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  His escort stopped, and stepped aside.

  Fallon turned toward the curse and saw a man in the uniform of a Huntsville inmate running hard.

  “You turncoat yellowbelly,” the man said as his lowered shoulder caught Fallon’s middle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Josh Ryker.

  Fallon recognized him just before the wiry onetime cowboy knocked the breath out of him. Landing hard on his back, Fallon managed to bring his knees up, and then he kept rolling, somersaulting, sending Ryker sailing toward Sergeant Barney Drexel and the other guards and inmates gathered around the whipping post.

  Josh Ryker. The last person Fallon expected to find in Huntsville. Who else could be here? Not that it mattered. What had Fallon expected the American Detective Agency to do? Go through a list of every inmate housed in the state pen and see if Fallon recognized the names? Hell, half the men Fallon had arrested in the Indian Nations and Arkansas had been using aliases.

  Fallon rolled to his side, pushed himself up on elbows and knees, trying to get his lungs to work again. He heard cheers, curses, and shouts coming from inmates who now provided a wide arena for the fight. Maybe some of the guards were cheering, too. Fallon also saw Josh Ryker running toward him. Fallon let him come. At the last second, he dived to his right, lifted his left leg high, and managed to trip Ryker. The man cursed as he went sailing into a wall of men in brown-and-white or black-and-white uniforms. The prisoners shoved Ryker back into the circle. He fell onto his back, spread-eagled, and slowly came up, shaking the cobwebs out of his head.

  By then, Fallon had pushed himself to his feet. He stood waiting.

  “Go get him!” an inmate shouted.

  “Kill him!”

  “Stomp his head into the dirt!”

  Fallon shook his own head. He wasn’t moving. He was still trying to remember how to breathe.

  And the spectators in prison uniforms and guard uniforms weren’t all cheering for the fresh fish.

  “Ryker, you’s a-fightin’ like a Baptist deacon’s wife!”

  “Get off yer ass, ya puny sack of snake turds, an’ kill dis new meat!”

  Ryker came to his feet, turned, staggered, straightened, and began moving cautiously, ready now. He probably expected Fallon to be the young green pup he had been back during their cowboying days, back when they had first arrived in Fort Smith. Ryker was the older of the two, the one who could outdrink, outfight, and outride anyone he ever met. Fallon had been the tagalong kid still in his teens and wet behind the ears.

  Now Ryker knew that fifteen years had hardened his onetime pard.

  He doesn’t know the half of it, Fallon thought as he brought his arms up, fists clenched, and began countering Ryker’s feints as he drew closer. Ten years in Joliet for a crime I didn’t commit. The riots. The knifings. The weeks in solitary and the whippings just so the guards could let everyone know who bossed the prison. And then, pardoned by the governor, only to find myself back in prison—this time working for the American Detective Agency. Yeah, that’ll harden a man until his skin and fists are like iron, and his soul and heart even harder than that. Yuma in Arizona Territory, known, rightfully so, as The Hellhole. Jefferson City in Missouri, called the “bloodiest forty-seven acres in America.” And now inside these god-awful Walls in eastern Texas!

  Yeah, Fallon wasn’t that kid Ryker had punched longhorns with in Texas, Indian Territory, and Kansas. Wasn’t that puppy dog who had followed Ryker to Fort Smith to gamble.

  Ryker swung a right. An easy punch to avoid. Fallon felt it pass over his head, and he came up quickly, bending his head so that the back of his skull caught Ryker’s jaw. He heard the crunch of teeth and saw Ryker fall backward. Fallon straightened, shaking off the pain in his head, and raised his right foot. He slammed the ill-fitting shoe down toward Ryker’s bleeding face, but Josh Ryker wasn’t the same youthful cowboy Fallon had ridden with from Dodge City to Fort Smith all those years ago.

  Yes, Ryker had learned a few things, too. He grabbed Fallon’s foot, twisted it, and sent Fallon spinning into the ground. Now Fallon rolled into the feet and legs of the prisoners who had formed a circle to watch the brawl. They kicked him, hissed at him, and rolled him back toward Ryker.

  Fallon turned and rose off the ground, just in time to feel Ryker’s kick that caught him in the left shoulder and drove him into the dust and sand. Fallon brought his legs up again, catching the diving Ryker, and once again sent the cowboy sailing. Again, Fallon rose quickly, rubbing his shoulder, already feeling the beginnings of a big, painful bruise. But his collarbone hadn’t been broken.

  “Quarter pound of tobbacy says the fresh fish takes that little punk.”

  “Bet.”

  “I’ll let you see that tintype of that whore I met in San Angelo if Ryker loses this fight.”

  “I’ve seen that picture. And never want to see it again. Give me nightmares, it did.”

  Eighteen months, Fallon remembered. That had been Ryker’s sentence. The scenes replayed in Fallon’s head.

  They had been drunk, Fallon and Ryker, not an unusual state for those two young fools. Pretty much cleaned out by Fort Smith’s gamblers, they had been shooting out the streetlamps the first time, only to be stopped by a man that Fallon guessed to be a preacher. The stranger turned out to be Judge Isaac Parker. Fallon should have learned then that Ryker wasn’t the type of saddle pal you wanted to be with. For a moment, Fallon thought Ryker would murder the judge, and maybe he would have had a lawman not come along then. Fifty dollars or fifty days. Ryker had to sell his horse and saddle to get them out of the Fort Smith calaboose, then lost most of what he had left over in a craps game. And decided to steal a saddle on display at a saddle shop.

  Fallon had tried to stop Ryker. Ryker wasn’t one to be stopped. They had fought. Ryker had won. And then another lawman came around, and after an insane and intense few seconds, Fallon had stopped his pard from murdering the lawman in cold blood. The lawman whose life Fallon had saved was a deputy U.S. marshal for Judge Parker’s court. When Fallon had been brought to the judge’s office, there had been no plea deal, nothing like that. The judge and the U.S. marshal, after hearing how Fallon had saved a deputy’s life, offered Fallon a job.

  “It’s not a gift,” Judge Parker had warned him.

  And it most certainly wasn’t. Fallon had moved up from driving a prison wagon for deputy marshals to becoming a federal deputy himself, one of the youngest, and best, in Parker’s court. Till that all came crumbling down.

  Josh Ryker had spent eighteen months at the Detroit House of Corrections for assault on a federal lawman. He could’ve gotten more had the state pressed for charges of breaking and entering, attempted burglary, and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

  Well, Fallon thought as the convicts and guards cursed and cheered, he couldn’t really blame Ryker. From the look of the inmate, life had never turned out the way the gambling, foolhardy cowboy had thought it would. Detroit was the first step. Now he was in Huntsville.

  Why don’t the guards stop this?

  Fallon threw a punch, ducked another, as the cheers and the curses grew louder. The dust blinded him.

  He answered his own question. They wouldn’t have stopped it in Joliet, Yuma, or Jeff City. They wouldn’t have stopped it in the dungeon in Fort Smith where men awaited trial. Unless it got out of hand. Huntsville’s no different.

  His nose was bleeding. So were his lips. His back hurt and shoulder throbbed. He swung, missed, ducked, swung again, connected, felt a punch that almost took off his right ear, and responded with one that Ryker deflected.

  Ryker brought his prison shoes down hard on Fallon’s right foot. Fallon wrapped his arm around Ryker’s neck and drew it close. He tried to flatten Ryker’s nose, but Ryker caught the wrist and held it tight, trying to twist it off. The men grunted, squirmed, attempted to break free, but neither man was willing to give.

  “Hell, they ain’t doin’ nothin’ but waltzin’,” a Texas accent drawled. Fallon d
idn’t know if that came from a guard or an inmate.

  “No más. No más,” a Mexican prisoner shouted.

  Ryker tried to spit in Fallon’s face. His breath stank of bad tobacco and worse coffee. He was missing several teeth. Scars cut through his once-handsome face, but, well, after all those years of hard time, Fallon wasn’t going to win any beauty contests himself.

  “Been waitin’ . . .” Ryker heaved. “A long time . . . for this.”

  Fallon said nothing. Ryker’s grip was so tight on his wrist, he felt his hand growing numb. They weaved this way and that. The shouts and curses sounded all around them, but by now the dust was so thick, the sweat stinging his eyes, Fallon couldn’t see much beyond Ryker’s bloody, sweaty, grimacing face.

  “I read . . . about . . . your . . . kid and wife,” Ryker said. His eyes gleamed. He laughed.

  Which was all Fallon needed.

  “You’re a softhearted kid, Hank,” a deputy marshal once told him in Fort Smith. “Too nice for this job, I often think. But when you get riled, it’s like I don’t even know who you are no more.”

  Josh Ryker now saw what Fallon was like when he was riled.

  Fallon’s knee came up, caught Ryker hard in the groin. The grip relaxed, and Fallon broke free and slammed his flattened palm against Ryker’s throat. The inmate’s eyes bulged as he tried to breathe. Had Fallon hit harder, Ryker would be dying, but Fallon had not lost all control. He had just lost his temper.

  He slammed a right into Ryker’s jaw, buried a left into the man’s gut. When Ryker doubled over, Fallon brought up his knee again, catching the man in the mouth, smashing his lips, knocking out two more teeth. Fallon reached with his left, grabbed Ryker’s shirt, hoping to pull him up and keep pounding his face until it was nothing but an unrecognizable pulp. But the cotton ripped, and Ryker fell into the dust. He was lying still when Fallon landed on top of him. He swung a left, a right, again, again, and again.

  Then he felt the stick of a guard against his skull, and Fallon rolled off the now-unconscious Ryker.

  Fallon saw stars first, then dust, and finally a burly, bearded face just above him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a face that Fallon recognized, but this time, it was a welcome sight.

  Aaron Holderman, another ex-convict Fallon had once put away but now an operative for the American Detective Agency, waved the nightstick over Fallon, then bent down and jerked Fallon to his feet.

  “Drexel,” Fallon managed in a strained whisper, “knows me.”

  At first, Fallon couldn’t tell if Holderman, not the keenest mind in the detective business, heard him or understood him, and if he did hear and understand, Fallon realized, he might not have cared one whit. Fallon had never trusted Holderman—for too many damned good reasons to count—but this time, in this operation, Fallon had no other choice.

  Holderman heard Fallon, however, for he balled his massive right hand into a fist and slammed it into Fallon’s face, breaking the nose, sending blood gushing from both nostrils.

  The big brute roared, “Take that, you son of a—!”

  “Holderman,” said another voice. “That’s enough.”

  Through the pain, the ringing in his ears, Fallon knew that new voice, too. Barney Drexel.

  “Get up,” Holderman said, and Fallon felt himself being jerked to his feet. Blood continued gushing, and Holderman brought his left hand up and smeared the blood all over Fallon’s face.

  When Sean MacGregor and his son Dan had started explaining the plan to Fallon back in Chicago, Fallon wasn’t sure it would ever work. He especially didn’t like the thought of Aaron Holderman being sent into Huntsville undercover, taking on the role of a prison guard. Fallon had worked with Holderman in Yuma and Jefferson City. Even if Fallon trusted the big lout, Fallon certainly didn’t think that Holderman was smart enough to pull off the job of a prison guard.

  Now Fallon realized he had been wrong. Aaron Holderman might not be the brightest man Fallon had ever known—that’s why they had told him to use his own name; he’d never remember his alias—but he had played everything perfectly.

  Holderman shoved Fallon toward Sergeant Barney Drexel.

  “Watch it, you damned fool,” Barney bellowed at Holderman. “I don’t want to get blood on my uniform. Damn, what a bloody mess.” Drexel chuckled. “Who’s the fresh fish?”

  The guard who had escorted Fallon into the prison yard produced the paper. “Harry Alexander,” Drexel read. “Life sentence.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it back to the guard. “Well, Mr. Harry Alexander. You might as well know how things work at Huntsville since you’ll be here maybe a long time, maybe a few days. Till the end of your pathetic life.”

  Fallon lowered his head, letting the blood pool in the dust between his miserable prison shoes. God bless Aaron Holderman, he thought. Any chance Drexel would have recognized me ended when that big galoot broke my nose.

  At the very least, Holderman had bought Fallon some more time.

  That time was about to grow.

  “Fighting is not allowed in Huntsville. We don’t even have a boxing club for prisoners. But we’ll give you some time to think about all you’ve done wrong here today, and maybe by that time, your nose will have stopped bleeding.”

  He stepped back, glanced at Ryker, and shook his head again.

  “A dozen lashes for Ryker,” Barney Drexel ordered. “As soon as he wakes up. Then get him to the hospital, give that ol’ sawbones something to do. A dozen days for the fresh fish. What’s his name again?”

  “Alexander. Harry Alexander.”

  “Introduce Harry Alexander to the sweatbox. Let’s make it an even two weeks, though. He’s got fourteen days to think about all the things he shouldn’t have done. Meditate on how you got here, fresh fish.”

  Fallon felt strong hands grab his upper arms. Still weak, in agony, his feet dragged over the dust, even over Josh Ryker’s legs, as he came to another dungeon. The heavy iron door was opened by two men, and Fallon felt himself hurtled into the box. He saw the slop bucket, a blanket, and ajar of water. Hitting the floor hard, he rolled over just before the iron door slammed shut, putting Fallon into a black void.

  Solitary confinement. The black box. Sweatbox. For two damned weeks.

  He had plenty of time to think now. In the darkness, in the tight confines of the sweatbox, Fallon could think. He thought a lot. There was much he could remember, some he wanted to, some he had to, some he hated to recall.

  Like sitting in that foul-smelling, dark-as-night office on the top floor of that brownstone building in Chicago.

  “Have you ever been to Huntsville?” Sean MacGregor had asked. He puffed on the cigar. His hair, what he had left, was mostly orange but the silver was rapidly gaining ground, and his eyes were a dead green. That was about the only color you could find in MacGregor’s office except for Fallon’s clothes. Everything around Fallon appeared to be brown, and once again, the curtains were closed. Only a little light came from the lamp and trickled through cracks in the curtains.

  “Illinois?” Fallon asked. “Or Alabama?”

  The little man slowly removed the cigar from his mouth and set the repugnant stogie on the ashtray. His eyes narrowed, and he answered angrily, “Texas.”

  Sean MacGregor knew that Harry Fallon knew that his boss meant Texas. And Fallon knew he knew.

  “Oh,” Fallon said. “Didn’t Jesse James rob some bank or train or paymaster in Huntsville, Alabama?”

  “Jesse James is dead. Frank James is retired and an outstanding shoe salesman or race starter or something along those lines.”

  Fallon nodded, and that movement hurt.

  “No,” Fallon got around to answering. “Huntsville’s over in East Texas, in what they call the Piney Woods. When I drove cattle, the trails were farther west.”

  “You know what’s in Huntsville, Texas, don’t you?”

  The aches started to intensify. Fallon had just gotten out of the prison in Jefferson City, M
issouri. Before that, Sean MacGregor had sent him to Yuma Territorial Prison in the hell on earth that was southern Arizona Territory. Fallon had thought that assignment was something like some gin-guzzling writer of dime novels would plot.

  Get arrested. Sent to The Hellhole. Befriend, or at the least, join up with that crazed killer Monk Quinn, who had robbed a Southern Pacific train of some two hundred thousand bucks’ worth of gold bullion. Escape the prison with Quinn, follow him into Mexico, find that stolen gold, and return it—along with Quinn and his companions, dead, hopefully, but alive if there was no preventing that. Let the American Detective Agency—make that, Sean MacGregor—enjoy the glory, and the rewards, of a successful operation.

  The Jefferson City assignment had seemed equally asinine.

  Go back to another prison—that ninth circle of hell called the Missouri State Penitentiary—once again as a convicted felon. Get friendly with another inmate, a pregnant young woman who happens to be married to a bank-robbing scoundrel trying to better everything the James-Younger, Dalton, and Reno gangs ever did, and find out where he’s hiding his stolen loot. Of course, no one could have foreseen a riot breaking out and Fallon barely getting out of there alive.

  Sean MacGregor had angrily repeated his question.

  “I don’t suppose,” Fallon answered, “that you mean Sam Houston’s grave.”

  “Don’t be a fool!”

  Fallon turned, not showing his surprise that the comment came from neither Aaron Holderman nor Sean MacGregor, but the agency president’s son, Dan, who sat next to big, bruising Holderman in the dark office.

  “This is serious,” Dan MacGregor said.

  Fallon looked back at the elder MacGregor. “So it’s back to prison,” he said.

  The tiny man nodded his child-sized head.

  A sigh slowly escaped, and Fallon leaned back in his chair. It could have been worse, he guessed. The Detroit House of Corrections, for instance, where he figured scores of prisoners would love to send a onetime federal marshal to meet his Maker. Or back to Joliet, which the MacGregors and Holderman had often threatened, to return Fallon “for the duration of your sentence.”