “He hated the life of wealth and privilege. Why, when his brothers took to it so well?” The large shoulders shrugged. “Who can say? But he spurned every chance he was offered and went off to, as he told me, make his own life, on his own terms. We’re speaking of a twenty-year-old here, who hardly knew his mind nor anything of the world. Well…he is twenty-three now. He has been educated by rough hands, and he wishes to come home.”

  “All right,” Lawson ventured. “And the problem is…?”

  “Eight months ago he threw in his lot with three other individuals. He understood they wanted to go north to work the goldfields of the Montana Territory. But on the circuitous way there, he realized they were cutthroats and thieves who thought they had discovered as wild a buck as themselves. They were recruiting new blood for their gang.”

  “New blood,” said Lawson. He lifted his eyebrows. “Hm.”

  “He couldn’t get away from them after he witnessed the first murder of a stagecoach driver. It’s been difficult for him to get letters out, but he’s managed to send two at the risk of his life.”

  “A high risk,” Lawson said. “He’s going by his real name?”

  “No, he was smart enough not to use the family name. He’s calling himself Eric James. He hasn’t been required to kill anyone but he had to take part in two bank robberies in the Wyoming Territory, to prove himself. Thank God no one else was killed in those, or Eric killed…or captured by the law. Do you see where I’m headed?”

  “A bad place,” said Ann.

  “Damn right,” Cavanaugh answered, and for the first time looked at her as if she really had a role to play in this. His eyes slid back to Lawson’s. “They have taken my son to their winter…shall we say politely…quarters. A town called Perdition, about thirty miles north of Helena by rail. If those men find out who my son really is, they could hold him for an extreme sum of ransom. Plus…” He hesitated, staring at his clasped hands. “Plus,” he went on, “my own future and that of my family would be destroyed.”

  Lawson had the picture, and it was not a pretty one. “You want us to bring your son home out of a snakepit.”

  “Eric wrote they have rewards on their heads from previous crimes. They’re wanted dead or alive in both the Wyoming and Dakota territories.”

  “Their names?”

  “The leader is named Deuce Mathias. The others are called Keene Presco and Johnny Rebinaux. They seem to be very good with their guns.”

  “What a coincidence,” said Ann.

  Lawson was silent. He listened to the wind shrilling outside the walls. The glass trembled in its windowframe. He was thirsty. His body ached. So did his soul. From a pocket inside his suit jacket he brought forth a small red bottle, a Japanese antique purchased in New Orleans. He uncorked it and wafted it back and forth under his nostrils. It was a heady scent that made iridescent colors bloom behind his eyes. Usually a spool of the thick crimson liquid would go into his favorite libation of rye whiskey, simple syrup and orange bitters, but tonight…

  He drank just a sip, just enough to get a taste, just enough…

  He recorked it and put it away.

  “Good for what ails me,” he told Cavanaugh. “My little sin.”

  “We all have them,” was the rich man’s response. He leaned forward on his blotter, planting his elbows like bulwarks to defend his pride, his ambition, and in this case also his desperation. In the eyes of that broad face perhaps there was a hint of pleading that this office had never witnessed by day. “Will you get my son out of there, and home?” Cavanaugh asked.

  There was no need to confer with Ann. She trusted him as much he did her, and Lawson knew what she would’ve said, in his place. It was a job worth doing, especially for the extra two thousand dollars he would require.

  He spoke for both himself and his associate.

  His answer was, “Yes.”

  Two.

  “Ready?” Lawson asked. “Ready,” Ann answered, with a purple-gloved hand’s quick touch to the holstered pistol under her coat. They set off. Positioned some fifty yards from the front porch of the aptly-named Perdition Hotel was the completely misnamed—and misspelled, on its sign—Cristal Palace. Or it might have been wishful thinking, that a saloon and gaming house nailed haphazardly together with raw green boards and roofed with corrugated tin might somehow stand fast during a long hard Montana winter. For the moment it was standing, though half of it seemed to droop in sad acceptance of its ugly frontage. Its windows were glassless, covered with oilskin paper, its front door a curtain of canvas doubled to keep the cold from blasting through. Smoke rose through a chimney that might have been formed of metal cans joined one on top of another in a crooked insult to the builder’s art, and was dashed away by the constant wind with an occasional flying pinwheel of indignant sparks.

  As Trevor Lawson and Ann Kingsley crossed what was purportedly a street, Lawson contemplated how a heavy fall of snow could ease the most repellent features of a ramshackle town like Perdition. All yesterday and last night the white snow had come down. Inch after inch of it had first frozen and then shrouded the town’s foundation of black mud. It had settled upon the roofs of the general store, the fledgling bank, the railroad depot and the assay office and made them groan like old men in tortured dreams. It had softened the hard vista of a primitive place situated in a valley between ancient mountains, from which the promise of a goldstrike was both a blessing to some and a curse to others depending on luck and fate.

  Such was Perdition in gray twilight on the sixth evening since Lawson and Ann had met with R. Robertson Cavanaugh. They had been at the hotel since night before last. Not inconsiderable attention was paid to them, since their clothes and coats marked them as being on business other than the search for gold; indeed, it appeared that their strike had already been counted. But the people of Perdition were not ones to ask too many questions or nose into anyone else’s business, as long as no claims were jumped and no killings were done in the street. At present the below-zero weather kept the miners in town, kept the Cristal Palace busy and raucous, and also in town—and sooner or later in that same Palace, Lawson guessed—would be the Deuce Mathias gang. He reasoned that wild bucks such as they would have a short resistance to cabin fever, and they would have to find steady release at either the gaming tables, the bar or the backroom bordello.

  Lawson and Ann waited for a wagon carrying a load of barrels to creep past, leaving black trails in the snow, and then they continued on their route. Though the light was low Lawson wore his dark-tinted goggles. He was bun
dled up not from the cold, which had no effect on him, but from the needles-and-pins pain even this weak sun had on his exposed flesh. The sun was going down fast beyond the western mountains; it could not sink fast enough for the vampire gunslinger.

  From the number of horses tied up at the hitching posts in front, the Cristal Palace was obviously doing a brisk business. As Lawson and Ann crunched through the snow they could hear the bad notes of a diseased piano being pounded and the shoutings and hollerings of rough men made happily stuporous by equally bad liquor. Last night the two searchers had been in the Palace for a couple of hours. There had been curious glances aplenty and one old miner had tried to dance with Ann, but after awhile they were treated as part of the scenery. They had been looking for any young man who fit the description of Eric Cavanaugh supplied by his father. The mission had not shown results. It was highly likely Eric would be sporting a beard and would no longer resemble as young a man as his father recalled, and likely also he would be in the company of at least one of the three gents who’d brought him here.

  “We have to be cautious,” Lawson had told Ann during the train trip from Helena in the late afternoon. Snow flew outside under dark gray clouds as the 4-4-0 steam locomotive pulled its coal tender, single red-painted passenger car and four freight cars through the mountain passes. There were six other passengers: a woman with two small children, a tall austere man who had the rigid bearing of a bible-thumper, and a man and woman travelling together who drank from a whiskey bottle most of the way, talked in slurred voices and gave out harsh laughter when nothing was funny.

  “Cautious,” Lawson repeated. He wore his dark goggles and was sitting in a corner where he could pull the curtains on the windows around him. The sunlight was nearly gone, and yet there was still pain. He wished he could wrap himself up in the black shroud he always carried in his bag but getting the attention that would bring was not wise. “If we find Eric here…a dangerous word, if…we’re going to have to figure out some way to approach him without bringing the rest of the gang down on us. The only problem I have with gunplay is that Eric or some bystander might be hit. Not by us, by them.” He noted the man he took to be a preacher staring at him from the other side of the car. The stare lingered for a few seconds and then the man looked away. If he only knew, Lawson thought.