A loud knock on the door didn’t do much to improve his state of mind; but Simeon’s pot of coffee and Lamar’s covered plate of breakfast fixings shook off the last sour feelings of insufficient sleep. He invited the men into the room, helped himself to the coffee (a quarter a cup, or a dollar for the whole carafe) and to the breakfast (a dollar a plate, and his men had already eaten theirs).
As he sat on the edge of the bed and made short work of the offerings, he told them about the note and the warning.
Lamar twisted his mouth into a frown and said, “That don’t make any sense. Who would hire the Pinks to come after us?”
“I don’t know,” Hainey said around a mouthful of eggs. “It’s bothering me too. God knows we didn’t hire ’em, and who on earth gives a good goddamn if the Free Crow gets stolen, except for us?”
Simeon shrugged and said, “Nobody, except whoever stole it. ”
The captain pointed his fork at the first mate and said, “Exactly. That’s all I can figure, anyway. Except at first, I was bothered because of the money. It costs money to hire the Pinks and get them to act as your enforcers. You’d think that people with money could just buy or build their own aircraft; but then I got thinking. ”
“Uh oh,” Simeon grinned.
“What I got thinking is this: The Free Crow was the strongest bird of her kind in the northwest territories—or at least, she’s the toughest engine anywhere close to Seattle. And I don’t think I flatter myself too much when I say that nobody in his right mind would swipe that ship out from under me for no good reason at all; so all I can figure is, this must’ve been a crime of opportunity. Somebody out west needed that ship to perform a specific task. ”
“What kind of task?” Simeon asked, tipping half a cup of coffee into a tin and taking a sip.
Lamar answered thoughtfully, before the captain could reply. “Something heavy. Someone needed our bird to move something really, really heavy from northwest to southeast. ”
Hainey set the fork down on the edge of his plate, and Simeon froze with his cup at the edge of his lips in order to ask, “How’d you come to that conclusion?”
The engineer said, “Ain’t you seen her flying? She’s weighed down with something, and weighed down bad. Otherwise, we could’ve never stayed as close behind her as we’ve been doing so far. She ought to have outpaced that nameless bird by a week, but she’s never got more than half a day on us. And when she moves, she looks like she’s carrying so much cargo that she can’t hardly lift herself up. ”
Hainey took one more bite and chewed it slow, before saying, “Which means she picked up something in Seattle, because she didn’t have anything but a few crates of guns when we lost her. All right, it’s coming together now. So Felton Brink, may he rot in hell, he takes the Free Crow because he has something heavy he needs to move—and ours is the only engine tough enough to carry it. ”
“And whatever it is,” Simeon concluded, “it’s important enough for somebody to put the Pinks on our tail in order to keep us from taking it back. But who? Where’s Brink taking our bird?”
Lamar’s frown deepened. “The Pinks do a lot of work for the military, don’t they? The Union uses them to shut down draft riots, and move money around. I’ve read about it, h
ere and there. ”
Simeon said, “So the Union could sure as hell afford to pay the Pinks. ”
“But that doesn’t mean they’re behind this,” Hainey was quick to say. “They might be, sure. It might be worth our time to ask around, if we can. But we’ll have to balance our time real careful. If we’re going to stay on the Free Crow’s trail, we need to get ourselves together, swipe that Union bird, and get back in the air. ”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” the first mate declared. He down-ed the last of his coffee and left the tin cup sitting on the basin.
Hainey stood up and pulled a shirt over his undershirt, then reached for his sharp blue coat. “Let’s see about the horses and that rotten coach, and head out to the service yards. We don’t have all day before the Pinkerton op finds his way into town, and I’d like to be gone before he gets here. ”
They left the High Horse by nine o’clock and took their secondhand coach down near the service yards, where they paid a Chinaman named Ling Lu to hold it and keep the horses behind his laundry. Another hundred dollars, spread around judiciously, revealed the general location of the Valkyrie and the name of a Pinkerton informant who had been known to let information flow in more than one direction.
Hainey sent Lamar ahead to the ship, with a forged document that declared him a free citizen and a Union veteran. He also included a letter of recommendation, composed as a fictional white man who managed a shipping yard in Chattanooga, declaring that Lamar was handy with tools and rich with integrity. Lamar was, in fact, handy with tools and absolutely faithful to his captain; and Hainey trusted that the engineer would learn what needed to be learned in order to fly the craft.
Meanwhile, he took Simeon back to the red quarters at the yard’s edge—where the saloons and billiards were cheap and easy, and the dance hall girls were either far older or far younger than they really ought to be. It wasn’t a pretty place, and it smelled like a cross between a coyote den and a leaky still. But in the right corners, hiding in the right shadows, information could be bought and sold as easily as a newspaper—even by a dark-skinned man with a terrible scar, and a foreigner with an accent that no one in Kansas City could place.
Behind a grocery store that dealt contraband ammunition out the back doors, Hainey and Simeon found Crutchfield Akers—a man with a hand-rolled cigarette sticking moistly to his bottom lip, and a pair of suspenders with eagles printed from top to bottom. His pants were rolled to keep them out of the wet sawdust and tobacco juice that covered the grocery stoop, and if he’d shaved or trimmed any part of his face the last six weeks, you couldn’t have proved it to the captain.
“You Crutchfield?”
“That’s me,” he answered with a nod that dipped his hat so that a shadow covered his eyes. “Who’s asking?”
“A man with money and some questions, looking for a man with answers and an open pocket. Maybe we can share a drink next door and have a conversation. ”
He shook his head. “Not next door. ” The hat lifted enough to reveal a pragmatic gaze. “I don’t mind sitting down with a Negro, but there’s folks who’ll hold it against me. Nothing personal, you understand. ”
“Nothing personal,” Simeon repeated with a snort.
Hainey didn’t press it. “All right. We can talk out here if it preserves your social standing. My money spends just as easy as anyone else’s. ”