Buchanan Says No (7 page)

"It's too true, worse luck
.”
the girl told him, mocking
his tone with a pretended sadness. "I get so bored with
myself
,”

"We c
ould put an end to your boredom.
" Troy sug
gested.

"But that's all I have left to imagine about
.”
Carrie said,
"Then I'd be more bored than ever
,”

Troy's thin-lip
p
ed mouth was touched briefly by a smile.

"Quite a dilemma
,”
he said,

"No solution to it at all
,”

"I'll think of something
,”
he promised her. He held the
dealer's chair for her, and when she was se
a
te
d
h
e
let his
hands rest on her bare shoulders and squeeze them briefly.
From the girl’s
face it would be hard to say whether the
little embrace had affected her at all

Tro
y
returne
d
to the private poker game then, to find
Boyd Weston grimly hanging on to his last stakes. Thanks
to the arrival of two oth
e
r players just as inept a
s
he was,
Wilson was having difficulty lowering the boom. Troy sat
in the game for several h
ands hopin
g to
maneuver Weston
between himself and the meat buyer for the decisive blow,
but someho
w
Weston eluded them and kept his small pile
of chips intact.

Troy's boredom was just reaching high water when a
rumpus started outside. He slipped out of his chair, vastly
surprised, for the sound of trouble was rarely heard in
Troy's, thanks to Moose Miller's forbidding presence. He
opened the door and entered the public room, his sur
prise graduating to stupefaction as he witnessed the utter
explosion of a myth that he had come to believe in as
much as any man in Bella. But there went Moose Miller,
down; down so hard that the glass spangles in the chande
lier overhead shook, the candles flickered in their sockets.

"Get that bastard!" Bernie Troy shouted, and Miller's
helpers, used mostly to clearing up after the bouncer,
awoke from their shock and laid into Buchanan with a
vengeance.
Carrie James
,
as already noted, was the only one in the
p
la
ce with the presence of mind or the inclination to stop
it
short of murder.

Chapter Six

"Buchanan?"

It was a plaintive sound in the utter darkness of that
place, also fretful, touched by both discomfort and a kind
of disillusion.

"Over here, kid
.”
Buchanan answered,

"Don't call me kid
?
" Mike Sandoe said automatically.
“Wh
ere the hell am I, anyhow?"

“J
ugged."

There was a pause, "What
^’
d I do?"

"Nothin' much."

Another pause. "Wha
t’
d you do?"

''Slugged a gent,"

"Then why'd they jail me?"

"Search me."

"You sure I wasn't the gent you slugged?" Sandoe asked
then, querulously.

"You caught a beaut," Buchanan admitted, "but not
from me. Recall anything about a place called the Happy
Times?"

"Sure I do. Bought a bottle there. Dead place."

"How about Troy
⁷
s?"

"Troy's? Oh
?
yeah. Yeah, sure. Girl with red hair. What
the hell was she doing, Buchanan?"

"Dealin'. Just sittin' there and dealin
’”

"Jesus!" Sandoe said suddenly, his voice like a whip
crack in that small black cell. "That big fat son of a bitch.
Bigger'n you. . . ."

"All my fault
,
Mike. Couldn't get loose of you fast
enough to give you a chance
,”

"Took you, too, huh?"

"No."

"No? You mean you got
him?
”

"Then the roof hit me. Man, you can buy this head real
cheap."

"Trade you even
,”
Sandoe said, then lapsed into silence.
"What's that fella's name, Buchanan?" he asked a long
minute later.

"Why?"

"Gonna spill his guts," came the positive answer. "First
thing after they bust me out of this calaboose."

"Sure," Buchanan said drowsily, humping himself in the
narrow cot, hoping that sleep would dull the banging in
side his skull, hoping that his collarbone was merely
bruised and not broken, hoping he would stop seeing that
bed and soft mattress in his room at the Green Lantern.

Sleep came, like a drug, but after three short hours of it
someone was beating a sawed-off ax handle against the
soles of his boots and the hot, blinding sun was assaulting
his eyes.

"Come on and meet the judge
,”
a wizened sixty-year-old
jailer told him nasally.

Buchanan rolled to a sitting position and regarded the
man with the ax handle thoughtfully. "Gently does it,
old-timer," he said,

"Don't tell me my business, ranny!"

"I'll tell you something else. Don't lay that stick to my
roomie. He ain't got my even nature."

The old man's eyes glittered snappishly, but when he
crossed to Sandoe he woke him with a shake of the shoul
der, then stepped back,

"Whatta you want?" Mike growled at him.

"I want you, that's what. You're keeping the judge
waiting."

"Tell the judge to go-"

Come on, Mike
,”
Buchanan
said, more and more
bor
ed by the other man's truculence.

They followed the bailiff out of the cell, down a corri
dor
past the tank with its collection of overnight guests,
an
d through a doorway into a courtroom of sorts. The
j
u
dge was not waiting, nor had Buchanan ever heard of
o
n
e who was, but the section set aside for witnesses and spectators was filled to capacity.

A murmuring spread through the place.

"There he is!" said a voice from the rear. "That's the
on
e did it!"

'Don't look so tough now
,”
said another voice be
littlin
gly.

"Tough enough
,”
answered the first.

Buchanan stood looking around, and his glance fell
inescapably on the massive figure of Moose Miller on the
front bench. Miller hunched forward menacingly and
fixed Buchanan with a scowl that worked wonders in
Troy's. Buchanan grinned at him.

"Over here
,”
said Marshal Grieve, coming up with a
worried expression on his face. He led them to an en
closure and closed the gate. "I've deputized half a dozen
men
,”
he told both of them in a low voice. "Start any
more trouble and you'll get it."

Sandoe stirred and Buchanan gave him a cautioning
poke with his elbow.

"Everybody rise!" the bailiff shouted then, and the judge
entered from a side door and mounted to the bench. "This
here court now in session!" The judge sat down, and so did everyone else. "First case, Your Honor
,”
the bailiff
went on in a quieter tone, "is the town against them two
miscreants yonder, identities unknown. Charged with
breaking the peace, damaging private property, trespassing where they got no business, and grievous assault on a town resident."

The judge, a bald-headed man with rimless spectacles,
heard the charges impassively and swung to Buchanan
and Sandoe.

"You two can have a jury if you really want one
.”
he said, plainly indicating that he would look upon any
impaneling as a waste of his valuable time.

"Whatever you say, Judge
,”
Buchanan said amiably.

"No jury. And you can have a lawyer if you think you
won't get justice from me."

"No lawyer
,”
Buchanan said.

The judge turned back to his bailiff. "Get a witness on
the stand," he said.

"Moose Miller to the stand!" the court official bawled,
though Miller sat less than six feet away. The man lum
bered up off the bench, seeming to cast a shadow on the
immediate vicinity, and moved to the chair set directly
below the bench.

"Moose, you swear to tell the truth here?" the bailiff asked, holding the Bible outstretched in a negligent way.

"Yeah
,”
Miller said, and for the benefit of the room
he gave Buchanan another ominous glare before seating
himself,

"What happened last night, Moose?" the judge asked
him.

"
I
got bush-hammered in the performance of my duty
for Mr. Troy
,”
he said sullenly. "Them two bas—Them
two there insulted a lady and broke the peace, like Jenkins
said."

The judge looked toward the prisoners. "Any ques
tions?"

Once again Buchanan quieted Sandoe. "Nope
,”
he said
for them both.

"Why don't you tell them the truth?" Sandoe mur
mured to him furiously when Miller was returning to the bench.

"What makes you think they want the truth?" Bu
chanan answered, and sat back in his chair.

The three who had worked on him with the bungstart
ers
3 gave their testimony in the unrecorded trial, and ex
cep
t for marking their likenesses in his memory, Bu
ch
anan had no cross-examination. He looked more inter
ested
however, when the next witness was called.

"Miss Carrie James to the stand
,”
Bailiff Jenkins said with
unconscious lechery in his voice, and tried to escort
h
er to the chair. She shook him off and sat down with her
back
half turned to Buchanan.

"What happened as you saw it, Carrie?" the judge asked

The girl turned, pointed briefly at Sandoe.

"That one c
a
me in to gamble when he should have been sleeping it
off
somewhere. That one"—pointing even more briefly at
Bu
chanan—"tried to get him out. Miller came up then
and
I guess maybe he didn't see how it was. Anyhow,
that's when the real trouble started."

''Which one did the insulting, Carrie?" the judge asked,
and it was obvious that her answer to that would weigh
very heavily with him.

But Carrie shook her head. "Neither
,”
she said very
definitely. "One of them might have got around to some
thing, but neither of them gave the other the chance."

"Any questions?" the judge asked Buchanan.

"Yeah," the big man said this time. "Tell me some
thing, Carrie. Did I dream it, or was there a lot of cater
wauling going on overhead just before my lights were
turned out?"

"The name is Miss James," she said in a low voice,
"And what, exactly, is caterwauling?"

"Well," Buchanan said, spreading his hands, "I don't
mean it the way we say on the range. Like, you know, when a cow's all heated up—"

The judge came down with his gavel, shutting off the
outburst of guffawing from the rear.

"I mean," Buchanan went on as though there had been
no interruption, "a lot of screechin* and screamin'. Was
that you, Carrie?"