“You going to shoot me with that?” he said, nodding at my six-shooter.
“Right now I’d sure like to shoot somebody.”
“Guess I can’t blame you there. But you wouldn’t want to shoot some creaky old bastard like me, Lane. Shootin’ younger folks is a lot more fun.”
I surprised myself by laughing. “C’mon and sit down.”
When he was seated across from me, he said, “You gonna offer me a drink or do I have to sit up and beg for it?”
“I’d like to see you sit up and beg sometime. Hard to imagine.”
He poured himself a drink. “Hits the spot.”
He wore a cotton shirt and a pair of faded corduroys. He looked like an ancient cowhand.
“I was thinking you’d be Horace,” I said.
“Oh, he’ll be here, all right. He’s gettin’ a search warrant.”
“Good old Toomey and Grice.”
“It isn’t just them now. Tom Ryan’s doin’ his best to hold everybody off-he’s the one who’d actually have to arrest you for not cooperating with the law-but he’s runnin’ out of support. Even the other two fellas on the town council are wonderin’ why you won’t turn her over.”
“Can’t, Old Sam. I don’t know where she is.”
I pushed the note at him.
He read it. “This sure isn’t like her.”
“No, it isn’t. She wrote it under duress.” I explained the code of using both her first and middle name. “Somebody took her.”
“Took her? But why?”
I explained that to him.
“You seem awful sure about this, Lane.”
“I am. She’d never run away. She isn’t guilty. Running away is as much an admission that she’s guilty.”
“They won’t believe you. They’ll think she took off on her own.”
“I know. That’s why I’m going to stall them as long as I can. Maybe I can figure out who took her and where she is.”
“Then you’d have the real killer, too.”
“That’s the way I figure it anyway.”
He pointed to the bottle. “Mind if I have a few more drops?”
“You just want to make sure it’s fit to drink?”
“Exactly right. You’re a very perceptive man. I like you a lot, Lane, and I wouldn’t want you pouring any bull piss down your throat.”
“That’s very considerate of you.”
He took a whole mouthful of the stuff.
“Horace’ll either be out here tonight or early tomorrow morning,” he said.
“They want to issue a warrant before the lieutenant governor gets here.”
He shook his head. “The man’s a fool. I sure don’t know why they’re making such a fuss over him. He only got elected because he decided to run on the same ticket as the governor, who’s a popular man. If he’d run as an independent, the way the lieutenant governor usually does, he wouldn’t have gotten ten votes.”
“You know Toomey and Grice,” I said. “They see themselves as Roman emperors. And they think he can help them.”
“You should see all the events they’ve got planned.”
“I’m going to,” I said.
“You are? Why the hell would you go down there and let half the town have at you that way?”
I poured a shot for myself and then brought him up to date. “Adams, Paul, Laura Webley-one of them killed Stanton. I just want to see how they react when I show up.”
“Grice and Toomey’ll try and have you arrested.”
“Ryan won’t arrest me.”
“He’s a good man, that’s for sure. But you know, he’s threatened to resign if they come after you. By the time the lieutenant governor gets here, Grice and Toomey may have their own marshal in place. And whoever that is won’t hesitate to move in on you.”
“I can’t think of what else to do, Old Sam. I want to see those three people close up. See how they look and talk. I’ve been a lawman a long time. I’ve developed some pretty good instincts.”
He raised the letter, read it again. “That code thing’s a good idea.”
“Read it in a dime novel actually.”
“Thought you hated dime novels,” he said in his best sardonic voice.
“We’ve all got a little hypocrisy in us.”
He laughed. “In my case, more than a little. I’m always talking about law and order, but I’ve probably gotten a dozen murderers off scot-free in my time. And two of them killed people again. So I’d be willin’ to match you any day for hypocrisy.”
We talked a good half hour more. He drank coffee instead of whiskey. His papery, gaunt cheeks were flush from the alcohol. He said, “I’d sure think it over hard, Lane.”
“You mean about tomorrow?”
“Absolutely. You’ll be turnin’ yourself over to Toomey and Grice. And they’d just love to make a big show of arrestin’ you in front of their important guest of honor. Then he’d go back to Denver and tell them what a couple of comers Toomey and Grice are, forcin’ the former marshal to be arrested.”
“You know something, Old Sam?”
“What?”
“I agree with you.”
“Good.”
“But I’m still going tomorrow.”
“But why?”
“Real simple,” I said. “I don’t have any choice.”
SIXTEEN
THEY RESEMBLED A small posse: Horace Thurman, Tom Ryan, Toomey, and Grice. I’d washed up in the creek at dawn, and was just putting on fresh clothes when I heard them coming fast down the road. By the time I was in the doorway, they were dismounting.
Tom said, “I’m sorry about this, Lane.”
“I know you are, Tom.”
“That’s a hell of a thing for a peace officer to say,” Toomey said. “You’re the acting marshal and you’re apologizing for doing your job?”
Horace said, “I brought a search warrant, Lane. I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
“You’re welcome to go inside and look around.”
“Are you going to tell us where she is?” Grice said.
“I would if I knew, Mr. Grice. But I don’t. When I came home yesterday, she was gone.”
“In other words,” Toomey said, “she ran away.”
“I guess that pretty much tells the story,” Grice said.
Horace had the grace to look embarrassed by the two buffoons.
“You want to come inside with me, Tom?” Horace said.
Tom nodded. Glanced at me.
“You’re just doing your job, Tom,” I said.
“If you apologize to him one more time,” Grice said to Tom, “there’ll be hell to pay, believe me.”
Grice was sensible enough to lean back when Tom glared at him. The glare had the power of a fist.
Horace and Tom went inside.
“You realize you’re aiding and abetting a felon,” Toomey said to me.
The morning was still fresh. The sun hadn’t been up long enough to bum off the dew yet. One of those hazy mornings when it would be nice to float downstream in a canoe and fish a little from time to time. But mostly just take in the splendors of Indian summer on the facing shorelines.
“I didn’t aid and abet anybody, Grice,” I said. “She was gone when I came home. I didn’t know she was going to leave. And she’s not a felon. She hasn’t been charged with anything yet.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Toomey said. “She will be as soon as we get back to town.”
They really were interchangeable: stout, loud, preening.
“You could make it easier on both of you,” Grice said. “You could cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” I said. “I didn’t try blocking Horace or Tom from entering, did I?”
“I never did like that sense of humor of yours,” Toomey said. “You always make yourself try and sound so superior.”
I decided not to respond. Shooting ducks in a barrel is the cliche, I believe.
“There’ll be a reward for her,” Grice said.
“And that means lawmen and bounty hunters will be looking for her,” Toomey said.
“She can take care of herself.”
“I can’t believe you don’t care that your wife ran off,” Grice said.
“I do care that my wife ran off. But what the hell can I do about it? I don’t know where she went.”
Tom and Horace came back.
“She didn’t leave a note?” Horace said.
“No.”
“Did she mention the possibility she might take off like this?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“And you didn’t encourage her in any way to take off?”
“I didn’t, Horace. Until yesterday I was a peace officer. I’d never advise anybody to run away in the face of criminal charges. I think you know that.”
“This is different, Lane,” he said quietly. “She’s your wife.”
“All the more reason not to advise her to run. Grice and Toomey here just pointed out that a lot of people will be gunning for her, wanting the reward.”
“What reward?” Tom said.
“We’re putting up thirty-five hundred dollars between us,” Grice said.
“We’re going to announce it when we’re on the platform with the lieutenant governor this afternoon,” said Toomey.
Horace said, “You two are shameless, you know that? Tom and I are trying to conduct a serious investigation here. And you two keep turning it into a circus.”
“She’s a wanted felon, isn’t she?” Grice said.
“Not yet, she isn’t,” Horace said. “And even if she was, isn’t that a pretty steep reward for what’ll probably be second-degree murder? At most. It could easily be manslaughter. Or possibly-since we haven’t heard her side of yet it-even self-defense. Stanton was no angel.”
Hard to tell which had the most impact on me. The fact that Horace had obviously hardened in his opinion that Callie had killed Stanton. Or that he was open to the possibility that it was self-defense.
“You throwing in with Ryan here, are you?” Grice said. “I’m throwing in with what’s called the law,” Horace snapped. “Maybe you should read up on it sometime. It’s a fascinating subject.”
He turned to me. “I’m going to ask you two questions. And I’m going to trust you to answer them honestly.”
I just hoped he’d ask me two questions that I could answer honestly.
“All right, Horace.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t urge her to run away?”
“No.”
“And I suppose you’re going to believe him,” Toomey said.
“I’ll believe him till you can show me that he’s lying, Toomey. Can you show me that?”
“He’s got all the reason in the world to lie, Horace,” Toomey said.
“That isn’t what I asked you, Toomey. I asked you if you could show me he’s lying. You obviously can’t, so I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your damn-fool mouth shut.”
“I’m counting on your word here,” Horace said to me. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Tom said, “Then there’s no reason to arrest him.”
Both Toomey and Grice seemed eager to respond to him, but kept quiet. Horace’s scorn was not anything people wanted to go up against if they didn’t have to. He could be as withering out of court as in.
“Let’s go back to town,” Horace said.
Toomey and Grice shook their heads, but followed him back to the horses. Tom lingered, about to say something to me, thought better of it, and followed Horace, too.
I spent an hour getting ready to head to town myself. But first I was hoping I might be able to break into Ken Adams’s place.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN I GOT there, I saw the oldest girl, Sandra, closing the front door and heading to her horse, which was ground-tied a few feet away. I would’ve found a place to hide, but as soon as she turned from the door, she saw me. I had to ride up to her.
She was fourteen or so and on her way to becoming as pretty as her mother had been. She wore denims and a blue cotton blouse and her sun-bleached blond hair was in pigtails. “Hi, Marshal.” She carried an armload of folded clothes, shirts and clean denims and drawers.
I dismounted. “Hi, Sandra. Is your dad around?”
“He just went on into town. To the mortuary. Mom’s gonna be buried tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry about what happened.”
She paused thoughtfully a moment. “It’s a sin to kill yourself. You can’t go to heaven when you do that. But the priest, he told us that sometimes God’ll let you go to purgatory. You know what purgatory is, Marshal?”
“Yes, I do, honey.”
“I bet that’s what happened to my mom. Where she went, I mean. Purgatory. I don’t think she went to hell. Do you?”
“No, I don’t. She was a good woman.”
“She shouldn’t ought to have done what she did with those men. But she always felt real sorry afterward. I felt sorry for her, the way she’d get, the way she was afterwards.”
There was no particular emotion in her words. She sounded as if she might still be having some trouble accepting the fact that her mother was gone.
“Dad says you think he killed that Stanton fella.”
Now there was a statement for you. A young girl in all this pain-and I was adding to it by saying that I thought her father was a suspect. “You have to consider everybody who had trouble with Stanton, honey. And that’s a number of people, not just your dad.”
She squinted into the sun. She had a mustache of sweat beads on her upper lip. Another scorching day. “Then how come you’re here?”
“I just thought I’d see how your dad was.”
The bright blue eyes grew hard. In this moment at least, she was a lot more woman than girl. “I don’t think I believe you, Marshal. I think you think my dad still did it and you come over here to see if you could get something on him.” She glanced back at her horse. That was when I noticed the Winchester in the rifle scabbard.