Yuma Prison Crashout Read online

  The lawman whirled, bracing the butt of the sawed-off scattergun against his hip.

  Everything that happened after that seemed to move incredibly slowly. All these years later, Fallon could remember it perfectly. Every detail, to the drops of sweat, the pounding of his heart, and the desperate breaths.

  “No!” Fallon screamed, and leaped aside. He felt the rush of buckshot tear past him, burning his side, two chunks splintering the butt of his Colt, still holstered. He could even hear the shot tearing into the side of the building.

  The lawman had rushed his shot and squeezed both triggers.

  How he had missed, Fallon couldn’t fathom. But now he saw the man pitching the empty twelve-gauge to the boardwalk and drawing the revolver on his right hip.

  “Don’t!” Fallon tried again.

  The lawman didn’t listen. Perhaps he couldn’t hear. Harry Fallon barely heard anything except the ringing of the shotgun blast. He also saw Josh Ryker, palming his own Colt—the one he had refused to drop. A wicked grin stretched across Ryker’s face.

  What Fallon couldn’t remember was drawing his own Colt. But the weapon was in his right hand, the hammer cocked, and he squeezed the trigger.

  Screaming, the lawman dropped to his knees as his Colt spun into the center of the dark, empty street. He grabbed for his bleeding right wrist, cursed, and then made a move with his left hand for the other pistol.

  Fallon felt himself thumbing back the hammer in the weapon that warmed his clammy right hand.

  “Don’t,” he said for the third time.

  And he saw the cocked Colt in Josh Ryker’s right hand.

  Fallon fired first. The shot sliced through the left collar on the lawman’s coat, causing him to fall to his right. That allowed the bullet that Josh Ryker just fired to dig up sod in the street a few feet in front of the lawman.

  The peace officer turned, but he had dropped his gun. He saw Ryker, the smoking Colt, and that look on Ryker’s face. Desperately, he reached for the nearest Colt with his good hand. Ryker tried to cock his weapon, but the Colt had jammed. He ran forward, cutting loose with a Johnny Reb battle cry, and brought the barrel down hard on the lawman’s head.

  The lawman dropped, faceup, in the ground.

  Fallon’s ears rang even louder now. But somehow he could hear shouts coming from all directions. Dogs barked. He could see lights turning up through curtained windows. And he could see Josh Ryker.

  His pard had pitched his jammed Colt into the street. Now he bent over and picked up one of the revolvers the lawman had dropped. Smiling again, Ryker brought the Colt up, cocked it, and pointed it just inches from the peace officer’s face.

  “This is better,” Ryker said in a voice Fallon hardly recognized—which wasn’t because of the ringing in Fallon’s ears. “I’d rather you see this than gun you down from behind, you lowdown cur.”

  This time, Fallon didn’t yell Don’t. He called out Ryker’s name. And he raised the .45 in his own hand.

  “Stay out of this, Hank!” Ryker cried. “He’s mine.”

  A second later, Ryker realized what Fallon meant. He swung the Colt in Fallon’s direction, and the gun bucked and roared in Fallon’s hand.

  Left arm pulsing blood, Ryker spun around, landing on his knees beside the lawman. He hadn’t dropped his weapon, though, and tried to bring it up with his good arm. Fallon wasn’t standing still, however. As soon as he had fired, he had started running. He stepped inside Ryker’s outstretched right arm, raised that smoking .45, and brought the butt down against Ryker’s hat.

  Ryker groaned, and dropped hard, unconscious. Fallon didn’t like the look of his pard’s arm, but he had sense enough to holster his Colt and jerk the weapon from Ryker’s grip. The Colt he pitched aside, and then he squatted beside the lawman.

  The man wore a six-point badge pinned to the lapel of his vest.

  A slight curse came out as a sigh from Fallon’s mouth.

  The badge read:

  DEPUTY

  U.S.

  MARSHAL

  The man gripped his bleeding wrist. He blinked. He was still conscious. Fallon heard hoofbeats now and footsteps pounding the boardwalk. Dogs still barked. Somewhere a bell rang.

  Part of him wanted to stand up and run out of here. Run like hell. Maybe even run back to his folks’ place in Gads Hill, Missouri. A body could hide a long, long time in that rough country.

  Instead, he let out a sigh, and asked, “How bad you hurt, mister?”

  If the lawman answered, Fallon never heard it.

  There were steps behind him, a curse, and then something caught Harry Fallon on the back of his head. He saw orange, red, purple, white. Then he saw nothing at all.

  * * *

  He woke, not in the city jail, but a dark, damp dungeon. He found himself in a pit with men—white, black, Indian, Mexican, even a couple of Chinese—some in rags, most in chains. He woke with a man emptying Fallon’s pockets.

  His knee came up and caught the man in his groin. When the man sat back, and grabbed his crotch, Fallon came up and belted the man across the jaw. The man went down, cried, gagged, vomited, and crawled away. Fallon would’ve gone after him, but his head hurt, and he became dizzy.

  The men watching him just laughed.

  One day later, two big black men in blue uniforms with badges came through the locked doors. One called his name. Fallon slowly rose and walked toward them. The silent one shoved him through the door. They led him out of the dungeon and into the courthouse. Outside of an office, the first one knocked on the door. A voice said something from the inside. The man opened the door, stepped back, and held the door open.

  “Judge Parker’ll see you now,” the man said, and Harry Fallon walked in.

  First, he recognized the man sitting in the leather-lined chair in front of the big desk. It was the lawman who had tried to arrest Josh Ryker, the one who had almost blown Fallon in half with a shotgun. His right wrist was bandaged, and another stretched across his head, but he seemed to be in good spirits for a man who had come this close to getting killed. He was smoking a good cigar. And he smiled at Harry Fallon.

  The second man. Well, Fallon wasn’t so sure he wanted to see Judge Isaac Parker. He remembered him from that night, what seemed a lifetime earlier.

  “I told you, Mister”—the judge glanced at a sheet of paper on his desk—“Fallon . . . that demon rum would land you in front of me one day. And here you are.”

  Fallon studied his boots. “Yes, sir.”

  “Breaking and entering. Attempted burglary. Unlawful discharge of a firearm in the city limits. The state would have fun with you. But shooting an officer of the federal court, that puts you in my bailiwick. Resisting a deputy marshal is a year in prison. But shooting one. The solicitor says he thinks he should try you and”—he looked at the paper again—“your partner, one Joshua Ryker, with attempted murder. You won’t swing. This time. But after a year in Leavenworth or Joliet, you’ll wish you had.”

  The judge glanced at the wounded lawman. “What do you think, Bob?”

  “He’ll do,” the lawman said.

  That caused Fallon to lift his head.

  The judge grinned. He tossed a six-pointed badge at Fallon. It landed at his feet. Fallon swallowed, looked at it, then the judge, and then the deputy marshal covered with bandages.

  “It’s not a gift,” Judge Parker said. “And some people, many of whom I respect, might advise you that a ten-year sentence in some federal prison would be better than what you would likely procure if you pick up that badge, young man. The choice, however, is yours.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  He made his choice. He lived with it. Mostly, it had been good. Not always, of course. Only a crazy person would think that having men try to fill you full of bullet holes was a good way to make a living. Fallon had been knifed, he had been hit with wagon spokes, chairs, brooms, ax handles, hammers, pistol barrels, shotgun barrels, rifle barrels, barrel staves, bottles of all sorts and sizes, and even a singletree. He had been shot twice. He had been in so many brawls, he couldn’t count them all—certainly he didn’t want to remember most of them. He had been bitten, clawed, scratched, urinated on, slapped, gouged, vomited on, and choked. He had been kicked by men, women, children, horses, mules, and asses. All in five years. Oh, for five glorious years, he had ridden for Judge Parker and his court with jurisdiction over the Western District of Arkansas, which included lawless Indian Territory. Fallon had sent men to federal prisons, and to the gallows. He had shot down nine men in self-defense.

  For the past ten years, however, he had been in prison, proving all those predictions from his parents, preachers, teachers, and friends correct.

  He had been imprisoned. He was innocent, of course, but none of that mattered. Parker had sentenced him. Parker, feeling betrayed, had thrown the book at Fallon. The book? And half the damned library.

  Harry Fallon didn’t blame him. Considering the lies sworn under oath, the framed evidence, well, Fallon would have likely done the same thing Parker had.

  The guards came to him while he was emptying bedpans from the prison hospital. The two burly men, newcomers—transferred from another prison, the turnkeys said—tapped their sticks against their thighs.

  “Fallon,” the one with the black front teeth said. “You’re to come with us. Warden’s orders.”

  Fallon held the two pots toward the guard, but kept his eyes on the dirt in front of him. “What about these?”

  “Leave them,” the one with the mustache said.

  Fallon shrugged. “If you insist.” He set the pots on the ground, wiped his hands on his trousers, and waited.

  “To your cell,” Black Teeth said.

  When Fallon turned, Black Teeth stopped him. “Not that way.”
He pointed his stick. Fallon looked at that, questioning the newcomer, but not saying a thing. He walked toward his old prison block, to the cell he had lived in before the riot.

  The block remained practically empty. Carpenters, hired from the outside world, busied themselves whitewashing the bloodstains. Others worked on the doors or repaired the bunks. Hammers echoed in the cavernous building. Yet the smell of sweating men, of tobacco, paint, and sawdust, could not rid the block of the odor of burned flesh, or of splattered brains and human intestines.

  He stopped in front of his cell and looked between the iron bars.

  It was, he found to his surprise, relatively intact. A few papers had been thrown on the floor. The bunk even looked as it had when Fallon had left for his work assignment that day. The bunks of his cell mates looked no worse for wear either.

  He tried to understand what the men had been thinking. Why they might leave one cell alone. His cell was easy enough to figure out. He had been in the laundry. The Mormon kid had been in the hospital with an intestinal complaint. The other two were on latrine duty. But the cell next to his was being painted. The rioters had found the keys, opened it, and tossed a bucket of coal oil onto the man who had killed a seven-year-old girl. Then they had shattered a burning lantern on the floor, slammed the door shut, and locked it.

  The place still stank of death.

  It always would.

  So the men moved from cell to cell, killing some—turnkeys, mostly—releasing a few, ignoring many. Then they had moved on, to the lower floors, and outside to kill and be killed, before they had reached the laundry—and Harry Fallon.

  Keys rattled in Black Teeth’s hand as he stepped in front of Fallon and guessed which key would work. It took him four guesses, but at last, the door slid open. Fallon stepped inside. He waited for the door to close. Maybe this was the warden’s idea of punishment. Make Fallon wait in his cell with nothing to do but smell the stink of a child killer who had been burned alive.

  The door remained open.

  “Get your stuff, Fallon,” Black Teeth said.

  “My stuff?” He did not look back.

  “Whatever you got that you want. Hurry up, man, this place makes my skin crawl. And that smell . . . just get what you want, damn it, and let’s get out of this horrible place.”

  Fallon tried to guess what all this meant. It didn’t take him long. They had been transferring guards from other prisons to here, and they had been moving prisoners to other prisons, at least, until this would become inhabitable. Fallon might be considered a hard-timer, but his record was, compared to most inmates at Joliet, clean. A couple of fights, but those had been with prisoners, not guards. And while his attitude might not please wardens, chaplains, or guards, he had never struck any of those. Quite a few times, of course, that had taken remarkable restraint.

  He moved to his bunk, reached under the pillow, and found the worn tintype. He didn’t look at the images of the woman and girl, and quickly slid that in his pocket. Then he reached for the bedpost. He twisted the top, pulled it open, and reached inside the hole he had hollowed out. He found the tin star and tried to put that in his other pocket.

  “What’s that?” the mustachioed guard asked.

  Fallon let his fingers open.

  “You hid that to get out of here?” Black Teeth asked. “Figured you’d use it to walk right through these gates.”

  “Our guards aren’t that stupid,” Fallon said. This time, he looked Black Teeth right into his rheumy eyes. “At least, they haven’t been.”

  “Deputy marshal,” Mustache said.

  “Deputy U.S. Marshal,” said Black Teeth with a snort. His head cocked. “You mean to tell me you once was a lawman.”

  “I don’t remember.” Fallon held the badge toward Black Teeth. “It’s contraband. Take it, if you want. Write me up.”

  Black Teeth started, but stopped, pulling his free hand back and clutching the stick tighter. He must have thought Fallon was trying to trap him in something. Planning some escape.

  “Hell, Gary,” Mustache said, “let him keep the damned thing. What can he do other than stick someone with the pin on the back?”

  That caused Black Teeth to snort and smile.

  “That all you got?” he asked.

  Fallon slid the badge into his other pocket.

  “That’s all.” He looked again at the cell floor, giving the guards the respect they wanted. Or what they took for respect.

  “Out,” Black Teeth said, and Fallon stepped onto the walkway. He looked over the edge at the lower floor. The door clanged shut.

  “To the warden’s office,” Black Teeth said.

  Fallon walked.

  * * *

  Warden Jethro Amadeus Cain sat behind his mahogany desk, decorated with crystal lamps, a silver ashtray, a Bible, likely never opened. A portrait of Napoleon hung on the wall behind his head. He was a fat man, with white hair, a fat nose, puffy cheeks, and he spoke with a lisp.

  “You ttthiink yer sssmartttt,” he said when Fallon stepped inside the office.

  Fallon said nothing, but he glanced to his right to find Captain Daggett sitting in another chair. Daggett shuffled through some papers, placing them on the desk as he read, or at least pretended to read, each one.

  “Assskk me, you planned ttthat riottt,” Cain said. “We jjjussst can’tttt ppprove ittt.”

  Fallon waited. If they were going to send him to another prison, he wished they would hurry up.

  “Uunndersssttand tthhhaat I had nnnnotthingggg to do with thhhisssss.” Cain bit off the end of his cigar, stuck it in his mouth, and picked up a yellow telegram. He started to light the cigar, thought better of it, and set it in the polished silver ashtray.

  He waved the paper in the air.

  “Thhheee governor hasss given you a pppparole.”

  Fallon looked thunderstruck. He straightened, turned his head, and wondered if he had heard that clearly. Paroled?

  “Issss evverythhhhing in order, Caaaptain?” the warden asked Daggett.

  Daggett placed the last page on the desk. “Appears to be in order, sir.”

  Picking up the cigar, Cain found a match and struck it, put the cigar in his teeth, and lit it. Once he had the cigar smoking, he removed it and waved it in Daggett’s direction. That must have been his way of ordering the captain of the guards to speak. Fallon didn’t care much for Daggett, but at least the pig didn’t speak with an annoying lisp.

  “The parole requires you to be employed within the state of Illinois,” Daggett said. “This is not a pardon. It is a parole. Violation of the parole will land you back in this prison, or any prison, immediately for the duration of your sentence. You are required to attend church services, of your religious preference, on Sundays, and the minister will report your presence. Failure to attend church will mean this parole is revoked and you will be returned immediately to this prison or another to complete the duration of your sentence. You are not to drink intoxicating spirits. You are not to gamble in public or private. You must not associate with known gamblers or anyone who has been convicted of a felony in Illinois or any state or territory. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in the immediate revocation of this parole and you will be returned to this facility or another for completion of your original sentence. You will be employed. You must have a job. You will start employment on Monday at Werner’s Wheelwright in Chicago. Lodging has been arranged for you at Missus Ketchum’s Boarding House near Lake Michigan. Your first month’s rent has been paid from the money you have earned while in prison. One word of negative nature about your conduct from Herr Werner or Missus Ketchum will lead to the immediate revocation of this parole and you will be returned to this prison or a similar facility for the completion of your original sentence. These are the terms, non-negotiable, of this parole. Do you have any questions?”

  Before Fallon could open his mouth, the warden was sliding a few slips of paper in Fallon’s direction. He removed his cigar, and said, “Thhhheesseee are thhee addresssssessss of your landlorrrrd and yourrr employeeeerrr.” He found another paper. “Thisssss isss a copy of terrmmms of yourrrr parrolllle.”

  Daggett continued. “You must report to an agent of the court in the city of Chicago once a month, or whenever he requests you to visit. He will meet you at the wheelwright office on Monday.” He slid one of the papers he had put on the warden’s desk. “Sign here. Or back to your cell.”