A Knife in the Heart Read online

  “Busy day,” Pigate said. “A tragic day.” He smiled at Holderman. “But it’s good to see the Army is helping us in these desperate times.”

  “What brings you to the landing, Reverend?” Fallon asked.

  “I was seeing my brother off on the ferry. He’s returning home to Independence.”

  He looked again at MacGregor. “Major, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. You must be new to the fort.”

  “Indeed,” MacGregor lied, extending his hand and shaking briefly. “Arrived two days ago.”

  “Well, let me welcome you to Leavenworth.”

  MacGregor bowed.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” Bowen Hardin said, keeping his head down, “but we do have a boat to catch.”

  “Yes. Chaplain.” MacGregor cleared his throat. “I’m sending this patrol across the river. In case the vermin that escaped have made it to Missouri.”

  “Very good, Major. Very good.” The man of the cloth looked at Fallon. “Good luck. I shall pray for you, for our deliverance.” As he walked away, he said, “Major, please come to my services Sunday. My sermon will be on Jacob and Esau.”

  He crossed the street and began whistling.

  “Move,” Bowen Hardin mumbled.

  * * *

  On the landing, Holderman waited with Janice, Christina, and Rachel Renee.

  The steamboat, the Muddy Queen, was pulling out, and people were hurrying away from the river and back toward town. Fallon was right. The police chief had sent men to check the boats, but now that the paddleboat was moving downstream for Kansas City, the officers figured there was no threat. None paid any attention to Fallon or the fake soldiers.

  “That was close,” Anderson said. “If that preacher had any sense . . .” He wiped his face with the wool sleeve of his Army uniform.

  “This is the trick of disguise,” MacGregor gloated. “He has seen me countless times in prison, but because I wore the uniform of a . . .” He stopped, wet his lips, and looked up the landing toward the street. “A major.”

  “What of it?” Indianola Anderson growled.

  “I am a lieutenant colonel.”

  “I don’t give a damn if you’re General Nathan Bedford Forrest,” Bowen Hardin said. “Find that monkey of yours who has the boat, and let’s get moving in a hurry.”

  Then Calloway laughed. “That sky pilot knows about as much ’bout military ranks as you boys know about your Scripture. Don’t read the Old Testament much, do you?”

  “Spill it out, Calloway,” Hardin ordered.

  “Joshua and Esau,” Calloway began, and Fallon stepped forward to lay the convict out, but felt the barrel of Holderman’s pistol, hidden in his Army coat, pressed against his back.

  Calloway finished. “Two brothers. One fools his pa to get the blessing by throwing a lamb’s skin, or something like that over his arm. See, Esau was a hairy son of a gun. So Esau gets shortchanged, and Joshua gets . . .”

  “Calloway,” Hardin said and stepped forward. “Find that preacher. Give him a taste of Old Testament vengeance before he finds a lawman or prison guard.”

  Then the killer ordered MacGregor. “Let’s get on that boat. Pronto.”

  * * *

  “This is a boat?” Bowen Hardin spit into the shallows of the Missouri.

  “What do you want, buster?” the fat, scrappy man named Tully said. “The Monitor or the Merrimack?”

  “I’d take a canoe,” Hardin shot back. “Who the hell are you? Huckleberry Finn?”

  Which proved one thing to Fallon. The damned killer at least visited the prison library every once in a while.

  The raft, complete with a lean-to, and, even two anchors in the center, rested in the sand, the tiller and oars in the rear. It was big enough to hold most of them, Fallon figured, providing they weren’t going far. But Sean MacGregor had given Fallon enough information to know they wouldn’t go downstream too far. The raft confirmed that.

  “The price of this raft—since I’m the only one who knows exactly where those horses are—just went up.” Tully leaned back and laughed.

  “If we don’t shove off now,” Indianola Anderson pointed out, “you’ll be swinging pretty soon, Bowen, and you”—he nodded at the fat river man—“well, you’ll be paid in a lengthy sentence at the new prison them fools are building west of here.”

  “Right.” Bowen Hardin shoved Janice toward the raft. “Ladies first.”

  “What about Calloway?” Holderman said.

  “What about him?” Hardin answered, and Holderman grinned. He had the foresight to tell Tully the river raft man, “Name your price. You’ll get it. But if you don’t start sailing, we can kill you here or leave you to build a big-arse jailhouse with Calloway.”

  * * *

  “I don’t want to go on a boat ride, Mommy!” little Rachel Renee wailed.

  “It’s all right,” Christina tried.

  “But we’re rocking. I’m scared.”

  Fallon felt that fear, too. Indeed, with all the movement—Tully seemed the only man comfortable on the river—water splashed over the logs that appeared to be held together with nothing but strips of rawhide. The big man of the Missouri found his place at the stern, one hand on the tiller, and laughed as the others sought, fruitlessly, to find their so-called “sea legs.”

  The others found spots that would keep the raft from listing to one side, and the current shot them downstream. Fallon wasn’t moving too much, for Holderman and Indianola Anderson had wrapped his hands together with a strip of rawhide, lashing him to one of the anchors.

  Fallon looked at Janice, Christina, and little, innocent, beautiful Rachel Renee, huddled between the two shivering women—women shaking from fear, not sickness from the motion of the raft in the current—and Fallon felt that old familiar feeling. The one from prison riots. Gunfights in the Indian Territory. Working for that lout Sean MacGregor. But all he could do was ball his hands into fists and feel the leather thongs bite into his flesh.

  The raft raced toward the Mississippi.

  Gunshots sounded from somewhere upstream in Leavenworth. Indianola Anderson laughed. “I guess Calloway didn’t make it.”

  Bowen Hardin, who had found a place in the shade in the lean-to, grinned.

  “Let’s hope he died game,” MacGregor said. “And didn’t tell the authorities—”

  “All the secrets you gave away,” Hardin concluded.

  “For a detective, I figured you might have learned to keep your trap shut.”

  “These people are mean, Mommy,” Rachel Renee cried out and tried to hug Christina tighter. “They are really, really mean.”

  Janice pointed to a bird, sitting on a branch on the other side of the river, trying to distract the child. The results were not all that anybody wanted.

  The raft floated downstream.

  The Muddy Queen shot past them, rocking the raft in the wake, and people on the decks, crewmen and passengers alike, waved and blew kisses, and then the only thing Fallon could see was the sternwheeler’s paddle moving the riverboat closer to Kansas City, Missouri, and leaving the lives of Fallon and—more important—his wife, his daughter, and an innocent woman in Fallon’s hands.

  Fallon’s hands . . . tied to an anchor.

  “What do you think?” Indianola Anderson asked as soon as the Muddy Queen had put a decent-enough length past Tully’s ramshackle raft.

  Bowen Hardin emerged from his shady spot underneath the lean-to, grabbing hold of a crossbeam to pull himself to his feet. He looked upstream, then downstream, and on the banks on the Kansas and Missouri side.

  “This will do,” he said at length, and gave a nod with a malevolent grin.

  “What are y’all boys doin’?” Tully said from the stern.

  “Shut up, and just get us to where we can pay you off,” Hardin told the raft captain.

  Aaron Holderman and Indianola Anderson stood, and began gingerly maneuvering their way to where Fallon sat, secured to one of the anchors—an anchor,
he suddenly realized, that was not connected to a rope.

  That’s when Fallon understood.

  The men positioned themselves on either side of Fallon and took hold of the lengthwise-running bar at the anchor’s top. Grunting, they dragged steel and Fallon toward the bow’s port. That caused the captain to yell at the other passengers: “Y’all quick. Quick now. Get to the starboard side. That side. Away from those fools. Hurry. Or we’ll capsize and have to swim to shore!”

  Janice grabbed Rachel Renee’s shoulders, and Fallon saw both the widow and Fallon’s baby girl being dragged by Sean MacGregor to the other side of the raft. The rawhide bit into his wrists, and his shoes tried to find some traction on the slippery, soaking poles that made up the bottom of the raft. His heart pounded. He twisted, turned, kicked his legs, trying to find some way he could prevent what the men meant to do.

  Then he saw Christina lunge, and Holderman let go of Fallon and buried his shoulder into the stomach of the woman. The breath must have been knocked out of Christina, for she fell on the raft’s bottom, heaving, trying to find oxygen. Which is what Fallon knew he would be desperately trying to find—but unlike sweet Christina, he would have no chance.

  The last thing he saw was his dearest child, lovely Rachel Renee, crawling toward him as the raft rocked furiously.

  Then the anchor pitched over the side, and Fallon felt the coldness, and the brutality, of the muddy, and mighty, and treacherous Missouri River. He caught a glimpse of sky before the darkness and the silt of the river closed in all around him.

  The weight of the anchor carried him to the bottom of the Big Muddy.

  To his own watery grave.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  When he understood what the vermin intended, he had sucked in as much oxygen as he could, and he held his breath when the anchor toppled off the side of the raft and sent him into darkness.

  Down he went, but Fallon also knew what worked in his favor. Tully, the raft master, had kept his ugly, barely watertight vessel close to the shore—the Kansas shore—rather than steer his passengers in the center of the wide river. When Fallon hit bottom—and he reached the muddy mess quickly—he knew he wasn’t all that far from safety, the banks of the Big Muddy, but reaching even the shallows was impossible.

  And a man’s lungs can hold only so much air for a short time, a time made even shorter when an anchor sinks deep in the dark, foul, mud-clogged bottom of a mighty river.

  He could count more luck. The anchor had not pinned him in the mud. Holding his breath, vision obscured by the darkness and the filth of the bottom, he pushed himself toward the surface, and began sawing the cords left and right against the iron stock. But the leather was tight, strong, and hard. His eyes remained open, but the soot and silt and mess that flowed this deep in the river hampered his vision.

  Seeing doesn’t matter, he thought. Just work. Cut these binds loose. If you don’t, you’re dead. Worse than that, if you don’t, Rachel Renee, Christina, and Janice are dead, too. And those sons of, as O’Connor would say, “strumpets” will be free for a while to wreak havoc on innocent people.

  The cords moved against the iron. His head ached. His lungs strained.

  Then he saw her, though he made out nothing more than a blur, an angel swimming down toward him, ready to raise him into paradise. And for a moment, he felt reassured, that death is not the end—not if you believe—and that heaven awaited even a sinner like Harry Fallon.

  But almost instantly, he felt terrified.

  Because what came closer to him was not an angel from Heaven. It was a young girl, a baby really. She did not swim. She pulled herself toward him on the anchor’s short line that she must have grabbed.

  Fallon could barely fathom what had happened. They had pushed him and the anchor off the rocking raft, and Fallon’s precious daughter, Rachel Renee, had leaped out, trying to save her father. At the last moment, she had latched hold of a chain, a small length of maybe four feet, not attached to a cable or rope or anything. Fallon had plunged with the anchor to the muddy bottoms of the river.

  To his horror, he suddenly realized that he had brought his baby girl with him.

  They would drown together.

  Fallon wanted to scream in rage.

  He wanted to yell at his daughter, tell her to let go of the chain, to forget her father. He wanted to beg her to let the current and her lightness raise her from the depths of hell back to the surface. This close to the shore, she could float to the banks, crawl to dry land. Live, baby.

  Just live.

  Maybe say a prayer for your father in the years to come.

  Yet he could not open his mouth.

  The mud, the debris, the trash, and the filth from the roiling bottom clouded Fallon’s vision, but Rachel Renee pulled herself toward him and the anchor. The current was furious, and her little hands desperately clutched the chain as she pulled herself closer. Closer, closer, and there she was, holding the chain, with the current jerking her every which way like a cork or a minnow being whipped in a mountain stream. Fallon wanted to scream at her to let go, swim away, but he could only try urgently to saw the cords loose. If he could save himself, then he could save precious Rachel Renee.

  She let go, and Fallon almost opened his mouth and screamed in terror. Rachel Renee, all of five years old, released her left hand, hanging on with only her right, which was affixed like a Gila monster’s jaws on that chain. She brought her tiny legs up, bending at the knee, and used the left hand to move toward her little boot. The next thing Fallon saw in his daughter’s hand was a knife, a knife from their kitchen cabinet, and then she managed to bring the blade to the leather cord.

  He watched her saw. Saw and cut, though in the darkness of the depths and the swirling mud, he only caught glimpses of a tiny hand holding a table knife.

  The pressure in his lungs, against his temples, tripled, quadrupled, and Fallon knew he could not keep his lungs closed for much longer.

  Suddenly . . .

  He felt freed.

  His hands parted from the anchor, and the current started to sweep him away. In desperation, he reached out with his left hand, swiped, missed, came back, and through some miracle, some burst of light that shown from the heavens to the bottoms of the Big Muddy, he saw Rachel Renee. He grabbed her tiny wrist and began kicking as hard as he could. He reached above him with his free hand, grabbed at water, and pushed the water behind him. Rising. Fallon kept rising, bringing his daughter with him. Swimming. Swimming toward the light.

  He burst through, and strained with all his might, bringing his daughter into the clearness of daylight. Rachel screamed and sucked in a deep breath. Fallon’s lungs worked hard, breathing in, exhaling, again and again. He caught a glimpse of the raft as it rounded a bend, and then Indianola Anderson, Bowen Hardin, the raft captain named Tully, and Fallon’s old nemesis Sean MacGregor and his ruthless brigand, Aaron Holderman, were out of his view.

  But for the time being, that really didn’t matter. Fallon kicked and brought Rachel Renee closer.

  They treaded water as the current carried them downstream.

  “Hey,” Fallon said, spitting out water. “Sweetheart, wrap your arms around my neck.”

  His daughter obeyed, and he clung to her as his legs worked, and he felt the current and his own strength carrying him to the banks. A moment later, his feet dragged through the mud, and his knees sank into the wet loam underneath the mighty Missouri. The current slackened, and Fallon and Rachel Renee were in the shallows. Alive. Somehow alive.

  Fallon rose, lifting Rachel Renee with him. She hugged him tightly, and Fallon moved through the ugly water, up the banks, and onto the narrow shoreline.

  “Papa,” Rachel Renee said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, pumpkin,” he told her. “Thanks to you.”

  He held her back, looked at his daughter with love in his eyes, and realized that his face had to show shock and confusion. “Honey,” he asked, “when did you learn how to sw
im?”

  She giggled. “Mama said living this close to the river, I needed to learn. So we’ve been going when you’ve been working.”

  But her face turned sad, and she looked down the river. “But Papa, where is Mommy going? And Mrs. Janice? What will happen to them with them bad, bad—”

  Fallon swept her into his arms and stood. “You don’t worry about your mother, honey,” he whispered, even though his stomach had turned sick with dread. “I’ll bring your mother back. And Mrs. Janice, too.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” He kissed her cheek.

  Her arms and her wet weight felt not like an anchor, but something comforting. He turned up the river, and walked back toward the landing at Leavenworth.

  “How did you get that knife, sweetheart?” Fallon asked.

  “I took it,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t have. Miss Janice told me to take it. When them mean ol’ men come to our house. She told me to keep it. To use it only in an emergency.”

  Fallon pulled her tight to his chest. He saw men running down the banks, now, and one of them, he recognized from the hat and the man’s frame as none other than the federal pen’s chaplain, the Reverend Pigate. Fallon’s heart started to slow down.

  “Did I do wrong, Papa? Mama says little girls ought not to play with knives.”

  Fallon kissed her wet, sand-coated cheek, one more time.

  “Your mother,” he told his pride and joy, “was a pretty fair hand with a knife before you were born—and a whole lot of other things. Maybe she’ll tell you about it when you’re a wee bit older.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Lowering Rachel Renee, Fallon extended his right hand as the chaplain slowed, out of breath, sweating. Lawmen from the city police force and county sheriff’s office circled around, and a few even ran down the river, carrying rifles, as though they might be able to stop the prison escapees—but the raft had rounded the bend by then.

  “Good to see you, Reverend,” Fallon said.

  “And you as well.” The chaplain smiled at Rachel Renee. “And I’m especially glad to see you, little girl.” Rachel Renee hugged Fallon’s leg. When Pigate raised his head to look at Fallon, his face turned serious. He looked at the two soaking bodies.