A Knife in the Heart Read online

  “Were there monsters?” Rachel Renee asked.

  By then, he had managed to cross the room and sat at the end of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Daisies and licorice.”

  Rachel Renee laughed, and that made Fallon breathe a little easier, if not quite relax. He even thought he saw a twinkle in Christina’s eyes.

  “Daisies and licorice aren’t monsters, Papa,” the girl said with bemusement. “Those are nice things. My favorite flower. And my favorite breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?” Christina now laughed.

  The day might be all right, Fallon thought.

  The precious little girl, one of the two loves of Fallon’s life these past few years, crawled from her mother and leaned against Fallon, still in the robe.

  She quickly pulled away. “Oh, Papa, you stink.”

  Fallon tried to laugh.

  “And you’re all sweaty.”

  “That’s what boys and men do, baby,” Christina said.

  “They’re gross.”

  “Yes,” her mother agreed. “Very much so.”

  “But I love you anyway, Papa.” She came back and tried to hug him. Fallon put his arm around her.

  “What was the nightmare really about?” Rachel Renee asked.

  Fallon looked across the room. It was a nice room, extravagant by Fallon’s standards, in a rented home—what Fallon would have considered a mansion back when he was a kid in Gads Hill, Missouri—in the upscale section of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fallon would have opted for something a little less pretentious, but the governor insisted, as did the state senators—Fallon could remember when Wyoming was just a U.S. territory. Everyone argued that the United States marshal for Wyoming needed to live in a fine house. Especially since he had a beautiful wife, and, for the past five-plus years, a lovely little daughter.

  Politics.

  All politics.

  That’s what Fallon’s life had become. Politics during the day. Nightmares for the night.

  A hell of a life.

  “Papa?” Rachel Renee pleaded.

  Fallon hugged her tightly. “Oh, I’m not too sure. Dragons, I think. Maybe a unicorn.”

  “Are unicorns mean?”

  “This one was.”

  “I know dragons are evil. They spit fire.”

  “Yeah, the two in my bad dream spit out a lot of fire.”

  “Where there any Indians?”

  Fallon looked down at her. “Indians aren’t mean like dragons and bad unicorns, or smelly boys and sweating old men.”

  “Janie Ferguson says Indians are real bad.”

  “Janie Ferguson is wrong.” He tousled her hair.

  “You know, back when I was just a regular old deputy marshal, back in Fort Smith, Arkansas, I worked with a lot of Indians. Lawmen. Peace officers like me. Scouts. They were always good folk. Really good folk. So I don’t think I met any real bad Indians.”

  “Honest?”

  Not really. Fallon had arrested Indians, too, but not as many as the white men who tormented the Indian Nations across the western district of Arkansas. But those times had changed, and after what happened at Wounded Knee so many years ago, Fallon had decided that he’d bring up his daughter to understand that you could find good and bad in all kinds of people, no matter their skin, no matter their beliefs.

  Although Fallon had a hard time thinking that for himself. Most of the men he had dealt with were rotten to the core.

  As a deputy marshal, and then as an operative for the American Detective Agency—the latter a job he had been forced into—Fallon had worked with dregs. And some of the worst of the lot were men who supposedly represented law and order, like the president of the American Detective Agency, a soulless pitiful man named Sean MacGregor.

  Often Fallon blamed MacGregor for these nightmares, for keeping Harry Fallon from being able to spend a night sleeping next to his wife—without having this fear that a nightmare would seize him and he’d wake up and realize that he had killed her by accident.

  No way for a man to live. No way for a daughter to grow up.

  On the other hand, Fallon might be having these dreams anyway, even if Sean MacGregor had not forced Fallon to go undercover into three of the worst prisons in America: Yuma in Arizona Territory, Jefferson City in Missouri, Huntsville and its prison farms in Texas.

  Because long before that, Harry Fallon had spent ten years in Joliet, Illinois—for a crime he had not committed.

  “You hungry?” Fallon asked his daughter.

  “I’m always hungry,” Rachel Renee said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty,” Christina answered. She started to rise. “I’ll get some . . .”

  “No.” Fallon pushed himself up. “You two snuggle or at least get a few minutes more of sleep. I’m wide awake. Let me make some breakfast.”

  Christina smiled, and the baby girl crawled back to her mother, hugged her, and Fallon pulled up the sheets and blankets over them. He kissed Rachel Renee’s forehead and looked into the hard eyes of his wife.

  He kissed her forehead, too, pulled back, and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

  Christina just nodded.

  And Fallon walked out of the bedroom and closed the door.

  One more time.

  If this kept up, he realized, he wouldn’t have a wife or a child with him.

  He could blame that on the American Detective Agency, the prison system in the United States, and the men who had framed him and tried to ruin his life.

  Tried? Hell, his life was still ruined, even five years after being pardoned. After being told he was free, with an appointment as U.S. marshal for the district of Wyoming.

  Fallon knew what most prisoners knew. Once you had spent time behind the iron, you never could be completely free again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Situated on the high, rolling plains of southern Wyoming, Cheyenne was a nice city, although it had taken Fallon a while to get accustomed to a land where trees came hard to find. He still remembered the shade and thickness of the woods around Fort Smith—similar to his boyhood stomping grounds of Gads Hill in southern Missouri. But the city of Cheyenne itself was remarkable. The Union Pacific Railroad connected it with East and West; it had industry, cattle, the Army at Fort D. A. Russell. Mansions could be found, for once a Western man or woman found wealth, he or she saw no reason not to flaunt it. Railroad workers, cowboys, and soldiers on payday could make things difficult for the local lawmen, but drunks and brawlers were not the business of a federal lawman.

  Lawman? Fallon didn’t feel much like a peace officer these days. A United States marshal didn’t enforce the law. That’s what all the deputies he hired were for, which had been the case back in Arkansas and the Indian Territory when Judge Isaac Parker and the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Arkansas including the Indian Territory had hired a green kid, onetime cowboy and hell-raiser named Harry Fallon as a deputy marshal. In those days, Fallon risked his life to bring in whiskey runners, bank and train robbers, and more murderers than you’d find in the slums of New York or Chicago.

  Keeping law and order was for young men, unmarried men mostly. Being the top lawman in the district, Fallon knew that a U.S. marshal was appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His job required kissing babies, making speeches, and every now and then talking to the U.S. attorney, taking federal judges out to supper, and on the rare occasion, saying howdy and how ya doin’? to the deputies who risked their lives chasing men who had broken federal—not local—laws.

  After making his family breakfast, then shaving and attempting to make himself presentable, Fallon left their home in pressed white shirt with four-ply linen collar, dress suspenders from Montgomery Ward & Co., a sateen Windsor tie of angled black and white stripes, and tailor-made suit of navy blue worsted wool, complete with a monogrammed gray silk handkerchief poking out of the breast coat pocket, and a solid gold watch stuck in the pocket of his matching vest. The whole rig
had cost him what he made in a month herding cattle. His hat was a dark cream with what the hatmaker called a “velvety finish,” six-and-a-half-inch crown, creased in the side and dented on the top, with three-and-half-inch curled and trimmed brim, with leather band.

  The only thing he really liked were the boots, the old Coffeyville style he had worn as a cowboy and deputy marshal, although these had been made by a saddlemaker near the depot. They fit like a glove. Even had spur ridges on the heels, although Fallon couldn’t remember the last time he had been on the back of a horse. He walked from his home to the office, unless the snow came down hard and he could hire a hack to take him wherever he needed to go in town. Or the train if, for some rare reason, he needed to travel to Laramie, Rock Springs, or Washington, D.C.

  Removing his hat when he stepped inside the office, he climbed the stairs to the second floor of the federal courthouse and made his way down the hall, turning in to the office.

  “Good morning, Helen,” he told the secretary, and moved to the coffeepot on the stove.

  “Hank,” she said. Only Fallon’s friends called him Hank, and Helen was a good friend. “How was your weekend?”

  “Fine,” he lied. Filled a cup, turned, held the pot toward her. Grinning, she lifted her steaming mug, saying, “I beat you to it.”

  He hung his hat on the rack by the door.

  “There’s no need for that, Hank,” Helen said.

  He sipped coffee. She was a good-looking woman, not as beautiful as Christina, and Helen would make a fine U.S. marshal herself. Probably could, since Wyoming had granted women suffrage decades earlier. Helen did the paperwork, kept track of the schedules, and even helped some of the deputies with arrest reports and requests for warrants. Fallon would be lost without her.

  “What am I doing today?” Fallon asked.

  “Speaking to the Abraham Lincoln Academy.” That was the all-male private school on the Union Mercantile Block for mostly wealthy kids, although they always brought in a few poor boys, so they would look better, especially if the poor kid could play good baseball. “Watch your language. The headmaster is a Methodist.”

  “Do I have time to finish my coffee?”

  She held up the newspaper in her other hand. “You even have time to read the Daily Sun-Leader.”

  An hour and a half later, Helen straightened Fallon’s tie and handkerchief, dropped the newspaper in the trash, stepped back, and asked, “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Probably, if it’s legal.”

  She handed him an envelope. “Deposit my check for me.”

  He took the brown envelope with his left hand, looked at it suspiciously, and said, “It’s payday?”

  “Already. End of the month. I put yours on your desk. Did you just read the paper?” She frowned. “Tell me you did work on what you’re going to tell those future lawmen at the academy.”

  “I saw the envelope,” Fallon said. Last month, his check had remained on the desk two weeks after it had been issued, until Christina asked for some shopping money, and he realized . . . well . . . it was hard to explain to women, even men, who had never been in prison. They didn’t let you have money in the pen. Men bartered with tobacco, or illegal whiskey, a handmade weapon, something to read—for those who weren’t illiterate.

  Helen shook her head. “Stockgrowers’ National Bank,” she told him as he slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of his fancy coat. “You remember where it is?”

  Fallon nodded. “I’ve done this for you . . . how many times?”

  “Usually, though you have forgotten a time or two.”

  “Well,” he said. “That’s because I’m not used to people trusting me with their money. I am an ex-convict.”

  “My understanding is that you were pardoned.”

  “Yes.” He patted his coat. “But we can be led astray.”

  “I’ll see you after your speech.” Helen walked back to her desk. “Give them heck, Hank.”

  * * *

  This was another thing hard to get used to. Back in Fallon’s day, school was a McGuffey’s Reader and a paddle with holes cut in the hindquarters-hitting part. Most of the boys didn’t wear shoes in the spring and fall, because most of them didn’t have shoes except during winter. Typically, there would be two or three empty seats, for some of the boys wanted to go fishing or squirrel hunting or to hang from the ties over the trestle and see who would drop into the river last when the train rumbled by. During spring planting or fall harvest, more desks would be empty, because the boys had to work.

  At the Abraham Lincoln Academy, the boys were dressed in smaller versions of Grand Army of the Republic dress suits, sitting ramrod straight, heads up, paying strict attention. Usually, a Harry Fallon speech would put half the audience to sleep, and Fallon always wished he were asleep, too. But not here. The headmaster and his two teachers stood at attention, rarely blinking, and the teachers held rulers as though sabers at arms.

  Eventually, Fallon finished his talk, and asked if anyone had a question.

  A hand shot up from the blond boy with big ears on the front row. Once Fallon nodded to him, the boy stood, cleared his throat, and asked, “How does one become a United States marshal, sir?” He promptly sat down.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  How does one become a federal marshal?

  Fallon grinned as he thought about how he could answer that question.

  Well, son, first you ride herd with a cowboy with a wild streak and a taste of John Barleycorn. You’re young, going to live forever, feeling invincible, and you drink far too much one evening in Fort Smith, Arkansas. And your pal, Josh Ryker, sees a saddle in a window that he figures he ought to have, but since he doesn’t have any money, he decides to steal it. And you try to stop him, and next thing you realize is a lawman has shown up, and you’re in the middle, and then Ryker is about to kill the lawman. That’s right. Murder a man in cold blood—all because of one saddle. And while plenty of preachers and doctors and professors might tell you that only time will sober you up after a night of drinking forty-rod and cheap beer, you know for a fact that you are stone cold sober. And you stop Ryker. And suddenly you’re in jail, and the dungeon at Fort Smith is as bad as a lot of prisons. This you’ll learn. In time, you’ll become an expert on prisons.

  So somehow, because you saved the life of a peace officer, and a lawman with connections, you’re standing before Judge Isaac Parker, who is offering you a job. Take the badge, pin it on, and you’ll be earning a living—if you aren’t killed—as a federal lawman. Oh, but since you’re just in your teens, you’ll just drive the jail wagon. Tend to the prisoners as the real marshals make the arrests and risk their lives. Till the deputies you’re tending jail for wind up getting cut down by cold-blooded killers, for murdering, heartless, soulless men populate the Indian Nations just west of Fort Smith. And something comes over you, and you’re not going to let them get away with it. The next thing you’re sure of is that you’re bringing in the jail wagon to Fort Smith, with the dead and condemned criminals, and suddenly the U.S. marshal, the U.S. attorney, the other deputy marshals, and even Judge Parker look at you differently.

  You’re not just a kid. You’re a man. And now a bona fide deputy marshal.

  So it goes. Till you meet a lovely woman. She happens to stay in the same boardinghouse as you do. And you marry her. And she brings you the joy of your life, a daughter. And you start reading law with a highly regarded defense attorney, because even Judge Parker says that a young man with a future and a wife and a baby doesn’t need to be risking his life chasing the scum of society. The West will be won by lawman, but mostly by law. And good lawyers are needed.

  Sure, you still ride after the badmen, though you’re never sent against the real killers. Till one day you find yourself accused of a holdup. Not enough evidence to get you on the murder charge, but you are convicted of a crime that you did not commit. Judge Parker, though, well he thinks you’re not only guilty—since the jury found you guilty—but al
so a Judas. Throws the book at you and then some, but others must weigh in, and Parker agrees that sending a crooked lawman to the Detroit House of Corrections isn’t justice.

  They put you in the darkness of the Illinois pen in Joliet.

  That’s where you are when you learn that your wife and baby girl have been murdered.

  What can you do then? Just turn hard, because you have to be hard, uncompromising, to make it out of Joliet alive. You learn what it takes to survive prison. You ask for no quarter, and you never give any quarter. Just get through one day, then live through the night, and watch it start over again. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

  Until Joliet witnesses one of the bloodiest riots in U.S. history. And some guards are begging for you to help save them. You don’t care a whit for these guards, most of them no better, often a whole lot worse, than the men they’re keeping out of society. But there’s that one thing you haven’t been able to shake. Human decency. You thought you had lost it, but it comes back to haunt you. So you help the guards. Save their lives. And when the riot is over, the governor issues you a parole.

  Up to Chicago, you’re told, room in a boardinghouse, work for a wheelwright—what the hell do you know about that?—and make sure you never break the terms of your parole, because if you do, they’ll ship your bruised hide back to Joliet to serve the rest of your sentence—ten years or so—in full.

  But when the hack takes you to see Lake Michigan—just because you’re a partially free man and might as well do something free people can do—you’re hijacked by a hood who you arrested before, a hood called Aaron Holderman who now is an employee of the American Detective Agency, headquartered in Chicago, rival of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

  And that’s where Sean MacGregor, a little red-headed Scot who likes smoking bad cigars and intimidating everyone, tells you a story. He knows who killed your wife and child, and he’ll help you get revenge, or justice, but only if you help him out first. It’s just a little assignment. Go to Arizona Territory—fear not, the warden and his associates at Joliet will get nothing but positive reports on your progress as a parolee—get arrested, get sentenced to the territorial pen, make friends with a brutal felon who happened to steal a fortune and cached it somewhere south in Mexico. Break out of Yuma with the cold-blooded killer. Find the stolen loot, recapture or kill Monk Quinn, and let the American Detective Agency reap the glory.