Dead Time Read online

  Thirty minutes passed before the undertakers arrived, and it took another ten before Walter Wilkinson, superintendent at The Walls, Dr. Crouch, and Barney Drexel showed up. Major Rufus K. Conley, the journalist from Indianola, came with them—and the local law officers made no attempt to keep him out of Peckerwood Hill with the other newspapermen.

  At least Fallon could be thankful for something. One of the guards standing watch over Fallon and the only two other surviving members of the grave-digging party, handed the prisoners a canteen. The water cooled his throat, quenched his thirst. Luckily, Fallon got the canteen after the Chinese man and before the lunger got his lips on the container.

  Well, there was something else to be thankful about. Harry Fallon was still alive.

  Dr. Crouch pronounced the dead men officially dead and came over to the tree where the prisoners were being kept. The old man knelt, his knees popping, and he shook his head. “Trouble follows you like a coyote follows a chicken,” he said quietly.

  Fallon shrugged.

  The old man looked around, then handed the nearest guard his black satchel and asked the young man to take it to the buggy that had brought the prison officials inside the cemetery. When the guard was out of earshot, the doctor glanced at the lunger and Celestial and began whispering to Fallon.

  “Our dear superintendent and erudite journalist have come up with this story: Two men, possibly more, attempted to break out Henry Moses, who had been detailed to bury Juanito Gomez at the prison cemetery, Gomez having died of natural causes yesterday afternoon. His heart, you see.”

  Fallon did not know which prisoner was Henry Moses, and he did not really care.

  “In the ensuing melee of gunfire, the two colored prisoners saw their chance to escape and joined the assault on the guards.”

  “You three prisoners, being obedient and God-fearing men . . .” He glanced at the Chinese man, shrugged, and went on. “You three did the right thing. You lay down and covered your heads, protecting yourselves as best as you could do.”

  “That ain’t what happened at all, Doc,” the lunger whispered. “It was this feller . . .” He nodded at Fallon. “And the Chink helped, too, at the end.”

  Doc Crouch paid him no mind.

  “During the assault, three guards died in duty, but the last one standing, Todd Corey, managed to kill the last of the gang members attempting to free Henry Moses. Moses himself was killed in the gunfire, as were the two colored boys. If there were others involved in the attempted escape, they vamoosed.”

  “But . . .”

  The doctor now glared at the lunger, who dropped his head and stared at the grass and mud.

  “That’s the story that will be printed in the Huntsville newspaper, in Fort Worth, in Indianola if the major deems it newsworthy that far away, and I dare say it will be picked up in papers from California to New York. Everybody loves a good prison escape yarn. We have dead heroes and martyrs and three more graves to dig here at Peckerwood Hill. I imagine the families of the deceased guards will take home their loved ones, and the outlaws will wind up in the potter’s field of Huntsville.”

  The doctor paused, pursed his lips, studied the three prisoners briefly, and then looked directly at Fallon.

  “What I’d like to know, Mr. Alexander, is what the hell really happened here?”

  That was something Fallon wanted to know, too. While sitting here, nursing his wounds, he went through the ambush and everything that happened then, even before, and after.

  Maybe it could have been an escape attempt that somehow had gone wrong. Really wrong. He even considered a theory that this had all been arranged to kill Fallon, that Justice and his cohorts had figured out that Fallon was working for a detective agency. But that would have been one extreme and sloppy way to kill off a detective. The gunfight had already brought out newspaper reporters. If you wanted to kill someone off in a prison, hell, there were hundreds of quieter ways. A knife between the ribs. An iron pipe against the skull. A kerosene bomb tossed inside the locked cell. They could have killed him in the prison mill. Pushed him off the balcony and called it a suicide, just like that old Indian that Fallon had heard about.

  No, this had to be something different. Hell, the theory Drexel and Wilkinson had concocted sounded as good as anything Fallon could come up with now. He touched his head, fingered the knot, and remembered the bandage.

  “Mr. Alexander.”

  Fallon heard the doctor’s voice, and now he remembered something else. The white-haired sawbones had told Fallon not to remove the bandage. Why? Medicinal purposes? Perhaps. Or had that been a way for the gunmen in the woods to identify Fallon. To kill him. Or to realize he was the one they didn’t want to kill.

  If he kept this thinking up, he’d wind up out of The Walls and into the nearest insane asylum.

  “Alexander.”

  Fallon looked at Dr. Crouch and held the old man’s gaze. He never looked away, but said clearly and definitely: “I wouldn’t know, Doc. Once the shooting started, I dropped to the ground and covered my head and prayed to be delivered.”

  Their eyes held, but eventually Dr. Crouch looked away.

  “Mr. Fat does not speak English,” Crouch said as he looked at the Chinese prisoner. Fallon wanted to smile, but kept his face hard, though he enjoyed knowing how the Oriental had everyone in this prison fooled. “And Mr. Dupree . . . ?” He waited until the lunger looked up.

  “Well,” the doctor said.

  “It’s like he says,” the weak man said, and dropped his head again to study the grass.

  The doctor sighed, but not at the lunger’s answer. It was because now the superintendent came over, flanked by Barney Drexel.

  “This will cause a lot of headaches for us,” Wilkinson said as he put both hands on his hips. “Newspaper editors are already here. What did these men say they saw?”

  “They say they saw nothing,” Crouch answered.

  The warden eyed Fallon. “Well?”

  Fallon shook his head.

  “That’s good. We’ve got us a story and we’re sticking to it. But don’t think you’re going to get your names in any newspapers. I’m telling the press that we are keeping the three surviving gravediggers’ names a secret, fearing that friends of Moses, that black-hearted sidewinder, might retaliate. The Chink and the lunger are lucky. I’ll transfer them to Rusk.”

  “What about him?” Dr. Crouch nodded at Fallon.

  “He just got his sentence reduced. Lucky. We can get him out of The Walls to some farm.” The warden looked at Fallon again, but this time his expression changed. “Hell, man,” the warden said as he pointed at Fallon’s side. “You’re bleeding.”

  Fallon took a quick look at his side, where one of the bullets had grazed him. It wasn’t anything more than a scratch, and the blood wasn’t pouring, just trickling enough to stain the white part of his striped uniform.

  “I’m always bleeding,” Fallon said.

  That got a laugh out of Barney Drexel.

  “What are the chances of us getting these men out of The Walls before that damned nuisance of a prison inspector shows up again?” Wilkinson asked Drexel.

  “None.” Drexel’s head tilted toward the gate. “He’s right outside the gate, behind the reporters. That dirtbag shows up at all the wrong times.”

  Drexel looked at the three inmates, chained together, dirty, sweaty, utterly exhausted. Once again, Fallon had lucked out. The chances of Drexel recognizing him in this condition, with his face covered with grime, sweat, gunpowder, and grass, were about the same as drawing into an inside straight in a poker game. “If you know what’s good for you, you keep your mouth shut when that nosy piker asks you what all you saw,” Drexel said, eyes narrow, tone forceful. “You saw nothing. You heard only gunfire and curses. If I hear that you told that snot-nosed arse anything other than that, it’s to solitary for all of you.” He grinned at the lunger. “And, Dupree, you know how long a lunger’ll last after seven days in that sweatbox.”
r />   CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Two days passed before the inspector of prisons met with Fallon. The inspector was, of course, Dan MacGregor.

  MacGregor, once again using the cover of Inspector of Prisons Byron Roberts, met with the Chinese inmate briefly, then the lunger, and finally asked to see Harry Alexander. They met in the visiting room, MacGregor went through the usual introductions, explaining what he wanted, telling him that he should be honest in his answers, that no harm would come to him . . . the usual load of crap most prison inspectors thought to be truthful.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Fallon answered. “As soon as the shooting started, I hit the dirt.”

  “I see. So did Mr. Fat and Mr. Dupree.”

  “Probably why we’re still alive and nobody else is.”

  MacGregor opened a folder and slid several photographs toward him. “Do you recognize any of these men?”

  Fallon studied each image, photographs taken of men lying on planks, bloodied from the fight at Peckerwood Hill, all of them looking very much dead. Yeah, Fallon knew those men, but not by name. Two of them he had killed.

  “I know the guards,” Fallon said, “but not by name.”

  “And the others?”

  Fallon looked again. His head shook and he slid two photographs back toward MacGregor. “These gents must’ve been some of the cutthroats that took to shooting. The guards died bravely, I reckon, doing their jobs. These were just cold-blooded killers.” He tapped the photograph of the man who had been driving the wagon, letting MacGregor know that the driver had been in on the . . . whatever it had been.

  MacGregor jotted down some senseless nonsense on the pad and pushed the photograph back.

  “I see.”

  Fallon leaned back in his chair, pushed the front legs off the floor, and rocked a bit, casually looking at the walls, the ceiling, trying to figure out where someone might be spying on them, listening to everything they had to say.

  “You have no idea what this was all about?” MacGregor asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Did you know the prisoner Henry Moses?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  Fallon laughed.

  “Hear anything?”

  “Gunshots.”

  “What else?”

  Fallon shrugged. “Well,” he said, “some fellow yelled to someone to start running and then they’d hightail it for some other place.”

  “Did they mention a name?”

  Fallon shook his head.

  “Did you see anything?”

  Fallon’s head repeated the shake.

  “Here.” MacGregor tossed back the photographs. “Look at them again.”

  MacGregor pointed at the images. “None of the men killed trying to free Henry Moses have been identified by any of our country’s leading detective agencies. The U.S. marshal, the city police chief, even three Texas Rangers have not been able to identify these assassins, and no one has claimed their bodies.”

  That meant something. It meant that the American Detective Agency could not identify the dead killers. Sean MacGregor’s outfit might not be the Pinkerton National Detective Agency when it came to compiling hundreds and perhaps thousands of photographs of wanted felons, but Fallon had seen the files and files of likenesses in the Chicago headquarters of the American Detective Agency. Of course, the men had not been the sharpest outlaws Fallon had ever dealt with. Perhaps this had been their first criminal act. No wonder they were about to be buried in a pauper’s graveyard. They weren’t cut out for that line of work.

  “They had no papers, very little money, and not one item that could identify them,” MacGregor said, and he slowly pulled back his jacket, revealing a medal pinned on the inside of his coat. Fallon saw it. The gold was tarnished, and the once-colorful ribbon frayed and stained beyond recognition. Fallon shook his head. He wouldn’t know what the Medal of Honor really looked like.

  “Look at the photos again, Alexander. Please.” He held up the folder that had kept the images, and Fallon read the writing:

  Maximilian. Medal. Mercenaries

  He pretended to pay no attention, but nodded as he sorted through the photos. Maximilian. Medal. Mercenaries. Now he knew what the medal was. Between 1865 and 1867, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had recruited, and paid, a number of American fighters to travel south of the border and take up arms with the emperor’s French forces against the Mexican rebels. Until the rebels took control of the country and wound up executing Maximilian.

  Most of the mercenaries were former Confederate soldiers. One of the men who had taken part in the ambush had been carrying that medal.

  Things started to add up. But Fallon was a long way from finding an answer.

  “Are you sure those photos mean nothing to you, Alexander?” MacGregor asked in a whining, pleading voice.

  “Nah.”

  Fallon found the image of the man who had run when called and was immediately gunned down. He tossed the photo toward MacGregor. “Nah. Like I said, I was hugging the ground.”

  “I see.”

  Fallon kept looking through the images. “I mean, Mr. Inspector, it’s not like I could tell you who all died first, and last.” Casually, while speaking, he began tossing the pictures back toward MacGregor, the dead guards first, then pausing to point a finger at the man who had been murdered while running for the woods, then the black men, and so forth, ending with the last man to be killed, the assassin who had been blown apart by Mr. Fat, the Chinese inmate.

  “You’re not much help,” MacGregor said. Which meant Fallon had helped him a lot.

  “You’re sure you couldn’t hear anything?”

  “Let me see those pictures again.”

  They came back to Fallon, and he found the photo of the man who had been murdered. His head shook, he sighed, and he slid that photograph back to MacGregor. “I don’t think that was him,” he said.

  MacGregor wrote that down. He could probably figure out that after the convict had been murdered, one of his killers had said, “I don’t think that was him.”

  But what did that mean? Had they been trying to kill Fallon? Why? Nothing really made sense, no matter how many theories Fallon came up with.

  The detective gathered the photographs, sighed, returned them to the folder, and said, “I’m going to run some names past you. Tell me if they mean anything to you.”

  He went through several names, none of which Fallon recognized.

  “Nope,” he said. “Never heard of them. Not a single one.”

  “You ought to get to know them,” MacGregor said with a sarcastic smile. “Those are the names of the members of the board of parole.”

  Fallon shrugged. “Don’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Want a smoke?” MacGregor passed a pouch of tobacco and some papers to Fallon.

  “Thanks.” He rolled two cigarettes, using the first paper, the one with writing on it, and sticking that one above his left ear. The other cigarette, he lighted as soon as he was finished.

  “I said a smoke,” MacGregor said.

  “Figured you owed me two because of the time I’ve spent here helping you.”

  “I got more out of the Chinaman than I got from you, Alexander, and that Chink doesn’t speak English.” MacGregor doodled, found an eraser, and began erasing some lines from his notepad, plus what he had written about the medal on the folder. He shook his head, sighed, and rose. “You’re a lost cause, Alexander. Just like the South.”

  “South ain’t lost yet, Yank,” Fallon said, and he stood.

  MacGregor had made it to the door, which opened before the detective could even knock. Yes, Fallon figured, they were eavesdropping, maybe watching the entire interview. But that was all right. Because nothing had been said or done that would have given anything away. In fact, Fallon’s head hurt from all this secret messaging and speaking in circles.

  Despite all that training he had gone through, all
the work, all the studying, all the learning of signals, even some Morse code—which he had yet to use—Fallon knew he wasn’t cut out to be an operative. That just wasn’t his strong suit, and, sadly, Harry Fallon knew what he was good at.

  He had proved that again at Peckerwood Hill.

  “You’re a man of action, Deputy,” a Creek Lighthorse policeman had told him back in the Indian Nations when they were tracking an outlaw named Davis Buscombe. “That’s all you know, my young friend. How to fight. How to kill. How to stay alive.”

  The guard escorting him to the woolen mill let him make a stop at a privy. Inside, Fallon unwrapped the cigarette he had rolled and looked at MacGregor’s message. It listed the names of those seated on the penitentiary board, but not one name triggered any memory in Fallon’s mind. Another miss. Another wrong trail. This time, as he crumpled the paper and dropped it through the hole after the tobacco flakes and his own excrement, he remembered something Christina Whitney had told him.

  “People think we detectives are always doing something exciting. They read too many dime novels. It’s not like that at all. Ninety percent of the time, maybe even more, it’s utter boredom. It’s dull. It’s the lousiest job in the world. Of course, sometimes, that other ten percent, or maybe even less, more than make up for the monotony.”

  Like a gunfight at a prison cemetery.

  Fallon exited the toilet and saw another guard waiting for him.

  “Today’s your lucky day, Alexander,” the new guard said. “You get out of more work. Superintendent Wilkinson wants to see you.”

  * * *

  “Have a seat, Alexander.” Warden Wilkinson sat behind his desk, head bent forward, and kept pushing the spectacles up with a finger as the glasses continued to slip down his nose as he read. “That’ll be all, O’Brien. Wait outside.”

  The guard closed the door behind him, and Fallon settled into an uncomfortable chair. Just to do something, he gently touched the shrinking knot on his skull.

  In a dull monotone, the warden found something else to read, and he began reciting: “‘The law gives the right, under certain restrictions, to hire out convicts, and to operate them outside the walls of the penitentiary.’” He looked up.