Showdown (2 page)

The terrible thing—the thing that had caused him to turn away from her—was that he wanted more. She worked in a café and he was a deputy. Even between them they couldn't earn enough money to live anything more than a hardscrabble life. A tiny shacklike house somewhere. Three or four kids running around. And a sameness—day in and day out—that would be as crushing to him as any prison could ever be.

He'd known a deputy once who'd courted and won the hand of a rich girl. The man now lived in splendor and relative ease. The girl's old man helped him learn the cattle business. And now the former deputy was on his way to becoming cattle-rich himself. Prine never told anybody about this. It'd make him sound like a moony young kid, some stupid magazine-story dream of hitching up with a rich girl. But it was a flame that burned with the tireless brilliance of a votive candle in the most secret part of his heart. He couldn't extinguish that dream even if he wanted to.

He looked up at Lucy now, hovering there, trying to smile with that small, lovely Irish mouth. But there was no smiling to be found in those sweet eyes. Just the terrible loss that Prine had put there.

"Try me again sometime, though," Prine said.

"Sure."

The tears in her voice and eyes were unbearable. He slipped his hand into hers.

"I'm sorry about it all, Lucy."

He glanced around, seeing if anybody was watching. Fortunately, nobody seemed to be. A scene in a café wouldn't be good for either of them.

"I know you are, Tom. I don't blame you."

"Maybe if it was a couple of years down the line, when I was more ready for—"

And then she laughed, a rich sound he'd always loved.

"You don't have to come in here, but you do. You don't have to be nice to me, but you are. You don't have to let me embarrass you, but you do. You're a good Catholic, Tom, and you're not a Catholic at all—but you've sure got the guilt like one."

He smiled, squeezed her hand, then removed his.

"I've got this book I read every night.
How to Be Guilty and Like It
. It's teaching me a lot."

Her moment of laughter was gone. "I'm thinking of moving, Tom."

"Not because of me, I hope."

A tiny smile. "Not because of you. You're not the center of my universe anymore, Tom Prine. I'm thinking of moving to get meself a better job and meet some new people." She always said "meself" instead of "myself." The last vestiges of a brogue she'd picked up from her long-dead parents.

Prine was surprised by his reaction. He felt—abandoned. It was ludicrous, stupid. He'd broken off with her. But now she was talking about leaving.

Before he could say anything, she said, "There's a customer waving for me, Tom. I'd better go."

Abandoned. Yes, that was exactly how he felt. It was one thing to break it off with her, but another to think that she'd be gone from his life completely. . . .

He went back to studying the man across the street.

What made Prine curious, as he sat there on his midmorning coffee break, was that every morning the man did two odd things. He would suddenly pull out his railroad watch and check the time. And then he would write something in a small notebook he took from his back pocket.

Only this morning did Prine see what spurred the man to take out his pocket watch and tablet. And that was the appearance of Miss Cassie Neville in her fringed buggy. Cassie was the daughter of Cletus Neville, a rich mining man who before his death had divided his estate between Cassie and her twin brother, Richard.

Now, there was an obvious reason for any man to watch Cassie. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty of grace and style. Twice a year she went to Chicago frock-hunting. And three or four times a year she traveled to St. Louis to hear their famous symphony orchestra. She had been engaged four times and she was only twenty-two years old. Needless to say, it had been Cassie who'd broken off the engagements.

Fine and dandy.

A smitten man, even a middle-aged fool, had every right to place himself in position to watch Cassie as she came to town five days a week to work in the basement of St. Francis Catholic church, where she taught school and handed out provisions to the poor. The Nevilles paid for all the provisions. A lot of townspeople donated clothes and used toys and housewares.

Fine and dandy. To just watch the young beauty in her buggy was one thing. But to clock her and then to write down the time—at the very least, that was a strange thing to do three mornings running.

Prine decided to find out what the man was doing.

K
arl Tolan had been in jail enough—never prison; that was his street-boy pride, never prison—to recognize when a lawman came within thirty yards of him. Tolan could sniff one out the same way a hunting dog can sniff out a bird or a fox.

The man sitting in the window of The Friendly Café was definitely law. This was the third morning he'd watched Tolan watch the Neville girl, and this morning—or so Tolan sensed, anyway—the lawman seemed to get a sense of what was going on here.

But the three mornings had been worth it. He had the information he needed.

By the time Prine reached the street, the man was gone. Prine hurried up and down the street, but there was no sight of him.

Five minutes after leaving the café, Prine walked into the sheriff's office. He knew instantly that Mae, the sheriff's spinster daughter, had cleaned up last night. The sweet scent of furniture polish was in the air.

The one-story building was divided into two parts. The office was large enough to hold four desks, an oil stove, three wooden filing cabinets, and several rifle racks mounted on the wall. There was a NOTICE board with current Wanted posters—current because this was another job Mae did.

Sheriff Wyn Daly looked up and said, "Coffee any better this morning?"

Prine shook his head. "I sure wish Peggy hadn't retired."

"People your age just don't seem to make good coffee," Deputy Bob Carlyle said.

Prine laughed. "I get the impression you don't think people my age can do much of anything."

Carlyle surprised him by saying, "Well, you're a pretty fair deputy, Prine. I'd have to say that."

Wyn, white-haired, beefy in the tan twill uniform they all wore, looked up and said, "I don't believe I've ever heard you hand out a compliment in the eight years you've been here, Bob."

"Well, it's true. Prine here's good at the job." This was coming from a scrawny man of fifty or so whom too many drunks had underestimated because of his somewhat slumped posture and one glass eye. He had a quick hard right hand that had put down nearly every street tough in town.

Wyn laughed. "Be sure and write that on a calendar somewhere, Tom. October 4, Bob Carlyle gives somebody a compliment."

T
he rest of the morning went pretty much that way. Sort of slow and chatty. There was a fourth deputy, Harry Ryan, but he was the night man. A morning like this gave the day people a chance to talk over open cases, most of which ran to minor rustling, minor arson, minor saloon violence, minor theft, minor burglary.

The emphasis being on minor.

In a town of 6,700—in a town that cattle drives bypassed, a town that was essentially one big general store for a lot of smaller surrounding towns—you didn't expect a lot of trouble. There had been three homicides and one bank robbery last year.

There was a portable gallows stored in the courthouse. Sheriff Daly had had to oversee the hanging of one of the convicted killers. Though the state legislature had made it next to impossible for gapers to attend hangings, many lawmen made a big event of hanging anyway. Hell, you had towns where they
advertised
their hangings. Turned the damned thing into a carnival—literally, with a horse race, games for the kids, a pie-baking contest, and a barn dance in the evening.

Wyn allowed as how he was grateful that the legislature was now considering making prisons responsible for all executions.

Prine and Carlyle brought Daly up to date on what they planned to do the next few days. Prine generally worked the north side of the map and Carlyle the south. This included town and approximately forty miles out.

When he wasn't talking or listening, Prine kept thinking about the man outside the café these last three days.

Just after noon, he started looking for the man. The obvious places were the two hotels. Nobody seemed to know who he was talking about. He next tried the main boardinghouses, of which there were four. Same result. Hadn't seen such a man.

He was just about to start on the houses where only a man or two boarded. There were a lot of them—maybe ten—and it would take some time.

He had started on the third such house when he happened to look over his shoulder and see something that rattled him.

The man he was looking for was following him. And he was pretty damned bad at hiding it.

About all the man could do was start swinging his head from side to side as if he were looking for a particular address. Then, ridiculously, he started whistling in order to give the impression that he was just out for a stroll on this mild autumn day when the scent of burning leaves lent the air a nostalgic aroma.

Prine was about to approach him when he heard the whistle. The sound emanated from a small steam device that Sheriff Daly used to pull in his deputies for an emergency. The sound was unlike any other in town, so a deputy couldn't say he confused it with something else. Pity the deputy who didn't respond to it.

Much as Prine wanted to talk to the man, he had to turn in the opposite direction and run back to town.

The emergency turned out to be a grain wagon that had overturned on a railroad crossing. The wagon was full. Not only was there grain heaped across the tracks, but the driver was pinned beneath. He didn't look good. For sure many bones, including his ribs, were broken, but he was also bleeding from his nose and mouth. Prine was no doctor, but he knew that death was in the air, hovering.

Took four men to right the wagon. A buckboard stood by to rush the man to the six-bed hospital. Prine rolled himself a cigarette and listened to Daly and Carlyle and nighttime deputy Harry Ryan talk about that poor sonofabitch probably wasn't going to make it. And they were right. He was dead when they lifted him from the bed of the buckboard.

I
n the late afternoon, Prine broke up a saloon fight, arresting one of the fighters. He also found a missing puppy and helped an elderly lady who had locked herself out, forcing open a back window and climbing inside to unlock the door.

Early dusk, a marvel of purple and gold and half-moon in the sky, and the scent of winter on the air—early dusk, and Prine sat in his window seat in The Friendly Café, putting away a good meal of meat loaf, corn, green beans, and apple pie.

Thinking about the man who'd been watching Cassie Neville three days running.

What the hell was the man up to, anyway?

T
wo days later, Prine resumed his canvassing, looking for the man he'd seen noting Cassie Neville's arrival in town each morning.

The smaller boardinghouses—two-, three-roomers, no more—rarely received the kind of upkeep the large ones did. The large ones were set up like hotels, with meals, washing privileges, mail set aside, and parlors and porches where the boarders could spend their nights in a homelike fashion. These houses generally catered to workingmen, especially unmarried railroad men, who were frequently gone half a month or so and didn't want to spend their money on renting anything bigger or fancier.

The smaller houses catered more often to transients. Prine remembered reading after Lincoln's assassination that cheap boardinghouses "were dreams for assassins and unholy people of every stripe." You take a big city like Washington, D.C., for instance. You had so many boardinghouses there, searching for one man was damned near impossible. He could keep moving, for one thing, and so the search became a shell game of a kind. Now he's here, now he's there. Impossible.

Claybank wasn't big enough to have such rabbit-warrens, but it still took Prine most of an afternoon to go to every house that advertised rooms, a list he'd gotten under the ruse of "official business" from the newspaper.

With three houses left to go, a weary, wiry woman named Wilma Chambers said, "That sounds like Mr. Tolan." She had a goiter on her neck the size of a baseball. It was hairy and tufted-looking. He'd never seen anything like it and didn't want to again.

"You know his first name, ma'am?"

"Of course I know his first name." She made a clucking sound that indicated that one of them here was pretty damned dumb, and it wasn't her. "Karl."

"Karl Tolan. Thank you. You probably know what he does, then."

"What he does is come and go. And pays his rent on time. That's all I know and all I need to know. The mister, when he was alive, always told me not to answer any questions from the law unless they told me why they were asking. Has Tolan done something?"