On the Wrong Track

by Steve Hockensmith

  “‘Not even a scream’ … ,” Old Red repeated slowly, as if trying to wrap his tongue around some strange foreign lingo.

  “Joe was probably too pie-eyed to know what was happenin’ to him,” Kip said, carrying his tray of merchandise to a large strongbox next to the desk. He unlocked the chest and stashed his wares inside. “Well … I’d better turn in. I have to be up early to start hawkin’ the mornin’ papers.” He tipped his cap to me and Old Red as he headed for the door. “Night, gents.”

  We offered our own good-nights—even El Numero Uno—as Kip left the car.

  “Tough on the kid, losin’ a pal like that,” I said.

  Gustav walked over to the coffins.

  “Death’s always tough on somebody.” He knelt and stroked the top of one casket, then the other. “Funny … it’s ‘the great equalizer,’ the preachers say. Yet even now I can tell rich from poor.” He gave the darker of the two coffins a rap with his knuckles. “Brass fittin’s on mahogany for the gentleman.” He tapped the other coffin, and the wood gave off a surprisingly low thunk. “Rope handles on pine for the pauper.”

  He eased himself onto the sturdier of the two coffins, using it like a bench just as Lockhart had. Any other time, I might’ve reminded him to show respect for the dead. But my brother was so pale gray and hollow-eyed, a casket actually seemed like a pretty natural place for him to rest himself.

  “You know, it’s a wonder you ain’t ended up like our friends here,” he said to our prisoner. “I mean, good God—ridin’ under train cars. That ain’t something a ‘committed coward’ is gonna try.”

  “One doesn’t become King of the Hoboes without some capacity for daring,” El Numero Uno said grandly, doing his best to puff out his chest. Then he deflated, chuckling at himself. “Of course, I prefer to ride the blinds. Any sane man does.”

  “‘The blinds’?” I asked.

  The hobo nodded, looking pleased to be passing on the lore of his realm. “A section between cars where there’s no door. Between the express car and the tender, say, or the baggage car and the express car. There’s no way anyone on the train can spot you. But you’re totally exposed to anyone who’s not on the train. Fall asleep, and you’ll wake up at the next station with a bull’s billy club breaking over your head.”

  “Do bums ever try to sneak inside trains?”

  Gustav’s question hit El Numero Uno like a slap to the face.

  “Well, I can’t speak for bums,” he huffed. “Or boomers or yeggs, for that matter. I, sir, am a hobo.”

  “I apologize for my brother’s ignorance,” I said, trying to look appalled even though I had no idea what elevated the noble hobo above any other vagrant. “What he should have said was, ‘Do your subjects—or any of the lesser men of the road—ever avail themselves of unofficial berths in the interior of a train car? Your Majesty.’”

  El Numero Uno nodded and smiled, appeased. “That’s a very good question. Boxcars are fair game, but you’ll never hear of a ’bo trying to sneak inside a car on a passenger train. Yeggs and bandits have been known to attempt it, though. There was even some buffoon a few years back who smuggled himself onto a train in one of those.” He nodded at the coffins. “The baggageman heard him and got a gun, and when the dolt tried to hop out and rob the train, he got a bullet in the gut before he could say, ‘Stick ’em up!’ Then the baggageman just loaded him right back in his coffin, and they buried him in it at the end of the line.”

  As El Numero Uno wound down his little tale, Gustav jumped up and stared at the box that had been beneath him like it had bitten him on the butt.

  “What?” I said.

  Old Red stooped over and started running his fingers over the coffin again, this time taking special care to pick at the edges and fittings. He even did what I was dreading—grabbed the lid and tried to lift it—but the top of the casket didn’t budge. When he was through with the showy mahogany coffin, he turned his attention to its humble pine neighbor.

  “Sealed up tight—both of ’em,” he finally announced. “He wasn’t hidin’ in either of these.”

  “He?” El Numero Uno asked.

  “The killer.” Gustav’s gaze moved from the caskets to the gently swaying towers of crates, boxes, and bags filling the rest of the car. “There’s tags on these coffins. Give ’em a read for me, would you, Otto?”

  My brother and I crisscrossed in the middle of the compartment as I headed for the coffins and he walked back toward the mounds of cargo. When he reached the first stack of baggage, Old Red went down on his hands and knees and brought his face in so close to the floorboards he could’ve used his mustache as a mop.

  “Are you huntin’ for clues or passin’ out?” I asked him.

  “Clues,” he sighed without looking back at me.

  “Just checkin’.”

  “You know, I’ve got to hand it to you two,” El Numero Uno said, a big grin peeking out from beneath his dark beard. “I’ve met plenty of cinder dicks in my day, but you’re the first I’ve come across with personality .”

  “Oh, we got plenty of that—it’s good sense we’re short on.” I crouched by a small, yellowed card attached to the mahogany casket with twine. The pencil markings on it were sloppy but legible. “The tag on the fancy box says, ‘Mrs. C.J. Foreman—San Jose.’”

  “The widow lady with the kids, I betcha,” Gustav said as he crawled off into the labyrinth of luggage. “That’d be Mr. Foreman crated up there.”

  I waddled over and snagged the tag on the other coffin.

  “The pine box belongs to … I’ll be damned.”

  Old Red peeked around the side of a battered steamer trunk. “And why is that?”

  “Because this coffin’s registered to Dr. Gee Woo Chan of San Francisco.”

  “Well … I’ll be damned, too.”

  Gustav disappeared again.

  “What exactly is he looking for?” El Numero Uno asked me. “You don’t really think there’s a murderer aboard, do you?”

  “That’s two different questions,” I said. “The answer to the first is, ‘I don’t know.’ And the answer to the second is … ‘I don’t know.’”

  “Well, if there is a killer creeping around, I’m actually glad to be tied up in here with my own personal guards,” the hobo said. “All of a sudden, I feel like the safest person on this train.”

  It was at that exact moment that someone cut loose with a bloodcurdling shriek.

  Twelve

  STRANGE CARGO

  Or, We Find More Than One Snake in the Grass

  In my mad dash into the stacks of baggage, I managed to clip a particularly wobbly heap with my broad shoulders, and I was quickly letting out a pretty good yelp of my own as an avalanche of leather, cloth, and wood sent me sprawling to the floorboards.

  “What happened?” El Numero Uno shouted.

  “Nothin’ I’d care to admit to,” I groaned from beneath a layer of luggage.

  A moment later, I was helped to my feet by the very man I’d intended to rescue.

  “Next time,” Old Red panted, winded from digging me out, “just ask if I’m alright.”

  I rubbed the back of my head where a satchel apparently stuffed with hammers had left a sizable lump. When I glanced down to see which bit of baggage to blame, I found myself looking at a very familiar war bag.

  I’d been knocked senseless by my own book.

  I used to think a man’s dreams carried no weight for him, but rather lifted him up like heated air lifts a balloon. I now knew better. A dream can weigh upward of ten pounds, and when it falls on your head, it smarts.

  “You know,” Gustav said, “that wouldn’t have been there to brain you if you’d—”

  “Yeah, I do know, alright? So there’s no use pointin’ it out.”

  “There is if it’ll get you to send the damn thing to Harper’s like you oughta.”

  “Can’t we talk about this later?” I peered over my brother’s shoulder. “I could’ve sworn I heard a little
girl screamin’ somewhere back here. Did you happen to see her?”

  “Come on,” Old Red grumbled. “Let’s find out what you sound like when you see it.”

  He led me toward a shadowy corner of the car.

  “I spotted somethin’”—Gustav grimaced and glanced back at the heaps of debris we’d just picked our way through—“which is pretty much buried now, thank you very much. It trailed off thisaway … and I noticed that.”

  He pointed at a peculiar crate at about waist height in the nearest stack of freight. Built into its side was a small, latched door covered with chicken wire. There wasn’t enough light to see anything inside it other than some sawdust and a coil of black rope or rawhide.

  I bent over and brought my face even with the crate, determined not to make the slightest peep when I laid eyes on whatever had spooked Gustav.

  “Go on. That’s it,” my brother said. “You’re just where I was when—”

  The rope launched itself at me, its gaping mouth flying into the chicken wire and chewing at it furiously.

  I didn’t scream like a little girl, as Old Red had. I screamed like a big girl with substantially more powerful lungs.

  “For God’s sake, someone tell me what’s going on back there!” El Numero Uno called out.

  “We found a snake!” I’d jolted backward onto my butt, and I pushed myself up and began dusting the seat of my pants. “Don’t worry, though—he ain’t loose!”

  “Why all the shrieking, then?”

  “You want me to haul him up there and show you?”

  The hobo shut up.

  “What the hell kind of snake is that?” I asked Old Red.

  My brother shrugged. “Too dark to tell. And I sure ain’t gonna take him out of his cage for a better look.”

  The snake retreated out of the light, then turned, pointing its arrowhead skull at us again. Its crate had a different kind of tag than the coffins. Instead of a slip of paper, a small, brass disk was attached to it. Stamped into the metal was a number.

  I was carrying four such disks in my own pocket just then, the numbers on them matching four more tied to our war bags and saddles. It was an efficient enough method for claiming luggage, but for one drawback: It gave you no way to identify anyone’s baggage but your own.

  Well, almost no way.

  “Hel-lo,” Gustav murmured, staring first at the box atop the snake crate, then at the one below it. Each was emblazoned with the same emblem: the words PROFESSOR PERTWEE’S HEALTH MIRACLE NUT BUTTER above two peanuts radiating wavy lines as if glowing like gold.

  “That say what I think it says?” Old Red asked.

  I read out the words, then checked the numbers on the claim tags. The nut butter boxes were 144 and 146. The snake’s box was 145.

  “So all three of these was turned over to a porter at the same time by the same person,” my brother said. “That loudmouth drummer.”

  “Why would a feller like Chester Horner be haulin’ around a snake?”

  “Let’s jar that up and set it aside for now.” Gustav turned and began gathering up the valises and hatboxes and whatnot that cluttered the narrow aisles between piles of baggage. “We got somethin’ to attend to first.”

  “And what ‘somethin’ would that be?” I asked as I pitched in to clear off the floor.

  “A trail,” Gustav said. “Of blood.”

  “Did he say blood?” El Numero Uno spluttered.

  “The subject did arise,” I replied.

  “Well, cut me loose, then! You can’t leave me alone back here trussed up like a Christmas turkey!”

  “You ain’t alone, Your Grace,” I said. “You can’t see us, but we ain’t more than thirty feet away. If a madman rises up out of one of them coffins and comes at you with a meat cleaver, just do what comes natural: scream. We’ll be there in two shakes.”

  “Oh, thank you,” the ’bo said. “I feel so much better.”

  We were almost through reheaping the upturned luggage by then, and I noticed that my brother had set two bags aside from the rest.

  “You got special plans for our war bags?”

  “Just wanna make sure everything ends up in the right place,” Old Red said. “Alright, that’s enough housecleanin’. I can pick up the trail again now.”

  He went into a squat and pointed at a small, dark smear on the floor. He waddled over to it, and his finger jabbed at another blotch a few feet away. And then another and another.

  “Those ain’t drops,” I said. “They’re streaks. Pezullo was dragged to the side door.”

  “That’s the way I got it ’duced,” Gustav mumbled, duckwalking along the blood trail. “Towed him from somewhere … back … here.”

  My brother—and the trail—came to a stop before an exceptionally large crate pushed up against the back wall of the car.

  “What’s that say?”

  Old Red pointed at a message scrawled in blue chalk on the side of the box—three words accompanied by an arrow pointed skyward.

  I was tempted to reply with something like CAUTION: POINTY STICKS or HEY, NICE HAT or simply “What the hell do you think it says?” But it’s my policy never to make light of Gustav’s lack of letters, as I only learned to read and write because my brother and the rest of our brood took up the slack around the farm while yours truly was granted the privilege of pursuing an education past grade two.

  “‘This end up,’” I said. I rapped my knuckles on the top of the crate. The resulting knock was loud and high-pitched—the sound of cheap wood and loose packing. “What do you think’s in here, anyway? Must be enough space inside for a piano and the feller to play it.”

  Old Red flinched like I’d just told him Barson and Welsh were perched atop the box, guns drawn.

  “Oh, I bet it’s a rolltop desk from Monkey Ward, somethin’ like that,” he said, his voice casual, his expression dead serious.

  He brought a finger to his lips, then leaned in close to the crate, inspecting each board and edge. He took special care going over several gouges in the wood along the left-hand corner. When he was done with the scratches, he went up on tiptoe to get a look at the top of the box. Soon his finger was on the move again, stabbing at three identical holes, all of them perfectly round.

  I held up my hands and made a cranking motion.

  “Drilled?” I was asking.

  Gustav nodded, and I could see from the wide, wary set of his eyes that he was thinking back on the same thing as me—that story El Numero Uno had told about the stowaway bandit.

  Those weren’t knotholes we were looking at. They were airholes.

  Without any signal from either of us, we prepared to do some drilling of our own, drawing our .45s and aiming them at the crate.

  “If there’s somebody in there, who’s to say he ain’t got a six-shooter, too?” I whispered.

  “Them holes ain’t from bullets,” Old Red pointed out, his voice so quiet I could barely hear it. “And Pezullo didn’t have any bullet holes in him, neither. If he was killed cuz he opened up this crate … well, at least we know he wasn’t shot for it.”

  “That ain’t much comfort.”

  “It ain’t. But there’s no way around it. We gotta open that son of a bitch. Stay here.”

  Gustav headed back toward the other end of the car, leaving me alone with the box. While I stood there, the grip of my Colt growing slick with sweat, I listened for telltale noises from the other side of the wood: voices, the cocking of a hog leg, the growl of a tiger, anything. But all I heard was my own breathing and the humming and clacking of the train.

  When Old Red returned, he was clutching a crowbar.

  “Alright,” he whispered, “you cover me while I—”

  I shook my head, holstered my Peacemaker, and plucked the crowbar from his hand.

  “We both know who’ll get this thing open quicker.”

  Gustav nodded brusquely, then stepped to the side and drew his .45 again. I found a good spot—the same side of the crate that had
been pried at before, to judge by the scratches—and slid in the crowbar’s claw. It didn’t take much muscle to work the side panel free, for the nails were small and already loose in the wood.

  “Don’t make a fuss, now—there’s a gun pointin’ your way!” Old Red barked as I pried the panel off. “Put your hands up and … ! Oh. Well. Hel-lo.”

  “What’s going on? Is someone in there?” yelled El Numero Uno, who’d apparently been apprised of the situation when my brother went off to fetch the crowbar.

  “Not a someone,” I called back to him. “A something. A bunch of ’em.”

  “Well? What?”

  “Bricks,” Gustav answered, staring in puzzled wonderment at the orange-red blocks spread neatly across the bottom of the box.

  “Did you say ‘bricks’?”

  “Yeah, yeah—bricks!” my brother hollered. “Now would you shut up for a second?”

  Old Red stooped down to get a better look at the crate’s cargo. There were forty-nine bricks in all—a single layer laid out in seven rows of seven.

  “Whoever was in there, we know this much about him,” I said. “He’s got one hell of a tough rump. Personally, I would’ve packed myself in with pillows to sit on, but maybe I’m just soft.”

  “Only from the neck up,” Old Red murmured as he picked up one of the bricks from the outermost row. It was different from its neighbors, flecked with small, dark dots. Gustav flipped it over to look at the side that had been facedown to the floor.

  It was coated with dark blood and curly, black hairs.

  “Well, that settles it. This is it,” my brother said, and then he used a phrase he’d picked up from the Holmes case Doc Watson had labeled “Silver Blaze”: “The scene of the crime.”

  “So Pezullo got his head stoved in by a stowaway?”

  Old Red slid the brick back into its slot and stood up slowly—so slowly I wasn’t entirely sure he was going to make it.

  “Sure looks that way,” he said, slumping against the crate. “So now the question is, where’d the bastard get to?”

  “Probably jumped out when we stopped for the body and snuck off into the desert,” I suggested. “Which means you can get yourself some rest. Whoever it was killed Pezullo, he’ll get what’s due him tomorrow with no help from you. The sun’ll have him charred to a crisp before he even gets to hell.”