High stakes, p.1
High Stakes, page 1
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
More by the Author
For Michael Madonna,
who told me how much you get for passing go.
Chapter One
IT WAS AS hot as Billy Ross could ever remember it being at Lantana Flats. And he had been thereabouts for more than ten years, first grubbing for gold and latterly as manager of the railroad depot.
‘Shit, Jack, you know how long I been in this neck of the woods?’ Ross asked with a scowl, after he had scratched his crotch and spat a globule of saliva into the dust that powdered the hard-packed dirt between the depot building and the railroad track.
‘Uh?’ Jack Logan grunted.
‘Better than ten long years is how long.’
‘Ten years for what?’
Ross eyed Logan with the fires of rising ill temper starting to flicker in his small and bloodshot eyes. Then grimaced, shifted his narrow shoulders in a slight shrug and shook his head once. ‘Don’t matter none,’ he growled.
‘Gab about stuff that don’t matter is a waste of time, seems to me,’ Logan countered tonelessly. And abruptly stiffened as he peered with steadfast concentration toward the east, in which direction his attention had been held for most of the time since he reached the depot. ‘Train’s comin’, Billy. Ain’t it?’
Ross first dug into a pocket of his vest to bring out a battered watch with just a short length of chain still attached, and checked that it was getting close to one o’clock. Then he glanced out along the twin rails of the single track that were converged by perspective into the distant east and told Logan: ‘If you can see smoke and it ain’t from no brush fire, then the train’s comin’, Jack. Right about on time, like she usually is.’
‘And I can, can’t I, Billy?’ Logan asked insistently. Then, when the other man did not respond immediately, Logan spared the moment for an entreating glance at him.
Irritation with his companion was still controlled on a tight rein, but Ross made the effort to verify that it really was a smudge of dark woodsmoke on the horizon where the railroad track disappeared into the far-off heat shimmer. Then he had to make a conscious effort to bite back on a sarcastic comment concerned with wasting time talking of what was obvious. And allowed in an even tone: ‘It ain’t never been no mirage on them other days you waited here, Jack. And it ain’t now.’
‘I’m obliged to you, Billy,’ Logan replied softly and got to his feet, the slow caution of his movements suggesting he was aware of the possibility that he might experience some pain. But if he did, it was not intense enough to disturb the smile that Ross’s confirmation had brought to his lips. Or perhaps it was that the high degree of his pleasurable anticipation brooked no lesser sensation in his mind or body.
He was an old man and, Billy Ross was convinced, a senile one who on occasions such as this came close to madness. Which made the depot manager nervous and persuaded him to rile the old-timer just so far: beyond this to humor him. He was about seventy, six feet tall and lean rather than skinny. When he was not moving with wary regard for latent pain in time-stiffened joints there was an impression of a power not yet diminished in his frame. And an undeniable strength of character was constantly to be seen in his aged and weathered face, ruggedly-hewn and clean-shaven beneath a crown of silver hair. His eyes were pale green in solid white surrounds and the few teeth that had survived in his thin-lipped mouth were well cared for. His clothing—battered hat, torn and much-darned shirt, patched pants held on his hips by a length of rope, and boots with string laces—was as clean as the man wearing it. Which was as unsoiled as anybody could be after a ten-mile mule ride down from the Black Mountains to the rim of Lantana Flats on a day that was about as hot as Billy Ross could ever remember in this piece of country less than thirty miles from Death Valley.
Thus was Jack Logan a little dusty and sweat-tacky as he stood in the shadow of the depot roof overhang, gazing fixedly across the railroad-bisected scrub desert to where the locomotive of the approaching train had taken solid shape in the heat-haze beneath the pall of woodsmoke.
‘Now don’t you go gettin’ your hopes way up high, Jack,’ Ross advised. ‘Ain’t no reason to expect today is gonna be any different from all them others you rode down here to meet up with the train.’
There was a degree of kindliness as distinct from condescension in the voice, but Logan was in no frame of mind to accept and respond to this.
‘Don’t you go tellin’ me what not to do, son,’ he growled without glancing away from the train that was still so far off that no sound of its approach carried across the intervening desert to reach the tiny depot. He pulled a frayed piece of rag from a pants pocket and began to mop at the sweat on his face while with his other hand he beat at the dust clinging to his clothes. ‘I got me a good feelin’ about today. Today’s gonna be different. Know it in my bones.’
‘Too damn hot to argue!’ Ross snapped and then shook his head in anger at himself for allowing the old-timer’s attitude to get to him. Next, as he began to thumb tobacco from a poke into the bowl of a pipe, he smiled himself out of irritability and moved his head more slowly from side to side. Being called son was what had sparked his temper. But, by the same token, he did tend to think of Jack Logan as an old-timer. While there was no more than twelve or thirteen years between them.
Billy Ross was a head shorter than the older man, but in other respects was a match for Logan’s build—proportionately. Thus did he have a fine frame for his height, and he was as strong as he looked: and despite being in his late fifties he was seldom bothered with even a twinge of the rheumatic aches that so obviously troubled Logan. He had a round face that was oddly over-fleshy compared with his solidly built body, but this acted to smooth the wrinkles in his element-darkened skin. His features all appeared to be slightly undersize for their backdrop and this could cause him at first glance to appear baby-faced on those occasions—sometimes as much as once a week—when he was freshly shaven. But a second glance would always reveal hair that was graying from brown, darker brown eyes that were worldly wise and world-weary, and teeth stained to various shades of the same color by both the juice and the smoke of tobacco.
The only item of his clothing that connected him with his job as manager of the Lantana Flats depot was a stiff crowned cap with a once shiny peak and a tarnished metal badge fashioned to form the letters CTRR. The cap had been blue when it was new, just as his collarless shirt had been white: but the dirt and sweat of an indeterminate length of time had come close to matching the cap and shirt to the black of the man’s vest, pants and boots.
On this day as the two men waited for the once-weekly train to reach the depot, Ross was unshaven for several mornings. And he only ever washed up when he shaved. Never laundered his clothes. So he smelled bad, but was too used to the stink of himself to be conscious of his own gaminess.
Jack Logan was of an age when a man’s faculties are inevitably past their sharpest—and was also close to the end of a life during which he had spent little time in the company of sweet-smelling companions. And in the present circumstances, anyway, as he strained to bring the distant train into distinct focus with weak eyesight, and to pick up its far-off sound with impaired hearing, the older man was near to being oblivious to all else in his surroundings. In truth had been detached to a lesser degree from everything save the anticipation of these moments since he set out to ride the mule to the depot this morning.
Probably the old-timer did not hear the scrape of a match on wood, the flare of the flame and the moist sucking sounds Ross made as he got the tobacco to burn smoothly in the pipe. Nor saw the clouds of smoke that billowed in the hot, breeze-free air when the railroad man rose from the bench seat and stood for a few seconds, undecided.
Neither man was in the least part relieved the aromatic tobacco smoke served to cover to an extent the stink of Ross and the fragrances of similar origin that lurked in the atmosphere beyond the threshold of the open doorway of the depot’s only building.
Ross made his decision and instead of heading out of the roof shade toward the water tower moved to stand beside Logan. Then almost gasped in shock as he saw the change that had taken place in the appearance of the man.
‘Jack?’ He took the pipe from between his teeth.
‘Uh?’ Logan did not look at Ross.
‘You wanna sit on the bench again? You look ready to … I figure you oughta take the weight off … Look, what if your boy ain’t aboard again and—’
‘Go and attend to your business while I mind my own, Billy,’ Logan cut in, his tone of voice strong and adamant. But there was no other sign of strength about the man now, as the train came clear of the shimmering heat haze and unnecessarily signaled its approach on the depot with a short, shrill blast of the steam whistle.
‘You can’t see yourself, Jack. I ain’t never seen a man look so sick and still standin’ on his own two feet.’
Logan moved his lips and his Adam’s apple bobbed, but it was as if now even the strength to give voice to his thoughts had failed him. So he compressed his thin lips into a tight line, and at the same time he clenched his bony hands into fists at h is sides. He did not shift his unblinking gaze away from the distant locomotive, which was closing by the moment. Teardrops spilled from the corners of his eyes, and beads of sweat oozed from the pores on his forehead and at the sides of his nose. The only perceptible movement of his respiration was a slight flaring and contracting of his nostrils at a slow cadence. A pulse beat at a far higher rate in his temple, under skin that was gray-tinged and had the look of crumpled paper. And the effort he needed to make to remain on his firmly planted feet seemed to have reduced him in stature—so that he appeared to have shrunk in height and lost some muscular bulk. For which Billy Ross found himself feeling grateful. Because, during several stretched seconds, he sensed malevolent aggression emanating from the silent man: and was certain that the old-timer wanted desperately to lash out at him, but lacked even the physical strength to shift his eyes and focus them on the object of his enmity.
Then the final moment of high tension between the two men was gone. Logan was still sweating and weeping and looking sick with emotional strain, but he no longer concerned himself with anything but the train that he could now hear more clearly than he could see because of the tears that misted his vision. While Ross scowled in self-contempt as he clamped the pipe stem back between his discolored teeth and swung away from the old-timer.
‘So keel over and die, you crazy old fool!’ he snarled, not making the effort to raise his voice in competition with the swelling volume of sound from the train, since he was sure Logan was deaf to what he was saying. ‘Just hope your boy’s aboard so he’ll get the chore of puttin’ you in the ground!’
The Lantana Flats depot consisted only of the small single-story stone-built shack where Billy Ross lived, and a water tank on a tower to the side of it; the both of them sited just a few feet back from the railroad track. It was to the base of the timber tower that the railroad man went now, and climbed up the ladder fixed to a corner strut to reach the narrow walkway that encircled the metal tank painted with the sun-faded legend:
LANTANA FLATS DEPOT—CENTRAL TERRITORIAL RAILROAD
From this vantage point, some twenty-five feet above the ground, he commanded a panoramic vista in all directions. To the east was the vast area of scrub desert for which the depot was named, which would have been virtually featureless had it not been for the railroad—just brush and low outcrops of rock and sand ridges and shallow hollows and a few shale-bedded arroyos. To the north and the south the terrain was much the same, but mountain ranges stood out against the heat shimmer that veiled the ultimate horizons in both these directions. To the west were the foothills of the Black Mountains which formed one flank of the lower reaches of Death Valley across the line in California.
It was from habit that Ross, pipe stem clenched tightly between his discolored teeth, and his small eyes cracked against the glare of the yellow sun, blue sky and bleached land, made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree survey of his surroundings. Likewise he glanced up at the unturning sails of the windmill pump and then checked the water level in the tank.
There never was anything out there on the parched landscape to threaten the safe passage of the weekly train—not Indians, nor bunches of hold-up men, nor herds of roaming wild animals. And the track looked to be in as good shape as it ever was, running in a perfectly straight line from the eastern horizon to a little way beyond the depot, where it started a gentle curve to the right until it straightened again to head north west alongside the lower slopes of the foothills. But the CTRR regulations specified that the Lantana Flats depot manager must climb to the tower walkway daily to carry out such a visual survey. Billy Ross carried out the duty weekly, as soon as the train showed in the distance. And as for the water level in the tank, there was always enough of the stuff to keep the one train a week running: and he could always tell when it was being replenished because of the racket the pump kicked up whenever the slightest of desert breezes set the sails to turning.
Company regulations also required him to keep the depot buildings in good order, but he paid less attention to this section of the rule book than to that dealing with safety. Thus, as he glanced directly downwards now—looking for but failing to see Jack Logan who was hidden by the roof projection—he saw with an uncaring eye that some shingles needed fixing, the heap of garbage out back of the place required burning and the cordwood pile between the shack and the tower was in a scattered mess.
Inside the building was a worse mess that smelled higher than the garbage heap, but this never concerned Billy Ross when he was amid the squalor and breathing the fetid air: and so occupied no place in his thoughts now. Instead, as he called himself a fool for being disturbed by the totally ineffectual hostility he had seen in the senile and sick old-timer, he recalled with a grimace that today he would have to do more than help the fireman top up the locomotive with water. This trip he was due a delivery of cordwood—and lending a hand to offload this was not a chore he relished.
Ross removed the pipe from between his teeth and sent a stream of saliva downwards as this thought struck him. But then a smile of keen anticipation lit his bloodshot eyes and drew back his lips as he started on the ladder toward the ground. And his mood was so much improved that there was genuine kindliness in his attitude as he patted the rump of Logan’s mule that was hitched in the scant shade of the tower.
The animal’s owner had not moved an inch from where Ross had last seen him—standing in the deeper but equally uncool shadow of the roof overhang, gazing fixedly at the train that was beginning to slow for the halt at the depot. A train that, as always, was comprised of a locomotive and tender, one day-car, a flatbed and a caboose. The engine and rolling stock were as old and as ill cared for as the depot where they now came to a clanking, shuddering, screeching and hissing stop amid billowing clouds of smoke and steam and dust. The locomotive was positioned precisely alongside the water tank tower, where Billy Ross stood ready with the hose. The smile still firmly fixed on his unshaven, dirt-streaked and sweat-run face as he allowed himself to think about the bottle of rye whiskey that signaled the weekly high spot of his monotonous life.
‘That crazy old bastard is gonna get hisself knocked flat on his ass and turned into mincemeat one of these days!’ the engineer snarled down at Ross as he leaned out of his cabin. ‘Don’t reckon the cowcatcher missed hittin’ him by more than an inch and a friggin’ half!’
The gaunt-faced, sallow-complexioned engineer gazed back along the side of his train: anxious for the dust and vapors to clear so he could make sure Jack Logan was not clipped by the leading edge of the widely splayed cowcatcher.
‘He’s still on his feet, Noah!’ Ross yelled through teeth that continued to be clenched to the pipe stem, and which again contributed to the interrupted grin after he had glimpsed the old-timer standing amid the settling dust and diminishing steam and smoke. ‘I guess you ain’t got no passenger to set down here? Just the cordwood for my stock and my regular order of a bottle? Afternoon to you, Deke.’
Deke was the short, flabby, totally bald fireman who was a match for Noah’s fifty-odd years. He was normally as cheerful as the engineer was dour, but now as he showed himself beside his partner on the footplate he wore a morose expression.
‘We don’t have no wood for you, Billy,’ he reported in a tone of voice that was funereal. And too loud after Noah had spun a wheel to close a valve and end an insistent hiss of escaping steam.
The engineer’s anger at Logan was now gone and he, too, eyed Ross mournfully. And the man on the ground let go of the water hose and took the pipe slowly from his mouth, the sense of rising dread he was experiencing clear to see on his round face with its disproportionately small features. He had to swallow what felt like a palpable blockage in his throat before he was able to growl:
‘They’re gonna close me down out here at the Flats, uh?’
Deke nodded and Noah confirmed:
‘That crazy old coot won’t get no more chance to get hisself killed by …’
He had jerked an oily thumb in the direction of Logan. Then all three men at the locomotive found their attention drawn toward the old-timer by a strangled cry. A sound that seemed at once an expression of joy and a reaction to pain. They saw that Logan had moved a little from where he had stood to wait for the arrival of the train: had turned and taken two or three backward steps so that he could see over the ledges and in through the dusty windows of the day-car. Which had been empty of passengers. But then a sound at the rear of the stationary train had captured his tear-glazed stare—the tears sprung by dashed hope instead of jubilant anticipation now. Until he saw a man swing down from the platform at the rear of the caboose. When exhilaration came flooding back into him and he began to give vent to his emotions as he made to swing around and bring up his arms.
