On the Wrong Track (5 page)

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Authors: Steve Hockensmith

BOOK: On the Wrong Track
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“Je-
zus
Key-
rist
!”
We’d all been paying Old Red about as much mind as the pile of coats in the corner at a Christmas barn dance, so his sudden—and ear-piercingly profane—entry into the conversation got a jump out of all of us. Without another word, he staggered to his feet and started stumbling down the aisle toward the back of the train.
I sat there a moment, stunned, before tossing out apologies and setting off after my brother. Curiously, I wasn’t the only one on his trail: The Chinaman hopped up and got to hustling after him first.
The screaming started before either one of us could catch him.
CHAN
Or, A Doctor Offers a Helping Hand, but Lockhart Gives Him the Boot
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Gustav had veered left
at the end of the aisle, just before the passageway to the next Pullman. We’d passed a lavatory there as Samuel showed us to our seats a couple hours before, and I’d noted something about it that my brother couldn’t—the word written on the door.
LADIES.
So the first shrieks after Old Red went barging into the john (or should that be the “jane”?) were, as one would expect, distinctly feminine. They were quickly joined by a male counterpart, though: For once, my brother’s fear of females was completely justified, and he screamed the scream of the freshly damned finding themselves in hell.
“Can’t you read?” a woman shrieked as Old Red staggered out of the privy. A hand shot out after him, bringing a drawstring purse down over his head three times before he could back out of range. Then the hand disappeared, the door slammed shut, and my brother bolted from the car.
I followed him through the vestibule into the next sleeper—as did the Chinaman.
“Gustav!” I called after him.
He kept going.
“Mr. Holmes, wait, please,” the Chinaman said.
Old Red stopped. And it wasn’t just because the Chinaman had said “please.” Gustav was still white-faced and wild-eyed when he turned around, but his curiosity was apparently enough to overcome his nausea and embarrassment.
“Yeah?”
“If I might have a word,” the Chinaman said, stepping closer to my brother. “In private, perhaps?”
His gaze darted past Old Red, down the aisle—at the churchload of curious Presbyterians who were now gawking at us.
“Alright,” Gustav said. “Over there.”
He shuffled into a small, recessed nook next to another washroom nearby. This privy had a sign, too—GENTLEMEN. Old Red stopped just outside the door.
“What you got to say?”
“I couldn’t help but notice your … discomfort, and I think I can be of assistance.” The Chinaman’s accent swallowed up a word here and there, but overall I understood him better than some Southerners and New England Yankees I’ve met. “Ginger can be quite effective in relieving motion sickness, and it just so happens that I—”
“I ain’t in the market for no patent medicine,” Gustav cut in brusquely. His urge to upchuck might have passed for the moment, but he looked sickened again in a wholly different way. “You can go peddle your tonics elsewhere.”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything, Mr. Holmes,” the Chinaman replied, slipping a hand into one of his coat pockets. “I’m a physician. Dr. Gee Woo Chan.”
He spoke gently and moved slowly, the way a cowboy approaches an unbroken horse. When he pulled out his hand again, it was clutching a small, brown paper bag.
“I brought some ginger tea along. For myself. And I’d be happy to give you—”
“That’s enough of that,” a raspy voice snapped.
Burl Lockhart stepped from the washroom behind us. Rather than lightening his bladder’s load while inside, however, he’d clearly been adding to it: When he spoke again, the nostril-singeing scent of cheap whiskey blasted into our faces like the heat from a blacksmith’s forge. It’s a wonder the man’s floppy false mustache didn’t burst into flame.
“Get back to your seat.”
“But Mr. Holmes here is—,” Chan began.
“Back to your seat.”
Chan eyed the old Pinkerton a moment, then turned back to my brother and held out the bag of tea. “You really should try it.”
“Thanks, Doc—maybe I will,” Gustav said, sounding decidedly more friendly than before. But even as he took the bag from the Chinaman, his eyes were locked on Lockhart.
“Good day, gentlemen,” Chan said, and he headed back toward our car, his back so straight he could’ve been a soldier on review. He might’ve been the uncivilized foreigner, as some folks reckon it, but to judge by manners, dress, and dignity of bearing, it was Lockhart, Old Red, and me who were the savages.
“Hey, ‘Custos,’” Gustav said. “What gives you the right to boss the little feller around?”
“Hey, ‘Holmes,’” Lockhart replied. “Mind your own goddamn business.”
And with that, he left, too. Except he didn’t follow Chan toward our sleeper. He spun on his heel and returned to the gent’s. Before he got through the door, I saw him fishing something out of his pocket. I had the sneaking suspicion it
wasn’t
ginger tea.
“Whadaya think that was all about?” I asked my brother.
He shook his head and sighed. “That’s just the thing—I
can’t
think right now. I gotta find somethin’ that ain’t”—he waved a hand at the dark wood that boxed us in—“
this
. Come on.”
He turned and hustled away, heading down the aisle toward the back of the train.
On our way through the next Pullman, we discovered that Samuel had predicted correctly: An impromptu Presbyterian choir was indeed singing hymns. We escaped the sickly sweet strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” by hurrying into the dining car. Though the inviting aromas drifting from the kitchen reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, they seemed to remind Old Red that he was sick to his stomach. He picked up his pace, rushing on to the last car of the train: the observation lounge.
There wasn’t much to observe there, at the moment. We’d left the Great Salt Lake behind, and the Great Salt Desert is hardly a feast for the eyes—it’s more like an empty plate. Yet still the lounge was a popular place. There were passengers standing in nattering knots, bent over foldout tables absorbed in games of euchre and whist, and arrayed around the brightly upholstered, circular couch that dominated the center of the compartment.
Even on Gustav’s most sociable days, this would have been more enclosed humanity than he’d happily subject himself to, and it didn’t surprise me when he weaved his way through the throng to the very back of the car. There was a final door there—one that didn’t lead to more train. Instead, it opened onto a small, brass-gated observation platform. Beyond that was nothing but track.
Old Red stepped out onto the platform, and I followed, closing the door behind me. Evening was coming on by then, and the rapidly cooling desert air rushed past so fast it felt like blustery October instead of the stagnant, stifling July it was.
We were alone.
“Yeah … this ain’t so bad,” Gustav said as he took in the view—dingy alkali sand, scruffy scrub brush, and distant peaks just starting to glow orange-pink with the last rays of the day. He didn’t so much lean on the railing as prop himself up against it. “Maybe out here I can catch my breath.”
“How’d it get away from you in the first place, that’s what I wanna know.”
My brother swatted at the air dismissively. “Oh, that mouthy drummer was just gettin’ on my nerves with his blab about the Give-’em-Hell Boys and wreckin’ trains and all.”
“You were ailin’ a long time before Horner opened his big yap.”
“Yeah, I suppose. But it ain’t nothing to worry about. I’m just—”
“‘Feelin’ a touch poorly’? Let me tell ya, that’s startin’ to wear mighty thin … and it wasn’t exactly thick to begin with.”
“I said don’t worry. I’m alright.”
“Oh, sure. You’re the very picture of health.”
Color was returning to Old Red’s pallid face, but it was the wrong kind. He wasn’t going rosy-cheeked. He was turning green.
“Look, Brother,” I said, “I know how you feel about detectivin’ and all, but something’s wrong here. Maybe that bullet you took’s messin’ with your innards again, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you need to stop and take stock of yourself. You’re sick as a dog with a damn Southern Pacific badge in your pocket. That can’t sit right.”
Gustav straightened up and looked me in the eye.
“It sits just
fine
.”
At that exact moment, the train gave a powerful jerk, and the landscape around us tilted. We were moving down now, into the Humboldt Valley and Nevada, and the patchy sagebrush and grass of the desert were soon whipping by at a noticeably quicker clip.
The train’s jostling pressed my brother back up against the rail—and squeezed a heave from his gut.
I offered Old Red a few pats on the back and soothing words as he spewed out onto the tracks. As soon as he could talk, though, we could squabble, and my tone quickly turned less than soothing. But just as we picked up our bickering again, a thumping clatter rose up underneath us, and something about the size and shape of a watermelon came caroming out from beneath the car.
Which brings us, dear reader, back to the door you stepped in through: Old Red and I were face-to-face with a man’s head.
Having as I do a basic grasp of human physiology, what came next wasn’t nearly so surprising. Heads, after all, are generally attached to
bodies—and even when they’re not, it’s a safe bet you’ll find a torso and limbs and such nearby.
The carcass Gustav and I spotted was rolling to a stop by the side of the tracks as we sped past.
“Sweet Jesus,” I croaked. “You reckon we oughta—?”
But my brother had already done his reckoning: He was rushing into the observation car.
I’d only managed a couple steps after him when someone inside cried out, “Wait! That’s the bell cord! What are you—?” And then I was hurtling through space and slamming into the doorway as the brakes clutched hold and the Pacific Express came screeching to a stop.
HEAD HUNTING
Or, We Go Looking for the Head and Almost Get Ours Shot Off
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I checked my face
for splinters as I got to my feet, but all I’d picked up from the doorway was a fat lip. A chorus of groans—like a barbershop quartet with a toothache—rose up from inside, and when I stepped into the observation car, I found most of its occupants piled atop each other on the floor.
“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,” my brother was murmuring as he hauled himself off Mrs. Kier, of all people. With her billowy skirts and matronly girth, she’d undoubtedly made a fine cushion when the brakes kicked in.
“No harm done,” the lady replied, still clutching a fan of cards even though her companions, the folding table they’d been playing on, and the rest of the deck were now scattered willy-nilly around the car. “This isn’t the first time a man’s thrown himself at me. It’s just never been so
literal
before.”
Old Red helped her to her feet, then backed away quickly.
“Best fetch the conductor,” he said to no one in particular. “We got a body on the tracks.”
He hustled past me out the door—which was probably wise given the murderous glares being directed his way by our fellow passengers.
“I hope you won’t mind my asking, Mr. Holmes—,” someone said, and I spotted Miss Caveo crawling out from under a mortified porter, “but is your brother entirely
sane
?”
“Miss, if he’s nuts, then it’s contagious—cuz I saw that body, too.” And I hurried off after Old Red.
He was already marching down the tracks, having opened a side gate in the railing and dropped to the ground. By the time I caught up to him, we were halfway to the body.
It was full-on dusk now, and the shadows around us seemed to grow longer with each step we took, swallowing up the smears of blood splattered on the rails and ties and sand. Dr. Watson himself had written of this place once, in
A Study in Scarlet,
and I couldn’t take issue with his description of “the Great Alkali Plain”: It was “an arid and repulsive desert,” a “region of desolation and silence.” Indeed, there wasn’t a sound to be heard beyond that of our own footfalls, and I could easily have believed we were the only living creatures within a hundred miles.
There was certainly no life left in the man we soon came upon.
“Looks like he was a short feller, even with a head on his shoulders,” Old Red said as we stopped by the body. “Powerful, though. Them muscles practically pop out of his shirt. And that’s denim he’s wearin’. He was a workin’ man … but not a cowpoke or a farmer. Got store-bought lace-ups on his feet, not boots. Scuffed, but not muddy.”
We’d practically sprinted to the corpse, but my brother seemed in no way winded as he rattled off his deductions. It was as if the chance to detectify was some kind of miracle cure—Holmes’s Genuine All-Natural Anti-Collywobble Elixir—and to look at my brother you’d never have guessed this was a man with puke still on his breath.
He turned and gazed off to the east. The sky there was a purple-black wall, featureless save for a few dim pinpricks—the first stars of a nightfall rushing to overtake us.
The head was nowhere in sight.
When my brother turned around again, he locked eyes on something behind me.
“Bring lanterns!” he called to a small party approaching us from the Pacific Express. “We got some huntin’ to do!”
After a brief consultation, one of the men—even from a distance I could see it was a tallish porter, probably Samuel—ran back toward the train. His three companions continued toward us. As they drew closer, I could make out who they were: the conductor, the engineer, and Burl Lockhart.
“Any of your bunch makes a move for the train, you’ll have holes in your heads quick as lightnin’!” Lockhart shouted, bringing up his .44 and thumbing back the hammer.
“Ain’t no ‘bunch’ here, Mr. Custos!” I yelled back. “Just two fellers with heads and one without—and not a one of us is packin’ iron!”
The conductor was a big man who pumped his arms fast as he walked, and he looked for all the world like a locomotive chugging down the tracks, indifferent to what or who might be run over.
“Which one of you pulled the bell cord?” he barked at us.
“That’d be me,” Gustav answered coolly. “Saw a body”—he nodded at the corpse—“
this
body—by the tracks. Saw the head, too. Came out from under the train and went bouncin’ Lord knows where.”
“Oh,” Lockhart mumbled, chagrined, as he and his companions came to a stop a few yards away. He lowered his gun. “It’s
you
.”
In addition to possessing the world’s worst false mustache, the old Pinkerton apparently had him some pretty crappy eyes, too.
“You know these men, Lockhart?” the conductor asked.
Old Red and I exchanged a quick glance: So Lockhart wasn’t “incognito” anymore.
“Couple of drovers,” Lockhart said. “Wanna be lawmen.”
“What we
are,
” Gustav said, addressing himself to the conductor as he fished out his badge, “is agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police.”
My brother clearly imagined this revelation would buy him some respect. What he got instead was a roll of the eyes.
“Crowe’s Folly blesses us again,” the conductor groaned. “I wondered how trail trash like you could afford the Pacific Express.”
The engineer was equally unimpressed. “Shit,” he said, and he leaned over and spat in the dirt just as Samuel came hurrying up with two lit lanterns.
“Pussyfooters,” the conductor explained, jerking his head at us.
“Well, well” was all Samuel said. Whatever his opinion of railroad police, he was keeping it to himself.
Gustav took one of the lanterns, and I helped him eyeball the scrub and sand on the north side of the tracks while Lockhart, Samuel, and the conductor moved down the south side. The engineer stayed rooted in place on the roadbed, muttering bitterly as the rest of us walked away slowly, heads down.
“Didn’t see a thing from the cab. Must’ve been lying on the tracks. If he was alive when we hit him, well”—the engineer spat again, having to lean quite a ways forward to get the tobacco juice beyond the round curve of his boulderlike belly—“screw him. Man wants to die, he oughta just throw himself off a cliff and spare other folks a lot of bother. Could have been a hobo riding the blinds or the rods, I suppose. Slipped, fell. If so”—once again he spat—“serves the dumb bastard right.”
All this callous grousing within literal spitting distance of a man’s carcass got under my skin, and I was about to turn around and question just who the dumb bastard was around here when Gustav pointed at a low patch of brush to our left.
“There.”
He lifted his lantern high, and the shadows around us shifted and shrank, revealing something round and moist up ahead.
“We found him!” I called out.
Samuel, Lockhart, and the conductor crossed the roadbed and joined us just as Old Red went down on his haunches and brought his
lantern in close. The head was facedown in the sand, and all I could see of it was curly, black hair ripped away here and there to offer glimpses of glistening bone and brain. My brother stretched out his hand and rolled the head over, and we found ourselves looking into a young man’s face, his eyes wide, his mouth open.
Which was exactly how I looked, for I’d seen this face before—and not just when it was bouncing from beneath the train. It belonged to the railroader I’d chatted with briefly back at Union Station, the one who’d told me to appreciate the magnificence of the Pacific Express before it was buried under dust and soot.
“Christ Almighty!” Samuel gasped. “Joe!”
“Joe?” Lockhart said.
The conductor turned his back on the gruesome sight and hunched over, clutching his knees.
“Pe-zul-lo,” he panted, obviously struggling to keep his last meal from joining Gustav’s in the sands of the Great Salt Desert. “Our baggageman.”
The engineer finally unstuck himself and took a few uncertain steps toward us. “Wiltrout … did you just say that’s … ?” He stopped next to the body. “
This
is Joe Pezullo?”
The conductor nodded weakly.
“So he wasn’t lyin’ on the rails,” my brother said. “He was on the train.”
The conductor—“Wiltrout,” apparently—nodded again. “Riding in the baggage car.”
What little light there was dimmed by half—Old Red had spun around and started back toward the Express, taking his lantern with him. Lockhart and I lit out after him, leaving Wiltrout, Samuel, and the engineer to reunite their compadre’s head with his body.
When we reached the tail end of the train, we had to zigzag our way through a throng: Twenty or thirty male passengers had come outside to gawk. They pelted us with questions as we passed—“What’s happening?” and “Is that really a body?” and “Are you robbing us?”—but we answered only with shouts of “Make way!” and “Comin’
through!” There was no escaping the crowd, though, and a string of men trailed us like baby ducks waddling after their momma.
“Get back inside, you damned idjits!” Lockhart shouted over his shoulder. But everybody seemed to assume the “damned idjits” referred to everyone else, and no one broke off the chase.
When we finally reached the baggage car, we found the side door pushed all the way back, leaving an opening at least six feet across and seven feet high—more than enough space for a man to tumble through.
“Now how’d the engineer miss that when he walked to the back of the train?” Lockhart asked.
“Must’ve come down the other side,” I suggested. I turned toward Gustav, assuming he’d want to weigh in, but my brother had already moved on to other questions.
“Kip,” he said, and only then did I realize our young news butcher was amongst the mob behind us. “You know Joe Pezullo? The baggageman?”
“Sure. He’s a friend of mine.” Kip started to move closer to the baggage car—and froze midstep. “Oh, jeez. That’s Joe back there on the tracks, ain’t it?”
Old Red stuck his lantern up into the car and moved it this way and that, its light playing over stacks of boxes, trunks, and bags—and a bottle sitting upright on the floor, uncorked and half-filled with amber liquid.
“Pezullo a drinkin’ man?” my brother asked.
“I … I don’t know,” the news butch stammered, his voice quiet and quivery.
Gustav was staring at the bottle, Lockhart was using his .44 to menace shadows inside the car, and the passengers present simply stood around gawping like they were watching a sideshow geek tear into a chicken. Which left it to me to walk over and place a comforting hand on Kip’s slender shoulder. He looked into my eyes, his own glistening in the dim light of the lantern, and nodded silent thanks.
“Hey!” a muffled voice cried out from somewhere nearby. “What’s going on out there?”
“Now who in the hell is that?” Old Red asked, swinging his lantern around.
Lockhart pointed at the next car up. “It’s comin’ from the express car. Must be the Wells Fargo man.”
“I think his name’s Morrison,” Kip said with a hint of a sniffle.
“Is there a door between the baggage car and the express car?” Gustav asked him.
“No, they ain’t—,” the kid began.
“Talk to me!” Morrison called to us again. “Who’s out there?”
The panic in the fellow’s voice was plain to hear—and easy to understand, given how many express messengers have been blown straight through the pearly gates by bandito dynamite the past few years. Unfortunately, a card in the crowd decided it was time to lighten the mood, and he called out a reply before a straight-thinking man could.
“It’s me—Jesse James, back from the dead! And I’m here with my pals the Give-’em-Hell Boys!”
“Who said that?” Lockhart bellowed, turning on our audience and waving his gun. “So help me, I’ll blow the fool’s goddamn head off!”
Not wishing to see mortal harm done to even so irritating an acquaintance as Chester Q. Horner—for it had been the drummer’s voice that had answered Morrison—I started to move between Lockhart and the crowd. But I’d barely taken two steps when there was a blast behind me, and my hat whipped off my head and sailed into the darkness. Within seconds, every man there had a face full of sand as we all went diving for cover.
“Don’t come any closer!” Morrison hollered. “I’m armed!”
“We know!” I shouted back. I was sprawled on my belly, and I peeked up to see where the gunfire had come from.
There were two barred openings, too small to be called windows, beside the express car’s side door. Pointing out of one was the barrel of a rifle.
“Don’t shoot, Morrison!” Lockhart shouted. “We ain’t outlaws! That was just some asshole’s idea of a joke!”

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