Initially Craig and Bonnie had been scheduled to fly out early in the morning and be back to work on Tuesday from this so-called vacation. But since Craig had been involved in the shooting of one of the suspects, there were going to be hearings to attend and paperwork to fill out.
Bonnie had called the airline and pushed their flight back to Tuesday. Then she had told their bosses in Seattle what had happened. So with an extra day or so, maybe, just maybe, they could end up having a little time alone.
“So what happens next?” Bonnie asked Maxwell as she gave up and pushed her plate away from her with a few bites of steak still left.
Maxwell shrugged. “Steph Baines said there were three men who kidnapped her. Two are now dead, so we still got one out there somewhere.”
“The guy who made the phone calls to the cell phones?” Craig asked.
Craig’s attempt to imitate one of the dead men on the second call had failed instantly. Clearly the man making the calls was smart and was being very careful. Both calls had been made from different stolen cell phones, and both phones had been quickly found, obviously tossed out of a moving car.
“More than likely he’s the third,” Maxwell said, nodding as he sipped a cup of coffee. “And he’s now a good distance out of the area.”
“But he wasn’t the money man,” Hagar said.
“I doubt it,” Maxwell said. “We’re pretty sure that is Robins. He’s the only one with motive to hurt the Senator. But proving it without the third man in custody is going to be damned hard.”
“Money trail?” Bonnie asked.
“Maybe,” Maxwell said. “If we can get the warrants, and if he was just plain stupid.”
Craig could only nod his agreement. He doubted Robins was that stupid.
“Is the Senator safely in Washington?” Bonnie asked, her voice low so only the four of them could hear the question.
“Safe and ready for a press conference right before he goes in for the vote tomorrow morning,” Maxwell said, smiling. “All his close family and friends have been informed of the ruse so they won’t worry.”
“Even without being caught it seems that Robins is going to get his just desserts,” Craig said. “I’d love to see his face as he watches that press conference.”
All of them laughed and agreed.
Craig glanced at Hagar. “When are you going to want me in the station tomorrow morning?”
Hagar looked at his watch. “How about at the crack of noon?”
“Perfect,” Craig said, feeling relieved that Hagar hadn’t said eight. “Just over twelve hours of vacation.”
“A good night’s sleep,” Bonnie said, sighing. “Won’t that be a change for this trip?”
“Let me know what it feels like,” Maxwell said.
“Yeah, me too,” Hagar agreed.
Thirty minutes later Hagar dropped them off in front of the hotel and twenty minutes after that they were in their swimming suits and sitting in the bubbling water of the hotel’s massive hot tub.
The tub was located in a corner of the swimming pool area. It was surrounded by boulders and made to look more like a natural hot springs than a hotel hot tub. Craig had to admit that was a nice touch. And the best part was that when sitting down in the tub, the boulders blocked the view of the pool and the hotel, leaving nothing but the rocky mountainside above the hotel and the night stars. It made for a wonderful relaxing hot dip in what felt like a mountain pool.
They were alone in the hot tub since it was almost one in the morning, but another couple was sitting on the far side of the pool, holding hands and talking while their feet dangled in the water.
“Perfect temperature,” Bonnie said, letting her body float with the bubbles beside him. “A great meal and a hot soak. I think I needed this.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, leaning back and letting the warm water soothe his nerves. “Only one thing I need more than this and sleep.”
She laughed. “And just what might that be?”
Without looking at her he said, “You have to ask?”
Her hand moved over and rested on his crotch. “What do you have in mind?”
“Maybe an hour of sex in that big bed upstairs,” he said, “then eight hours of sleep, then another hour of sex tomorrow morning.”
“Before or after breakfast?” she asked.
“On second thought,” he said, “maybe both.”
“Oh, feeling young, are we?”
“What are vacations for?”
She laughed as her hand moved slowly on him for a moment and he hardened under her touch.
Then she said, “That’s a perfect plan if you add in just one thing.”
“Trust me,” he said, “the thing you’re playing with is part of the plan.”
She laughed again, but didn’t stop moving her hand. “No, I just wanted to stay in the hot tub for a few more minutes. Let some of the tension drain away.”
“Before we go back to the room and create more tension?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she said.
Maybe, just maybe, they might be able to salvage this vacation after all.
To be continued…
When men start getting run over by slow-moving train cars in a gold rush town in the mountains of Idaho, Marshal Duster Kendal must solve the murders.
But there might not be a motive besides the fact that Duster Kendal lives.
Duster knows exactly what to do about that.
And he needs to do it fast before things get much, much worse.
An early story of when Bonnie and Duster were first testing time travel and a problem they had early on.
LAST CAR FOR THIS TIME
A Thunder Mountain Story
ONE
Marshal “Duster” Kendal really had no great desire to see the death scene. He stepped off the wooden porch of the Dewey Hotel and moved his six-foot frame as slow as he could down the dry dirt of the Main Street of the tiny town of Dewey, Idaho. With each step his boots kicked up a small cloud into the hot, morning air.
Lately he’d seen far too many deaths and he had a hunch this one wouldn’t look much different than the other two he’d seen here and others he’d seen over the last year.
Things seemed to be unraveling. He knew the signs.
This time he had met the dead guy two nights before in the Benson Saloon in Silver City. It was one thing to see a body of a stranger. Another to look on the dead face of a man Duster had watched pour drinks for two hours.
The morning sun beat down through the clear August sky with such force Duster could almost feel it like a weight on his shoulders, pressing him down into the dirt of the street. The day would be a scorcher before it was finished.
People thought him odd to wear his light, oilcloth duster even on hot summer days, but he had learned while in the Arizona territory a long, long time ago that it actually kept him cooler in the hot sun. His wide-brimmed Texas cowhand hat kept the sun off his face as well.
Wearing the long, brown coat had gotten him the nickname “Duster” and he had no intention of changing that now. He actually had grown to like the name and the coat. Both fit him like a comfortable old pair of boots.
He wore his gray and brown hair long and streaming out the back of his hat to cover his neck, and his face and chiseled features gave away very little of his actual age, which was north of forty-five now. Only his bright green eyes let his intelligence shine through and he was known for the intensity of his gaze. Sometimes he could stare a man down enough to kill a growing problem.
Today he had no plan on being out in the sun much longer than he needed. If this death followed the pattern of the others, he wouldn’t need to be out long.
And this morning just maybe he might figure out what was causing these men to die.
Or at least why.
He had a hunch he knew, and with no train due back in the valley for six days, he had time to find out if his hunch was right and set everything on the correct path again.
In his years of wearing a badge, he’d never seen anything quite like this. Of course, no place else in the west, or in the world for that matter, was like the Owyhee Mountains. They had been mostly ignored by the huge rush on the Oregon Trail close by in the 1860s and if it hadn’t been for the gold found in the streams and deep veins here, Duster doubted anyone would be in this hostile place.
And if no one had come here, he wouldn’t be here either.
These deaths by train were the reason he was up here from Boise in the mining district of Silver City. The only law in the valley was a constable in Silver City named Ben and his deputy. The poor guy had called for help after the first death. Ben’s job was to break up bar fights, not figure out why someone died under the wheels of a train.
What bothered Duster even more was that there didn’t seem to be anything going on in the town that would cause this. No fights beyond drunken brawls, no mine-labor disputes beyond normal. Yet four men in three weeks had been run over by slow-moving freight trains just down the hill from Dewey, Idaho.
Dewey was a silver-and-gold-mining boomtown tucked in the bottom of a valley leading up between War Eagle and Florida Mountains in the Owyhee Mountain Range in Southern Idaho. The town straddled Jordon Creek like it couldn’t decide which way to step.
The main attraction of the town beside the huge twenty-stamp ore mill and the Blaine tunnel was the Dewey Hotel. Colonel Dewey had built the hotel tucked up against the west side of the narrow valley. Two stories and as plush as anything Duster had seen in San Francisco or back east. Colonel Dewey himself lived in a large house beside the hotel and seemed just as upset at all the deaths as everyone.
Maybe more. Colonel Dewey had brought in the railroad in the first place. He knew that if the deaths didn’t stop soon, there wouldn’t be a person left in the valley to work his mines. This was scaring everyone and Colonel Dewey had offered Duster extra to solve this fast.
Duster had turned him down, of course.
If Colonel Dewey actually knew how fantastically rich Duster was, and where he actually came from, he would have never offered. But Duster played the role of marshal well, even though he always stayed in the best hotels when he traveled and only ate at the best restaurants and drank the finest brandy.
Duster felt that just because he worked as a marshal didn’t mean he couldn’t fully live life as well. And no one really questioned the money he spent and he didn’t offer an explanation.
The railroad had put a spur line up the valley to the Dewey Mill in 1881. All the ore from Silver City and all the mines farther up either had to be hauled out over forty miles by wagon down to Murphy or taken the short three miles down to Dewey in the summer months when the train could get up the valley. In a few months the snow would start flying and the train wouldn’t return until late spring.
If it returned then.
The town of Dewey was dying. Duster had seen it before around the west. Towns sprang up and then vanished, often within years. In a hundred plus years there wouldn’t be anything left here but a bend in the road.
Silver City, the county seat three miles up Jordon Creek above Dewey, wasn’t in much better shape. He had no doubt that the winter would kill most everything in this valley and the mines that were marginal wouldn’t open again. And after the snow started flying the train wouldn’t be back.
Plus, with the Bank of California going down a few years back and payrolls for most of the mines in this area being lost, people were already not trusting anyone.
The valley had a few more generations in it as it slowly died, but not much beyond that.
And now the deaths of four good men weren’t helping.
This area was about to go down and would become a ghost town.
Duster just needed to figure out why people kept dying under the wheels of slow-moving ore cars so he could get back to his wonderful suite in the luxurious Boise Hotel.
He really wanted to get back to the life he had picked and the restaurants and the women in Boise as well. Everyone knew how Duster loved his food, and his friends wondered how he could eat so much and stay so rail thin. He had his secrets he would say.
Duster had a lot of secrets.
TWO
Duster kept trudging down the street thinking about the deaths. None of this made a lick of sense. If someone wanted to drive people out of the valley ahead of when they would naturally leave, what would they gain besides changing the natural history of this valley? The mines were pinching off. The death of this valley was only a matter of time, so these deaths couldn’t be about that.
Duster walked past the big mill and down the rail line to where a group of bystanders gathered near the edge of the almost-dry creek across from the tracks.
Just as with the others before, this body wasn’t a pretty sight.
The head and upper torso were on one side of the track, the waist and legs on the other. The train had pretty much cut old Benny in half, leaving his toes pointing down and a stunned look on Benny’s face as he stared with blank eyes at the morning sky.
Benny had to be at least fifty and his face and hands showed many rough years in the mines.
The blood had stained the rock fill around the ties slightly darker than normal for about ten feet along the track. No telling which stains were Benny’s and which were from the other three men. All of them had died in the same place.
The train had left parts of Benny’s guts strung out along the rail. That smelled just downright awful, like an overfull outhouse baking in the afternoon heat. The nasty odor had kept the gawkers back a distance. And the hot morning sun wasn’t helping matters.
Duster had no desire or need to go any closer, so he stopped about twenty paces away and just studied the scene. He knew what he would find if he went in closer. Nothing.
The same as every man who had died before Benny in the same spot in the same way.
Benny wouldn’t have a mark on him. And no ropes had held him in place under the train. And the railroad men wouldn’t have seen him on the tracks when they walked the train before starting down the valley.
Somehow Benny had gotten under the car on the tracks in broad daylight just as the train started.
And without anyone seeing him.
Then he had turned face up and let the train cut him in half.
What a horrid way to die.
Duster shook his head and turned to look at the silent crowd.
“Marshal,” one man said, fear clearly in his eyes. And some anger as well. “When is the great Duster Kendal going to stop this?”
“Yeah,” another guy said. “I got a family that’s starting to get spooked.”
“They should have gotten worried after the first one,” Duster said, glaring at the man. “Someone wants all of us to be scared. Seems to me it’s working just fine.”
Duster watched the faces of the twenty people, watched their eyes in the hot sun. Not a one of them seemed satisfied at what he had said. All showed fear.
Damn. He shook his head and turned away from the crowd. It would have been too easy to have the murderer standing around watching. He hadn’t been in the crowd at the previous murder either and that had been larger. This was happening so often now, fewer and fewer people were going out to look and stand in the odor of a man’s guts cut open and baking in the hot sun.
Duster turned and headed back up the road toward the hotel and the bar there. He had four men to meet and if luck held, they would have his answer.
He just didn’t want to hear what he was afraid it might be.
This all might be his fault.
THREE
The air felt cooler inside the hotel and out of the hot sun.
Duster pulled off his hat and coat and carried them into the bar over his left arm, his right arm free to reach for his gun on his hip. Over the decades he had become one of the most accurate shots with a Colt around. Luckily, he seldom had to use that skill.
The bar smelled of cigar smoke and a faint od
or of puke. None of the windows were open yet, trying to hold off the heat of the day as long as possible.
The four men were sitting at the bar, clearly drinking and not talking, their heads down. He motioned for them to follow him and he went out and into the dining room and to a large table in the back.
The dining room was even cooler since the drapes were pulled closed and it still smelled of the breakfast bacon. It was empty.
Bonnie, a middle-aged woman with a bright smile and bright red hair, saw him coming and got up from where she was reading the Silver Avalanche paper. Her blue dress had been protected from a couple of morning spills by a stained apron tied around her neck and her waist. Her wonderful brown eyes looked very, very worried.
She looked as good as always. He had known Bonnie for a very long time and every time he saw her, his heart skipped a beat. Being in love with Bonnie was a normal thing for him.
And lately he had been missing her a lot. More than he wanted to admit to even himself.
“Another one, Marshal?” she asked standing across the table from him, her smooth hands on the back of the chair.
Duster nodded. “Not anything you’d want to see.”
She shook her head, worry and fear filling her eyes. “You think it might be against us?”
“It might be,” Duster said, nodding. “I’m about to find out for sure. Could I get a big glass of water if you wouldn’t mind? Actually, make that two and add a couple chips of ice.”
“Never a problem for you, Marshal,” she said, smiling and turning as the four men followed him into the room carrying their drinks from the bar.
She would have to go down into the cellar to where they stored the ice from the winter, and it would cost him, but after that walk in the sun, it would be worth it.
And he tipped well. Everyone in the valley knew he tipped well. It got him a lot of extras he didn’t even ask for.
Smith's Monthly #23 Page 7