by Lou Cameron
“Never mind earlier misadventures with big lightning rods that just ain’t there, today.” He cut in, demanding, “Tell me how you’d switch blocks of downtown Colorado Springs off and on at will, give switched-off lamps and even folk in bed with no clothes on indecent shocks and so on, with or without these Tesla toys you just showed me.”
She protested, “Nikola Tesla never invented anything but the first practical a.c. generators and motors, working with Westinghouse before the turn of the century. That was more than enough. Had we stuck with the direct current Edison and other pioneers insisted on, mostly because it was easier to understand, we would be talking toys, or low-powered ceiling fans and such running on the feeble currents of close-up and modest power plants. Tesla made the big breakthrough that’ll no doubt mean, mark my words, an all-electric world by the end of this century. But the poor dear just can’t rest on his laurels. He’s cursed, or blessed, by an imagination that carries him farther than our science has the tools for yet, if it ever can have them. I asked him one time, only to get fussed at, what happens in the end if it turns out nobody lives on Mars, after all?”
He grimaced and said, “H.G. Wells and Percival Lowell will feel just as let down. But never mind Mars or even the Russian Navy. If you can’t figure out who’s doing it, can you figure out what it would cost ’em, and how they might profit from it?”
Before she could answer, the back door on her far side crashed open and two men with drawn guns burst in on them as one. The one who snapped, “One move and you’re both dead!” was the same jasper in the undertaker suit who’d started up with him and never finished that time in Cripple Creek, outside the telegraph office. The other was less dapperly-dressed but if anything, meaner-looking. The girl was directly in their line of fire in the narrow confines of the workshop. So Stringer sighed and asked, “Who’s moving? I’m the one you were sent after, boys. So whatsay we let the little lady run outside and play whilst we settle this more manly?”
The better dresser and talker growled, “It’s not for you to set the rules, here, Stringer. First we disarm you and then we decide the next moves. Miss Hotwire, would you be good enough to hand me Mister MacKail’s gun before we continue this discussion any further?”
She nodded soberly and turned back to face Stringer. As their eyes met he nodded fatalistically and drew his .38, He shrugged, twirled the gun on its trigger guard to grip it backwards, and held it out to her. But instead of taking it, she shot him a warning look, materialized a pipe wrench from some damned place if not thin air, and turned with her other hand casually resting on the ball of the spinning electrostatic generator as she held the wrench, rather than the gun he’d demanded, out to the gunslick between her and the door. He snarled, “What’s this? Are you trying to be cute, Stringer?” as he brushed her offer aside with his more serious gun muzzle, or tried to.
Stringer was almost as shocked, but nobody else could have felt the way the gunslick must have when all his hair stood on end and blue green Saint Elmo’s Fire writhed all about the wrench in Hotwire’s hand and the six-gun in his. Then both the girl and his gun were on the floor and Stringer was firing through the space they’d just occupied. He was more worried about the one who still displayed a weapon as well as a startled expression. It was just tough shit about the horrorstricken rascal frozen in place between them and, to be fair, it would later be established that his sidekick had put two rounds in him from behind as Stringer blew them both out the door into Hotwire’s back yard. Then he flipped off the induction coil and dropped down beside her in the resulting blackness, hissing, “Roll under your work bench, if you can. Are you all right?” She hissed back, “Yes, but there’s too much shit under there for me to slip my slender form between. What are we whispering about? I think you got both of ’em pretty good!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He had, it developed, once he and Hotwire had allowed the copper badges who responded to the gunshot the dubious honor of shining their swell new flashlights in the back yard. Stringer’s old pal, Sergeant Magnuson, arrived with the detective squad about twenty minutes later to verify both rascals were dead, and give Stringer mild hell for failing to leave at least one of them in condition to explain the shoot-out from their end. Even Stringer had to agree the story he and Hotwire told the law left a lot of loose strings dangling, for the girl had never seen either of the sons of bitches before and while Stringer recalled at least one of ’em from Cripple Creek, that conversation hadn’t been all that illuminating, either.
Their conversation with Sergeant Magnuson took place back up in her kitchen, where Magnuson had to allow her marble cake was swell, despite his disgust at the rest of the case.
Seated across from the weary-eyed lawman, Stringer tried, “That thicker-set one couldn’t have been out to hold my hand up in the gold fields. What if I just got the boys who got that poor innocent wearing my yellow slicker that wetter evening when I first passed through?”
Magnuson shook his head and said, “We’re pretty sure Harry Orchard was one of the killers that time, wherever the rat’s run off to by now. You weren’t the one they were after that night. Their intended victim knew he was their intended victim. Young Gorman was working with the Pinkerton Agency and knew they’d found out. As we put it together, he stole your slicker in that chili joint, hoping to make it to the night train north during the power failure as someone else. It didn’t work. Sorry about your raincoat. You never made much sense as a target for those union toughs to begin with, MacKail.”
Stringer nodded and said, “I was told some of ’em, at least, wanted more newspaper coverage than they’d been getting. As a matter of common sense it would have made more sense for them to back-shoot Bert Carlton or even old General Bell if even Big Bad Bill thought he could win that way. But if nothing I saw or did up around Cripple Creek inspired this latest attack, what could have?”
As she sliced more marble cake for the three of them, Hotwire said, “The problem you came to me with, Stuart. The funny things that have been happening to the wiring here in town. Didn’t you say you’d asked about it before you rode up to Cripple Creek on other business?”
Stringer started to say that sounded sort of complicated. Then he nodded soberly and said, “Right. Eliminate that cuss getting shot in my slicker, take me off any black list either the union or mine owners might have made up, and my troubles do seem to have commenced before I really knew much about what was going on up in the gold fields. I did poke my nose into past history and they tell me I met up with at least one agent of a government mighty interested in old Nick Tesla’s wireless experiments, dumb as Hotwire, here, thinks they were. So …”
“I never said the poor man was dumb,” she cut in, adding, “I said his dreams were too big for the hardware anyone has to work with on this more mortal plane. I try to keep up with the field. I know how to read. Anyone can see Edison and Marconi are just plodders, next to Nikola Tesla, when it comes to inventing electrical wonders in one’s head. Meanwhile, even though Tesla and his backers keep accusing poor Marconi of stealing his grand notions, Marconi’s built wireless telegraphs that work while Tesla’s labs have yet to turn out anything good for more than scaring the neighbors. It’s one thing to predict sending music, voices and even pictures by radio waves instead of just dots and dashes. Doing so is another chore entirely.”
Stringer objected, “It might not really matter whether something Tesla left out this way really works or not, as long as someone rich enough to hire guns thinks it does, right?”
Sergeant Magnuson suppressed a yawn and said, “This is all mighty interesting, I’m sure, but, no offense, we’re now using our imaginations more than any really practical solutions or even suggestions I’d be willing to offer my superiors. So, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. By me I mean my outfit. We’re going to backtrack those two dead cusses you were kind enough to deposit in this little lady’s yard for us. After we find out just who they was and where they came from we’ll dou
btless find it easier to connect ’em up to whomsoever sent them after you, Mister MacKail. That they were after you and not Miss Hotwire, here, seems self-evident. They called first to make sure you were here before they come calling with their guns out. So your intimation that they feared you’d write an exposé about the dumb way this town’s been wired commences to go mushy as soon as you study on that.”
Stringer didn’t have an answer, so he just washed down some cake with some coffee and didn’t offer any. Hotwire said, “Oh, I see. Anyone fooling with the juice would be more worried about me, Sparks Fletcher, or some other regular electrician catching them at it.”
Magnuson nodded and said, “That’s about the size of her. Meanwhile the coroner may want a word with both you young folk in the next few days. So can I tell the chief neither one of you are fixing to leave town in the near future?”
Stringer nodded and said, “You can reach me by telephone at the Alta Vista.”
“Or here,” their attractive hostess chimed in, meeting Stringer’s suddenly thoughtful amber eyes with her not-that-innocent baby blues. So even though Sergeant Magnuson only stayed for one more cup of coffee before excusing himself for the night, Stringer could hardly wait for the thick-witted lawman to get the hell out of there and, from the way Hotwire Hamilton responded to his first enthusiastic grab, she’d been mighty anxious as well.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She asked him to call her Nell, after they’d tingled down and dirty betwixt the clean sheets in her front bedroom in a manner that made him suspect she’d wired her springy bedstead for shock value. But as he assured her when she complimented him on his virility the third or fourth time they started over, he didn’t need his hair raised by anyone who could raise a man’s love muscles so grand, just by looking so grand with her work shirt and bib overalls out of the damned way.
Aside from being soft and satin-fleshed over the shapely muscles she’d developed getting into all sorts of other curious positions under houses or up atop utility poles, the lusty young widow made love in neither a coy nor a sluttish way, as if they were old pals who’d done it before, enjoyed it a heap, and ought to do it some more. So they did it some more until, as they were going at it dog style with the window shades up but the bedroom lights out, of course, the damned lights flashed on, exposing them to public ridicule if anyone was still up just across the street. So as she flattened out, blushing red with all four cheeks, Stringer dashed to the wall switch, flipped it in vain, and had no choice but to charge right at the window, bare as he might be, and yank down the shade as, behind him, the red-faced gal insisted that what had just transpired was impossible.
Somebody seemed to agree with them. The lights went out again. Stringer rose, tried the switch some more, and grunted, “No dice. No juice, either way, now. We’d still best leave the shade down. I don’t want to go through that again.”
She said she didn’t, either, and when he tried to take her naked body in his bare arms again she protested, “Hold the thought, darling. Don’t you think we ought to search for burglars, or maybe elves, down below? I just told you there’s no way to do what someone just did. I meant not from any distance. They obviously just did it.”
He drew his S&W from the gun rig he’d draped over the bedpost and told her he’d see to it, adding, “What am I looking for?”
She rose to follow, naked as she might be, saying, “You saw the induction coil I made. If they’re not right downstairs they can’t be far, big as they may have built their own.”
As they padded barefoot down the back stairs, he asked what the maximum range of a really awesome creation like that might be. She whispered, “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either. I know Nikola Tesla liked to impress visitors by stepping out of the lab to greet them in the open, take a forty watt Westinghouse bulb from his frock coat, and have it light up in his bare hand. The induction coil his assistant, Czito, switched on inside was beaming a good hundred and fifty, mayhaps two hundred feet, but it was really a big one, draining an awful lot of the free juice they extended him until they found out what Nikola Tesla meant when he said he needed just enough to run a few experiments.”
They got to the bottom. He made her stay put as he quickly made sure there was nobody, with or without any mystery gear, in either her workshop or out front. As he rejoined her in the hallway he told her, “Two hundred feet is about the width of a city block. How do we go about getting copies of your neighbors’ electric bills, let’s say all of ’em at this end of the block and, come to study on it, right across the street?”
She started to ask why. Then she said, “My, you sure think fast on your sweet bare feet. I’m sure Sparks Fletcher could get carbon copies or just copy down those bills, and of course anyone playing pranks like that last one would wind up with one electric bill indeed!”
“For more than one month,” he began, then frowned and said, “Hold it. Didn’t you say all this funny stuff started about a month ago? Before or after billing time, Nelly?”
She said, “I’m not sure. Let’s see, today was the last working day of June. Sparks would know better than me whether the billing for the past month has gone out already or waiting to be mailed next Monday. But … why, darling?”
He recalled an extension telephone set in her bedroom, so he suggested they get up there, quickly. She naturally knew Fletcher’s home phone number, having worked with the company trouble shooter so often. The Bell system, having its own source of the low amperage direct current telephones required, hadn’t been effected by the latest power failure. They found out the whole downtown of Colorado Springs had gone dark, again, when Fletcher’s wife told Nelly her husband had just been called down to the power house to do something about it, adding, “Thank the Lord tomorrow is the Sabbath!” to which Nelly replied, “Amen!” and hung up. As she lay back down beside Stringer she said, “Dear old Martha Fletcher has a point. With all the banks and most of the businesses shut down for the day, Sparks and his crew will have until Monday to get the juice flowing again and, speaking of flowing juices …”
He laughed and took her up on that, but since by now they’d gotten to that pleasant stage where a couple feels comfortable gabbing and grabbing at the same time, he felt free to ask, “Didn’t you tell me before, that so far neither you nor any other electrician in town has any notion what’s been going on, let alone just how to fix it?”
She moved her hips teasingly but remained calm, above the waist, as she replied, with less interest, “It has to be deliberate mischief. But so far the power’s never been off more than a few hours and you just suggested a swell way to catch the culprit, dear. I’m surprised none of us thought about comparing past and recent electric bills. I know mine are much higher than any of my neighbors, unless some of my neighbors have gotten awfully sneaky, and I can’t be using the juice it would take to run all that … Hold it, run what? I just can’t figure it, honey. I mean I know how to switch off someone’s current from outside. I know how to make their dead house current wink on and off with wireless induction. But I’ll be wired d.c. if I can see how anyone could do so without it showing up somewhere for the meter readers and, like Sergeant Magnuson said, there’s no sensible reason I can come up with to play such pranks, even if I could!”
He said, “There has to be, despite how casually everyone in town seems to take the bugs in their electrical system. Call me an old fussbudget, but if I had my life savings tied up in a business or bank amid such uncertain surroundings, I’d be anxious as hell.”
She started moving faster, sort of panting, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ve just grown used to having crazy electric current with no harm done. But do we have to worry about it now, Lover?”
They didn’t, of course. But after they’d finished and Stringer was building a smoke for them to share whilst they recovered their strength the telephone set beside them rang. Stringer had trouble following just one side of the conversation, so he didn’t try, and had the Bull Durh
am going by the time she hung up and said, “That’s odd. It was Pete Collins, from the power plant. He says there’s nothing wrong with either their new steam turbines or their Westinghouse generators. The current’s going out. Folks all over town are telephoning in to ask where theirs is. Pete asked if I had any juice and if not, whether I knew where Sparks might be.”
Stringer blew a thoughtful smoke ring and asked, “Where should he be on a night like this?” To which she replied, “Out reading meters and climbing poles, of course. I wish I knew where he was for sure, for I’d like to join him, in a more sisterly way, I mean. I like your suggestion about looking through the company records instead of alley transformers.”
He said, “I’ve got another suggestion. Get that Collins gent at the main plant on the telephone again and let me talk to him about those electric bills some more, will you?”
Stringer wasn’t as surprised as the rest of the town when the juice was still shut off, however it had been shut off, well after sunrise. He took it more seriously than some, however. Few folk minded going to church on a bright Sunday morn, whether there were Edison bulbs or candles lit up to compete with the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass. The downtown shops were mostly shuttered for the Sabbath. The banks wouldn’t open before Monday for Teddy Roosevelt in the flesh. So, as Stringer and Sergeant Magnuson lay belly down in the dust below the porch of the locked-up feed store across from the D&RGRR Depot, the local lawman kept grousing, “Damn it, MacKail. The more I study on your proposal, the less sense it makes. I’ll allow it unsettled my breakfast when they told us at the Electric Company how much of their cash reserves they kept at First National, and I’ll allow your notion made sense at first glance, when they told us the vaults at First National can’t be opened until their dumb electricated time locks get some juice to run on. But as I lay here adding your figures up, they don’t add up. You say the electric bills go out tomorrow. I get mine around the third or fourth of the month but I’ll take your word for it.”