Showdown (16 page)

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."

T
here 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?"

"They say something agin me?" Murphy, agitated, said. "People always say things again me and they got no right, no right."

"Did they buy you drinks? Two men? Last night?"

"I stay away from them windas now. And I don't look at naked ladies, either. I swear to God I don't." Prine grabbed the man by the shoulder, squeezed.

The old man's eyes reflected sudden pain.

"Last night. You were talking with two men. Tolan and Rooney."

The expression shifted. A half-smile of recognition. "Oh, yes, them two. They was mostly makin' fun of ole Murphy, was what they was doin'. But they kept buyin' me drinks, so I put up with 'em."

Prine squeezed harder. Tears gleamed in the old man's eyes again. "I want you to think hard now."

"It hurts awful, mister. It hurts awful."

"Just answer my questions."

"It hurts awful. Just awful."

"Did they say anything about where they were going?"

"Going?"

"After they left the saloon."

"Bad place," the old man said, and then started babbling to himself again. "They kick ole Murphy out.
 
Say I was tryin' to peek in the doors and see the naked women. But I just wanted warm to see. I needed warm. The snow and cold, Murphy needed warm was all. Sonsofbitches, dirty sonsofbitches." He made a pathetic little fist.

"The bad place? Where's that, Murphy?"

Looking at Prine as if for the first time, Murphy said, "You work for them, don't you?"

"Work for who, Murphy?"

"I shoulda seen that right off. You work for them. You was there the night they drove me out in the cold and Murphy got pneumonia an damn near died. You was one of them that run me off, wasn't you?"

"Where is this bad place, Murphy?"

"You know where it is."

"No, I don't, Murphy. I really don't."

A drunk four feet away said, "You talkin' about the bad place again, Murphy?"

"You just shut up," Murphy said. "You just shut up."

"He means the Empire Hotel," the other drunk said. He was a man of hair so wild, he looked like an insane jungle beast of some kind. "They kicked him out one winter night when they caught him sleepin' in one of the rooms. He was sick—pneumonia, like he said—and they run him out of there and he got a lot sicker by mornin'. The doc damned near couldn't save his life. About five times a day, ole Murph here remembers it and gets mad all over again."

"This Empire Hotel still in business?"

"Right down at the end of the next block."

"I'm gonna blow that place up some night," Murphy said as Prine was leaving. He was still talking to up one of these days and they'll be sorry they ever treated me like that. Sorry to the end of their born days."

T
he Empire was a two-story Victorian-fronted place with a colored man in some kind of smart wine-red uniform just inside the vestibule to take your luggage. Drummers, judging by all the checkered suits and heavy valises, preferred this particular hotel when in the embrace of Picaro. The colored man looked sad when he saw that Prine had no bags.

Prine went up to the desk, where a middle-aged woman in a bun and a severe gaze said, "Help you, cowboy?" She apparently didn't notice his badge.

"I'm looking for two men who might be staying here."

"We have forty-seven guests at the moment. You'll have to help me out there. Oh, a badge, huh?"

"You can check me out with Marshal Valdez if you'd like."

Icy smile. "I can tell you aren't from around here."

"Why's that?"

"Why's that? Because he won't talk unless you pay him to, and even then he lies most of the time anyway. You over to his office, were you?"

"Yeah."

"His daughter? With her tongue cut out?"

"She's a beautiful girl."

"He sing you his sad song about these terrible men cutting her tongue out as a way of getting back at him?"

"It is a sad song, ma'am. You shouldn't make fun of it."

"It'd be sad if it was true. Hell, he raped her himself and then cut her tongue out and made up this story to tell his wife. But the girl wrote her mother a letter, explaining everything. Then the mother died in a drowning that the coroner always said looked funny to him. You know what 'funny' means, don't you, son?"

"That he doesn't think she really drowned? That she was probably murdered?"

"That's exactly what he meant. But with her gone, and the note the daughter wrote missing, how's anybody gonna prove anything? But everybody knows the truth anyway. You got to watch yourself with Valdez, believe me."

Picaro was proving to be just the kind of place Prine had been searching for—the sort of town where a fella could settle down with a wife and raise some kids. And then hide out in the barn when all the local lunatics and degenerates came for you carrying torches and pitchforks.

He had no doubt that this version of the tongueless daughter was the true one. But he wondered what sinister secrets of her own this woman harbored.

He gave her the description of Tolan and Rooney.

"Oh," she said, "those two."

"They're here?" He sounded eager, too eager.

"Upstairs. They got pretty drunk last night." Then: "What the Sam Hill is this?"

Marching through the front door, fanning out in military fashion, were six men carrying rifles. The leader was Gomez, the man who'd tried to pass himself off as the marshal of the town.

Gomez appeared to be much more sober than the last time Prine had seen him. He didn't wobble when he walked. And his gaze was fixed on the desk clerk as he stalked over to her, the barrel of his Winchester leading the way.

"There are two men here, Tolan and Rooney. Which room?"

She told them.

"They are there now?"

"As far as I know they are, Gomez."

"My name is Deputy Gomez. This would be a healthy thing for you to remember, se
ñ
ora." The woman looked about to laugh, but then stopped herself. "All right, Deputy Gomez, if that's the way you prefer it. Just remember, Marshal Valdez always gives me a little bit of the cut."

Gomez glanced at Prine and then back at the woman: "This so-called cut, I have no idea of what you're saying. We run this law and order here. We do not have 'cuts.' Cuts are for criminals and lawmen who do not honor their laws." This seemed to be for Prine's benefit, this profoundly moving and convincing speech on law and order. Prine was surprised that Gomez didn't choke on words as hypocritical as these.

Gomez angled his head to his men. "Let's go." To the desk clerk: "Do not try to warn them in any way, se
ñ
ora, as that would be bad for the health of your entire family."