For a brief moment she considered calling the creepy account executive with the small eyes and big feet from Parsippany and telling her to stay away from her dad.

  Maybe another trip.

  Now she had a job to do. Maybe she didn’t need to wait until tomorrow morning.

  She knew the odds of being a Throwback were slim.

  But it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  30

  Riding a horse was hard enough, but it was worse with a broomstick in your right hand and a seven-ton rope weighing your left shoulder down. “Do I have to carry this thing?” Corey grumbled.

  “I got a great price—who’da thought? New York City?” Quinn said with a laugh. “You’ll thank me for this when I teach you some roping. You need to know these skills. They’ll come in handy someday.”

  “I’m sure,” Corey grunted. As they rode from the horse shed to the train terminus, he was feeling pain in muscles he didn’t know he possessed. Being a West Side cowboy was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

  At least he and Quinn had both caught a good long nap. During the day, the Better Ridgefield hadn’t seemed so creepy. And Quinn was a lot less nervous now that she’d confided her big secret to Corey. “Hey, there she is—she’s a beauty,” Quinn said, gesturing toward a locomotive that faced north. She cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted, “Well, howdy there, Mr. Conductor!”

  “Do you always have to be so cheerful?” Corey grumbled.

  There were two men in the cab of the locomotive, a younger guy busily shoveling coal into a chute, and a silver-haired older guy with his hand on a lever. As Corey and Quinn approached the train, the older man leaned out his window on a deeply tanned elbow. His face was cragged and angular, his eyelids at half-mast, as if they had lost their will to stay open. He let loose a jet of brownish-black spit into a wooden bucket just a few feet from where Paisley now stood. The horse shied and backed away.

  “Guess the old nag doesn’t like surprises,” the man said. He looked Corey and Quinn up and down and raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. Two of youse, huh?”

  “We work well as a pair, sir,” Quinn explained. “I do the rope work, he clears with the precision lance. Complementary skills.”

  “If you’re looking for compliments, this ain’t the right place.” Chhhhppwwtt! Another bull’s-eye, right into the bucket. This guy was an Olympic-class spitter. “How old ya say you are?”

  “Thirt—seventeen,” Corey said.

  “Eighteen,” Quinn added.

  “Yeah? So how come your voices ain’t changed yet?” Chhhhppwwtt! “I know why. It’s the food youse kids eat these days. Tell ya what I’ll do—but only if you play yer cards right. Once we get past Gansevoort, I’ll flip youse a little hunka somethin’ that’ll put hair on your chests. Maybe some pork loin. Or a slab of chuck.”

  “Thanks?” Corey said dubiously.

  The guy’s face twisted into a smile slowly, as if he wasn’t used to doing it. “Don’t let nobody say Mugsy Coleman ain’t a genuous soul.”

  “What’s ‘playing our cards right’?” Quinn asked.

  “Two words,” Mugsy replied. “Clear. Them. Tracks. The last kid on the job, he got too confident, too far ahead. So some wino wanders on the track behind him and heads to the train like he wants to kiss it. I slam on the brakes. Now, we go pretty slow, but it takes a lot of time to stop this monster. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, they have to cart the bum away in three bags. Plus I derail. Got me?”

  “Got you,” Corey replied. “But that was three words, not two.”

  “What?” Mugsy said.

  “‘Clear them tracks,’” Corey replied. “Three words. Another thing? It’s either genuine or generous. There’s no such word as genuous.”

  “’Zat so?”

  Chhhhppwwtt!

  That one landed outside the bucket, an inch from Paisley’s hoof. The horse shied, jerking its neck back and nearly unseating Corey. Quinn reached out to steady Paisley’s reins. “Don’t be so smart,” she whispered to Corey.

  “Yer friend is making good sense,” Mugsy said. “Time to work.”

  The train let out two small toots. Corey and Quinn both spurred their horses onward, heading uptown. For the first time, Corey looked upward into the skyline and really examined it. The city’s profile was dense and low-slung. All the markers Corey was used to—the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the glass towers along the river—were gone. The stone and brick buildings along Eleventh Avenue had orderly windowed surfaces like crossword puzzles, and in the setting sun those windows blazed fiery orange.

  Corey rode to the right of the tracks, the city side. He tried to use a modified standing position, which eased the pain. Paisley liked to veer toward the buildings, but Corey kept pulling the reins. Riding Thunder, Quinn took the left side of the tracks, closer to the river. “Looking good, Corey,” Quinn cried out. “You’re a natural!”

  “Th-th-thanks,” Corey said through clenched teeth as he bounced in the saddle. “Can’t wait to use . . . my precision lance. . . .”

  Quinn laughed. “It sounded better than broom handle.”

  “I don’t know . . . how long I can . . . do this. . . .”

  “Think about that nice fat five dollars,” Quinn said. “That oughtta get your energy back!”

  “Where I come from . . . five bucks would get . . . an energy bar . . . ,” Corey said.

  Behind them, the train let out a horn blast so loud and deep that Corey could feel it in his spine. Paisley reared with a startled neigh. Letting go of the reins, Corey slid down the saddle.

  With a yell, he landed in the dirt.

  “Get back on!” Quinn screamed. “Just get back on!”

  Corey scrambled to his feet, stepped into the stirrup, and nearly overshot the horse. As he settled into the saddle again, his heart was drumming. “I thought you said you could pick horses!”

  “I can. I didn’t know Paisley was like this.” Quinn was looking over her shoulder, her face lined with disgust. “But I’ll bet they knew, the bums.”

  Still shaking, Corey turned. Through the soot-stained window of the locomotive, he could see Mugsy Coleman and his assistant cracking up with laughter. “They did that on purpose?” Corey said. “That was a joke?”

  “Next time,” Quinn murmured, “let him say genuous.”

  Corey chased away three chickens and a highly offended rooster. He poked away a tree branch and an empty bottle.

  Quinn lassoed a garbage can, a broken chair, and an old, sleeping dog.

  With every little success, Mugsy tooted the horn softly to celebrate. Paisley flinched each time, but Corey held tight.

  “Hey, people in the future don’t dump their trash like this, do they?” Quinn asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Corey replied. He squinted at the track ahead. As the sun sank below the horizon, colors began to wash out to shades of gray. It was hard to tell shadows from real objects. Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and rats darted across the tracks in search of food.

  “Feeding time for the critters,” Quinn remarked as a fat old rabbit lumbered toward the river. “Ever had one of them?”

  “Had, as in tasted?” Corey said. “No.”

  “Tastes just like chicken.”

  “Which is why we eat chicken and not bunny rabbits.” Before the words could leave Corey’s mouth, Quinn unhooked the rope from her shoulder and twirled it over her head. “Well, it’s the wrong size rope for this, but I’m seeing some free supper!”

  “No, Quinn,” Corey said. “Don’t—”

  The rope hurtled through the air. It landed on the startled rabbit, who hopped straight upward in surprise. But the rope was a little thick for the body of a small animal. The rabbit slipped through and began hopping away, down the street toward the river.

  Whooping and laughing, Quinn spurred Thunder on and gave chase. They disappeared around a factory building en route to the waterfront. The train horn blasted again, and again Paisley shied. From behind him, Corey could hear Mugsy shouting angrily but couldn’t make out the words.

  Enough. This was not what Corey had bargained for. His body felt like it was going to split in two, his companion was off on a wild rabbit chase, and Mugsy was getting his kicks out of scaring a horse. This was not why he’d traveled into the past. None of this was getting him a step closer to going home.

  “Quinn!” he shouted. “Will you get back here—I can’t do this alone!”

  As Paisley veered away from the track, Corey could hear the screech of the train’s brakes. Mugsy’s assistant was leaning out the window, his eyes bugged out, his arm pointing at something up the track.

  “MAN AHEAD!”

  This time Corey heard the words clearly. He spun in the saddle. To the right, about fifty yards ahead, a gate in the protective fence had been left open. A guy in gray baggy clothes was stumbling toward the tracks, past a tall cement shed. His toes jutted from his shoes, his hair was like a nest of loose wires, and he was having a lively conversation with a small bottle he held in his right hand.

  Corey shouted at him, but he was too far away. As the man reached the track, his toes caught on the rail. He stared down for a moment, teetering. Then he dropped facedown into the path of the train.

  31

  Mugsy blasted the horn again, long and loud. Paisley recoiled, but Corey held tight.

  In a split second, Corey’s brain made a calculation. The train was massive. Its brakes were 1917 caliber. There was no way it would stop before making contact. But it was pretty far behind and going slow.

  He gave Paisley a kick with both heels. “Get him!”

  Paisley let out a snort, then quickly accelerated to a gallop. Corey clutched the reins. The fallen guy was lying on the track in a fetal position. His face was angled toward them, eyes shut tight. He was huge, at least two hundred pounds—too heavy and too unconscious to move with a broom handle.

  As the horse pulled alongside the body, Corey jumped off. Running to the man’s side, he fell to his knees and grabbed his shoulders. “Wake up!”

  Useless. The guy was dead weight.

  “QUI-I-I-INNN!” Corey shouted, but his friend was behind the buildings that faced the river.

  The train’s brakes were screaming, and those screams were getting closer. Corey’s nostrils filled with the sickly, acrid stink of burning metal. In his peripheral vision he saw the front of the locomotive looming slowly closer in a cloud of dust and smoke. He tried to pull the man away, but it was like lifting a hippo. The heavy rope fell from Corey’s shoulder, landing on the guy’s face, but even that didn’t rouse him.

  The rope.

  Working as fast as he could, Corey lifted one end, tied it around the man’s chest under his arms, and cinched the loop with a quick double knot. Pulling it tight, he held on to the other end of the rope, jumped to his feet, and ran to Paisley, who was shifting anxiously from hoof to hoof.

  “Sorry about this, buddy,” he said, wrapping his end of the rope tightly around Paisley’s neck. “I think you’re strong enough for this, right?”

  Mounting the horse, he turned. The train was maybe twenty yards from the guy and gaining. Mugsy and his assistant were both staring at Corey as if he’d lost his mind. Corey pantomimed pulling an overhead rope. “BLOW THE HORN!” he shouted.

  Mugsy got it right away and reached upward. The sound echoed off the walls of the buildings. Paisley whinnied and rose on his hind legs.

  HO-O-O-O-ONNNNK!

  “Go!” Corey shouted, kicking the horse’s flank. “Run away! The train is coming for us!”

  Paisley lunged forward. The rope went taut. The horse’s body angled to the left with the added weight.

  It took a few stuttering steps to build up speed. Corey’s eyes were fixed on the track. The train was just a few feet away from the old guy and closing steadily. But his limp body was moving now, dragged by the rope, sliding over the rail and onto the gravel track bed. The head was clear . . . the shoulders . . .

  A crowd had begun to form, mostly people in ragged clothes emerging from darkened doorways. A chorus of gasps and screams resounded, mixing with the continued screech of the train’s brakes. Corey had to turn away. The clamor rose to a deafening pitch. A deep groan of shifting metal echoed against the buildings.

  And then, a dull thump.

  The horn, the brakes, and the cheers were all sucked away into an absence of sound. All Corey heard now was Paisley’s hooves, clopping dutifully forward. He felt nauseated. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see exactly what the horse was pulling. Or what it wasn’t.

  Gathering up his strength, Corey turned toward the track.

  The first thing he saw was Mugsy’s face in the window of the halted locomotive, ashen with shock.

  Through a break in the crowd, Corey could see something on the ground. Something brown and wriggling.

  “Gaaaahhhh! I apologize! Let me go! Sweet mother of life, let me go!”

  Head, torso, two arms, two legs.

  The man was there, all of him, fighting against the rope, trying to get loose. “Whoa, Paisley, whoa!” Corey shouted, pulling back on the reins.

  The horse came to a halt. Corey jumped off and began running along the length of the rope. He pushed his way through the gawkers until he finally reached the bewildered old guy. The man was sitting up now, his cheeks bleeding and his eyes glassy. “What’d I do?” he cried.

  Corey found the knot and quickly wrenched the rope free. “I can’t believe this worked. I—I don’t know what I’m doing. You are so lucky.”

  “Worked? What happened to me?”

  “You fell onto the tracks when the train was coming,” Corey explained.

  Through the locomotive window, Mugsy was shaking an angry fist and shouting. As the old man took in the scene, he murmured to himself and looked at Corey in amazement. “You—you’re one of the cowboys,” he said. “You saved me from . . . that?”

  “I—I guess I did,” Corey said.

  The man wrapped his arms around Corey and began to sob. He reeked of alcohol and a body that probably hadn’t showered in recent memory, but Corey didn’t fight him. Laughter and “awwww”s sprang up around them. Corey felt people clapping his back. Someone began to applaud, and in a moment, the entire crowd joined in.

  The man let go of Corey. His face was red, mottled, and teary, but he radiated gratitude. “Do I know you?” he said.

  “No. I’m Corey Fletcher. From the Upper West Side.”

  “Oscar Schein. Bless you. Bless you, my boy!”

  “Any time,” Corey said.

  “No offense, but I hope we never meet again,” Oscar said with a slow, impish smile. “At least not under these circumstances.”

  The old man broke into a wheezing laugh, and people in the crowd joined in. Corey felt bombarded by backslappers. Through the din he heard the clopping of hooves, and a familiar voice calling his name. Quinn was crossing the tracks on Thunder. Her face was bone white until she caught a glimpse of Corey. Jumping off the horse, she ran toward him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, he’s all right,” Oscar said. “He saved my life.”

  “I am so sorry I wasn’t there!” Quinn said, her face lined with tears. “I—wait. You lassoed that guy?”

  “It’s a long story,” Corey said with a laugh.

  HO-O-O-O-ONNNNK! came the impatient sound of the train’s horn.

  “Mugsy thinks the story’s already too long,” Quinn said. “We’d better go. Give me the details later.”

  “Wait!” Oscar was moving his massive body, heaving himself to his feet. Eyeing Corey closely, he nodded. “Yeah, I do know you. You were the kid asleep in the Gash. The one Ratboy rolled.”

  “Someone named Ratboy took my stuff?” Corey said.

  “What does he look like?” Quinn asked. “Besides a rat?”

  “Nasty little guy, scrawny mustache, buckteeth, squeaks when he talks,” Oscar replied. “Always bragging. Likes to steal from the trains and the barges. Most guys pawn their loot. This one’s different. Cuts out the middleman and sells it himself. Makes a hundred, two hundred percent profit. Smarter than he looks, I think. Says he wants to set up a business buying and selling goods from overseas. Good luck with that, the lowlife. Anyways, I seen him in Grumney’s just last night, on Washington and Bank. Tried to buy drinks for the house, but the bartender wouldn’t take his money, told him it was fake.”

  “Wait. Why did he think it was fake?” Corey asked.

  “All’s I know,” Oscar said, “is that Fritz the bartender, he keeps pointing to the bill and shouting ‘Unmöglich!’ Which is German for ‘impossible.’”

  Quinn and Corey exchanged a glance. Impossible could mean a lot of things. Like, the dates on the bills were from the future maybe. Which would make them seem counterfeit to a bartender in 1917. “Listen, I need to see this guy,” Corey said.

  “Ohhhh, you don’t want to mix with Ratboy,” Oscar replied. “’Cause the nickname don’t just come from the way he looks but also from what’s in his soul. I ain’t got no trouble with him personally. But he eats his enemies, if you catch my drift.”

  Corey swallowed. “I’ll take the risk.”

  “You’re a kid.”

  “There are two of us,” Corey pointed out.

  “Well, you’re crazy,” Oscar said, “but he’s at Grumney’s every night at eleven on the dot. And there’s an abandoned lot next door. I can get him in there, but then I leave him to you. And you better have a plan.”

  Quinn gave Corey a look. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You can just stay here. It’ll be fun. Exciting.”

  “You visiting from somewhere else?” Oscar asked. “I thought you said you were from the Upper West Side.”

  “I—” Corey didn’t know what to say. Not to Oscar about time travel. Not to Quinn about the exact nature of the artifacts that would take him back.

  He took a deep breath. Quinn’s words echoed in his brain. You can just stay here. The idea was crazy. He couldn’t take it seriously.

 

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