The Killing Machine (16 page)

I became conscious of every breath I took. Images of being buried alive always included being planted several feet down in the earth. There was a good chance I was going to suffocate sitting in some mortician's back room.

Distant conversations. A door opening and closing somewhere far away. Out back, workmen pulling a clattering buckboard up to the door. A contralto voice—a church singer rehearsing, probably up in the visitation room. Just another ordinary day in the death business, except for the Army investigator suffocating in a newly made coffin in the backroom.

I started working on the lid. Not being a masterpiece of construction, this pine box shouldn't be too hard to escape. I started slowly, quietly pushing upward on the lid with my one good arm. I spent several minutes before I realized that, shoddy as this box was, the lid wasn't going to give. The air started to get tainted with my own sour breath.

The coffin was a rectangle. I pressed the soles of my boots against the front of the box. I could apply more pressure with my feet than I could with my hand. I went to work. After the first five minutes or so I started thinking that maybe this wouldn't work any better than the lid would.

Yes, I could kick out the front of the coffin easily enough. But to do it I'd have to make too much noise. By the time I'd freed myself from the rest of the box, Newcomb would've heard me and come back here with a gun.

 

My breathing was starting to thin, get shallower with each breath. No dizziness yet, but I couldn't hold out forever. I tried to remember the setup in Newcomb's backroom. There were empty coffins stacked against one wall. There was the large table where he worked on the corpses. And then there were the two sawhorses next to the worktable. He'd had an empty coffin sitting there, presumably so he and his workmen could put the body in it when Newcomb was finished with his work. I wondered about trying to force my coffin off the sawhorses and then realized that I was beginning to panic. Think of what a hell of a noise the coffin hitting the floor would make.

I pushed with my arm and legs again, trying to find any vulnerable spot in the coffin. My best chance was still the front end, kicking out with my feet.

I hadn't experienced the sensation of suffocating yet. But it was starting to work on me. The coffin seemed much smaller than it had a few minutes ago. And darker. And now it was silent. No conversations
in the dim distance up front. No wagon chink or horse neigh in the alley. No sobbing anywhere.

The coffin was beginning to shrink even tighter. I knew that soon enough I would start smashing my way out of here. Panic. Survival. Anything but giving in to the slow siphoning of breathable air. I would be alive, yes, but for how long? I'd be back in Newcomb's gunsights again. He'd make it easy on himself. He'd kill me quick.

I was starting to press upward with my hand when I heard what sounded like footsteps. Quick, soft footsteps. Newcomb would make more noise than that.

Then Newcomb's voice in the dim distance up front: “Where're you going, Beth? I need to dictate that letter.”

“I just need to get some more paper from the storage room, Mr. Newcomb.”

“Well, hurry up, will you? I want to get this letter dictated. Then I have to get over to Rotary for a meeting.”

“Well, you certainly wouldn't want to miss Rotary.”

The quiet footsteps kept moving toward me during the conversation. I wondered if Beth Cave knew I was back here in the coffin. Even if she did, it was doubtful she'd help me. She was comfortable in her life here and part of that comfort was a good job. She'd made it obvious that she didn't want to risk losing that job.

Then she was at the coffin. Whispering. “If you can hear me, knock once with your knuckle.”

I didn't even think about what this might mean. It could be some kind of ruse, a way to find out if I was
alive without going through the task of taking the nails out of the coffin.

I knocked lightly with my knuckle against the coffin lid.

“I'm going to help you,” she whispered.

A minute went by. Footsteps. The faint clanking of tools being moved around. Apparently she was looking for something.

“Are you about ready, Beth?” Newcomb shouted from the front of the place.

“I'll be right there, Mr. Newcomb.”

“I don't have all day.”

“I know, Mr. Newcomb. Rotary.”

At any other time, in any other circumstance, I would have smiled at the way she was able to put so much malice in the word “Rotary.” All her contempt for her boss was in the scorn she was able to pack into that word. Newcomb wasn't the subtle type, apparently. He didn't seem to hear what she was really doing with the word.

The coffin shrank a few more inches. I had no idea why, but my rigid, anxious body was now slick with sweat. Cold sweat.

“I'm on my way, Mr. Newcomb,” she called.

And beneath the sound of her voice was another sound. At first I didn't know what it was. But then it came clear.

The metal claws of a crowbar gently opening the lid of the coffin. Not all the way up. Just enough to let in air. Just enough to let me do the rest myself.

She whispered, “That's the best I can do, Mr. Ford.”

She was gone by the time I could whisper a thank you in return. I lay there, cooler air sluicing in
through the half inch she'd raised a small part of the coffin lid.

Her footsteps told me that she went hurriedly down the hall, stopped, opened a door of some kind, took something out—the paper she needed, apparently—and then continued her way back to Newcomb's office.

“I was beginning to wonder if you'd snuck off on me,” Newcomb said.

“Oh, yes, that's something I do often, isn't it, Mr. Newcomb? Sneak off on you.”

“Now, now, none of your smart mouth. It's what I've told you before, Beth. I think that's the biggest reason you've never been able to find a husband. Men don't like women with smart mouths.”

“I was wondering what my trouble was, Mr. Newcomb, and I guess you've figured it out for me.”

Mr. Newcomb didn't complain about that particular smart-mouth remark. Either it was too subtle for him or he was just tired of the banter. “Are you ready now? Can we finally get this letter dictated?”

“Anytime you're ready,” she said. She was back to being prim and dutiful.

I started work on the coffin. She'd made it easy. I worked slowly, a few inches at a time. I still couldn't afford to have Newcomb hear me.

The coffin, as I'd suspected, was lying across two sawhorses. The next thing would be climbing down without making any noise. Rather than go to the floor, I stepped out of the coffin onto the bloodstained table where Newcomb practiced his dark craft. I walked across the table, stepped down onto a chair, and from the chair stepped to the floor.

Newcomb had done me the favor of covering my escape with his shouting. He was dictating a surly let
ter to a maker of headstones, telling them how shoddy their work had become in the last several months, and how customer complaints had become a daily battle for him.

But I didn't feel much sympathy. I had a battle of my own to fight. I went looking for everybody's favorite marshal, one Charley Wickham.

I
spent an hour looking for him. Office, livery, saloons, even his home. Nobody had seen him.

As I walked past the depot, I saw several long, wooden crates being loaded onto a cart that would be brought up to the next train to pull in. The two men doing the loading didn't look particularly impressed with me when I approached them. I probably looked pretty rough after my time in the coffin. The coffin hadn't done much for my wound, either. The cramped quarters had made the lancing pain sharp and frequent again.

With my good hand, I reached in and dug out my identification. I showed it to the bald one. Even though the day was turning into long shadows and chilly breezes, he wiped the back of his forehead off with the back of his hand and said, “Pete, better look at this.”

Pete said, “He don't read too good and neither do I.” He squinted at it.

“The print says I'm a Federal agent working for the United States Army. That badge says pretty much the same thing.”

“Pretty fancy badge.”

“They give me that instead of a lot of money.”

My joke loosened Pete up. “All right. What can we do for you?”

“This all you got to load for the next train?”

The bald man spoke. “There's another cartload back there.”

“I'd like to look through the freight.”

“Anything special you looking for?”

I couldn't tell him. He might be kin to Wickham. Or he might want to have Wickham owe him a favor. “Afraid I can't go into that.”

The bald man said, “Let me have a look at that badge again.” I handed him the identification Pete had just handed back to me.

The bald man studied the bright badge a moment and said, “Well, I guess you are who you say you are. We was gonna go grab a little coffee, anyways. We got another two hours before the train gets in and we don't have much else to do but wait around.”

“Might as well help yourself,” Pete said.

With the onset of dusk and lamplight filling the depot windows, there was that sense of loneliness that always comes with the dying day. The exterior of the depot was as empty as the long, gleaming, silver tracks themselves.

I didn't find anything much on the cart near the depot platform. Most of the crates seemed to be some kind of farm tools being shipped from a small factory here to points farther west of here. Nothing suspicious, nothing even very interesting.

I had much better luck on the cart near the back of the depot. Six crates of various sizes. There was just enough light to read the one that was being sent to a
Mrs. Marie Wickham in Normal, Missouri. Seems like the marshal was sending his mom a gift.

This was the one I was looking for. It was on the bottom of a stack of four other crates. Meaning that there was no way I could get to it with just one useful arm and hand. I walked to the other side of the depot, looking for Pete and his friend. They'd said they were going to take a break. Most breaks consisted of sitting down somewhere on the premises and rolling yourself a smoke to go along with your cup of coffee.

But I couldn't find Pete and his friend anywhere. I started looking for the depot manager, but was told by the gent in the ticket window that the manager had gone home early with a bad cold. “Should a heard him cough,” the ticket man said, “sonofabitch sounded like he was dyin', is what it sounded like. I had a cousin, shirttail cousin I guess you'd say, sounded like that and two days later he was dead. You shouldn't take no chances when your cough gets like that. No, sir. Shouldn't take no chances at all.”

I went to the platform. Dusk was sucking up all the daylight. You could see the lonesome lines of railroad track below the cold, distant stars. The wind came all the way down from the mountains. It smelled and tasted of snow. But it was clean and fresh and for a moment took away the pain in my wound.

I walked to the edge of the platform and moved down the three steps to the ground. I saw Pete and his friend walking toward me. They were coming from a long ways away, a lot longer than you'd ex
pect them to be on a break. They'd brought another friend along. In the shadows of early evening he sure looked an awful lot like Marshal Wickham.

Wickham knew what he was doing. He would already have had a deputy or two come on ahead and move in on me. The next minute or two, they'd show themselves and arrest me. Any direction I headed, they'd have me trapped.

I went back inside the depot. The ticket window was part of a small office. I knocked on the door. The window man shuffled over, opened it, and said, “Oh, it's you.”

His eyes dropped down and saw the Colt I was holding on him.

I told him who I was and what I wanted. He wanted identification. I moved my gun to the hand jutting from the sling and dug out my badge. He looked it over. Handed it back, all right.

“There going to be shootin'?”

“Hope not. Now move aside.”

“I sure don't want to get shot. And you sure don't look like good luck.” He nodded to my sling.

No more time for talk. I pushed past him. Closed the door behind me. Moved to the back of the one-desk, two-file-cabinet office and crouched down in the shadows.

I heard the front door swing open and heard Wickham say, “Bill, we're looking for a man named Noah Ford. He's pretending to be a Federal agent. But actually he's the man done all the killing lately.”

“Nobody been in here for the last twenty minutes,” Bill said.

The problem was that I couldn't see his face. He
stood at his ticket window. With his back to me I couldn't see what his expression was. It would be easy enough for him to signal Wickham.

“Maybe you missed him,” Wickham said. “Maybe there was a crowd. Tall, lean fella. Hard-lookin' face. Arm in a sling.”

“Think I'd remember the sling, Marshal. Afraid I just didn't see him.”

“Well, we're gonna look in the storage room in the back.”

The sweat came back. Cold sweat, hospital sweat, wound sweat. I'd pushed too hard since leaving the hospital. Now I was stuck back here behind the desk, hungry, cold, damning myself for setting myself up in a trap like this. Any way you cut it, Wickham was going to grab me sooner or later. I had to resist the impulse to just stand up and start shooting.

“Well, thanks, Bill,” Wickham said. But the way he said it revealed a lot more than he imagined. Because his voice had a wink in it. The secret had been passed between the two. Wickham knew I was back here and now he was going to act on it.

Well, not act on it personally. For that he had a deputy I'd never seen before open the office door and without any hesitation at all, start emptying one of two six-guns at the desk I was hiding behind. The noise, the smoke, the ticket clerk shouting and cussing and praying, and all about the same time, only added to the confusion I felt. Confusion that was clarified when, just as the last bullet was fired, I heard heavy footsteps enter the office and Wickham say, “I've got a shotgun here, Ford. Whether I use it or not is up to you. You've got a bad arm and I reckon you've overworked yourself since leaving the
hospital. Now put your gun down and we'll talk this thing over.”

I thought of a couple things I could say, but they would just be foolish things said by a foolish man fast running out of luck and strength.

“Save yourself some bullets, Marshal.”

“You know better than to try anything.”

“I'm going to slide my gun across the floor and then get up and put my hands in the air. How's that?”

“Get moving.”

I hadn't mentioned my Bowie knife. But then that wasn't any of his business. That had been a gift from my brother David. And it was between me and him.

I did what I promised to do and I did it slow and easy and obvious, the way you do it when you want to avoid having a lawman put a whole lot of lead in your chest. He had an unerring eye, Wickham did. He watched my every move carefully.

When I slid my Colt over to him he didn't even stoop to pick it up. He wanted his eyes on me. He just kicked the Colt off to the side.

“Now the hands. Up in the air.”

“You charging me with anything in particular?”

“The hands, Ford. In the air.”

I put them in the air. “I have a citizen's right to know what I'm being charged with.”

“Now what do you think, Ford? You're a smart Federale. You know what you did. I don't need to tell you that.”

“I'm not sure, but I can guess.”

“Be my guest.”

“You're going to charge me with the murder of my brother and the three arms merchants.”

“You forgot a couple of people, but keep going.”

“You think maybe I assassinated old Abe Lincoln and pinned it on Booth?”

“Walk toward me. Slow. And keep the hands in the air.”

The next five minutes were routine. He got me in handcuffs, he repeated the charges for his deputies to hear. I tried to figure out how he was going to kill me between here and the jail. I wasn't going to help him. I wasn't going to make any kind of move that could be misinterpreted as trying to make a break. I was going to do what he told me to do and make it obvious.

But he'd figure out a way to kill me. He had to. I knew everything now. I was the only thing standing between him and his old hometown where the gun was being shipped. He could relax there for a while and when the federal hunt for the gun wasn't so hot, he could quietly sell it on the black market and have all the money he'd need for the rest of his life. And me? Washington had warned me not to get involved in my own brother's case. But I knew better. I was going to give him a chance to escape—after I had secured the weapon. But things hadn't worked out quite that way. And it would be no trouble for Wickham to make a convincing enough case to Washington that I'd been so upset about the murder of my brother—said murderer still conveniently on the loose—that I just started killing people in a crazed attempt to find his murderer. So Wickham, good and true lawman that he was, was forced to track me down and shoot me. Washington wouldn't be surprised. Hell, they might even give Wickham one of those citations they're always so eager to hand out.

Then he said it and it all came clear. “He knows where his brother's gun is,” he said to his deputy. “And he's going to take me there and we're going to get this whole thing all wrapped up.”

No sense in murdering me in cold blood in front of witnesses when a nice little buggy ride could take us out somewhere in the country where the only witnesses would be birds and frogs. And they were both notoriously unreliable in a courtroom.

So he had his ruse going well—pretending to still be searching for the gun while in fact it was in a crate not far away, about to be shipped to his old ancestral home—and he had me in tow, about to rid himself of the last person blocking him from his getaway and his money.

 

He did it right. And he did just what I thought he'd do.

We walked over to the livery where the men I'd gotten to know all kept staring at my handcuffs. Marshal Wickham ordered up a buggy and a horse, and while that was being readied for him, he explained to his audience what he'd explained to his men—that I was the killer everybody was so nervous about and that I was going to show him where this weapon was that so many had died for.

Then we were on the dusty road—a rifle on one side of him, his Colt in his holster on my side, plenty of firepower to kill me with—the new buggy nice and easy on the relatively smooth patch of road. Over the thrum and whir of the wheels, I said, “You see their faces?”

“Whose faces you talking about?”

“The men at the livery. Or your own men, for that matter.”

“What about their faces?”

I didn't say anything for a time. I let my question work on him, as I knew it would. My friends the night folks were out now—the owls and stray dogs and raccoons and so many, many others that pass through the shadows unnoticed. The wind was up and it was cold, but oddly enough the chill only added to the hard imperious beauty of the full golden moon. Even the starlight seemed more vivid tonight.

“I asked you, what about their faces?”

He was getting nervous. It hadn't been just my question. Everything that had happened these past few days, everything that he'd done, was starting to overwhelm him. It had to. It had been too much.

“Your story about me. They didn't believe it.”

“Oh, they believed it all right. Because I said it. I've never lied to them.”

“Until now.”

He glanced at me. “All right. Until now. And what I did was justifiable and you'd better damned well believe that. You know what happened, Ford. You've figured it all out. They killed Louise. They raped her and then they killed her. But they wouldn't have had to pay for it. They haul some fancy-ass Eastern lawyer back here and they'd get reduced sentences. A few years. Nothing.”

He looked straight ahead again. “When my wife died, Louise took my life over. She got me through it. I never had a friend like her. And then one day I fell in love with her. She was the most decent woman I've ever known. And they raped her. One right after the
other. I try not to think about it, what it must have been like for somebody like her.”

“But why kill my brother?”

“Because he brought them here. He also knew what they'd done and he didn't step forward to say anything. He didn't give a damn about Louise. He just wanted money for his gun.”

“You didn't need to cut his throat.”

“He would've screamed otherwise. And I'd spotted you sneaking up to the barn. A gunshot would've made too much noise.”

“He was my brother.”

“I thought you hated him. That was my impression.”

“Whatever I felt for him, he was still my brother. Kin. Blood. However you want to say it.”

 

I did it then. Even handcuffed, it wasn't all that difficult. He had way too much faith in the ability of his handcuffs to inhibit my actions. He was also too caught up in his memories of Louise to take note of how I waited until we hit a rough patch, which jolted the entire small buggy off one of its wheels and jounced us together on the narrow seat of the narrow buggy.