that clear to him?”
Sharpton chuckled in the dark. “Oh yes. Besides, he’s not that tough anymore. He’ll do as he’s told.”
“Take this,” said the Wrecker.
Sharpton felt the package with his fingers. “This isn’t money.”
“You’ll have the money in a minute. This is the fuse I want him to use.”
“You mind me asking why?”
“Not at all,” the Wrecker said easily. “This looks exactly like a fast fuse. It would fool even an experienced safecracker. Do I assume correctly that yours is experienced?”
“Blowing safes and express cars his whole life.”
“As I asked for. Despite its appearance, this is actually a slow fuse. When he lights it, it will take longer to detonate the dynamite than he’s calculated.”
“If it takes too long, it will blow up the train instead of just blocking the tracks.”
“Does that pose difficulties for you, Sharpton?”
“I’m just saying what’ll happen,” Sharpton said hastily. “If you want to blow up the train instead of just rob it, well I guess that’s none of my business. You’re paying the bill.”
The Wrecker pressed a second package into Sharpton’s hand. “Here is three thousand dollars. Two thousand for you, a thousand for your man. You can’t count it in the dark. You’ll have to trust me.”
13
THE LUMBERJACK’S DRAWING OF THE WRECKER PAID OFF IN five days.
A sharp-eyed Southern Pacific ticket clerk in Sacramento recalled selling an Ogden, Utah, ticket to a man who looked like the man that Don Albert had drawn. Even though his customer had a beard, and his hair was almost as blond as Isaac Bell‘s, there was something similar in the face, the clerk insisted.
Bell interviewed him personally to ascertain that the clerk was not another fan of
They hit pay dirt in Reno, Nevada. One of the flyer’s conductors, a resident of Reno, recalled the passenger too and agreed it could have been the man in the drawing, though he pointed out the difference in hair color.
Bell raced to Nevada, ran him down at his home, and asked casually, as if only making conversation, whether the conductor had seen the
From Reno, Bell caught an overnight express to Ogden, and had dinner as the train climbed through the Trinity Mountains. He sent telegrams when it stopped at Lovelock and received several replies when it stopped at Imlay, and he finally fell asleep in a comfortable Pullman as it steamed across Nevada. The wires awaiting him at Montello, just before they crossed the Utah border, had nothing new to report.
Nearing Ogden, midday, the train sped across Great Salt Lake on the long redwood trestles of the Lucin Cutoff. Osgood Hennessy had spent eight million dollars and clear-cut miles of Oregon forest to build the new, level route between Lucin and Ogden. It shortened the Sacramento-Ogden trip by two hours and dismayed Commodore Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, his rivals on the southern and northern routes. At the point where Bell was so close to the rail-junction city that he could see the snowcapped peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to Ogden’s east, his train ground to a halt.
The tracks were blocked six miles ahead, the conductor told him.
An explosion had derailed the westbound Sacramento Limited.
BELL JUMPED TO THE ground and ran alongside the train to the front end. The engineer and fireman had dismounted from their locomotive and were standing on the ballast, rolling cigarettes. Bell showed them his Van Dorn identification, and ordered, “Get me as close to the wreck as you can.”
“Sorry, Mr. Detective, I take my orders from the dispatcher.”
Bell’s derringer appeared in his hand suddenly. Two dark muzzles yawned at the engineer. “This is a matter of life and death, starting with yours,” said Bell. He pointed at the cowcatcher on the front of the locomotive, and said, “Move this train to the wreck and don’t stop until you hit debris!”
“You wouldn’t shoot a man in cold blood,” said the fireman.
“The hell he wouldn‘t,” said the engineer, shifting his gaze nervously from the derringer to the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. “Get up there and shovel coal.”
The locomotive, a big 4-6-2, steamed six miles before a brakeman with a red flag stopped them where the tracks disappeared in a large hole in the ballast. Just beyond the hole, six Pullmans, a baggage car, and a tender lay on their sides. Bell dismounted from the locomotive and strode through the wreckage. “How many hurt?” he asked the railroad official who was pointed out to him as the wreck master.
“Thirty-five. Four seriously.”
“Dead?”
“None. They were lucky. The bastard blew the rail a minute early. The engineer had time to reduce his speed.”
“Strange,” said Bell. “His attacks have always been so precisely timed.”
“Well, this’ll be his last. We got him.”
“What? Where is he?”
“Sheriff caught him in Ogden. Lucky for him. Passengers tried to lynch him. He got away, but then one of them spotted him later, hiding in a stable.”
Bell found a locomotive on the other side of the wreck to run him into Union Depot.
The jailhouse was situated in Ogden’s mansard-roofed City Hall a block from the railroad station. Two top Van Dorn agents were there ahead of him, the older Weber-and-Fields duo of Mack Fulton and Wally Kisley. Neither was cracking jokes. In fact, both men looked glum.
“Where is he?” Bell demanded.
“It’s not him,” said Fulton wearily. He seemed exhausted, Bell thought, and for the first time he wondered if Mack should be considering retirement. Always lean, his face was shrunken as a cadaver’s.
“Not who blew the train?”
“Oh, he blew the train all right,” said Kisley, whose trademark three-piece checkerboard suit was caked with dust. Wally looked as tired as Mack but not ill. “Only he’s not the Wrecker. Go ahead, you take a crack at him.”
“You’ll have a better chance of getting him to talk. He sure as hell won’t admit a word to us.”
“Why would he talk to me?”
“Old friend of yours,” Fulton explained cryptically. He and Kisley were both twenty years older than Bell, celebrated veterans and friends, who were free to say whatever popped in their heads even though Bell was boss of the Wrecker investigation.
“I’d knock it out of him,” said the sheriff. “But your boys said to wait for you, and the railroad company tells me Van Dorn calls the tune. Damned foolishness, in my opinion. But no one’s asking my opinion.”
Bell strode into the room where they had the prisoner manacled to a table affixed solidly to the stone floor. An “old friend,” to be sure, the prisoner was Jake Dunn, a safecracker. On the end of the table was a neat, banded stack of crisp five-dollar bills, five hundred dollars’ worth, according to the sheriff, clearly payment for services rendered. Bell’s first grim thought was that now the Wrecker was hiring accomplices to do his murderous work for him. Which means he could strike anywhere and be long gone before the strike happened.
“Jake, what in blazes have you gotten mixed up in this time?”
“Hello, Mr. Bell. Haven’t seen you since you sent me to San Quentin.”
Bell sat quietly and looked him over. San Quentin had not been kind to the safecracker. He looked twenty years older, a hollow shell of the hard case he had been. His hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to imagine him setting a charge without detonating it accidentally. Relieved at first to see a familiar face, Dunn shriveled now under Bell’s gaze.
