Madsen sat in a corner of the sofa, squinting at Bill, a full snifter clutched in his lap. “Maybe he was tired.”

The prosecutor climbed the hotel stairs, his right hand dragging along the bannister. Bill could hear the slow crump of his shoes in the carpet. My brother smirked at Madsen and shouted, “How can you fellas sleep at night with those Daltons running around loose?”

In the coach of the Santa Fe train, men with rifles sat next to a boy curled up in the wooden seat, a woman resting her brow on three fingers, and a man rattling a newspaper open and reading through bifocals under the light. A white conductor in a blue suit walked down the aisle touching all the seat backs. “Red Rock, the next stop. Red Rock.” Then the men stood up and sidled out to the aisle and followed each other to the smoker. The front man knocked just once and the smoker door wrenched open. It was black as a movie theater inside.

A railroad detective slammed the door shut behind them. “How’s it look?”

“Normal,” the first man said.

“There’s empty places in front.”

They ducked low and scuttled forward past windows where men with shotguns were scrunched down, picking shotgun shells out of boxes or squashing cigarettes out.

The railroad detective went out the front door onto the grated platform and hopped onto the green express car’s carriage. He thumped the door with his elbow as he held onto the ladder.

When the back door was opened a slide of light bent to the cinder roadbed and the weeds. He stepped in and the door was kicked shut behind him. Three men in suits sat on chairs with shotguns held like pole lamps; a man in a gray fedora sat on an empty safe idly kicking it with his shoe heels. A man in suspenders and arm bands was loading a rifle next to the wooden mail slots; the messenger was braced against the side door, a pistol hanging from his hand. The man on the safe took his fedora off and tossed it onto some mail sacks. “How’d you know about this?”

The railroad detective said, “One of our operatives. Madsen put him to work in the area.”

(Eugenia Moore had gone to the Red Rock railroad station in a pink flounced dress and talked to a boy who wrote shorthand whenever the telegraph signaled. When he next worked the graveyard shift, she had allowed him to take her into a broom closet and she showed him how the French kiss and she asked him questions about trains and money shipments, and when he answered she pushed his hand under her blouse.

Two or three minutes after she left, a man in a black suit and bowler walked in throwing his badged wallet down on the boy’s desk. “I hope it was pretty good.”)