The warden nodded to the assistant who had been quietly standing near the door and the deputy marshal who had escorted Fallon the one hundred and fifty or sixty miles from Austin to Huntsville. Once the assistant signed a receipt and handed it to the deputy, the lawman looked at Fallon, nodded, thanked the warden, and opened the door. The assistant closed the heavy door behind the departing lawman, and Fallon slowly, discreetly, let out a long breath.
So far, so good.
The man in the dark uniform spoke in a dreary monotone, as though by rote.
Fallon would be issued a uniform, of white and brown stripes. This being summer—it was actually spring, but spring usually seemed like a figment of one’s imagination in Texas—Fallon would be given shoes, pants, shirt, and hat. Socks, drawers, and a jacket would be provided in winter.
“If he’s still alive,” the warden said, sniffed, and searched for a handkerchief in his coat pocket.
“You may keep any drawers, undershirts, socks, or handkerchiefs that you brought,” the assistant said, “or may receive any through friends, or purchase them but only after receiving permission from Superintendent Wilkinson, the assistant superintendent, or the sergeant.”
Fallon learned about the bedding he would receive, how to handle mess call—once again, no prisoners could speak while eating—bathing (once a week), privileges (like Fallon would ever be granted any of those), visitations, punishments, and work details.
“Start him out tomorrow in the mill,” the warden said.
The assistant went on. Fallon had heard it all before. Maybe one time, Fallon thought, he might hear it coming from someone who cared. Wouldn’t that be something!
“Questions?” the warden asked.
“No, sir,” Fallon answered.
“Peter.” The warden had found his handkerchief and wiped his nose. Spring, Fallon realized. Hay fever. Fallon grinned. It was good to see a man like Walter Wilkinson suffer. Fallon had never been allergic to anything, though he wished he were allergic to prisons.
“Get him . . .” The warden sneezed. “Outfitted. Show him . . .” Another violent sneeze that almost doubled over the lout. This was only March. Wait till all the cedars started doing their damage, the wildflowers started blooming, and the winds picked up. “His cell. Then . . .” This time, the sneeze provoked a vile oath from the warden. “Turn him over to Sergeant Drexel.”
The assistant chuckled. “Barney loves breaking in the fresh fish.”
Every muscle in Fallon’s body tightened. He had been inside The Walls for no more than thirty minutes, and everything—all the planning they had spent—could be jeopardized. Fallon had mentioned the possible risk, but the Texas attorney general and Sean MacGregor had waved off his concerns.
“What would you say the chances are of you actually running into someone you know in Huntsville? ” MacGregor had asked. “As a deputy marshal for Judge Parker in Arkansas and the Indian Nations, the men you sent to prison went to the Detroit House of Corrections.”
“I ran into them in Joliet,” Fallon had reminded the Scot. “And in Yuma. And in Jefferson City.”
“But Huntsville’s Texas,” MacGregor had scoffed.
“I cowboyed in Texas,” Fallon had reminded him. “A lot of men I chased out of the Nations rode south to Texas.”
The attorney general hadn’t bought that argument, either.
“The chances are slight,” Malcolm Maxwell had said. “And it’s a risk you’ll have to take.”
Fallon had corrected him. “You mean it’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
“If you want out, Fallon,” MacGregor had said, “say the word.” He had spoken that so smugly, condescendingly, that Fallon had found himself grinding his teeth. “Say it, Fallon. There’s always room for you at Joliet. Just remember, this isn’t just a chance to bring justice to a madman. To help your country. But more than that, this is your chance, your only chance, to right your name. To avenge the murders of your wife and daughter.”
Now, thinking about that meeting, Fallon saw their faces then. His wife, Renee, so young, so beautiful. His daughter, Rachel, a sweetheart of a baby . . . who would be approaching young womanhood had she not...
Fallon shuddered.
The warden laughed, and the images before Fallon, those recurring, haunting memories, stopped instantly, bringing Fallon back into the office of the superintendent of The Walls.
“It happens all the time, doesn’t it, Steve?”
The assistant chuckled softly.
“The Walls have a way of sending a chill up your spine. Especially when you know that you’ll be here for the rest of your scum-sucking, miserable life.” The warden sneezed again. “No. No. Not a life. You don’t have a life anymore. You have an existence, and maybe that’s only a figure of speech. Get him out—” Another violent sneeze rocked the warden, and the assistant, Steve, opened the door and nodded for Fallon to follow.
Barney Drexel, Fallon kept thinking as he picked up his clothing, exchanging his denim pants, cotton shirt, and boots for the scratchy, ill-fitting summer uniform of white and brown stripes, rough shoes, and a cap that had to be one size too small. At least he had socks, relatively clean, and summer underpants. Those shoes would cripple a man without socks.
Barney Drexel.
Fallon hadn’t thought of him since Judge Parker had fired the lout back in Fort Smith maybe twelve years back. Drexel had pinned on a badge after Parker had just been appointed as the only federal judge serving western Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Drexel had brought in most of the men he went after dead, but Fallon had also killed his share. The rule of outlaws in the Indian Nations was: die game. Certainly, it beat hanging on the scaffolds outside of the old army building that now held the jail and the judge’s courtroom. Even if, sometimes, you’d get to hang with your friends. Judge Parker’s gallows could hold up to six doomed men at a time.
Drexel should have wound up on those gallows himself. He shot another deputy marshal dead while both were off duty in a saloon on Garrison Avenue. Put four .45 caliber slugs into Deputy Marshal Flint Logan’s stomach, and another in the back of Logan’s head while he lay in a pool of his own blood on the saloon’s sawdust-covered floor. He would have put another bullet in Logan’s corpse but the Colt misfired the last chamber.
That shooting had not surprised Fallon. Drexel had always been a brute and a bully, and too often went for his Colt or Winchester. What saved Drexel from the gallows was the fact that Flint Logan’s reputation also smelled like a coyote’s carcass, and witnesses couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say that Drexel drew first. The argument seemed to be over a prostitute, but she couldn’t be found after the shooting. The U.S. marshal, U.S. attorney, and Judge Parker agreed that they had rid the U.S. Marshals Service of two bad apples. Flint Logan was dead. Barney Drexel was told not to show his face in Arkansas or the Indian Nations again.
So Drexel had wound up as a sergeant of guards in Huntsville.
Such was Harry Fallon’s luck.
He made it through the prison doctor’s evaluation in rapid time.
“You seem to attract a lot of bullets, sir,” the bony, white-haired old-timer said.
“And knives,” Fallon told him. “Clubs. Broken bottles. Fists. Hatchets. Fingernails.”
“I’ve performed autopsies on bodies with fewer scars. Take a deep breath. Exhale.” The doctor lowered the stethoscope. “You’re in remarkable condition for what should be a corpse. Have a peppermint stick, Mr. Alexander. And welcome to The Walls.”
* * *
Now he had been turned over to a guard, a redheaded man with a thick mustache and blackened teeth. As the guard escorted Fallon across the prison yard toward Sergeant Barney Drexel, Fallon kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, after all these years Drexel wouldn’t recognize him. A dozen years had passed, and ten of those years had been hard, brutally hard on Harry Fallon. The Illinois State Prison at Joliet certainly had earned its reputation for aging a man.
“Sergeant Drexe
l,” the black-toothed guard said. “Fresh fish for ya.”
Big, ugly, bearded Barney Drexel turned around and rapped a big stick into the palm of his beefy left hand.
Barney Drexel looked the same.
Fallon muttered a curse under his breath, but he was saved by another savage curse.
His escort stopped, and stepped aside.
Fallon turned toward the curse and saw a man in the uniform of a Huntsville inmate running hard.
“You turncoat yellowbelly,” the man said as his lowered shoulder caught Fallon’s middle.
CHAPTER 2
Josh Ryker.
Fallon recognized him just before the wiry onetime cowboy knocked the breath out of him. Landing hard on his back, Fallon managed to bring his knees up, and then he kept rolling, somersaulting, sending Ryker sailing toward Sergeant Barney Drexel and the other guards and inmates gathered around the whipping post.
Josh Ryker. The last person Fallon expected to find in Huntsville. Who else could be here? Not that it mattered. What had Fallon expected the American Detective Agency to do? Go through a list of every inmate housed in the state pen and see if Fallon recognized the names? Hell, half the men Fallon had arrested in the Indian Nations and Arkansas had been using aliases.
Fallon rolled to his side, pushed himself up on elbows and knees, trying to get his lungs to work again. He heard cheers, curses, and shouts coming from inmates who now provided a wide arena for the fight. Maybe some of the guards were cheering, too. Fallon also saw Josh Ryker running toward him. Fallon let him come. At the last second, he dived to his right, lifted his left leg high, and managed to trip Ryker. The man cursed as he went sailing into a wall of men in brown-and-white or black-and-white uniforms. The prisoners shoved Ryker back into the circle. He fell onto his back, spread-eagled, and slowly came up, shaking the cobwebs out of his head.
By then, Fallon had pushed himself to his feet. He stood waiting.
“Go get him!” an inmate shouted.
“Kill him!”
“Stomp his head into the dirt!”
Fallon shook his own head. He wasn’t moving. He was still trying to remember how to breathe.
And the spectators in prison uniforms and guard uniforms weren’t all cheering for the fresh fish.
“Ryker, you’s a-fightin’ like a Baptist deacon’s wife!”
“Get off yer ass, ya puny sack of snake turds, an’ kill dis new meat!”
Ryker came to his feet, turned, staggered, straightened, and began moving cautiously, ready now. He probably expected Fallon to be the young green pup he had been back during their cowboying days, back when they had first arrived in Fort Smith. Ryker was the older of the two, the one who could outdrink, outfight, and outride anyone he ever met. Fallon had been the tagalong kid still in his teens and wet behind the ears.
Now Ryker knew that fifteen years had hardened his onetime pard.
He doesn’t know the half of it, Fallon thought as he brought his arms up, fists clenched, and began countering Ryker’s feints as he drew closer. Ten years in Joliet for a crime I didn’t commit. The riots. The knifings. The weeks in solitary and the whippings just so the guards could let everyone know who bossed the prison. And then, pardoned by the governor, only to find myself back in prison—this time working for the American Detective Agency. Yeah, that’ll harden a man until his skin and fists are like iron, and his soul and heart even harder than that. Yuma in Arizona Territory, known, rightfully so, as The Hellhole. Jefferson City in Missouri, called the “bloodiest forty-seven acres in America.” And now inside these god-awful Walls in eastern Texas!
Yeah, Fallon wasn’t that kid Ryker had punched longhorns with in Texas, Indian Territory, and Kansas. Wasn’t that puppy dog who had followed Ryker to Fort Smith to gamble.
Ryker swung a right. An easy punch to avoid. Fallon felt it pass over his head, and he came up quickly, bending his head so that the back of his skull caught Ryker’s jaw. He heard the crunch of teeth and saw Ryker fall backward. Fallon straightened, shaking off the pain in his head, and raised his right foot. He slammed the ill-fitting shoe down toward Ryker’s bleeding face, but Josh Ryker wasn’t the same youthful cowboy Fallon had ridden with from Dodge City to Fort Smith all those years ago.
Yes, Ryker had learned a few things, too. He grabbed Fallon’s foot, twisted it, and sent Fallon spinning into the ground. Now Fallon rolled into the feet and legs of the prisoners who had formed a circle to watch the brawl. They kicked him, hissed at him, and rolled him back toward Ryker.
Fallon turned and rose off the ground, just in time to feel Ryker’s kick that caught him in the left shoulder and drove him into the dust and sand. Fallon brought his legs up again, catching the diving Ryker, and once again sent the cowboy sailing. Again, Fallon rose quickly, rubbing his shoulder, already feeling the beginnings of a big, painful bruise. But his collarbone hadn’t been broken.
“Quarter pound of tobbacy says the fresh fish takes that little punk.”
“Bet.”
“I’ll let you see that tintype of that whore I met in San Angelo if Ryker loses this fight.”
“I’ve seen that picture. And never want to see it again. Give me nightmares, it did.”
Eighteen months, Fallon remembered. That had been Ryker’s sentence. The scenes replayed in Fallon’s head.
They had been drunk, Fallon and Ryker, not an unusual state for those two young fools. Pretty much cleaned out by Fort Smith’s gamblers, they had been shooting out the streetlamps the first time, only to be stopped by a man that Fallon guessed to be a preacher. The stranger turned out to be Judge Isaac Parker. Fallon should have learned then that Ryker wasn’t the type of saddle pal you wanted to be with. For a moment, Fallon thought Ryker would murder the judge, and maybe he would have had a lawman not come along then. Fifty dollars or fifty days. Ryker had to sell his horse and saddle to get them out of the Fort Smith calaboose, then lost most of what he had left over in a craps game. And decided to steal a saddle on display at a saddle shop.
Fallon had tried to stop Ryker. Ryker wasn’t one to be stopped. They had fought. Ryker had won. And then another lawman came around, and after an insane and intense few seconds, Fallon had stopped his pard from murdering the lawman in cold blood. The lawman whose life Fallon had saved was a deputy U.S. marshal for Judge Parker’s court. When Fallon had been brought to the judge’s office, there had been no plea deal, nothing like that. The judge and the U.S. marshal, after hearing how Fallon had saved a deputy’s life, offered Fallon a job.
“It’s not a gift,” Judge Parker had warned him.
And it most certainly wasn’t. Fallon had moved up from driving a prison wagon for deputy marshals to becoming a federal deputy himself, one of the youngest, and best, in Parker’s court. Till that all came crumbling down.
Josh Ryker had spent eighteen months at the Detroit House of Corrections for assault on a federal lawman. He could’ve gotten more had the state pressed for charges of breaking and entering, attempted burglary, and unlawful discharge of a firearm.
Well, Fallon thought as the convicts and guards cursed and cheered, he couldn’t really blame Ryker. From the look of the inmate, life had never turned out the way the gambling, foolhardy cowboy had thought it would. Detroit was the first step. Now he was in Huntsville.
Why don’t the guards stop this?
Fallon threw a punch, ducked another, as the cheers and the curses grew louder. The dust blinded him.
He answered his own question. They wouldn’t have stopped it in Joliet, Yuma, or Jeff City. They wouldn’t have stopped it in the dungeon in Fort Smith where men awaited trial. Unless it got out of hand. Huntsville’s no different.
His nose was bleeding. So were his lips. His back hurt and shoulder throbbed. He swung, missed, ducked, swung again, connected, felt a punch that almost took off his right ear, and responded with one that Ryker deflected.
Ryker brought his prison shoes down hard on Fallon’s right foot. Fallon wrapped his arm around R
yker’s neck and drew it close. He tried to flatten Ryker’s nose, but Ryker caught the wrist and held it tight, trying to twist it off. The men grunted, squirmed, attempted to break free, but neither man was willing to give.
“Hell, they ain’t doin’ nothin’ but waltzin’,” a Texas accent drawled. Fallon didn’t know if that came from a guard or an inmate.
“No más. No más,” a Mexican prisoner shouted.
Ryker tried to spit in Fallon’s face. His breath stank of bad tobacco and worse coffee. He was missing several teeth. Scars cut through his once-handsome face, but, well, after all those years of hard time, Fallon wasn’t going to win any beauty contests himself.
“Been waitin’ . . .” Ryker heaved. “A long time . . . for this.”
Fallon said nothing. Ryker’s grip was so tight on his wrist, he felt his hand growing numb. They weaved this way and that. The shouts and curses sounded all around them, but by now the dust was so thick, the sweat stinging his eyes, Fallon couldn’t see much beyond Ryker’s bloody, sweaty, grimacing face.
“I read . . . about . . . your . . . kid and wife,” Ryker said. His eyes gleamed. He laughed.
Which was all Fallon needed.
“You’re a softhearted kid, Hank,” a deputy marshal once told him in Fort Smith. “Too nice for this job, I often think. But when you get riled, it’s like I don’t even know who you are no more.”
* * *
Josh Ryker now saw what Fallon was like when he was riled.
Fallon’s knee came up, caught Ryker hard in the groin. The grip relaxed, and Fallon broke free and slammed his flattened palm against Ryker’s throat. The inmate’s eyes bulged as he tried to breathe. Had Fallon hit harder, Ryker would be dying, but Fallon had not lost all control. He had just lost his temper.
He slammed a right into Ryker’s jaw, buried a left into the man’s gut. When Ryker doubled over, Fallon brought up his knee again, catching the man in the mouth, smashing his lips, knocking out two more teeth. Fallon reached with his left, grabbed Ryker’s shirt, hoping to pull him up and keep pounding his face until it was nothing but an unrecognizable pulp. But the cotton ripped, and Ryker fell into the dust. He was lying still when Fallon landed on top of him. He swung a left, a right, again, again, and again.
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