A Knife in the Heart Read online

  * * *

  During his forced, and, thankfully, brief, employment —or imprisonment—with the American Detective Agency, Fallon had been an undercover officer, not a detective, but now he kept putting together evidence—hoping he might have enough to present to a judge and the attorney general, and see about getting Carlos Pablo Diego IV out of the Big House Across the River in Laramie.

  Four days later, he decided it was time to travel to Laramie, meet with the warden, get an interview with Diego, and see what he would tell. Christina had found an interpreter, a cook at one of the small cafés in Cheyenne that catered mostly to cowboys. Two round-trip train tickets to Laramie and back for Fallon and Señora Rodriguez. They could do this on the cook’s day off, no hotel, since Fallon was paying for this on his own.

  He stood before Helen in the outer office, asking his secretary if she could telephone the train depot, see about getting those tickets for Monday, when the door opened, and Attorney General Hector French removed his bowler.

  “Hank,” he said. “Helen.” His face was grim. “Got a minute?” he asked Fallon, and already was moving to Fallon’s office.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, Hec?” Helen asked.

  “ No.”

  Fallon frowned, entered his office, closed the door, and saw the yellow telegraph paper that the attorney general held out for him to read.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “It stinks,” French said. “And I hate to bring it this way. But I figured . . .” He sighed.

  Fallon leaned against his desk, shaking his head.

  He looked at the telegraph, read it again, felt his stomach turn over, his heart sink, and he wondered if God was playing another joke on him or cursing him.

  Carlos Pablo Diego IV, Convict Number 4231, was dead. Knifed in the back, throat slashed, in the exercise yard at the state prison in Laramie on Thursday afternoon.

  “It stinks, all right,” Fallon said and tossed the telegraph into the wastebasket.

  French straightened. “Hank, I spent all morning checking this out, exchanging telegraphs with Jackson—”

  “A gutless wonder,” Fallon said, and swore bitterly.

  “Be that as it may, but don’t think this was some conspiracy. That’s the first thing I thought, too, but M. C. Jackson is a fool but not an idiot. He wouldn’t do anything that would hurt his chances of getting out of Wyoming and landing that federal job at Leavenworth.”

  Fallon sighed. “How do you figure it?”

  “Diego was Mexican,” French said. “You know what prisons are like, federal or state. Even that hellhole at Fort Smith, the jail, was no different. You got your Mexicans. You got your whites. You got the Negroes. And the Chinese. And none of them mix. By all accounts, Diego had made an enemy of a white convict, Easy Emmett Tanner, murderer and cattle thief. Tanner swore he would kill Diego, and he did. Two men witnessed the affair. The guards rushed in, but it was too late. They threw Tanner in the sweatbox. But they did not check him for any other weapons. He had another homemade knife, and he used that to cut his own throat.”

  “God.” Fallon moved to the basket and spit out the bitterness. He ran his hands through his hair, tried to control his breathing, and spit again. “What the hell did Diego do to make Tanner so mad?”

  “He prayed too loudly in his cell.”

  Fallon cursed softly.

  “I’m truly sorry, Hank,” French said.

  Fallon sighed, shook his head, moved to the book cases. “Diego never should have been in that prison.”

  “I know.”

  “I should have moved quicker. Gotten him out of there.”

  “Hank, even if you had presented all the evidence to the governor, to me, to a judge, it would have taken us two weeks, maybe longer, before we could have overturned the court actions, the sentence. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . we could have gotten Diego to a safer place, maybe out of the Big House and into a county jail. But that wasn’t going to happen in a hurry. The law doesn’t move that fast. Prisons don’t operate that quickly. We did all we could do.”

  Fallon nodded. “Yeah. But it’s a waste.”

  “Yeah.”

  Their eyes met, held.

  “Does his son know?” Fallon asked. “His wife?”

  “I don’t think so,” French said. “I thought I’d find a priest, take him over to the shack or the school, break the news to them.”

  “I’ll do it,” Fallon said.

  “Hank, that’s not your job.”

  “Yes,” Fallon said. “It is.”

  * * *

  Christina seldom cried, but that night she did, but only after Rachel Renee had fallen asleep. Fallon hugged his wife tightly, told her none of this was her fault, that life sometimes didn’t go the way it was supposed to. He laid Christina in the bed, kissed her forehead, and pulled the sheet and blanket over her.

  Then he moved out of the bedroom.

  “Where are you going?” Christina asked.

  “I’d better sleep in the parlor tonight,” he said. He did not look back at her, merely slipped out, closed the door, and walked to the chaise. He knew the nightmares would return. He knew a raven’s kaw, or the rustling of the wind in the trees, anything like that would have him leaping out of bed, ready to kill some imagined inmate or guard coming after him—frightening Fallon’s wife and baby girl.

  The only way that wouldn’t happen would be if he stayed awake all night.

  He didn’t. The meeting with the Diego family had exhausted him. And he was right. He woke up from the first dream a little after midnight. Two hours later, he fell back asleep, and the nightmares resumed.

  When Fallon sat bolt upright on the chaise around four in the morning, he wiped his brow, swallowed, and said, “Welcome back to hell.” At least he wasn’t screaming. At least he had not awakened his wife and daughter. There was no use in trying to sleep anymore. Fallon moved to the winter kitchen, found the coffee grinder and the can of beans, and busied himself.

  Two days later, the coffin carrying the remains of Carlos Pablo Diego IV arrived at the Cheyenne depot, and the funeral mass was held that afternoon. Fallon was there, hat in hand, along with Mrs. Diego, young Carlos, his two sisters and brother, and the headmaster of the Abraham Lincoln Academy. Young Carlos shook Fallon’s hand, thanked him for all he had tried to do for his late papa, and helped his sobbing mother away. Two aunts and an uncle assisted with the children. Fallon paid the priest, nodded at the headmaster, and walked back to work.

  Two weeks passed. Two weeks of nightmares and anxiety.

  Hector French entered Fallon’s office on a Thursday afternoon, and he brought company.

  “Governor.” Fallon rose from his desk and shook the hands of his two visitors.

  “Hank,” the governor said. “Hector tells me that you already know about the job opening for the new federal prison being built in Leavenworth, Kansas.”

  Fallon nodded. “And I hear that Warden Jackson down in Laramie has his eye on that job.” He made himself smile.

  “It’s not Jackson they want,” the governor said. “It’s you.”

  Fallon stared, realized he had not misheard, understood that the governor and French were serious. He felt like sitting down, but instead he said, “I’ve seen enough walls and bars in my day.”

  The governor pulled out a newspaper, slid it onto Fallon’s desk. “You heard about the execution of Slim Boris.”

  Fallon had heard. Everyone in Wyoming had heard. The professional hanging of a condemned killer had been botched. Hell, even the hangman at Fort Smith had left men kicking at the end of a rope, but this one had ripped off Boris’s head. But that had been in Rawlings. And it had been a state matter, not federal, so Fallon had not been obligated to attend the execution.

  “And did you see this?” The governor tapped another headline.

  Fallon nodded. “Helen says I never read the paper, just look over the headlines, but I can read. And I do read.” That article had been picked up by the
Cheyenne editor from the telegraphs. In Denver, a young man named McKee had been gunned down by lawmen because he could not stand to return to prison.

  “Like I said,” Fallon reminded his guests, “I’ve spent enough time behind the iron.”

  “Hank,” Hector French said. “The way the governor and I figure it, Leavenworth needs you. The prisoners need you. Justice needs you.”

  Fallon laughed without humor. “You boys are crazy. And I don’t think you do the hiring for the Leavenworth pen.”

  “No,” the governor said. “But we know who does. And those boys have been asking about you. That Carlos Diego story made Harper’s Illustrated and the New York Herald. People are starting to think something might be wrong with a prison here and there. And I think those people are right. You … you could make a difference.”

  “Talk it over with Christina,” French said. “You’ve got a couple of days to think it over.”

  “Otherwise,” the governor said, “M. C. Jackson will most likely be moving to Leavenworth. Good for the state of Wyoming. Not so good for the boys locked up in Kansas.”

  * * *

  “Well.” Christina stirred sugar in her coffee cup. “How much does it pay?”

  Fallon shrugged. “Not much more than this job.”

  “Well, Rachel Renee is young enough. It’s not like we’d be uprooting her. Besides, she likes having adventures.”

  Shaking his head, Fallon twisted in his chair in the dining room and stared out the window. “I’m not sure I could be a warden.”

  “You weren’t sure you could be a U.S. marshal, either, the way I remember it. But you have been a good one.”

  “Maybe,” Fallon said. “But the wardens I met—”

  “Were not,” she interrupted, “Harry Fallon.”

  He smiled.

  “You owe it . . .” Christina started.

  Their eyes held. “To Carlos Pablo Diego?” Fallon asked.

  “To Harry Fallon,” she said. “I think you could make a difference. Better than Jackson.”

  “Well,” Fallon said. “It could be the feds have already found their man.”

  “I think they have.” Christina reached across the table, found Fallon’s right hand, and gripped it. She squeezed. “And his name is Fallon.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Is it always this windy here?” Christina asked the waitress at the quaint Leavenworth, Kansas, café near the Missouri River.

  “Chil’,” the gray-haired, stout woman told her, “’T’ain’t even windy dis afternoon.”

  After they ordered coffees to start and a lemonade for Rachel Renee, the waitress walked to the kitchen.

  “Don’t they call Chicago the ‘windy city’?” Fallon grinned. “And isn’t that where you grew up and worked?”

  “It’s a different kind of wind.” Frowning, Christina sniffed, then sneezed, and a sigh followed that.

  “I thought Cheyenne was windy.” Rachel Renee bounced in her seat, staring after the waitress, eagerly awaiting her lemonade.

  Christina reached inside her purse and withdrew her handkerchief one more time. She blew her nose.

  “Are you sick, Ma?” Rachel Renee asked.

  “I think”—she sniffed again—“I think . . . I must have . . . a cold.”

  “It’s called hay fever,” Fallon said.

  “It’s a cold,” Christina insisted.

  They had arrived in Leavenworth, Kansas, late yesterday morning, found the house they had rented on the western part of town, and basically spent the day unpacking. Fallon had not even been by the federal penitentiary, either the old one or the larger one being built. He was supposed to check in on Monday. Today was Saturday. After getting the house arranged to something Christina could live with, and getting all of Rachel Renee’s dolls and other toys arranged to her liking, they had decided to see what all Leavenworth had to offer.

  It was bigger than Fallon remembered, but he had not been to the city in years. Like most places, it had grown. Brick buildings dominated the business district, a trend Fallon was seeing as the new century approached. Western towns had learned that wooden buildings burned, and when one caught fire, quite often the whole town went up in smoke. Red brick had replaced whitewashed facades. Many of the streets were paved. The streetlights were gas. Telephone and telegraph lines gave crows and other birds a place to watch the bustling of a thriving town.

  One of the reasons Leavenworth thrived, of course, was because of the military fort—and the federal prison.

  The Army and crime were always good for a booming economy.

  The waitress returned with their drinks. Christina greeted her with yet another loud sneeze.

  “If de cedars don’t gets you, den de weeds will,” the old woman said. “Dis time of year be the worse fer pure mis’ry. Dat’s what dey ought to call this town. Spring Mis’ry. Best thing dat could happen would be if de river was to flood. I mean of Jesus in the wilderness proportions. Cover us underwater for thirty days and thirty nights.”

  “Forty,” Rachel Renee corrected, and Fallon thought that Cheyenne’s Bible school had come in handy.

  “Even better,” the waitress said. “Eat honey, ma’am,” she told Christina. “Only cure we got, ’cept fer drownin’.”

  “You don’t seem to suffer,” Fallon observed.

  “I eat honey. By de gallons. Ya might as well jus’ call me Queen Bee. Y’all new here?”

  “Yes,” Fallon said. “Just moved.”

  “Figured. What with her askin’ ’bout de wind, and now sufferin’ the mis’ry of March. What would y’all care to have fer dinner?”

  “Honey,” Rachel Renee sang. “It’s sweet.”

  They ordered the special, fried fish and onions, but the waitress brought out baked bread and two jars of local honey first. Rachel Renee filled up on so much bread and honey she barely touched her plate. Fallon figured his daughter was the smart, and lucky, one. The fish, at least his, was mostly bones anyway, and he could scarcely taste the onions because of all the grease. He had figured, this close to Missouri, he might have something resembling a home-cooked meal. But he had found some bad cafés in Cheyenne, too, and this was pretty much their first foray into Leavenworth. The city was big enough.

  He paid his check, grabbed his hat, and escorted his wife and daughter to the front door, which swung open, and three men entered. They blocked the exit.

  “Hello, Hank,” the weasel in the middle said.

  Only my friends call me Hank.

  The weasel was a runt, standing no taller than five-foot-five, and that included the cowboy boots he wore with their two-inch heels. He wore striped trousers, a plaid shirt, moth-eaten vest, stained bandana, and trail-worn slouch hat. The eyes were too far apart, his left earlobe was missing, his face was pitted with scars, and his nose had been broken countless times. He carried an old Colt tucked inside his waistband.

  To the weasel’s right stood a stout man, the kind Fallon usually saw working in a blacksmith’s shop. The only thing missing was a smithy’s apron. He had huge arms that strained the sleeves of his cotton shirt, a thick beard of blond hair stained on one side by years of tobacco juice. Fallon saw no gun, not even a sheathed knife, but with arms that size, he figured, this leviathan wouldn’t need one.

  The last man was tall, wiry, dressed better than his two pards, but nowhere near clean enough for a Kansas church. He wore a belt gun, a shiny, nickel-plated pistol holstered butt forward on his right hip. Probably a southpaw, Fallon figured, but the Smith & Wesson must not be his preferred weapon, for he held an iron rod and kept tapping one end against a calloused right palm.

  The welcoming committee, Fallon thought.

  “Do I know you?” Fallon asked the weasel.

  The weasel’s grin revealed several missing teeth and more that a dentist would consider a lost cause.

  “Name’s Jenkins,” the weasel said. “Buster Jenkins.”

  Fallon’s mind searched, but came up
empty.

  “Sorry, Buster. I don’t recall the privilege of meeting you.”

  “Choctaw Nation. You arrested me.” His left hand rose slowly, carefully, and the pointer finger traced a thin scar from the part in his hair to the center of his forehead.

  He didn’t look that old, Fallon thought, but it was hard to figure out the age of a man as dirty as this one.

  “I arrested a lot of men,” Fallon said. “But, congratulations. You’re out of jail. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Buster,” the waitress called out. “I don’t want y’all wreckin’ dis place. Y’all take yer business outside.”

  The men did not move.

  “What’s going on, Papa?” Rachel Renee asked.

  “Christina,” Fallon said tightly, “go on home. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  “You sure?” his wife said.

  “Yeah.” He had sized up the men. He would not need Christina’s assistance with these three, and he didn’t want his baby girl to see her papa at this kind of work. Fallon nodded at the weasel. “If you’ll step aside, let my family go home. They have a lot of unpacking to do.”

  “They might wanna pack up,” the burly man said, causing the thin one with the pipe to snigger.

  But they did step aside, though the weasel warned Christina, “Don’t go after no law dog. Just go straight home.”

  “I thought we were gonna see the town,” Rachel Renee said. Christina scooped up the girl.

  “We are,” Fallon said. “After I finish my business with these . . . gentlemen. I’ll be home in a jiffy.”

  “In a box,” the weasel whispered with a malevolent grin as they stepped aside to let Fallon’s wife and child leave the restaurant. The one with the pipe turned sideways to watch through the window as Christina and Renee moved down the sidewalk.

  “Where they headin’?” the weasel asked.

  “West,” the thin one said.

  “Might find a law dog down,” the big brute said.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” the weasel said.

  “I’m gonna call de police,” the waitress bellowed, “if ya don’t take dis outside.”