Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery (23 page)

I slammed the glass again. “There’s a woman in the last car of that coal train you’re loading!”

His eyes bugged like headlights as he looked past me down the road at the empty tracks. “Lord almighty.”

“Get on your radio!”

He shook his head as he rolled down the window. “There’s no radio reception; something must’ve happened to the transponders that relay out of Gillette.”

I became aware of another vehicle sliding to a stop behind me and turned in time to see Lucian dropping his window. “What the hell is going on?”

“The woman, she’s in the last coal car of that train. Rowan threw her in there in hopes of getting rid of her.”

“Like the hobos?”

“Yep, like the ho— homeless.” I started around. “We’ve got to catch that train and stop them from loading.”

Lucian picked up the mic from the floor. “These damn things aren’t working.”

“I know.”

The BNSF driver, Fry, yelled at me, “That booth is on the north side—there’s nobody you can get on our side of that train.”

I kicked a tire, in full realization that my options were running out. “Are there any other roads?”

He made a face as he looked off into the fog, the delineation of the horizon lost in all the whiteness. “One, but you have to go out past the highway, then down the frontage road, and then drive in on the gravel, and it probably hasn’t been plowed.”

I pulled the cell phone from my pocket. “Who can I call?”

“Nobody; it’s a skeleton crew working tonight. We’re supposed to load this train and then call it quits.”

“Nobody has a phone?” The ludicrousness of this statement coming from my mouth was not lost on me. “Somebody?”

“No. There won’t be anybody in the administrative offices, and without radios you won’t be able to get hold of anybody in the chute section—it’s all computer generated, and besides, as you might have noticed, there’s no service out here.” He shook his head. “There just isn’t any way.”

I stared at the tracks leading west, my mind racing like a runaway locomotive. I bit the inside of my lip and stared down at the steel wheels of the high-rail gear equipment on his massive truck. “Oh, yes there is.”

—

As fast as the driver was working, it was still agonizingly slow. His voice was strained as he shouted down from the cab of the oversize truck. “This is a really bad idea.”

“Give me a better one?” We watched as he lined the one-ton truck up with the rails, rapidly backing up and pulling forward. “And hurry.”

Fry shouted down. “I don’t get this thing right, we get derailed in the first twenty feet and then it’s going to take a hell of a lot longer, I can tell you that much.”

With a mechanical whine, the steel wheels lowered onto the
iron rails just enough to carry the weight of the vehicle but still allowing the traction to the tires that would provide us with power. The driver jumped from the other side and came to the front, touching a lever and lowering the front high-rail wheels onto the track with a loud, jarring noise.

He pushed back his hood again and smiled as he shook his head. “Just so you know, this goes against every safety regulation on the line.”

“I’ll take responsibility.”

He nodded with the same smile as he turned and walked around, climbing in the driver’s side. “You take responsibility for the three switches between here and the mine?”

Hoisting Lucian up into the cab, I followed, closing the door behind me. “What about the switches?”

He engaged the transmission, hit the gas, and we lurched forward. “No radio—no dispatch; we hit one of those switches and it’s turned against us and we get hit head-on by another mile-long train going in the opposite direction.”

I looked down the rails, feeling more and more like a maiden tied to the tracks. “That would be bad.”

He nodded and studied me. “Very bad.”

We gathered speed. “How fast can this thing go?”

“Pretty damn fast on the straight and flat—faster than you’re gonna want to go.”

“Bet me.”

Lucian leaned forward. “And once we get there, what the hell are you going to wanna do?”

“I’ll figure that out when it happens.” We were picking up speed, and the high-rail began sounding more and more like a train, with the clickety-clack of the rail joints closing time like
the second hand on a stopwatch. “How long does it take to load one of those cars?”

He glanced at the clock on his dash. “About a minute.”

“How many cars per train?”

“A hundred and forty, give or take, but they’ve already filled those.”

I looked at the clock, too. “So, where are we on the spur?”

He swallowed. “I’m betting near the end.”

I braced a hand against the dash. “Speed up.”

“You want me to go faster than this?”

“Yep.” He did as I said, and the snow swirled and whipped around the windshield like galloping ghosts. “They have to slow the train to load it, right?”

He nodded. “They’ll just run it at about three miles an hour.” His head swiveled around, and then he turned back to look at both Lucian and me. “Did you see that switch indicator?”

“What does a switch indicator look like?”

He glanced out the window. “A very large, blinking green light.”

“No.”

Lucian interrupted. “There was a red one.”

We both looked at him.

The old sheriff shrugged. “Large, blinking red light to the left.”

The driver hit the gas even harder. “It’s a train coming the other way.”

Lucian and I looked down the rails joining in the distance at a vanishing point, fully expecting to see a BNSF locomotive heading straight toward us. “Where?”

The driver’s mouth set in a straight line like a teeter-totter,
weighing the odds. “I know this switchman, Bruce; he always throws early. I’ll hit the horns, and he’ll switch it back just long enough to get us through before that big son of a bitch comes over onto our rails.” With that, he hit the air racks on the truck by pulling a cord near the headliner—three short, three long, three short.

I shouted, “SOS?”

He smiled. “He’ll know it’s me—we were in the Navy together.”

We all peered through the snow and fog, and up ahead, in the far distance and barely a glimmer in the fog bank, was a light.

“Is that what I think it is?”

He nodded his head and hunched a shoulder over the steering wheel. “Another coal train, headed east.”

“And through us?” Lucian joined me in bracing both hands against the dash, for all the good that was going to do. “How long before we know if he switched us through?”

The driver pushed the throttle some more, continuing with his Morse dots and dashes. “Any time now.”

I peered through the windshield, trying to ignore the growing orb slightly to our left. “Will there be another indicator?”

“Nope.”

“So we just have to get to the switch before the other train does?”

“You got it.”

I glanced at the speedometer on the dash. “We go straight, right? I mean, we don’t have to change directions, do we?”

He glanced down. “No, we’d roll at this speed.”

“That’s comforting.”

“And then probably get run over by the train anyway.” He glanced at me. “Say, who’s the woman in the coal car?”

I stared at the man, amazed that he would ask a question like that at a time like this. “A woman by the name of Jone Urrecha.”

“The Basque Rose?” He took the cigarette from his mouth and licked his lips. “The dancer from over at Dirty Shirley’s?”

“You know her?”

He smiled and held the cigarette out, studying the glowing tip. “Oh, hell yeah. I used to go over there every week after shift until she left.” His hands tightened on the wheel, and his head nodded up and down in determination. “We have to damn well make it.”

I took a deep breath and glanced at the old sheriff. “Having fun?”

His jaw was tight, and his eyes widened as we both turned and looked at the oncoming train. “If I was next to the damn door, I’d make a jump for it.”

—

With a sudden burst of clarity, the front end of the locomotive leapt into view like a building on wheels, a gigantic, stories-high building on wheels. The driver gave one last rhythmical blast of the horns as we shot through the switch, and I saw a man standing by the levers, looking up at us with an amazed and horrified look on his face.

The other train blew by us and continued east, rocking the cabin of the high-rail like a hundred fully loaded eighteen-wheelers, its own horns drowning out ours in an instant. All I could see in the side mirror were the flashing sides of the freight
cars as they shifted onto the track where we’d just been only seconds ago.

The driver gave one last blast of the air horns. “Hell yeah, just like draggin’ ’em down in Douglas.” He turned to look at us. “We used to play chicken down there after they closed the drag strip.”

Lucian turned and looked at me as I glanced at the driver. “How many more switches?”

“Two.”

Lucian muttered, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“Nah, the others will see Bruce pulled his switch late, and they’ll figure something is up. They wouldn’t send another train through on this line anyway, so we’re good.”

The rhythmical thumping of the rail joints continued to sound like a mechanical second hand, and all I could think of was a woman lying at the bottom of a coal car with the jarring off-and-on progression of two hundred tons of the stuff thundering into each container growing louder and louder.

“Can you climb out of one of those cars?” The driver lit another cigarette, clamped it between his teeth, and offered the pack to us. “No, thanks, even though the conditions have me thinking about taking it up.”

He nodded and stuffed the cigarettes back in his shirt. “No way, the sides are smooth and close to twelve feet tall—I suppose if you were some kind of pro basketball player, maybe.”

I remembered Rowan saying that he kept the women drugged—there was no way Jone Urrecha was getting out of that coal car without help. “How much farther?”

Fry checked his odometer. “About a mile and a half.”

“When we get close, are you going to be able to stop this thing?”

“On a mercury dime, my friend.”

I peered into the distance, the swirling clouds of snow worse with the passing freight that still roared and clanked only a few feet away. “I think you’re enjoying this more than we are.”

Fry nodded and pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “I rarely get to chase a train down with my truck and save a fair damsel in distress.”

Lucian mumbled as he looked at me. “You would have to flag down the craziest bastard that works for the entire Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.”

I ignored him and watched the distance ahead, finally spotting a couple of lights, strangely enough, arranged almost as if in a cross. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“It looks big.”

“Well, it’s a train . . .”

My eyes widened as I realized, for the first time, that the back of this train was being pushed by a locomotive. My hands crept out to the dash, as did Lucian’s. “Is that an engine?”

He squinted his eyes and took the cigarette from his mouth again, and I was pretty sure he was judging time by how fast he was smoking it. “Don’t worry about it, it’s a couple of pushers they’ve got in the back.”

The lights of the coal train were impressive and enough to let the driver know to hit his brakes as the string lights of the coal mine’s delivery system lit up the sky like Russian Christmas. “How are we going to gauge our gapping distance?”

“You said it runs about three miles an hour; doesn’t the last car have a ladder on it?”

He tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth like the bolt action on a rifle. “Yeah, but do you know how fast three
miles an hour is when you’re out there slipping and sliding around on the ice and snow beside a moving train?”

I stared at the multiple lights. “How close can you get?”

He glanced at me and then at the train ahead, consistently applying pressure on the brakes. “I told you, I can put you nose to nose.”

I began rolling down the window with the manual crank. “Do it.”

Lucian looked at me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I pulled the Colt Walker and rested it on the dash. “The hood of this truck gives me a six-foot height advantage; all I’ve got to do is make it from the front of this thing onto the observation platform of that locomotive.”

He shook his head. “Have you lost your mind?”

I unbuckled my safety belt and nudged over to the door as Fry slowed, judging the distance between us and the back of the train. “I’m open to suggestions.”

The train continued its crawl forward. The driver turned to look at me. “You see what we’re up against?”

“I do.” I took a deep breath. “From here to the loader, how many cars would you say we’ve got?”

He studied the distance. “Less than twenty, probably sixteen at best.”

There still wasn’t much wind, but the patterns of the few falling snowflakes were disorienting to say the least. I gripped the headache bar that protected the top of the cab and rested my rear near the windowsill. I started to reach out and pull myself up when I heard the crashing noise of the coal being loaded—one minute between loads.

That was a fast sixty seconds.

I waited until the driver roared forward and positioned himself right behind the train, almost to the point where I was sure we were going to run into it. Bracing my hand, I slipped a boot up onto the seat and could feel the strongest grip in Absaroka County latch on to my leg to make sure I didn’t slip.

Lucian let go, and I pulled my other leg after and lodged my boot on the windowsill, pushed off and landed with my chest on the headache rack; then I grabbed hold of the spare tire that was mounted there with both hands, ignoring the numbness in my arm.

Lucian called out from the cab. “You all right?”

Standing on the sill, I edged forward, glancing down at the slick, white hood of the one-ton truck. “Yep.” The clanking cacophony continued again, and the train surged forward with another tremendous crashing noise.

Another load. Another minute.