Croggon Hainey slipped his unarmed hand down to the knob, and with two swift motions side by side, he flipped the lock and whipped the door open—then pointed the Colt at approximate head-height, in order to properly reprimand whoever was standing there.
“What do you want?” he almost hollered, his voice rough with sleep, but his gun-hand steady as a book on a table. He dropped the weapon to the actual head-height of the prowler, who was somewhat shorter than expected.
The prowler quivered and cringed. He threw his arms up above his head and curled his body in upon itself as he tried to melt into the striped wallpaper behind him. “Sir!” he said in a whisper loud enough to be heard in Jefferson City. “Sir, I didn’t…sir…Barebones sent me, sir!”
This revelation in no way assured the captain that it was safe or appropriate to lower his weapon, so he didn’t. He eyed the intruder and saw precious little to worry him, but that didn’t set him at ease, either.
The speaker was a skinny mulatto, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. He was wearing the food-stained apron of a kitchen hand tied around his waist, and a faded blue shirt tucked into brown pants. When he put his arms down enough to see over his own elbow, the boy asked, “Sir? Are you the captain? You must be the captain, ain’t you?”
“I’m a captain, and I know Barebones, so maybe I’m the man you’re looking for.” He backed into his room without inviting the boy to follow him. Without taking his eyes or his gun off the kid in the doorway, he used one hand to light a lamp and pick it up.
“I’ve got a message for you, sir.”
“Is that why you were trying to let yourself inside my room?”
“Only because I didn’t know which one was yours, sir. The lady downstairs said you’d taken two. Sir, I have a message for you. Here.” He held out a folded piece of paper.
“Set it down.”
The boy bent his knees until he was down at a crouch. He dropped the note.
“Now get out of here before I fill you full of holes, you idiot kid!” Hainey almost roared. The messenger was down the hall, down the stairs, and probably out into the street by the time the captain picked up the note and shut the door again, locking himself inside with even greater care than he’d taken before he’d gone to bed.
The weight of his weariness settled down on his shoulders as soon as the door was closed and he felt somewhat safe again; but the lantern’s butter-yellow light made his eyes water and the note was brittle in his hand as he opened it. The message was composed in the flowery hand of a man who clearly enjoyed the look of his own penmanship.
Incoming to Jefferson City in another few hours—a Pinkerton operative sent from Chicago. Whoever stole your ship has friends in high places with very deep pockets. Borrow a new ship and get out of town by the afternoon if you know what’s good for you. If Pinkerton’s paid to be involv-ed, someone has big plans for your bird. Watch where you’re going, but watch your back, too. You’re being tracked.
Hainey crumpled the note in his fist and crushed it there, squeezing with enough rage to make a diamond. He composed himself and sat on the edge of the bed. He held the note over the lantern’s flame and let it evaporate into ash between his fingers, then he set the lantern aside and dropped himself back onto the bed. The lantern stayed lit, because if he’d blown it out, he might’ve fallen back asleep.
He needed to think.
Jefferson City wasn’t more than a hop, skip, and a jump from Kansas City, though Barebones was right—he probably had until the following afternoon before he ought to get too worried. But Pinkerton? The detective agency? The captain had heard stories, and he didn’t like any of them. The Pinks were strike-breakers, riot-saboteurs, and well organized thugs of the expensive sort. Like Barebones’ note had suggested, they had pockets deep enough to pay for loyalty or information from anybody who was selling it. Down south of the Mason-Dixon, they weren’t so well known. But in the north and west, the Pinks were their own secret society.
To the best of Hainey’s knowledge, no one had ever called the Pinks on him before—despite his less-than-legitimate business enterprises, his occasional bank robbery, or his intermittent piracy. It made things sticky, and even stranger than they already were.
Why would anyone steal the Free Crow in the first place?
Anyone with the resources to invoke the Pinks ought to be able to afford their own damn war bird.
He fumed on this matter for another five minutes before leaning over and stifling the lamp, dropping the austere room into darkness once more. In half an hour he was asleep again, and before long the light of morning was high enough to make him semi-alert and terribly grouchy.
A loud knock on the door didn’t do much to improve his state of mind; but Simeon’s pot of coffee and Lamar’s covered plate of breakfast fixings shook off the last sour feelings of insufficient sleep. He invited the men into the room, helped himself to the coffee (a quarter a cup, or a dollar for the whole carafe) and to the breakfast (a dollar a plate, and his men had already eaten theirs).
As he sat on the edge of the bed and made short work of the offerings, he told them about the note and the warning.
Lamar twisted his mouth into a frown and said, “That don’t make any sense. Who would hire the Pinks to come after us?”
“I don’t know,” Hainey said around a mouthful of eggs. “It’s bothering me too. God knows we didn’t hire ’em, and who on earth gives a good goddamn if the Free Crow gets stolen, except for us?”
Simeon shrugged and said, “Nobody, except whoever stole it.”
The captain pointed his fork at the first mate and said, “Exactly. That’s all I can figure, anyway. Except at first, I was bothered because of the money. It costs money to hire the Pinks and get them to act as your enforcers. You’d think that people with money could just buy or build their own aircraft; but then I got thinking.”
“Uh oh,” Simeon grinned.
“What I got thinking is this: The Free Crow was the strongest bird of her kind in the northwest territories—or at least, she’s the toughest engine anywhere close to Seattle. And I don’t think I flatter myself too much when I say that nobody in his right mind would swipe that ship out from under me for no good reason at all; so all I can figure is, this must’ve been a crime of opportunity. Somebody out west needed that ship to perform a specific task.”
“What kind of task?” Simeon asked, tipping half a cup of coffee into a tin and taking a sip.
Lamar answered thoughtfully, before the captain could reply. “Something heavy. Someone needed our bird to move something really, really heavy from northwest to southeast.”
Hainey set the fork down on the edge of his plate, and Simeon froze with his cup at the edge of his lips in order to ask, “How’d you come to that conclusion?”
The engineer said, “Ain’t you seen her flying? She’s weighed down with something, and weighed down bad. Otherwise, we could’ve never stayed as close behind her as we’ve been doing so far. She ought to have outpaced that nameless bird by a week, but she’s never got more than half a day on us. And when she moves, she looks like she’s carrying so much cargo that she can’t hardly lift herself up.”
Hainey took one more bite and chewed it slow, before saying, “Which means she picked up something in Seattle, because she didn’t have anything but a few crates of guns when we lost her. All right, it’s coming together now. So Felton Brink, may he rot in hell, he takes the Free Crow because he has something heavy he needs to move—and ours is the only engine tough enough to carry it.”
“And whatever it is,” Simeon concluded, “it’s important enough for somebody to put the Pinks on our tail in order to keep us from taking it back. But who? Where’s Brink taking our bird?”
Lamar’s frown deepened. “The Pinks do a lot of work for the military, don’t they? The Union uses them to shut down draft riots, and move money around. I’ve read about it, here and there.”
Simeon said, “So the Union could sure as hell afford to pay the Pinks.”
“But that doesn’t mean they’re behind this,” Hainey was quick to say. “They might be, sure. It might be worth our time to ask around, if we can. But we’ll have to balance our time real careful. If we’re going to stay on the Free Crow’s trail, we need to get ourselves together, swipe that Union bird, and get back in the air.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” the first mate declared. He down-ed the last of his coffee and left the tin cup sitting on the basin.
Hainey stood up and pulled a shirt over his undershirt, then reached for his sharp blue coat. “Let’s see about the horses and that rotten coach, and head out to the service yards. We don’t have all day before the Pinkerton op finds his way into town, and I’d like to be gone before he gets here.”
They left the High Horse by nine o’clock and took their secondhand coach down near the service yards, where they paid a Chinaman named Ling Lu to hold it and keep the horses behind his laundry. Another hundred dollars, spread around judiciously, revealed the general location of the Valkyrie and the name of a Pinkerton informant who had been known to let information flow in more than one direction.
Hainey sent Lamar ahead to the ship, with a forged document that declared him a free citizen and a Union veteran. He also included a letter of recommendation, composed as a fictional white man who managed a shipping yard in Chattanooga, declaring that Lamar was handy with tools and rich with integrity. Lamar was, in fact, handy with tools and absolutely faithful to his captain; and Hainey trusted that the engineer would learn what needed to be learned in order to fly the craft.
Meanwhile, he took Simeon back to the red quarters at the yard’s edge—where the saloons and billiards were cheap and easy, and the dance hall girls were either far older or far younger than they really ought to be. It wasn’t a pretty place, and it smelled like a cross between a coyote den and a leaky still. But in the right corners, hiding in the right shadows, information could be bought and sold as easily as a newspaper—even by a dark-skinned man with a terrible scar, and a foreigner with an accent that no one in Kansas City could place.