"Oh, hell," Melvis said, shutting off his pager and seeking out a pay phone.
His supervisor was direct. "Got another one for you, Cupper."
Melvis groaned. "Where is it this time?"
"Essex, Maryland. Colonial slammed into a wrong-way Conrail diesel."
"Hell, Sam. You soused?"
"You're the one slurring his s's, Mel."
"I may be drunk as a boiled owl, but even I can remember through the haze that Essex, Maryland, was the site of that hellacious wreck back in '87. Colonial plowed into a Conrail humper then, too. Conrail hogger was on drugs."
"You always say that."
"That time it was true. He ran a signal he shouldn't, confessed and got his ass suspended for life."
"Damn. I remember it now. You're right. That's downright weird."
"Weird or not, I'm on my dang way," said Melvis, hanging up. It took him six tries. He kept missing the switch hook.
"Damn Jap phone," he muttered, handing the receiver to a bewildered child.
AN NTSB HELICOPTER was waiting for Melvis at the Baltimore-Washington international airport. He was on-site thirty minutes later.
"Don't tell me that's one of them new Genesis II engines," he moaned as the chopper was settling.
"What's that?" the pilot asked.
"Never dang mind," Melvis said, slapping on his Stetson and ducking out of the winding aircraft.
The on-site Amtrak director of operations shook his hand and said, "We're still processing bodies here."
Melvis said, "I aim to stay outta your way. Just want to get a preliminary gander at the point of impact."
The man pointed the way and rushed off.
Melvis walked down, picking his way carefully. He almost tripped over the bottom half of a leg that lay in his path. It was naked except for an argyle sock with a hole big enough to allow one cold toe to poke out.
"That boy shoulda listened to his mama about keeping up his socks," Melvis muttered, clapping his Stetson over his big chest out of respect for the dead and dismembered, which were plentiful.
The train cars had performed every acrobatic stunt from flying sideways to gouging their wheels into trackside ballast, Melvis saw as he passed the mangled mess.
The compacted engines were as bad as in Nebraska. The monocoque body of the Genesis had gotten the worst of the deal. There was a joke in the industry that the Genesis looked like the box the real locomotive had come in. Now it looked like the box thrown out after Christmas Day.
The Conrail freight engine was an SD50 diesel. By some freak it had bounced back from the point of impact.
Melvis decided he should check out the Conrail cab, in case he had another inconvenient headless engineer on his hands.
Climbing up the tangle of blue steel that had been the access ladder, he heard voices, paused and muttered, "Naw. Couldn't be."
A wrinkled ivory face peered out at him through the shattered glass of the gaping nose door. "You are too late," said Chiun.
"Hidy, old-timer," Melvis said with more enthusiasm than he actually felt. "Hell of a way to run a railroad, don't you think?"
Chiun withdrew so Melvis could step in. Remo was there with him, looking unhappy-which seemed to be his natural condition.
"You boys are sure tramplin' up my patch."
"We got here first," Remo remarked.
"You did, at that. What you find-anything?"
"No engineer. No blood."
"So I see," said Melvis. "Well, let me show you how we do things at the NTSB. Follow me down into the necessary."
Melvis led them down into the toilet compartment, where he lifted the seat and sniffed expertly. "Crapper here ain't been used recently," he pronounced. "Not in at least two hours."
Returning to the console, Melvis checked the controls. What he saw bothered the fool out of him.
"Damn controls are set for highballin'. The engineer would have had to jump clear to escape. But if he had, he would surely have splattered his dumb ass all over the trackage. Guess we walk the dang tracks," he said.
"You sniff a toilet and look over some dials and that's your conclusion?" said Remo.
"That," said Melvis, "is why I get the buck buckaroos. C'mon."
They walked the track. A mile, two, then three.
"I see no body," Chiun sniffed.
"This is powerful strange," Melvis admitted.
"Why's that?" asked Remo.
"Why's that, you say? Those freight controls have an interrupter on them. If the engineer doesn't respond to a beep every forty-five seconds by resettin' a switch, the air brakes will clamp down and stop her cold. Fifty seconds at an estimated eighty miles per means if he didn't jump clear by this point, he didn't jump clear. Period."
"Maybe it was radio controlled," Remo said.
"It's possible. Controls were set. But you're single-footin' down a trail I don't care to follow-if you take my meanin'. "
"We are doing this incorrectly," said Chiun.
"How's that, old-timer?"
"We are looking for a dead engineer when we should be looking for a live Japanese."