Hell's Marshal (10 page)

Curtis took off at a run for the nearest boxcar. When he reached it, he ran along beside the train, matching its speed.

“This will be faster!” he shouted. “Come on, quick now!”

Spike grinned at Frank. “Grit.”

Then he huffed and puffed his way alongside the boy. Frank sighed, then followed, Batcho yipping at his heels.

Spike grasped the handle on the boxcar door and heaved it open just as a shout rose from the depot. Spike hauled himself inside, then tugged Curtis in with him. The train had picked up speed now, and Frank struggled to keep up. He managed to grasp Spike’s wrist, though, and the stronger man pulled him inside.

That left Batcho. The coyote ran alongside the train, moving as fast as his legs would move, scruffy tail streaming behind him like a banner.

“Jump!” Frank yelled. “We’ll pull you in!”

But the coyote gave up, slowing to a trot, then a walk, then finally sitting beside the track, his tongue lolling out as he watched his companions go.

“Damned worthless coyote,” Frank muttered.

“He’ll find us,” Spike said. “Inside that coyote head is the mind of an Indian guide.”

Frank grunted, then sat with his legs dangling out the door. Curtis and Spike stood behind him in silence.

When the marker came into view on the side of the tracks, Frank heaved himself out of the car, rolling when he hit the grass-covered ground. Spike and Curtis followed, the boy doing surprisingly well, as if he’d jumped off trains before.

The three stood, waiting for the train to pass.

“What now?” Spike asked.

“Now, we wait.” Frank snatched a long stalk of prairie grass and chewed on it, his hand resting on the handle of his pistol. “And when the James gang shows, we kill them, save Camille, and drag Jesse’s spirit back to Hell, screaming.”

Thunder clouds stalked in the distance, behind a small stand of trees, but the sky overhead was bluer than Frank had ever seen.

“We’d best hide in those trees,” he said.

The shade cooled them, but did nothing to relieve the thick, wetness of the air.

Frank took up position behind an ancient oak, peering out around its fat, textured trunk to watch the tracks. Curtis and Spike sat, backs against trees, and closed their eyes.

“Last time they robbed a train here,” Spike said, “they removed a section of track. Train crashed, people died. You reckon they’d make the same mistake again?”

Frank shrugged. “Don’t know, but I don’t suppose a soul condemned to Hell rightly cares who he kills in the living world.”

“He cares,” Curtis said, not even opening his eyes as he spoke. “He’s trying to paint himself the hero, judging from that letter. Can’t kill innocent people and still be a hero.”

Spike raised an eyebrow at Frank. “Young man has a point.”

Frank nodded. “You’re proving more useful than that damned coyote guide. Just stay out of sight when the shooting starts. You’re the only one of us with a life left to live.”

“So, you three are really dead?” Curtis asked.

Frank nodded again, still watching the tracks in both directions. A smudge of smoke rose from the east.

“How’d you come back?”

Frank gave the boy the short version of their story, starting with the judges, and Curtis listened in silence, nodding his head from time to time. When Frank finished, the smoke on the horizon had grown and in the distance, a whistle blew. The train appeared as a thin, black worm sliding toward them across the rolling terrain.

“Frank?” Curtis didn’t look at him, the boy’s eyes far away and dark, like the undersides of the storm clouds coming in from the west.

Frank grunted.

“Since there’s a Hell, you suppose there’s a Heaven too?”

“Residents of Hell seemed to think so.”

That painted a smile on the boy’s lips, though his eyes remained far away. “Then that must be where my parents are. And it must mean I’ll see ‘em when I go there, too. They’ll be waiting for me.”

Staring at Curtis, Frank felt a bond with him, one he’d never had with his own boy. It made him question if bringing him along had been the right thing.

The train whistle blew again, and Frank readied himself.

“Well, you just stay hidden like I told you,” he warned. “Don’t be in such a hurry to make it out of this world.”

Curtis didn’t reply, but continued to stare off into the distance, like he could see his ma and pa waiting for him.

“We wait here until the James gang makes their move on the train,” Frank told Spike. “With any luck, we can catch them by surprise. Shoot for the head, especially if our prospector friend shows up. I’ll handle Jesse myself.”

He patted the lasso on his hip and the iron cuffs under his duster. He’d take the Fisher boy alive. Killing a child was not an option.

The locomotive was visible now, a gleaming black machine burping clouds of smoke, looking like it was bound for destination: Hell itself. The ground shook as it reached them, and the engineer blew the whistle again, making Curtis cover his ears. Frank studied the train and its surroundings, searching for any sign of the James gang. Flat cars, box cars, and hoppers clattered past on the track, with no sign of the gang or its leader. Finally, the caboose streaked by, a flash of red following a snake of browns and grays, and still the new James gang was nowhere to be seen.

As the caboose lumbered out of sight, Spike stood and stretched.

“That was a freight train anyway,” he said, pacing around their little copse. “The gang preferred to rob passenger trains, so if the safe was empty, they could steal from the passengers.”

Frank acknowledged him with a curt nod, but something in his gut felt wrong. He went over things in his mind, from the map to what the gang had done so far. Adair had been circled on the map. Like Creede and Northfield, it marked a wrong Jesse needed to make right. It was almost too perfect, and for an instant, Frank wondered if it was a trap.

He shook off the feeling. This had to be it.

So, like Spike, he paced their hideaway, only Curtis still lounging against a tree. The day wore on, the sun turning their shaded spot into an oven, and the clouds rolled closer, pushing the humidity up until Frank thought he could have taken bites of the air. Mosquitoes found them, whining in his ear and trying to bite him, mingling with the constant swarm of flies. Curtis swatted and swiped to keep them off him, but Frank and Spike didn’t have to bother. Bites would heal before starting to itch.

The next train blew its whistle around three hours after the first, startling Curtis from a light sleep and making Frank look west, where a tendril of smoke rose to merge with the gray of the cloud base above it. Flashes of lightning lit up the clouds, and the train sped east, fleeing the wrath of the storm.

This was a short, sleek passenger train that streaked by them in just a few seconds, not even slowing, its passengers staring out their windows, unaware Frank and his comrades were staring back.

As the passenger train slipped east into the wavy hills around Des Moines, Frank cussed under his breath.

“Still no sign of the gang,” he muttered. “I’m starting to think we got the wool pulled over our eyes.”

“There’s one more westbound passenger train due in ninety minutes,” Curtis said. “The Des Moines to Omaha evening run. I asked around at the depot, and it normally carries armed Army officers, so I’m betting it has a gold shipment.”

“You couldn’t have mentioned this earlier?” Spike asked.

“Sorry,” Curtis said. “Frank had his mind set on waiting here.”

Frank rolled his eyes, but sure enough, ninety minutes later, as the sun dipped behind the storm clouds and a few drops of rain pattered the grove around them, a train whistle blew to their east. Lightning flashed and a few seconds later, thunder pealed across the plains. Frank’s gut twisted—the thunder seemed somehow prophetic, like some sort of omen or warning that evil rode on the clouds and that the world of the living should move aside and make way.

The train came into sight over a hill, smoke erupting from its stack as it sped across the open plain. With the sun almost down and the lightning their only true source of illumination, Frank caught only glimpses of the locomotive, with its light a shining eye in the dark between flashes. Slowly, the train’s roar took hold in Frank’s knees.

“They should be here,” Spike said, looking both directions along the track. “If they’re going to rob this train, they should be in position by now.”

“Something doesn’t feel right,” Frank replied. “We should—”

“What’s that?” Curtis jumped to his feet and pointed at the oncoming train. “There, on top of the cars!”

Frank squinted into the growing darkness, and at first he saw nothing. Then lightning flashed, splitting a tree just across the tracks from them, and Frank saw what the boy was talking about. There, standing tall atop the first passenger car, tattered flannel flapping in the wind, stood the prospector. Even at a hundred yards, the old man looked eight feet tall, maybe more, and his eyes seemed to absorb the darkness around him, getting blacker than they’d ever been. His ghost-white hair streamed out behind him. He held his pickaxe to the sky, challenging the lightning to take its best shot at striking him down.

Frank’s first instinct was to hide, but the prospector stared right at him, and he knew without a doubt he’d been spotted. He drew his six-shooter, ejected one round, and inserted the green-glowing bullet, his weapon of last resort. He flipped the cylinder closed and spun it until the special round would be the last he fired. He preferred not to waste it on anyone but Jesse James, but something told him it might be all that stopped the old man this time.

He handed the cuffs to Spike.

“I’ll handle this,” he growled as the wind picked up and the rain started to pummel the earth around them. “You two stay safe. Get away if you can.”

“Hell no,” Spike said.

“Someone’s gotta rescue Camille,” Frank argued. “In case I don’t make it out of this gunfight on my own.”

The train was almost on them now, and Frank stepped out of the trees to take on the prospector from Hell. The wind stole his hat, but Frank let it go.

To his surprise, the prospector leapt from the passenger car, landing in a crouch a few feet away, tossing aside the bloody pick. When he started to rise, Frank drew and aimed at his head. The prospector froze, and an icy laugh hacked its way from his lungs.

“You still think you can kill me with a fancy bullet, gunfighter? That's why I used a living body. Unlike your corpse, it can change. Evolve.”

Frank cocked the hammer on his Colt in answer.

The prospector laughed again, the sound of ice cracking on a frozen lake.

“Even your friend with the Winchester over in those trees knows that won’t work.”

“Where’s Jesse James?” Frank barked. “I’m here to return him to Hell where he belongs.”

The prospector rose up to his full height, towering over Frank by two or three feet.

“Jesse and the boys went on ahead. They told me to come and be your welcoming party.”

His gut had been right—it was a trap.

“Then get to welcomin’,” Frank said, “so I can move on and do my job.”

The prospector drew his revolver so fast Frank barely had time to fire. The bullet tore into the old man’s left shoulder, rocking him back. Unlike the last whiskey-coated round, though, this one had no other effect. No smoke, no shrinking. Nothing.

Frank dove right as the prospector fired off a three-round burst that sent up wads of dirt and grass. Frank rose to his knee and fired two more shots, both striking the prospector in the chest. Again, though, the old man simply rocked back, then fired again. No shrinking. No pain.

Frank rolled and saw Spike and Curtis running for the speeding train. The prospector turned to aim at them, and Frank fired his last coated bullet at his back.

This time, the Holy-whiskey worked, making the prospector arch his back and fall to one knee. Seeing his chance, Frank holstered his gun and ran. He lowered his shoulder, ready to drive it into the wound in the old man’s back, but the prospector was ready for him. At the last instant, he wheeled, grabbed Frank by his duster, and flung him at the speeding train. Frank fell just short of the tracks, balling up to keep his limbs from being run over as the last car thundered past.

The prospector fell on him like a rabid dog, snarling and foaming, his black eyes full of hatred and bloodlust. The fingers of one huge hand closed around Frank’s throat, while the other held his right hand—his gun hand—down against the ballast of the track.

The two wrestled for control, but the prospector had the edge. As Frank watched Curtis and Spike jump onto the caboose, he felt his world going black. He tried to reach for his gun with his left hand, but the prospector held him still.

“Foolish judges sent the wrong man,” the prospector growled. Spit dripped from his mouth onto Frank’s forehead, where it burned, despite the rain on his brow. “After I destroy you, I’ll welcome your friends, too. I’ll enjoy hurting the boy.”

Fire erupted in Frank’s heart, and with the last ounce of strength in his left hand, he grabbed the lasso off his hip and looped it around the prospector’s neck. The old man’s midnight eyes went wide and he clawed at the rope. That freed Frank’s hands. In a single motion, he drew his Colt, put it under the old man’s chin, and fired the green bullet.

The prospector’s head snapped back, his body flying from Frank in a flash of misty, green light. He landed with a thud a few yards away, writhing on the ground as glowing, serpentine mist flowed around his arms and legs. On its own, the lasso tightened around his neck.

The light disappeared and the world fell silent. Even the thunder seemed muffled and distant. Frank rose to his knees, afraid to do anything but stare.

To his dismay, the prospector sat up, an evil grin spreading across his face like oil across a pond. His fingers grasped the lasso and started to loosen it.

“Fool,” he snarled.

Lightning flashed and the sound of the train returned, shaking the ground. Frank looked for the train, wondering how Spike had talked them into backing up, but a second burst of lightning showed him the true source of the noise.