The Wrecker ib-2

by Clive Cussler

  Emma Comden came running in a dressing gown, her dark hair in a long braid and her face pale at the urgency in his voice.

  “Hold this!” he said.

  Bell circled Lillian’s slender waist in his long hands and lifted her out of the car.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted. “Put me down!”

  He thrust Lillian, kicking and shouting, into Mrs. Comden’s arms. Both women went down in a flashing tangle of bare legs.

  “I can help you!” Lillian shouted. “Aren’t we friends?”

  “I don’t bring friends to gunfights.”

  Bell leaped behind the steering wheel and sent the Gray Wolf flying up the buggy track in a cloud of dust

  “That’s my car! You’re stealing my race car!”

  “I just bought it!” he fired over his shoulder. “Send the bill to Van Dorn.” Although, strictly speaking, he thought with a last grim smile as he wrestled the low-slung car over the ruts gouged by freight wagons, once Van Dorn’s expense sheets were submitted Osgood Hennessy would end up buying his daughter’s Gray Wolf twice.

  The look over his shoulder revealed that he was trailing a dust cloud as tall and dark as a locomotive’s smoke. The Wrecker would see him coming miles away, a sight that would put the murderer on high alert.

  Bell twisted the steering wheel. The Wolf sprang off the buggy track, up the railroad embankment, and onto the rail bed. He wrenched the wheel again to force the tires over the nearest rail. Straddling it, the Wolf pounded on the crossties and ballast. It was a bone-jarring ride, though the banging and bouncing was far more predictable than the ruts in the road. And unless he punctured a tire on a loose spike, his chances of keeping the car intact at such speed were better than on rocks and ruts. He glanced back, confirming that the chief benefit of riding on the rail bed was he was no longer trailing a dust cloud like a flag.

  He raced northward on the line for a quarter of an hour.

  Suddenly, he saw a column of smoke spurting upward into the hard-blue sky. The train itself was invisible, hidden around a bend in the track that appeared to pass through a wooded valley between two hills. It was much closer than he had expected on first glimpsing the smoke. He instantly steered off the track, down the embankment, and bounced into a thicket of bare shrubs. Turning the car around in the thin cover, he watched the smoke draw nearer.

  The wet huffing of the locomotive grew audible over the insistent rumble of the Gray Wolf’s idling motor. Soon it became a loud, smacking sound, louder and louder. Then the big black engine rounded the bend, spewing smoke and hauling a long coal tender and a string of empty gondolas and boxcars. Lightly burdened and rolling easily on the slope of a downgrade, the train was moving fast for a freight.

  Bell counted fifty cars, scrutinizing each. The flatbeds looked empty. He could not tell about a couple of cattle cars. Most of the boxcars had open doors. He saw no one peering out. The last car was a faded red caboose with a windowed cupola on the roof.

  The second the caboose passed by, Bell gunned the Wolf’s motor and drove it out of the thicket, up the gravel embankment and onto the tracks. He fought his right-side tires over the nearest rail and opened the throttle. The Wolf tore after the train, bouncing hard on its ties. At nearly forty miles an hour, it bucked violently and swayed from side to side. Rubber squealed against steel, as the tires slammed against the rails. Bell halved the distance between him and the train. Halved it again, until he was only ten feet behind the train. Now he saw that he could not jump onto the caboose without pulling alongside the train. He slewed the car back over the rail and steered on the edge of the embankment, which was steep and narrow and studded with telegraph poles.

  He had to pull alongside the caboose, grab one of its side ladders, and jump before the race car lost speed and fell back. He overtook the train, steered alongside it. A car length ahead, he saw a telegraph pole that was set closer than the others to the rail. There was no room to squeeze between it and the train.

  10

  BELL GUNNED THE ENGINE, SEIZED THE CABOOSE’S LADDER IN his right hand, and jumped.

  His fingers slipped on the cold steel rung. He heard the Packard Wolf crash into the telegraph pole behind him. Swinging wildly from one arm, he glimpsed the Wolf tumbling down the embankment and fought with all his strength to avoid the same fate. But his arm felt as if it had been ripped out of his shoulder. The pain tore down his arm like fire. Hard as he tried to hold on, he could not stop his fingers from splaying open.

  He fell. As his boots hit the ballast, he caught the bottom rung of the ladder with his left hand. His boots dragged on the stones, threatening his precarious grip. Then he got both hands on the ladder, tucked his legs up in a tight ball, and hauled himself up, climbing hand over hand, until he could plant a boot on the rung and swing onto the rear platform of the caboose.

  He threw open the back door and took in the interior of the caboose in a swift glance. He saw a brakeman stirring a vile-smelling stewpot on a potbellied woodstove. There were tool lockers, trunks on either side with hinged tops doubling as benches and bunk beds, a toilet, a desk stuffed with waybills. A ladder led up to the cupola, the train’s crow’s nest, where the crew could observe the string of boxcars they were trailing and communicate by flag and lantern with the locomotive.

  The brakeman jumped as the door banged against the wall. He whirled around from the stove, wild-eyed. “Where the heck did you come from?”

  “Bell. Van Dorn investigator. Where’s your conductor?”

  “He went up to the locomotive when we took on water. Van Dorn, you say? The detectives?”

  Bell was already climbing the ladder into the cupola from where he could see the train cars stretching ahead. “Bring your flag! Signal the engineer to stop the train. A saboteur is riding in one of the freight cars.”

  Bell leaned his arms on the shelf in front of the windows and watched intently. Fifty cars stretched between him and the smoke-belching locomotive. He saw no one on the roofs of the boxcars, which blocked his view of the low-slung gondolas.

  The brakeman climbed up beside Bell with a flag. The stew smell was worse in the raised cupola. Or the brakeman hadn’t bathed recently. “Did you see anyone stealing a ride?” Bell asked.

  “Just one old hobo. Too crippled to walk. I didn’t have the heart to roust the poor devil.”

  “Where is he?”

  “About the middle of the train. See that green cattle car? The old man was riding in the box right ahead of it.”

  “Stop the train.”

  The brakeman stuck his flag out a side window and waved frantically. After several minutes, a head bobbed up from the locomotive cab.

  “That’s the conductor. He sees us.”

  “Wave your flag.”

  The locomotive’s chugging slowed down. Bell felt the brake shoes grind. The cars banged into one another as they filled the slack caused by the train slowed to a stop. He watched the roofs of the boxcars.

  “Soon as the train stops, I want you to run ahead and check each car. Do not engage. Just give a shout if you see anyone, then get out of the way. He’ll kill you soon as look at you.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have to send a flagman back when we stop. I’m it. In case a train’s following us, I have to wave it down. Wires are screwy today.”

  “Not before you check each car,” said Bell, drawing the Browning from his coat.

  The brakeman climbed down from the cupola. He jumped from the rear platform to the tracks and jogged alongside the train, pausing to look into each car. The engineer blew his whistle, demanding an explanation. Bell watched the rooftops and moved to either side of the cupola, to see alongside the train.

  THE WRECKER LAY ON his back in a bench locker less than ten feet from the cupola ladder, gripping a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. All night, he had worried that by setting loose the runaway gondola he had put himself in danger by trapping himself so far up the line. Fe
aring that railway police, goaded by Van Dorn detectives, would mob the train before it reached Weed or Dunsmuir and search it thoroughly, he had taken decisive action. During the last water stop, he had run back to the caboose and slipped inside while the crew were busy tending the locomotive and checking the journal boxes under the railcars.

  He had chosen a locker that held lanterns, reasoning that no one would open it in the daytime. If someone did, he would kill him with whichever weapon suited the moment, then spring out and kill anyone else he came across.

  He smiled grimly in the cramped, dark space. He had guessed right. And who had boarded the train but none other than Van Dorn’s chief investigator himself, the famous Isaac Bell? At worst, the Wrecker would make a complete fool out of Bell. At best, he’d shoot him between the eyes.

  THE BRAKEMAN CHECKED EVERY car, and when he reached the locomotive Bell saw him confer with the conductor, the engineer, and the fireman, who had gathered on the ground. Then the conductor and the brakeman hurried back, checking each of the fifty boxcars, cattle cars, and gondolas again. When they got to the caboose, the conductor, an older man with sharp brown eyes and a put-out expression on his lined face, said, “No saboteurs. No hobos. Nobody. The train is empty. We’ve wasted enough time here.”

  He raised his flag to signal the engineer.

  “Wait,” said Bell.

  He jumped down from the caboose and ran alongside the train, peering inside each car and each chassis underneath. Midway to the locomotive, he paused at a green cattle car that stank of mules.

  Bell whirled around and ran full tilt back toward the caboose.

  He knew that smell. It wasn’t stew. And it wasn’t an unwashed brakeman. A man who had ridden in the green cattle car that stank of mules was now hiding somewhere in the caboose.

  Bell bounded up onto the caboose’s platform, shoved through the door, flung the nearest mattress off a bench, and pulled up the hinged top. The locker held boots and yellow rain slickers. He flung open the next. It was filled with flags and light repair tools. There were two more. The conductor and the brakeman were watching curiously from the far door.

  “Get back,” Bell told them. And he opened the third bench. It contained tins of lubricating oil and kerosene for lamps. Gun in hand, he leaned in to open the last.

  “Nothing in there but lanterns,” said the brakeman.

  Bell opened it.

  The brakeman was right. The locker contained red, green, and yellow lanterns.

  Angry, baffled, wondering if the man had somehow managed to run for the trees from one side while he was watching the other, Bell stalked to the locomotive and told the engineer, “Move your train! ”

  Gradually, he calmed down. And finally he smiled, remembering something Wish Clarke had taught him: “You can’t think when you’re mad. And that goes double when you’re mad at yourself.”

  He had no doubt that the Wrecker was a capable man, even a brilliant one, but now it seemed he had something else going for him too: luck, the intangible element that could throw an investigation into chaos and prolong capture. Bell believed it was only a matter of time before they caught up with the Wrecker, but time was short-terribly short-because the Wrecker was so active. This was no ordinary bank robber. He wasn’t going to hole up in a brothel and spend his ill-gotten gains on wine and women. Even now, he would be planning his next attack. Bell was painfully aware that he still had no idea what motivated the man. But he did know that the Wrecker was not the sort of criminal who wasted time celebrating his victories.

  Twenty minutes later, Bell ordered the train stopped beside Lillian Hennessy’s special, which was still on the siding. The crew moved the freight ahead to the water tank.

  THE WRECKER WAITED UNTIL the train crew was busy taking on water. Then he dropped down from the cupola’s shelf and slipped back into his first hiding place, the lanterns locker. The next water stop, he slipped out of the caboose and back into a boxcar, as the crew would be reaching for lanterns when the sun went down.

  Ten hours later, in the dead of the night, he jumped off at a staging area at Redding. Seeing many detectives and railroad police searching trains ahead, he hid in a culvert and watched their lights bobbing in the dark.

  While he waited them out, he used the time to think about Isaac Bell’s investigation. He was tempted to mail him a letter: “Sorry we didn’t meet on the freight train.” But it wasn’t worth the joke. Don’t gloat. Let Bell think he wasn’t on that train. That he got away by some other means. He would find some better way to sow confusion.

  An empty freight rumbled out of the yard, heading south, just before first light. The Wrecker ran alongside, grabbed a ladder on the back of a boxcar, and worked his way under the car and wedged himself into the supporting framework.

  In Sacramento, he climbed out when the train halted for permission to enter the yards. He walked a mile through factories and workers’ housing to a cheap rooming house, eight blocks from the capitol building. He paid the landlady four dollars for holding his suitcase and carried it to another rooming house that he chose at random ten blocks away. He rented a room, paying in advance for a week. Midmorning, the house was empty, the lodgers away at work. He locked himself in the shared bathroom at the end of the hall, stuffed his filthy clothes in the gripsack, shaved and bathed. In his room, he pulled a top-quality blond wig over his hair and applied a similarly colored groomed beard and mustache with spirit gum. Then he dressed in a clean shirt, a four-in-hand necktie, and an expensive sack suit. He packed his bags, transferring his climbing spurs to the suitcase, and polished his boots.

  He left the rooming house by the back door so no one would see him in his new persona and walked a roundabout route to the railroad station, checking repeatedly that he was not followed. He threw the gripsack behind a board fence but kept the suitcase.

  Hundreds of travelers were streaming into the Southern Pacific station. He blended in as he joined them, another well-dressed busi nessman embarking for a distant city. But suddenly, before he could stop himself, he laughed out loud. He laughed so hard he covered his mouth to make sure the beard didn’t shift.

  The latest Harper’s Weekly magazine was displayed on a newsstand. The cover cartoon depicted none other than Osgood Hennessy. The railroad president was rendered as a fearsome octopus extending train tracks like tentacles into New York City. Smiling broadly, the Wrecker bought the magazine for ten cents.

  The newsie was staring at him, so he went to another stand outside the station to ask, “Do you have pencils? A thick one. And an envelope and stamp, if you please.”

  In the privacy of a toilet in the nearest hotel, he tore off the magazine cover, wrote on it, and sealed it in the envelope. He addressed the envelope to Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, Van Dorn Detective Agency, San Francisco.

  He attached the stamp, hurried back to the station, and dropped the envelope in a mailbox. Then he boarded the flyer to Ogden, Utah, six hundred miles to the east, a junction city near Great Salt Lake where nine railroads converged.

  The conductor came through. “Tickets, gents.”

  The Wrecker had bought a ticket. But as he reached to pull it from his vest pocket, he sensed danger. He did not question whatever had sparked the premonition. It could have been anything. He had seen extra railway police at the Sacramento yards. The ticket clerk had eyed him closely. A hanger-on he had noticed in the passenger station could have been a Van Dorn operative. Trusting his instincts, he left his ticket in his pocket and flashed a railway pass instead.

  11

  BELL BATTLED HIS WAY THROUGH FORTY-EIGHT HOURS OF maddening delays to reach the Cascades construction site at the head of the cutoff line. The Southern Pacific dispatchers were beset by downed telegraph wires, making train scheduling haphazard. Lillian had given up and taken her special back to Sacramento. Bell had hitched rides on material trains and finally arrived on a trainload of canvas and dynamite.

  The Southern Pacific Company had used the time better than
he had. The fire-ravaged locomotive roundhouse had been demolished and the debris carted away, and a hundred carpenters were hammering a new structure together with green wood hauled down from the lumber mill. “Winter,” a burly foreman explained the speed of repairs. “You don’t want to be fixing locomotives in the snow.”

  Heaps of twisted rail had been loaded on flatcars and new track laid where the runaway gondola had torn up the switches. Cranes were hoisting fallen boxcars onto the fresh rails. Roustabouts were raising giant circus tents to replace the cookhouse that burning embers from the roundhouse had set on fire. The workmen eating lunch standing up were in a sullen mood, and Bell overheard talk of refusing to return to the job. It wasn’t the inconvenience of having no tables and benches but fear that upset them. “If the railroad can’t protect us, who will?” he heard asked. And the answer came hot and heavy from several quarters. “Save ourselves. Pull out, come payday.”

  Bell saw Osgood Hennessy’s vermilion red private train gliding into the yards and he hurried after it, though he was not looking forward to the meeting. Joseph Van Dorn, who had joined Hennessy in San Francisco, met him at the door, looking grave. “The Old Man’s fit to be tied,” he said. “You and I are going to hunker down and listen to him roar.”

  And roar Hennessy did. Although not at first. At first, he sounded like a beaten man. “I was not exaggerating, boys. If I don’t connect to the Cascade Canyon Bridge before it snows, the cutoff is dead. And those sons of bitches bankers will cart me off with it.” He looked at Bell with mournful eyes. “I saw your face when I told you I started out driving spikes like my father. You wondered, how could that scrawny, fossilized rooster swing a sledgehammer? I wasn’t always skin and bones. I could have pounded circles around you in those days. But I got a bum heart, and it’s shrunk me down to what you see.”