The Wrecker

18

THERE WERE TWO OF THEM.

The punch from behind flung Bell reeling at the first boxer, who gave him a shot to the jaw. The blow spun him like a top. The second boxer was waiting with a fist that knocked the detective clean off his feet.

Bell hit the ballast with his shoulder and rolled across splintery ties and banged into one of the rails. The cold steel made a pillow for his head, as he looked up, trying to focus on what was happening to him. Seconds ago, he had been standing on the rear platform of a first-class, all-stateroom train. Then he’d run to rescue a woman not needing rescuing. Now two bare-knuckle prizefighters were hurling punches at him.

They circled, blocking any thought of escape.

A quarter mile down the tracks, the busy depot switch engine stopped on a siding and cast the long glow of its headlamp down the rails, illuminating Bell and his attackers enough so that they could see one another but not enough, Bell knew, to be seen by anyone who might intervene.

In the light of the distant headlamp, he saw that they were big men, not as tall as him but each outweighing him handily. He could tell by their stance that they were professionals. Light on their feet, they knew how to throw a punch, knew where to hit the body to inflict the most damage, knew every dirty trick in the book. He could tell by their cold expressions to expect no mercy.

“On your feet, boyo. Stand up and take it like a man.”

They backed up to allow him room, so confident were they of their skills and the fact that they outnumbered him two to one.

Bell shook his head to clear it and gathered his legs under him. He was a trained boxer. He knew how to take a punch. He knew how to slip a punch. He knew how to throw punches in lightning combinations. But they outnumbered him, and they knew their business, too.

The first man poised to charge, eyes gleaming, fists held low in the brawling stance of bare-knuckle champion John L. Sullivan. The second man held his hands higher in the style of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, the only man who had ever knocked Sullivan out. He would be the one to look out for, Corbett being a scientific boxer as opposed to a fighter. This man’s left hand and shoulder were protecting his jaw, just like Corbett would. His right, guarding his stomach, was a sledgehammer held in reserve.

Bell stood up.

Corbett stepped back.

Sullivan charged.

Their strategy, Bell saw, was simple and would be brutally effective. While Sullivan attacked from the front, Corbett would stand by to slam Bell back whenever Bell staggered out of range. If Bell lasted long enough to tire out Sullivan, Corbett would take his place and start fresh.

Bell’s two-shot derringer was in his hat, which was hanging in his stateroom. His pistol was on the train too, steaming toward Cheyenne. He was dressed in the evening attire in which he had dined and played poker: tuxedo jacket, pleated dress shirt with diamond studs, silk bow tie. Only his footwear, polished black boots, largely concealed by his trouser legs, instead of patent leather dancing pumps, might have caused a discerning maitre d’ not to seat him at the best table in a restaurant.

Sullivan threw a roundhouse right. Bell ducked. The fist whizzed over his head, and Sullivan, thrown off balance, stumbled past. As he did, Bell hit him twice, once in his rock-hard stomach, which had absolutely no effect, then on the side of his face, which made him shout in anger.

Corbett laughed, harshly. “A scientific fighter,” he mocked. “Where’d you learn to box, sonny? Harvard?”

“Yale,” said Bell.

“Well, here’s one for Boola Boola.” Corbett feinted with his right and delivered a sharp left to Bell’s ribs. Even though Bell had managed to move away, it was like getting hit by a locomotive. He tumbled to the ground with a searing pain in his side. Sullivan ran over to kick him in the head. Bell twisted frantically, and the hobnailed boot aimed at his face ripped the shoulder of his dinner jacket.

Two on one was no time for Marquess of Queensberry rules. He scooped a heavy piece of ballast from the rail bed as he rolled to his feet.

“Did I mention I also studied in Chicago?” he asked, “On the West Side.”

He threw the stone with all his strength into Corbett’s face.

Corbett cried out in pain and clutched his eye. Bell had expected to stagger him, if not take him right out of the fight. But Corbett was very fast. He had ducked quickly enough to dodge the stone’s full force. He lowered his hand from his eye, wiped the blood on the front of his shirt, and closed his hand into a fist again.

“That’ll cost you, college. There’s quick ways to die and slow ways to die, and you just earned a slow way.”

Corbett circled, one fist high, the other low, one eye dark, the other glaring malevolently. He threw several jabs-four, five, six-contrived to calculate, by Bell’s reactions, just how good he was and where his weaknesses lay. Suddenly, he came at Bell with a quick one-two, a left and a right, designed to soften him for a heavier blow.

Bell slipped both punches. But Sullivan charged from the side and landed a hard fist across Bell’s mouth that knocked him down again.

Bell tasted salt in his mouth. He sat up, shaking his head. Blood ran down his face, over his lips. The switch engine light gleamed on his teeth.

“He’s smiling,” Sullivan said to Corbett. “Is he loco?”

“Punch-drunk. I hit him harder than I thought.”

“Hey, college, what’s the joke?”

“Get in there, finish him off.”

“Then what?”

“Leave him on the track. It’ll look like a train killed him.”

Bell’s smile grew wider.

A bloody nose at last, he thought. Wally and Mack, old friends, I must be closer to catching the Wrecker than I know.

The Wrecker had gotten on at Ogden after all. He had laid low, waiting for his chance, while Bell ate dinner, played cards, and hosted a victory party in the observation car. Then the Wrecker had jumped off at Rawlins to hire these two to kill him.

“I’ll give him something to smile about,” said Sullivan.

“Got a match?” Bell asked him.

Sullivan lowered his hands and stared. “What?”

“A match. A lucifer. I need more light to show you this picture I have in my pocket.”

“Wlhat? ”

“You asked, what’s the joke. I’m hunting a killer. The same killer who hired you hydrophobic skunks to kill me. Here’s the joke: you hydrophobic skunks are going to tell me what he looks like.”

Sullivan rushed at Bell, throwing a vicious right at his face. Bell moved quickly. The fist whizzed over his head like a boulder, and he brought his left down on the Sullivan’s head as he stumbled from the force of missing Bell. It drove Sullivan to the ground like a pile driver. This time when Corbett rushed in from the side, Bell was ready, and he backhanded Corbett with the same left, smashing his nose with a sharp crack.

Corbett grunted, wheeling gracefully out of a predicament that would have seen an ordinary mortal fall. He whipped his left high to protect his chin from Bell’s right cross and kept his right low to block Bell’s left to the stomach. Conversationally, he said, “Here’s one they didn’t teach you in college,” and hit Bell with a one-two that nearly tore his head off.

Sullivan slugged Bell as he hurtled past. The full force of the blow struck just above his temple and knocked him flat. The pain was sharp as a needle in his brain. But the fact that he felt pain at all meant he was still alive, and conscious that Sullivan and Corbett were moving in for the kill. His head was spinning, and he had to push with his hands to regain his feet.

“Gentlemen, this is your last chance. Is this the man who paid you to kill me?”

Sullivan’s powerful jab knocked the paper from Bell’s hand.

Bell straightened up as much as he could, given the searing pain in his ribs, and managed to elude the combination Sullivan threw next. “I’ll take you next,” he taunted Sullivan. “Soon as I teach your partner something I learned in college.” Then he turned his scorn on Corbett. “If you were half as good as you think you are, you wouldn’t be hiring yourself out to beat people up in a godforsaken railroad town.”

It worked. As table talk could smoke out intentions in poker, fight talk provoked recklessness. Corbett shoved Sullivan aside.

“Get out of my way! I’m going to make this son of a bitch weep before he dies.”

He charged in a rage, throwing punches like cannon fire.

Bell knew he had taken too much punishment to count on speed. He had one last chance to gather all his strength into one killing blow. Too tired to slip the punches, he absorbed two, stepped inside the next, and hit Corbett hard on the jaw, which snapped Corbett’s head back. Then Bell unleashed a right with every ounce of his strength and plunged it into Corbett’s body. The breath exploded out of the man, and he collapsed as if his knees had turned to water. Fighting to the last, he lunged for Bell’s throat as he went down but fell short.

Bell lurched at Sullivan. He was gasping at the exertion, but his face was a mask of grim purpose: Who hiredjou to kill me?

Sullivan dropped to his knees beside Corbett, reached inside his fallen partner’s coat, yanked out a flick knife. Leaping to his feet, he charged Bell.

Bell knew that the heavily built brawler was stronger than he was. In his own half-dead state, attempting to take the knife away was too risky. He slipped his own blade from his boot and pitched it overhand, dragging his index finger on the smooth handle to prevent it from rotating. Flickering like a lizard’s tongue, it flew flat and true into Sullivan’s throat. The brawler fell, spewing blood through hands desperately trying to close the wound.

He would not be answering Bell’s questions.

The detective knelt beside Corbett. His eyes were staring wide open. Blood was trickling from his mouth. If he wasn’t dying from internal ruptures from Bell’s blow to his stomach, he was close to it, and would not be answering questions tonight either. Without wasting another moment, Isaac Bell staggered along the rails to the Rawlins Depot and burst through the dispatcher’s door.

The dispatcher stared at the man in ripped evening clothes with blood pouring down his face.

“What the hell happened to you, mister?”

Bell said, “The president of the line has authorized me to charter a special.”

“You bet. And the Pope just gave me a pass for the Pearly Gates.”

Bell pulled Osgood Hennessy’s letter from his wallet and thrust it in the dispatcher’s face.

“I want your fastest locomotive.”

The dispatcher read it twice, stood up, and said, “Yes, sir! But I’ve only got one engine, and she’s scheduled to hitch onto the westbound limited, which is due in twenty minutes.”

“Turn her around, we’re going east.”

“Where to?”

“After the Overland Limited.”

“You’ll never catch her.”

“If I don‘t, you’ll be hearing from Mr. Hennessy. Get on that telegraph and clear the tracks.”

The Overland Limited had a fifty-minute head start, but Bell’s locomotive had the advantage of hauling only the weight of her own coal and water while the Limited’s engine was towing eight Pullmans and baggage, dining, and observation cars. Hundred-dollar tips to the fireman and engineer didn’t hurt her speed either. They climbed through the night, encountering snow in the Medicine Bow Mountains, a harbinger of the winter that Osgood Hennessy’s railroad builders were striving to beat even as the Wrecker sowed death and destruction to stop them.

They left the snow behind as they descended into the Laramie Valley, stormed through it and the town, stopping only for water, and climbed again. They finally caught up with the Overland Limited east of Laramie at Buford Station, where the rising sun was illuminating the pink granite on the crest of Sherman Hill. The Limited was sidetracked on the water siding, her fireman wrestling the spigot down from the tall wooden tank and jerking the chain that caused the water to flow into the locomotive’s tender.

“Do you have sufficient water to make it to Cheyenne without stopping?” Bell asked his fireman.

“I believe so, Mr. Bell.”

“Pass him!” Bell told the engineer. “Take me straight to the Cheyenne Depot. Fast as you can.”

From Buford Station to Cheyenne, the road descended two thousand feet in thirty miles. With nothing on the eastbound track in front of Bell’s special, they headed for Cheyenne at ninety miles an hour.