The Wrecker

14

“I’M FIRST, YOU WATCH.”

Wally Kisley ran for the stairs.

The tall workman with the sack slung over his shoulder shoved through the crowd, stepped over one drunk and around another, and resumed his quick pace toward Union Depot. From the window, Mack Fulton traced the path he drove relentlessly through the pedestrians who were hurrying to and from the station.

Wally bounded down the stairs and out the building. When he got to the sidewalk, he looked up. Mack pointed him in the right direction. Wally sprinted ahead. A quick wave said he found their quarry, and Mack tore down the stairs after him, his heart pounding. He’d been feeling lousy for days, and now he was having trouble snatching a breath.

He caught up with Wally, who said, “You’re white as a sheet. You O.K.?”

“Tip-top. Where’d he go?”

“Down that alley. I think he saw me.”

“If he did and he ran, he’s our man. Come on!”

Mack led the way, sucking air. The alley was muddy underfoot and stank. Instead of cutting through to Twenty-fourth Street, as the detectives assumed it would, it hooked left where the way was blocked by a steel-shuttered warehouse. There were barrels in front big enough to hide behind.

“We got him trapped,” said Wally.

Mack gasped. Wally looked at him. His face was rigid with pain. He doubled over, clutching his chest, and fell hard in the mud. Wally knelt beside him. “Jesus, Mack!”

Mack’s face was deathly pale, his eyes wide. He raised his head, staring over Wally’s shoulder. “Behind you!” he muttered.

Wally whirled toward the rush of footfalls.

The man they had been chasing, the man who looked like the sketch, the man who was definitely the Wrecker, was running straight at him with a knife. Wally shielded his old friend’s body with his own, and smoothly whipped a gun from under his checkerboard coat. He cocked the single-action revolver with a practiced thumb on the gnarled hammer and brought the barrel to bear. Coolly, he aimed so as to smash the bones in the Wrecker’s shoulder rather than kill him so they could question the saboteur about future attacks already set in motion.

Before Wally could fire, he heard a metallic click, and was stunned to see a glint of light on steel as the knife blade suddenly jumped at his face. The Wrecker was still five feet from him, but the tip was already entering his eye.

He’s made a sword that telescopes out of a ,rpring-loaded knife, was Wally Kisley’s last thought as the Wrecker’s blade plunged through his brain. And I thought I had seen it all.

THE WRECKER JERKED His blade out of the detective’s skull and rammed it through the neck of his fallen partner. The man looked like he was dead already, but this was no time to take chances. He withdrew the blade and glanced around coldly. When he saw that no one had followed the detectives into the alley, he wiped the blade on the checkerboard coat, clicked the release to shorten it, and returned it to the sheath in his boot.

It had been a close call, the sort of near disaster you couldn’t plan for, other than to be always primed to be fast and deadly, and he was exhilarated by his escape. Keep moving!. he thought. The Overland Limited would not wait while he celebrated.

He hurried from the alley, pushed through the mob on the sidewalk, and cut across Twenty-fifth Street. Darting in front of an electric trolley, he turned right on Wall Street, and walked for a block parallel to the long Union Depot train station. When he was sure he was not followed, he crossed Wall and entered the station by a door at the north end.

He found the men’s room and locked himself in a stall. Racing against the clock, he stripped off the overalls that had concealed his elegant traveling clothes and took an expensive leather Gladstone bag with brass fittings from his tool sack. He removed polished black laced dress boots from the Gladstone, a gray Homburg from its own protective hatbox, and a derringer and packed in it the rough boots that held his sword. He laced up the dress boots and dropped the derringer into his coat pocket. He removed his beard, which he also put in the Gladstone, and rubbed traces of spirit gum off his skin. Then he stuffed the overalls in the sack and shoved the sack behind the toilet. There was nothing in the overalls or the sack that could be traced to him. He checked the time on his railroad watch and waited exactly two minutes, rubbing his boots against the back of his trouser legs to polish them and running an ivory comb through his hair.

He stepped out of the stall. He inspected himself carefully in the mirror over the sink. He flicked a speck of spirit gum off his chin and placed his gray Homburg on his head.

Smiling, he sauntered from the men’s room and across the bustling lobby, which was suddenly swarming with railroad detectives. With only seconds to spare, he brushed past station attendants who were closing the gates to the smoky train platforms. A locomotive shrieked the double Ahead signal, and the Overland Limited, a luxury flyer made up of eight first-class Pullmans, dining car, and an observation-lounge car, began to roll east for Cheyenne, Omaha, and Chicago.

The Wrecker strode alongside the last car, the observation-lounge, matching its pace, his eyes everywhere.

Far ahead, just behind the baggage car, he saw a man leaning from the steps of the first Pullman, holding on to a handrail so he could swing out to get a clear look at whoever was catching the Limited at the last minute. It was six hundred feet from there to where the Wrecker was reaching for a handrail to pull himself aboard the last car of the moving train, but there was no mistaking the sharp silhouette of a hunter.

The head of the train moved out of the shadow cast by the station, and he saw that the man leaning out to watch the platform had a full head of flaxen hair that gleamed like gold in the light of the setting sun. Which meant, as he had suspected, that the hunter was none other than Detective Isaac Bell.

Without hesitation, the Wrecker gripped the handrail and stepped onto the train’s end platform. From this open vestibule, he entered the observation-lounge car. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the smoke and noise, and luxuriated in the peace and quiet of a first-class transcontinental flyer decorated with heavy moldings, polished-wood panels, mirrors, and a thick carpet on the floor. Stewards were carrying drinks on silver trays to passengers lounging on comfortable couches. Those who looked up from newspapers and conversation acknowledged the well-dressed late arrival with the sociable nods of brother clubmen.

The conductor broke the mood. Flinty of eye, hard of mouth, and impeccably uniformed, from his gleaming visor to his gleaming shoes, he was imperious, brusque, and suspicious like conductors everywhere. “Tickets, gents! Ogden tickets.”

The Wrecker flourished his railway pass.

The conductor’s eyes widened at the name on the pass, and he greeted his new passenger with great deference.

“Welcome aboard, sir.”