The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

Zeke, like Patrick, had braced for the impact and not been hurt badly.

“Grab Bill,” Patrick told Zeke, who was a powerful man. “I’ve got the boy.”

Patrick slung Billy under his arm like a gunnysack and jumped for the ground. Zeke draped Bill Wright over his shoulder, leaped from the engine, and hit the steep gravel slope running. Patrick stumbled with the boy. Zeke grabbed Patrick with his free arm and kept him upright. The crashing sounds had ceased abruptly. In the comparative quiet, they could hear injured passengers screaming in the first car, which was crumpled open like Christmas wrapping paper.

“Run!”

The coal fire that Zeke Taggert had shoveled so hard to feed was still raging under the locomotive’s crown plate. Burning fiercely to maintain the twenty-two hundred degrees necessary to boil two thousand gallons of water, it continued to heat the steel. But with no water above it to absorb the heat, the temperature of the steel soared from its normal six hundred degrees to the fire’s twenty-two hundred. At that temperature, the half-inch-thick plate softened like butter in a skillet.

Two-hundred-pounds-per-square-inch steam pressure inside the boiler was fourteen times ordinary air pressure outside. It took only seconds for the captive steam to exploit the sudden weakness and burst a hole in the crown plate.

Even as the steam escaped, two thousand gallons of water pressure-cooked to three hundred eighty degrees also turned to steam the instant it came in contact with the chill Glendale air. Its volume multiplied by a thousand six hundred times. In a flash, two thousand gallons of water vaporized into three million gallons of steam. Trapped inside the 4-4-2 Atlantic’s boiler, it expanded outward with a concussive roar that exploded the steel locomotive into a million small pieces of shrapnel.

Billy and his uncle never knew what hit them. Nor did the Wells Fargo Express messenger in the baggage car, nor three friends who had been playing draw poker in the front of the derailed Pullman. But Zeke Taggert and Rufus Patrick, who understood the cause and nature of the nightmarish forces gathering like a tornado, actually felt the unspeakable pain of scalding steam for a tenth of a second, before the explosion ended all they knew forever.

WITH A CLANG OF cast iron on stone and the crackle of splintering ash, the Kalamazoo Velocipede tumbled down the railroad embankment.

“What the hell is that?”

Jack Douglas, ninety-two, was so old he’d started out as an Indian fighter protecting the first western railroad’s right of way. The company kept him on out of rare sentiment and let him act as a sort of night watchman patrolling the quiet Glendale rail yard with a heavy single-action Colt .44 on his hip. He reached for it with a veined and bony hand and began sliding it with practiced ease from its oiled holster.

The Wrecker lunged with shocking swiftness. His thrust was so efficient that it would have caught a man his own age flat-footed. The watchman never had a chance. The telescoping sword was in his throat and out again before he crumpled to the ground.

The Wrecker looked down at the body in disgust. Of all the ridiculous things to go wrong. Jumped by an old geezer who should have been in bed hours ago. He shrugged and said, half aloud, with a smile, “Waste not, want not.” Pulling a poster from his coat pocket, he crushed it into a ball. Then he knelt beside the body, forced open the dead hand, and closed the fingers around the crumpled paper.

Dark and empty streets led to where the Southern Pacific rails crossed the narrow tracks of the Los Angeles amp; Glendale Electric Railway. The big green streetcars of the interurban passenger line did not run after midnight. Instead, taking advantage of inexpensive electricity purchased in bulk at night, the railway carried freight. Keeping a sharp eye for police, the Wrecker hopped aboard a car filled with milk cans and fresh carrots bound for Los Angeles.

It was growing light when he jumped off in the city and made his way across East Second Street. The dome of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s Moorish-style La Grande Station was silhouetted against a lurid red dawn. He retrieved a suitcase from the luggage room and changed out of his dusty clothes in the men’s room. Then he boarded the Santa Fe’s flyer to Albuquerque and sat down to a breakfast of steak and eggs and fresh-baked rolls in a dining car set with silver and china.

As the flyer’s locomotive gathered way, the imperious conductor of the express passenger train came through, demanding, “Tickets, gents.”

Affecting the brusque attitude of a man who traveled regularly for business, the Wrecker did not bother to look up from his Los Angeles Times, which allowed him to keep his face down, concealing his features, as he wiped his fingers on a fine linen napkin and fished out his wallet.

“You’ve cut your finger!” said the conductor, staring at a bright red bloodstain on the napkin.

“Stropping my razor,” said the Wrecker, still not looking up from his newspaper while cursing again the drunken blacksmith he wished he had killed.

6

IT WAS STILL THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN ISAAC BELL bounded off the train before it stopped rolling onto the waterfront terminal on Oakland Mole. This was the end of the line for westbound passengers, a mile-long arm of rock that the Southern Pacific Railroad had built into San Francisco Bay. The pier reached another mile into the bay to deliver freight trains to seagoing vessels and boxcar floats to the city, but passengers transferred here to their ferry.

Bell ran for the ferry, scanning the bustling terminal for Lori March, the old farm woman from whom he always bought flowers. Nestled in the bottom of his watch pocket was a small, flat key to Marion Morgan’s apartment.

Drowsy newsboys with seeds in their hair from the hay barges where they slept were crying in shrill voices “Extra! Extra!” and waving special editions of every newspaper printed in San Francisco.

The first headline to rivet Isaac Bell’s eye stopped him dead.TRAIN WRECKERS DITCH COAST LINE

LIMITED AT GLENDALE

Bell felt as if he’d taken a bowie knife in the stomach. Glendale was seven hundred miles from the Cascades Cutoff.

“Mr. Bell, sir? Mr. Bell?”

Right behind the newsboy was an operative from Van Dorn’s San Francisco office. He didn’t look much older than the kid hawking the papers. His brown hair was pillow-flattened against his head, and he had a sleep wrinkle still creasing his cheek. But his bright blue eyes were wide with excitement.

“I’m Dashwood, Mr. Bell. San Francisco office. Mr. Bronson left me in charge when he took everyone to Sacramento. They won’t be back until tomorrow.”

/>