The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

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.