Midnight Rider (Ralph Cotton Western Series)

by Ralph Cotton

  “Not very much,” said Rochenbach, lying straight-faced. “I rode past it one night the last time I was here. I remember wishing they had left a basement window open.”

  “How long ago was that?” Grolin asked, studying Rochenbach as he spoke.

  “A year, maybe longer,” Rock replied.

  “In that case, you would have been sorely disappointed,” said Grolin. “There was nothing in the basement there but minting equipment left behind after the government bought out the Clark Gruber Mint back during the war. The fact is, after the government bought out Clark Gruber, equipment and all, they’ve yet to strike a single coin there, silver or gold.”

  “No kidding?” said Rochenbach, already knowing it, but feigning mild surprise. “Why is that?

  Grolin shrugged a thick shoulder and poured more whiskey into his coffee.

  “Hell, if we’re going to talk about why the government does or doesn’t do what they say they’re going to, we’re in for a long, sad conversation,” he chuffed, stirring the whiskey and coffee around with the tip of his finger.

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Rock agreed, raising his warm mug and taking a sip from it.

  “My notion, Honest Abe and his gang couldn’t stand the thought that a commercial business was conducting banking and striking coins without getting their greasy noses stuck into the mix.” He raised his cigar with his thick fingers and stuck it into his mouth. “That’s usually what happens, right?”

  Rochenbach saw Grolin stare at him, searchingly, for a reply. But he wasn’t going to give one. There was such a thing as him knowing too much.

  “If you say so,” he said. “I don’t keep up much on banking practices—government either, for that matter.”

  “Yeah?” Grolin looked at him closely. “I figured in your time as a detective, you had the chance to learn quite a lot about both.”

  “Maybe I should have,” said Rock. “I spent most my time figuring the best way to get bank money to follow me out the door.” He sipped the last of his whiskey-laced coffee.

  Grolin gave a short laugh. He puffed his cigar and considered it for a moment.

  “The reason I asked how long ago since you’d ridden past there,” he said, “is that the past eight months, there’s been smoke seen rising from the smelt furnace in that basement.” He paused, then added, “Always, it’s been seen late at night.”

  Rochenbach gave him a curious look. “But you just said they’ve yet to strike the first coin—?”

  “That’s right, I did,” said Grolin, cutting him off. “And they still haven’t. But they do melt down gold and ship it back East, all the way to Philadelphia. They don’t do it all the time, and they try to keep it under their hats when they do.” He gave him an oily, crooked grin, the black cigar still in his mouth. “But I’ve got eyes in Denver City. Nothing gets past me.”

  “Smelting gold, huh?” Rochenbach straightened a little against the bar, looking even more attentive. He set the mug on the bar in front of him.

  Noting the empty mug, Grolin started to reach out and fill it with more whiskey, but Rochenbach put his hand between the bottle and the coffee mug, stopping him.

  “Thanks, but I’m good for now,” he said. “We’re starting to talk about money.”

  Grolin nodded and set the bottle down. He liked that, he told himself—Rochenbach, cool and even, facing up to Spiller and Casings, knocking back a little whiskey before breakfast, but turning strictly business, now that business was at hand.

  “Yes, we are, and big money at that,” he said, still watching Rochenbach’s eyes closely. “Only, this is not cash money.”

  Rochenbach kept quiet, listening.

  “This is all in bullion, three-and-a-half-inch gold ingots,” said Grolin, another oily grin around his black cigar. “Got anything against taking your pay in gold, Rock? My extra men I pay off in cash, out of my pocket. But my regular men get paid more, so they’ll take their pay in gold, convert it to cash themselves, if they know somebody who’ll convert it.”

  “Nothing against gold, unless I have to dig it up first,” Rochenbach replied. “I know plenty of folks who can touch bullion gold and turn it into cash. They don’t care what stamping is on it.”

  Grolin grinned and bit down on his cigar.

  “I like those kinds of folks. I know some myself,” he said. “But these are shipping ingots. They have no stamping on them.”

  “Even better,” said Rochenbach. “You mentioned a big safe built inside a rail car?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did,” said Grolin, and he offered nothing more. Instead he gazed steadily at Rochenbach, seeing what he had to offer on the matter.

  “I take it we’re talking about the freight car specially made by Lomack Car and Foundry,” said Rochenbach, “the one Kennedy’s Detective Agency had made for the U.S. Treasury Department.”

  “You’re right,” said Grolin. He cocked his head and gave Rock a bemused look. “How’d you come by that? It’s not something widely known.”

  “No, it’s not,” Rochenbach said. “But Allen Pinkerton had his men keep a close eye on anything the Kennedy detectives were up to. Kennedy started out working for Pinkerton. He went home to Ohio and started Kennedy’s Secret Service. Allen Pinkerton has never forgiven him for it. When he heard about the special Treasury car being built, he offered a bonus to any agent who could get his hands on the design drawings. Guess who that agent turned out to be?” he added with a level gaze.

  “Well, well,” said Grolin, pouring himself more whiskey. “I’m impressed all to hell by this. So you know all about this rail car we’re discussing?”

  “All about it, no,” said Rock. “But I know more about it than most people would.” Now it was his turn to give Grolin a curious look. “Why is it I think you already knew this? Maybe this is why Arnold the Swede looked me up.”

  Grolin didn’t reply. Instead his sipped his whiskey and puffed his cigar.

  “So, you have held the design to this Treasury car in your hands?” he asked.

  Rock only nodded.

  “Tell me how it’s built,” said Grolin.

  Rochenbach decided this cagey thief leader already knew how the big freight car was built. One more little test…, Rock told himself. So he would lay it all out for him just the same.

  “When you look at it, you can’t tell it from any other freight car,” he said. “When they finished building it, they weathered it and beat it up, made it look years older than it really is.”

  “Go on,” Grolin said, seeming mildly interested so far.

  “The entire car itself is heavily armored,” said Rock. “It’s been fabricated four inches thick—three and a half inches of diagonal cross layers of wood and a half inch of boilerplate steel. Getting into the car alone is like getting into a safe. So there’s no way into the actual safe from outside the car, unless you have a field cannon and all day to keep loading and firing it. If we did, we really would be digging what’s left of the bars and ingots out of the hillsides.” He looked at Grolin expectantly.

  “I’m listening,” Grolin said, smoke curling up from the cigar in his mouth. “Tell me how we rob it.”

  Rochenbach knew Grolin had it all worked out. He was still testing him, seeing if he knew enough to be worth cutting in on a robbery this size.

  Rochenbach continued, saying, “Being an Ohioan, Kennedy turned the actual construction over to the Diebold Bahmann Company—safe builders out of Cincinnati. They’re the ones who turned one end of the freight car into a rolling safe.”

  Grolin sipped his whiskey and grinned knowingly.

  “Pretty smart for the Yankee government,” he said. “Most thieves don’t even know about the car. Them that do know about it wouldn’t recognize it if it was staring at them.”

  “And then there’s some of us who wouldn’t touch it if it was sitting in front of us,” Rochenbach continued. “Without the right information, how would anybody know when to hit it, or where?” He shook his head. “Only a fo
ol would risk getting himself killed over opening a safe that just might be sitting empty.”

  “That’s my part,” said Grolin. “I’ll know when to hit it, where to hit it and how much gold it’s going to be holding. Otherwise I’d put the whole thing out of my mind.”

  “I hope this information of yours is as reliable as the morning sun,” Rochenbach said, not about to ask where it came from right then.

  “Don’t concern yourself with that,” Grolin said. “If I put you inside the rail car, will you put me inside the safe, without blowing it to hell and gone?”

  “If it’s a Diebold Bahmann experimental permutation safe, I’ll walk you in it quiet as a mouse.”

  “What makes you so cocksure of yourself?” Grolin said. “These experimental safes are not widely known.”

  “I know them,” Rock said.

  “From having been a detective…,” Grolin murmured.

  “Yes,” said Rock. “Every brand of these new permutation safes has its own sound. So, let’s just say I speak this safe’s language.” He returned the saloon owner’s stare.

  Grolin weighed his words, then nodded slightly.

  “All right,” he said, “I believe you.”

  If Grolin really had the information he purported to have, it meant he had himself a spy inside either the mint or the Treasury Department. It had to be somebody powerful enough to access the scheduling, date of gold shipments and amounts being shipped.

  Rochenbach wanted that person—wanted him bad, he told himself. But that would have to wait until later.

  “How much do you believe me?” Rochenbach asked flatly.

  “Fifty thousand in gold bullion,” Grolin returned in a like tone.

  Rock allowed a gleam of excitement to come into his eyes.

  “For fifty thousand gold, you’re inside it,” he said.

  At the rear of the saloon, a door opened and a large man wearing a plaid wool coat stepped inside the Lucky Nut.

  “One of my bartenders,” Grolin said in a lowered voice. “We’re through talking for now.” He looked Rochenbach up and down. “Now that you know my play, stick close to Spiller and Casings. I hate a man who’d change his mind and try to skin out of town.”

  “I’ll stick close. Once I’m in on a job, there’s no turning back until my pockets are lined,” Rock said.

  “Done,” said Grolin. “Go next door, tell my desk clerk I said to give you a room. Get yourself some grub down the street and get some rest. I’ll send Spiller and Casings by later. You ride with them.”

  “Where are we going?” Rock asked, not really curious, but just curious if Grolin would tell him.

  “Don’t worry about it. They’ll tell you,” Grolin said.

  He looked at Rochenbach’s bare head. “The kind of money you’ve got coming, you might think about getting yourself a hat.”

  “I already am,” Rochenbach said, turning toward the front door.

  After a breakfast of elk steak, eggs, gravy and biscuits, Rochenbach walked back to the Great Westerner Hotel, where he’d stopped long enough to get a room for himself on his way to the restaurant.

  “I had your horse taken to the livery barn like you asked,” said a young, thin desk clerk, “and there are your bags and rifle.” He nodded toward a saddlebag and a Spencer rifle standing in a corner near the stairs. He laid the key to Rochenbach’s room on the counter with a wide smile.

  “Obliged,” said Rock, picking up the key. “Please see to it I’m not disturbed before noon.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the clerk, the wide smile still stamped on his face.

  Inside his dusty room overlooking the main street, Rochenbach took a wooden chair and tipped it back beneath the door handle, wedging it into place. He sat down on the edge of a lumpy mattress, pulled off his ill-fitting boots and stood them beside the bed. He stared at the boots in dark reflection as he wiggled his stiff toes inside his dingy gray socks.

  He had taken the boots off one of two dead men he’d left lying in a livery barn in Gunn Point. He’d also taken the black-handled Remington, holster and all, and one of the dead men’s coats. Neither of their blood-soaked hats had been fit to wear, he recalled.

  He loosened his gun belt and hung the belly rig on a bedpost. Sliding the big Remington from its holster, he turned it in his hand, looked at it and slid it under his pillow.

  The two gunmen had led him from his cell coatless and in his stockinged feet, despite the snow that was on the ground.

  “What about my coat?” he had asked.

  “You won’t need it,” came a reply.

  Their intentions had been clear enough; they’d escorted him to the livery barn to kill him, plain and simple. But they were both dead now, and here’s where he’d landed, on the outskirts of Denver City, right back on the job. He let out a breath. There was no shortage of work in his profession. Working for the government…

  He collapsed back onto a long, neglected feather mattress, coat and all, and stared up at two bullet holes in the pine plank ceiling. He watched a small brown spider zigzag across the ceiling and crawl into one of the dark holes. All right, then, back to work…

  A train job, he recounted to himself. Grolin had asked all the right questions, and he was certain he’d given the right answers. As for his ability to open a Diebold Bahmann, that much was true. He could open one.

  He’d been taught how to listen to these new combination safes’ inner mechanism through an ear trumpet by the best in the business: Quick Charlie Simms, a reformed Roma Gypsy safecracker who turned lawman and now worked for Judge Isaac Parker’s court. How Simms had learned about the safes so quickly, he had no idea. The innovation of a master thief…, he mused to himself.

  But he’d learned on his own that for the Diebold safe, he would need more than an ear trumpet; he would need the Cammann stethoscope he’d picked up in Boulder City and carried here with him.

  The rest of the story he’d given Grolin had been a lie that he’d made up on the spot. He picked up the threads of what Grolin wanted to hear and he’d pieced together a story that suited the situation. As for the Treasury car, he’d never seen it, but he’d heard of it. He’d never held its design in his hands, but he’d heard talk. As for Allen Pinkerton offering a bonus for information on the construction of the car—huh-uh, all a lie.…

  But it was close to what he’d shared with Arnold the Swede three months ago in a gambling hall in San Antonio. Two days earlier, a condemned prisoner named Vernal Tooney had told him the Treasury car was a target of a robbery in the works.

  “I don’t expect telling you all this could keep me from swinging, could it, Rock?” Tooney had asked him.

  “Not a chance,” Rochenbach replied.

  “Then why am I telling you, knowing you’re the law dog who put me here?” Tooney said.

  “Beats me,” Rock said. “Maybe just to get it off your chest? Do something decent?”

  “Decent, ha. I hate every sumbicth I ever rode with, north or south, that’s why,” Tooney said.

  “I understand,” Rochenbach had replied.

  No sooner had the rope snapped tight around Tooney’s neck than Rochenbach had looked up the Swede. He’d spent a few days drinking, gambling with him, reliving the couple of times they’d ridden together—a bank job, a counterfeiting spree. Then he’d let the Swede know he was available. Reminded him how handy he was at opening safes.

  He smiled and closed his eyes. That was enough to get himself into the game, he thought, drifting, catching flashes of the long ride he’d made from Gunn Point, almost nonstop, down from the Medicine Bow Range, along the mountain line to Boulder City, a dozen plank towns and mining camps in between and now finally to Denver City.

  Three weeks late, according to Grolin.

  But right on time, as far as he was concerned, considering he’d lost almost a week in the Gunn Point jail—not to mention he’d burned down part of a counterfeiting ring run by the Golden Circle and killed the man running it. But he was he
re now, ready to get to work, he thought, rubbing the sore but nearly healed wounds of two separate bullet fragments he’d taken in his shoulder—souvenirs.…

  He was fit enough now, he thought, taking stock of himself. He’d have to get some better boots—a hat of some sort, some gloves… but all that in good time. Right now he needed sleep. After he’d rested, he thought, Let the game begin.

  Chapter 3

  Rochenbach awoke at midday to the sound of a key turning inside the door lock. Almost before he’d opened his eyes, his hand streaked from beneath his pillow and raised the Remington, cocking it on the upswing. He rose quietly from the bed and stood in his stockinged feet, still dressed, his wool coat still on. He saw someone try the door against the chair back wedged beneath it. He lowered his big pistol a little as he watched the doorknob ease back around into place. He waited; a knock came.

  He stepped over to the door and listened for the second knock before reaching out and taking hold of the chair.

  “Who’s there?” he asked. He heard cursing on the other side of the door. Then he heard Denton Spiller’s gruff voice.

  “It’s us, damn it!” Spiller said. “Spiller and Pres Casings. Open the damned door. What are you so scared of?”

  Rock uncocked the Remington, bent his arm at the elbow and raised the gun upright beside him, poised. He pulled the chair from beneath the doorknob and set it back out of the way.

  “Jesus, Rochenbach, come on,” Spiller grumbled.

  But Rock still took his time. He stood to the edge of the door frame, twisted the knob and shoved the door open, leaving the two gunmen staring at an empty room for just a second before he appeared at the right edge of the door.

  The two looked at the wooden chair and at the Remington in Rochenbach’s hand.

  “Damn,” said Spiller, “a man takes all this precaution, you must be guilty as sin.”

  Rochenbach took his thumb off the Remington’s hammer and lowered the gun to his side as he gestured for the two to come inside.

  “That’s in case somebody had a key to my room,” Rock said flatly, staring at Spiller.