Ed Gorman - Showdown

"I see. A point well taken, my friend. But in such a heinous matter—I will be most cooperative in any way you suggest. And if these two should end up in my jail, I can assure you they will rot there."

Neville spoke for the first time. "We'll take them back with us to Claybank."

"Of course, whatever you wish. Cooperation is what I promised you, and cooperation is what you shall have."

Prine said, "We're pretty tired, but we're going to start looking for them right away. Then we'll get some sleep and some grub."

"Your poor sister," Valdez said. "She was young, Mr. Neville?"

"Twenty-three."

"A child—an innocent flower. These men will pay for what they've done, believe me."

"Thank you, Marshal," Neville said. "Now we need to get going."

Prine and Neville pushed up from their chairs. The brandy had made Prine groggy. He needed cold wind to cut his lethargy.

A man in a white apron over Levi's and a red wool shirt walked past the door, nodding. "Good morning, Marshal. This food is much better than they deserve."

It stood to reason that since everything else was so splendid about Marshal Valdez, his laugh would be splendid, too. On stage, it would carry well to all the highest seats in the balcony. Valdez the opera star.

"You say that every morning, Mr. Wiley."

"I say it because it's that good every morning."

Prine had the feeling that the banter was part of an entire ritual. A really boring one.

Wiley vanished. Prine heard the heavy door leading to the cells in back being opened and then closed. There would likely be a slot for food trays built into the cell doors.

"Remember, my friends, I will take every opportunity to help you."

Prine glanced at Neville. Neville looked as weary of this splendiferous speech as Prine was.

Prine thought they'd walk themselves to the front door. But Valdez couldn't just let them go, could he? What kind of host would he be?

"This is a lovely town, this Picaro," he said, escorting them up front. "I hope you have time to enjoy the cultural activities."

Whorehouses, gambling pits, maybe a hoedown or two. Those would be the cultural activities, Prine reasoned. Valdez here could make a good living writing brochures for tourists. With his grandiose manner of speech, he could make a pigsty sound like a Bavarian castle.

Then, at last, they were outside and Valdez was closing the door behind them.

"That guy's as full of shit as a Christmas turkey," Neville said.

"You trust him?"

"Do you?"

"Fuck no," Prine said.

"He's angling for something, but I'm not sure what."

"Money. I'm just trying to figure out how he's going to get it out of us."

"You think he knows where they are?"

"Probably. But there isn't anything we can do about it. He's got jurisdiction here. He's paying me the courtesy of asking around for Tolan and Rooney. But he doesn't even have to do that if he doesn't want to."

"Your badge doesn't travel?"

"Not outside the limits of Claybank county, it doesn't. And we're a long ways from Clayback county."

"A long ways," Neville said, looking around at the town. "A long ways."

Chapter Fifteen

There were five saloons, if you counted a private club called The Gentleman's Grill. They split them up and set about their work.

The first one Prine entered was a latrine with walls and a roof. He didn't know what he was smelling, but whatever it was was long dead. Not that the customers seemed to notice in the crypt-shadowy place that consisted of a raw timber bar and three long benches along the east wall. The place wasn't ten feet wide. A dog was noisily eating something from the damp dirt floor. Prine wouldn't have been surprised if the meal consisted of a human corpse.

One drunk had his head down on the bar. Passing out while you were standing was no modest feat. Another drunk, one of those sitting on the bench, had puked on himself but didn't seem to notice. He was conversing with another drunk who kept almost sliding off the bench. There was another drunk who every few seconds would raise his head and shout, "I need some pussy over here!"

The bartender was ridiculously dapper, a merry fop in a leper colony. White shirt, string tie, rimless glasses, hard dead smile, white hair. He had to be in his late sixties.

"Is that a real badge?" he said.

"It is if you live in Claybank."

"You're a ways away from home."

"Your marshal was telling me about all the cultural activities in town here." He looked around. "I thought I'd check one of them out."

"Believe me, mister," the bartender said, "you can't insult this place. All the jokes have been told. And as for the marshal, we pay that sonofabitch through the nose to stay in business here. He makes as much from this place as I do."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"Oh? Claybank pretty clean, is it?"

"The sheriff doesn't get a cut from the saloons or the whorehouses, if that's what you mean."

"Maybe I'll move there."

"And leave a nice place like this?"

Just then, the drunk who'd thrown up on himself threw up on himself again.

"He'll clean himself up later," the bartender said. "He'll wobble down to the river and throw himself in."

"Lucky river."

Three drunks came in the front door, arguing about some horse race. There seemed to be an unwritten law operating here. Not until you'd almost reached the blackout stage of drunkenness were you allowed to enter this hallowed land.

"So what can I do you for, Deputy? I've got customers to take care of."

"Take care of them and come back."

A few minutes later, the bartender appeared out of the murk at the far end of the bar and said, "So how can I help you?"

Prine told him and the man said instantly, "Yeah, they were here."

"When?"

"Last night."

"You happen to know if they're still around?"

"Now, how the hell would I know that?"

"So you haven't seen 'em around anywhere today?"

"Not today."

"They do anything in particular last night?"

"Drank. Kept to themselves. Left, I dunno, maybe eleven o'clock. If I hadn't been serving them beers, I wouldn't have known they were here."

"They talk to anybody here?"

"Not that I saw. They didn't look real friendly. And the big one kept his Bowie knife on the table, like he just might be of a mind to use it all of a sudden."

"You see anybody here now who was in here last night?"

The bartender glanced around. "Murphy over there. Redhead with the long red beard. He was in here for a while last night."

"You see them again, I'll be staying at the Fordham Hotel. Name's Prine. Tom Prine."

The bartender nodded. Didn't say goodbye.

The redhead was talking to himself, which Prine assumed was not a good sign. Sitting up front all by himself on a stretch of bench. Just jabbering away. He apparently thought he was pretty funny, because every thirty seconds or so he'd laugh hard at something he'd just said.

He was probably forty. He had beggar-sad eyes and no teeth. His smell could repel bullets. Up close, Prine saw that the man hadn't been laughing. He'd been crying. His blue eyes were wet and his lower lip had Saint Vitus' dance. He had a violent tic that twisted his neck half around every few minutes.

Prine said, "Bartender tells me you were in here late last night."

Murphy looked at Prine's badge. "I wasn't lookin' in no windows this time. I honest wasn't. The priest, he tole me not to look at no more naked women through their windows. He said I scairt them when I did. So I ain't done it no more."

When he spoke, he pushed the stench of his breath farther and wider than it would normally travel. Prine stepped back from him.

"There were two men in here last night. Tolan and Rooney. You remember them?"