the Devil's Workshop (1999)

by Stephen Cannell

  "Let's get it going," he said, handing her the keys. She turned on the engine. He leaned over and checked the gas gauge. "Half a tank." He nodded in satisfaction, then turned on the climate control, setting it at seventy-two degrees. "Welcome to the hobo Dome Liner. What kinda music do you like?"

  "Pop ... or R and B," she smiled.

  He found a station and set the volume low. Then he reclined the seat.

  "And I thought this was gonna be a grim, dirty ride," she said.

  "Every occupation has its points of craft, even hoboing, but there's also a practical side to this. We've got a three-mile tunnel up ahead, which would asphyxiate us if we were outside. In here we'll be fine."

  They sat back and listened to the music, as the East Texas landscape floated past under a cloudless, moonlit sky. Half an horn-later they flashed into the blackness of the long tunnel, and, as Cris had promised, they rode through the deadly diesel fumes breathing cool air-conditioning.

  After they came out of the tunnel they rode in comfortable silence. Stacy glanced at Cris, who was pensively looking out the window at the passing scenery. "It must have been horrible losing your daughter like that," she suddenly said, reading his thoughts as accurately as Max used to read hers. "I can imagine how much you must miss her." She waited for his reply.

  He bit his lip but didn't answer. Words couldn't possibly express Cris's true feelings.

  Chapter 37

  THE THRONE NEXT TO GOD

  Robert Vail and the Texas Madman rarely spoke; they had completely different agendas. R. V. saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior, a godlike Messiah who had divine direction. The Texas Madman saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior of a different sort. Fannon provided the Texas Madman with permission to kill, his acts of murderous "cleansing" easing the terrible ache inside him.

  Now, R. V. and the Madman sat behind the Yardmaster's tower in Shreveport, Louisiana, waiting for the Engine Foreman to deposit the unused carbon sheets in the trash. The yard was huge; almost a thousand parked railcars cooked in the humid heat. Shreveport had been a scrap metal center and had grown from that into a "railhead," where train line-ups and track warrants for the East Coast originated.

  The two men didn't speak, nor did they look at one another, as if even accidental eye contact would stir the contempt they naturally had for each other.

  They had been sent ahead to get consist sheets on the milk trains coming out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was a dairy center where the huge funnel-flow refrigerated tank cars were loaded with milk for major cities in the eastern United States. Fannon had carefully chosen the two cities he intended to attack. Detroit, he proclaimed, was the capital city of the mud races. New York, he declared, was the home of the Jew, an infested conclave of Hasidic corruption. All Fannon needed now was the consist sheets to tell him which milk tankers were going where. This was the mission he had assigned to R. V. and the Texas Madman.

  They hid in the shade behind the Yardmaster's office while flies buzzed around their heads and landed in their hair.

  At a little past ten in the morning the door opened and a skinny man in jeans and a T-shirt carried a cardboard box down a wooden flight of stairs and upended it into the trash. Then he turned and moved slowly in the summer heat back up to the air-conditioned coolness of the Yardmaster's office.

  "Let's go," R. V. said, and the two of them moved out of a magnolia tree's shade over to the trash can. They quickly retrieved around twenty carbon sheets, then moved away from the tower.

  "Hey!" a deep voice shouted.

  "Huh?" R. V. answered as he turned, slack-jawed and indolent in the oppressive heat.

  A heavy-set yard bull in a Southern Pacific uniform was in a doorway twenty yards away with a doughnut in his right hand. "Whatta you two fuckheads think you're doin'?" the yard bull growled, closing the door and moving toward them ominously, his leather gun belt and Sam Browne harness creaking loudly as he walked.

  "Whatta we doin'?" R. V. repeated, glancing over at the Texas Madman for help. The Madman was already beginning to smile in murderous anticipation, slipping a hand inside his unbuttoned shirt. His corpulent cheeks gathered in folds at the side of his fleshy mouth as he spread a grin that showed teeth, but no humor.

  "You heard me. Whatta you two dickbrains up to? You stealin' carbon sheets?" the yard bull sneered.

  And now, as the bull came closer, he put the doughnut in his mouth and held it there between his teeth to free his hand as he grabbed the carbon sheets out of R. V.'s grasp. "You fucks don't get to ride my trains, no sir, not today," he slurred around the doughnut, which was still in his teeth. "You two are headin' for the lockup."

  As he reached behind his back to unhook a pair of handcuffs from his Sam Browne belt, the Texas Madman pulled a gun out of his waistband and shot him between the eyes. The nine-millimeter slug punched a hole in the center of the yard bull's forehead. The man's head snapped back from the impact, but defying all laws of physics, the doughnut miraculously stayed in his mouth. The Texas Madman was treated to the orgasmic thrill of watching the light go out of the yard bull's eyes. It faded slowly, like a rheostat dimming an incandescent bulb. The yard bull fell, first to his knees and then forward, banging his destroyed forehead and uneaten sugar doughnut into the dirt at the Madman's feet.

  It was silent for a moment, and then R. V. heard something that sounded like high squeaks or fingernails being scratched on a blackboard. He looked over and saw that the Madman's huge girth was shaking. It was then that he realized that his murderous companion was giggling.

  The Reverend Fannon Kincaid sat in the still heat of the sleeper boxcar on the sided grain train. They were parked waiting for a "hot train" behind them to pass and for the Texas Madman and R. V. to return. The unit train they were on had been forced "into the hole" and had been waiting for almost two hours.

  Randall Rader was sitting at the far end of the car, his feet dangling over the graded shoulder of the tracks, reading the Available Light Bible in a low voice to Dexter DeMille. Fannon looked at their backs and listened to the resonant tone of Randall's gravel-strewn voice.

  Fannon had started out years before as a patriotic Army Lieutenant from a Southern Baptist family who had idealistically gone to Vietnam to serve his country. He had been told that he wasn't fighting North Vietnamese, he was fighting Communists. He knew that Communists were God's enemies, so he felt that his mission there was just. However, what he saw and did in that godforsaken place changed his perspective on mankind. He saw drug abuse and chemical insanity's corruption and debauchery. Still he believed in God and country, and through it all had distinguished himself under fire. He came home a combat-decorated Colonel. Once he got stateside his world shifted.

  He was called "Baby Killer" and spat on when he wore his uniform, which proclaimed his victories against the godless Communists in neat rows of ribbons over his heart. There was no adequate work. Affirmative Action took jobs from him and handed them freely to protesters, Niggers, and Jews who had stayed home. As he read passages in the Old Testament over and over he now saw things he had never seen in the Good Book before. Things that had had no meaning for him as a youth now screamed out at him from the pages of Genesis and Revelation. It had all been prophesied thousands of years ago. He read and interpreted and understood how the devil had put the Levites and Mud Races on earth to defy God's will. Over the next few years he drifted to the side of the road, forgoing traditional political correctness in favor of White separatist literature. He traveled to Hayden Lake, Idaho, and to Richard Butler's Aryan Nations Church. It was there that he had met and befriended Bob Matthews. He and Matthews took a blood oath one night and swore to purge the Jewnited States of corruption and evil. Fannon became a sort of Aryan Robin Hood, holding up banks and markets and handing the money to men he saw as defenders of the White Christian cause. He asked for nothing in return, save the purity of their uncompromised convictions.

  Fannon's views on religion had changed from his long-ago Southern Baptist
upbringing. His new religious convictions were like plaster poured on the imperfect imprint of humanity, hardening until they bore the veins and lines of what he saw as America's moral mistakes. Welfare programs and politically correct theories rutted the surface of his beloved nation like enemy trenches. More important, Fannon had gained a new sense of his own significance. Now he saw his calling as more profound, more exalted. He wasn't just a Robin Hood, he was now the new Messiah.

  A whistle ripped through the silence, shattering these ruminations. The rail that the sided grain train was sitting on began to shake as the ground trembled. Then the priority train they had been waiting for roared past, trapping air between the cars, rocking the boxcar he was standing in.

  Fannon snapped his gaze up at the thousands of shiny new automobiles as they flashed by three decks high, quivering on their axle chains. A godless tribute to man's endless need for material validation. The cars were speeding madly to market, where they would eventually fulfill their commercial expectations as gaudy containers for the inflated egos of heathens. Here he was, the new Messiah, God's avenging angel, waiting on a siding while they were rushed past. But Fannon knew that like Jesus and Moses before him, when he fell on the battlefield, he would be taken to heaven and asked to sit on the Throne next to God.

  Chapter 38

  SHREVEPORT, LA.

  Cris and Stacy saw the SP unit train from the windows of the white Mercedes as the priority train they were on flashed past.

  "There it is," Cris said, as he craned his neck to look back at the freight full of enclosed grainers.

  "You think Kincaid is still on it?"

  "That's gotta be the train he caught out on," Cris said, turning back to her. "At least according to Steam Train it is."

  "What do we do?" she asked, as they rocketed past the parked line of grain cars, the trapped air between the trains shaking the Mercedes violently.

  "We gotta get off. He could be changing trains here or he could be just waiting for us to pass. Either way, we have to check the switching yard and the local jungle. Shreveport's a hub--he could be heading anywhere from here."

  "How do we get off?" she said, looking at Cris with her eyes wide now, because the train they were on was going over sixty.

  "We'll slow for the yard in Shreveport, cut down to ten miles or less. Come on!" He reached over, turned off the engine of the Mercedes, and opened the door. As they got out they could already feel the train begin to slow.

  They moved along, retracing their steps, finally getting to the ladder. Cris climbed down and helped Stacy, until finally they stood on the main floor of the car carrier, only four feet above the tracks.

  "Shit, you can't be serious," she said, as she looked down at the rocky grade flashing by beneath them.

  Cris climbed down the side ladder and was now only a couple feet above the grade. Holding on to the grab-iron, he stepped down to the stirrup at the bottom of the ladder, then slowly let his right foot down, not quite touching the fast-moving gravel. Then he dropped his foot a few inches lower until it touched the ground. Almost immediately, it kicked back and behind him; his heel flew up and hit him in the ass.

  "Not yet," he grinned. "Still goin' too fast."

  "What the hell are you doing?" Stacy demanded.

  "It's a way to find out whether the train's going slow enough," he explained. "When you can put your foot down and it doesn't fly all the way up and hit you in the ass, then it's safe to jump. These are time-tested procedures."

  She wrinkled her nose in distrust as he smiled up at her. Again she could glimpse the heroic man in the picture behind his father's bar.

  The train was now near Shreveport, and wooden shacks marking the edge of the town began to appear; their pebble-scared backs turned toward the tracks like banished children. Cris pointed to one of the old wood structures as it flashed by them. It had a chevron painted on the side: ^

  "See that?" he said pointing to the drawing.

  "Yeah," she said, whipping her head to watch the shack recede behind them.

  "A chevron on a wall outside, of town means the cops in the switching yard are assholes likely to beat the crap outta you before making an arrest. It's a hobo warning... means we've gotta get off before we hit the yard."

  They could see that a couple of hobos had already jumped off the train and were rolling in the dirt as they shot past.

  Cris put his foot down again, and this time it flew back, but didn't come all the way up and hit his butt.

  "Okay, let's go." He gathered his strength and jumped, running a few awkward steps as he hit the ground, then went down, rolling onto his shoulder. Stacy climbed down after him, and without thinking, jumped. She hit and rolled like tumbleweed in the dust.

  The train slowed further as it approached the yard. They could hear the brake valves hiss; tortured metal screamed as the brake shoes engaged.

  Cris helped her up. "You just did your first train hop," he smiled as they brushed themselves off. "Welcome to the Knights of the Road. If I was still drinking we'd split a bottle over it. That was some dismount."

  "Jesus, that's not as easy as it looks," she said, but she was smiling broadly, invigorated by the experience.

  Now that the train was gone, keening insects took over, playing their field music. The other hobos had all magically disappeared like cockroaches under a baseboard. Stacy and Cris began walking along the track, toward the line of wood shacks. Cris pointed to some crude stick drawings on the side of one of the buildings. "See those?" he said.

  She nodded.

  "Over the years, hobos have put them there to tell other 'bos what's going on up ahead in the switching yard." He pointed to a triangle with two arms on either side: "That means the cops in the switching yard carry guns." Then he pointed to another symbol: "That means a kind lady lives here." Next to the cat were three triangles, each one larger than the last:

  "What's that mean?" she asked.

  "It means an exaggerated story will work with her. She's gullible. Come on."

  They walked along the side of the shack with the cat and found the gate, pushed it open, then crossed a dirt yard strewn with rusting junk. Cris knocked on the back door of the weather-beaten house, which was badly in need of paint. After a minute the door opened, and an old woman with her hair tied in a bandanna appeared at the screen door.

  "Well, lookie here," she said, smiling at Cris. Then she shifted her speculating gaze to Stacy. "Don't believe I've seen you two before."

  "We just got off that train, and were wondering if you'd be kind enough to tell us more about the yard up ahead."

  "Stay outta Shreveport. Them SP bulls is the worst." She smiled at Cris. "You got a name, son?"

  "I'm Lucky, she's Stacy," Cris answered.

  "Cinder-Ella," the old woman said proudly. "Cinder for the trains, Ella 'cause my given name is Eloise."

  "Nice knowin' ya," he smiled, then added, "We need to know where the jungle is around here and what kinda place it is."

  "That's Black Bed Jungle, but it ain't too healthy. It's east a' here, down by the river, but lotsa Low Enders hang there. Two old 'bos got murdered at Black Bed last year. The cops didn't do nothing, and the word spread. It's been fillin' up with F. T. R. A. S ever since. There's a new camp been forming 'bout two miles away, called Need More Jungle. It's safer." She smiled at Stacy, who smiled back. " 'Course things ain't like in the old days. Everybody's packin' guns. Some 'bos shot a cinder bull in the switching yard just this mornin'--plugged the bastard right outside the Yardmaster's office," Cinder-Ella said.

  "No kidding," Cris said.

  "Yep, been on the TV all day. News said the dead man was an SP yard bull, shot with a nine-millimeter."

  Cris remembered it was a nine-millimeter that Fannon Kincaid had pointed at him when he'd been in the water at Vanishing Lake. "How far down the tracks is the switching yard?" he asked.

  "Not far, 'bout half a mile. But them yard bulls is crazed right now. They'll be billy-jackin' anybody lo
oks like a train rider."

  "Would it be okay if my friend stayed here while I run a few errands?" he asked.

  "Be fine with me," she smiled. "Can always use the company."

  "I'll only be gone a little while," Cris said to Stacy.

  Stacy followed him to the garden gate. *4 What're you gonna do?"

  "If Kincaid's men shot that bull, I'll bet you anything they were carbon-sheet-spotting. I'm gonna go to Black Bed Jungle, see if they're still around. If I can find them, maybe I can figure out what train they're catching out on. I want you to stay here and listen for that grain train. It should be pulling through anytime. Move out to the side of the tracks and check out the cars as they pass. Look for a sleeper car, and look under all the cars at the suspension rods. Sometimes 'bos ride there, or up on the roof. There'll be around forty of them, probably riding in two or three cars. If they're still on that train, you should be able to spot them."

  "If you think they're on that train, why don't we sneak back and check it?"

  "I don't, 'cause they wouldn't have been at the Yardmaster's office and killed that cinder bull, but we gotta check in case I'm wrong. Besides, by the time we hike all the way back to that train, my guess is it'll already be moving. Just check it from here when it passes. Be back in a few hours." Then he smiled at her, and in a second he was out the gate. Stacy could hear his footsteps on the gravel as he moved along the side of the house and away.

  She turned and faced the old woman, who was busy tucking loose strands of wispy gray hair into her scarf, making herself more presentable for the company. Stacy felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. She was in a whole new world where none of the rules of her old life applied. She could barely understand any of it.