Chapter 9: The Yard Office

The railroad kept its Crack dead in a refrigerated boxcar on Track Six, and had since 2019.

Reiss and I stood in the ballast at nine on Wednesday morning.

The Cicero yard stretched away on both sides, forty tracks of tank cars and empty hoppers.

The yardmaster who met us wore a hard hat and a union pin, and his eyes were red.

"Courier was supposed to take him Tuesday," he said. "The gang wouldn't let it on the property."

"Why not?" Reiss asked.

"Because Tuesday's too soon to burn a man, Inspector. You people did the Honore Street thing, and we got to wondering."

He unlocked the reefer door with a key on a chain.

The switchman lay on a plank in the cold with a work jacket folded under his head.

He was forty-four.

He had died on Monday at ten minutes to five in the morning, with a yellow tag already wired to his boot.

I counted the hours.

His Crack had opened at 3:20, and the hook, if it had been a hook, had found him an hour and a half later.

"I need to go back to ten to three," I said to Reiss. "Two hours."

"Two? You said an hour."

"I've got a new number. It costs me another one in my head, and eleven more minutes."

He put a hand on the doorframe, close to mine, and did not take it away.

"I'll be outside," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

I took my glove off and laid my palm on the dead man's wrist.

[Reach: two hours. Carried: 4 hours. Capacity: 12.]

Then I was a railroad man at ten minutes to three, in a hard hat with a lantern, walking down Track Nine.

He stopped to text his daughter a photograph of the moon over the hoppers, and she answered at once with a heart.

The yard had its own hum box, a coil on a pole, and it began its horn at 3:18.

"Gang up!" someone yelled, and nine men came out of the shanty with rifles and flare guns.

A Crack in a rail yard means tank cars.

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