by Carl Dane
“That sentence, my friend, is largely something you’ll determine for yourself. Let’s walk very carefully through the next couple minutes here and see how much help you can be.”
Weed reached into a briefcase.
“Do you need a gavel, Sir?”
Davis looked at the ceiling for a minute and was about to speak again when I cut in.
“You’re going to tell me you’ll make this go away if I tell you where the ransom money is. I assume you’ve already strong-armed the bank manager and he’s showed you his cupboards are bare.”
“All right,” Davis said, drawing out the words and ending on a high note so I knew it was a question.
“But I want something in return,” I said. “It’s no skin off your back. We both know you’re going to kill me anyway. I just want to know why you’re doing this.”
The judge’s face was flinty and his eyes focused a hundred feet in back of me. He probably practiced that look, along with the old-fashioned mannerisms.
“That’s assuming you know why you’re doing this,” I said. “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just acting on orders. You’re probably not high enough in the food chain to know the whole story. Or that you’re afraid to tell it to me.”
I knew that what I’d said was not true, but I wanted to goad him.
A lot of men can train themselves to hide their expressions, but some just can’t stop whatever mechanism it is that sends blood rushing to their faces. His cheekbones and forehead were crimson.
I had him. He couldn’t help but set me straight.
“What is it you’re incapable of understanding?” he asked.
“Why the staged kidnapping? Why the ambush? What’s so important about killing me?”
“You got in my way,” Davis said, and it was a growl of barely restrained fury.
“In the way of what? A year ago, I broke up a scheme to drive Elmira out of her business and sell it to a stooge. I assume you were behind that?”
He said nothing, but his face was mottled now, with blotches around his eyes like the mask of a red-faced raccoon.
“I get that part,” I said. “You found out that there was a railroad going through her property and there was a lot of money to be made if you acquired property along the route before anybody knew, while it was just scrub wilderness. The developers would come running to you with money in hand after the route was announced, or maybe you’d build it up yourself with hotels and casinos and the like. Either way, you’d make a fortune.”
He said nothing, so I continued.
“But you couldn’t very well be seen profiting directly from secret information, so you flooded the town with muscle and drove Elmira’s customers away, and your thugs took over the only other bar in town and tried to force her to sell to the owner, who was under your thumb. An amazing plan.”
Except for the blushing predilection – which was almost like a dial that I could read the same way a train engineer detects how hot the boiler is – Davis could hold a good poker face.
But I noticed his eyes widened a little when I praised his cunning.
So now I knew what to do, and it was time to move in.
“And that was brilliant,” I said. “I’ll give you that.”
I actually wasn’t lying about that part.
Davis liked what I said. He actually nodded a little.
“But there’s still something that I just will never be able to understand. I just can’t scheme like you, I guess. You totally lost me.”
Davis lifted an eyebrow and prepared to hold forth, like a professor about to explain a concept to a slow student, prepared to bask in his superiority.
“What exactly don’t you understand?”
“What the hell is so important about the land where the railroad is going? I understand that there’s a lot of money to be made, and the first attempt might have been worth it. But round two … staging the kidnapping of your own daughter to lure me into an ambush. Hiring Tremaine?”
I wasn’t acting now; I really wanted fill in the blanks. The fact that he staged the kidnapping was just a guess, but he didn’t correct me.
So I’d guessed right.
“All that money,” I said, “and all that risk. Setting up Gillis here as some sort of shadow government. Making Weed come down here and try to hand down bogus rulings. Attempted murder of a marshal. What in God’s name is back there? Gold? Silver? Carmody and I have been over and over that patch of scrub and we can’t find anything. What could possibly be back there that’s worth all this?”
Davis leaned forward and almost whispered.
“It’s what will be there. Your dead body.”
He pounded his fist on my desk three times. Steady beats like a machine, each one harder than the one before. He was shaking with fury.
“You’re going to die because you fucked up my deal and made me look bad. In front of my colleagues.”
In front of his colleagues. His colleagues.
I almost laughed, but it was more sad than funny, and I actually felt my shoulders slump. Word choices lead us to interesting and scary crevices of the human mind, and here they had just provided an unintentionally trenchant insight into Davis’s world.
His colleagues are what I’d call accomplices.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, so I could think clearly when I started the fight for my life.
I made up my mind how to start.
Chapter 47
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said.
Gillis snorted and laughed at me. Davis said nothing
“Davis,” I said, “I’ll use my connections to get them to go easy on you.”
The audacity of it caught him off guard.
Gillis make that snorting sound again, and Droopy and Stinky looked amused, glancing back at each other several times, poking each other, as though it were a long-practiced ritual. I surmised that they were easily amused.
Weed looked thoughtful and troubled.
Tremaine had no reaction. He just watched me. Just looked. He made no attempt to glare or posture or to look tough, and the fact that he didn’t feel the need to try worried me.
I turned my attention to Gillis.
“But you, you’re on your own. You’re an even lower species that Davis here. He’s just a crook. You’re a parasite. You find vulnerable people who believe your bullshit and you suck the life out of them.”
Gillis, of course, had an innate need to act tough, because he wasn’t. He sauntered up to the bars, though not quite close enough for me to reach him. He sneered at me.
“As for you two,” I said to Droopy and Stinky, “you’re too stupid to know any better. Leave now and I’ll forget I saw you.”
Stinky gave a wheezy laugh that started and ended abruptly, like a cat hissing.
I returned my attention to Davis.
“I know what’s on your mind, Davis. You want the money back. Though not in the way a normal man wants money. You want it back because each of those bills has your arrest warrant written on it.”
Droopy and Stinky were still poking each other and Gillis was still sneering but I had Weed’s attention.
And Davis’s.
“I buried that money, but not before I gave a bill each to Munro, Harbold, and Carmody,” I lied. It would have been an excellent idea, but I hadn’t thought of it until now. I reminded myself to start thinking more clearly about the future, if indeed it turned out I would have one.
But they didn’t know I lied.
“I told them to hang onto it and to take it to Washington if anything happened to me. Don’t worry, Davis, I replaced each greenback with my own money. Didn’t want to be caught stealing in front of my colleagues.”
Davis surely could run a range of colors like a chameleon. He was a pale gray now.
“I knew there was something fishy about that money. On the back it said, ‘tens note is legal tender.’ I guess that could be the right way to word something on a ten-dollar Greenback, which is all I h
ad, but it’s a pretty convoluted way to put it. So when I was waiting for Carmody to heal up, I checked with the local banker and he told me that there was a huge run of counterfeits with that error.”
I figured I might as well take my last shot, and I gave Davis my best hard-case stare and continued.
“So the way I see it, Davis, ten grand of these Greenbacks were sitting around in an evidence vault for some counterfeiting trial and you ‘borrowed’ them for the payoff. You’d have easy access. All you had to do is say you wanted to examine some evidence. It’s a hell of a lot easier than stealing actual cash, or God forbid, using your own money. And there was no risk. Your henchmen would kill me on the way out of town, when I didn’t expect an ambush, and retrieve it.”’
Now Davis was on his feet, thinking, plotting, moving toward me. His face was red again. His lecture wasn’t working out as planned.
I began to yell.
“You’re through, Davis. You can kill me, but Carmody knows about the counterfeits, Harbold knows, and most important, Munro knows. You’re going to kill us all? You think I’m a pain in the ass? Wait until you get Munro on your case. And he’s a state senator. You think you can kill him with a bunch of sad-sack hired goons?”
“I’m fully capable of dealing with them one at a time,” Davis said, taking a step closer to the bars and standing with his legs spread and his hands on his hips.
“I do one thing, finish it, and then move on,” Davis said. “Right now, unfortunately for you, you are the complete focus of my attention.”
“Davis, there’s one more thing. Your daughter is no dummy. She’s going to figure out you used her. Why would you do something like that?”
And then the answer hit me. I’d only been taunting him, and didn’t have the answer to the question, but now I’d figured it out.
Sometimes your mind works best when you’re cornered – as I now literally was, trapped in an eight-by-twelve corner cell surrounded by six men who had everything to lose if I lived.
Chapter 48
“I’ll give the devil his due, Davis,” I said. “It was a fucking incredible scheme. I just figured the whole thing out.”
“You think so? Tell me.”
Davis put a hand on his hip and lifted his eyebrows to let me know he was waiting. His face remained set in the serious stony countenance that people of his strata employ to pose for historical commemoration. He looked for all the world like a statue from a bygone era, what with his double-breasted tailed coat, two-toned lapels, and wing collar over the type of neck sash that Daniel Webster wore in the 1840s.
“Tell me.” The eyes turned harder.
I held up my index finger.
“First, using your daughter as a pawn in the game completely insulated you from suspicion, didn’t it? You’re at the center of this web, but you wove the strands in such an overlapping and tangled pattern that no one could follow it back to you.”
I lifted another finger, a habit Carmody occasionally mimicked, and when he’d had a few drinks and wanted to parody my long-windedness he’d theatrically take off his shoes. It always got a laugh from his ashram at the bar. He was a natural entertainer, but sometimes I wondered about the wisdom of my carrying a gun in his presence.
But fuck it, I thought, this was complicated, and I was figuring out the details as I went, so I’d unravel the story it my own way.
“Second,” I said, holding up the appropriate finger, “you sent Weed on a fool’s errand to start some trouble, piss me off, and get myself into a jam.”
Weed was a study in slow, horrified realization. His eyes and his mouth and even his nostrils grew wider as it sunk in. He glanced between me and Davis as if looking for an answer.
I popped up my ring finger next.
“Third, you used a crew of henchmen to stage the kidnapping of your daughter, conveniently leaving a survivor – an innocent man, totally uninvolved in the whole affair – to communicate the ransom plan.”
Gates nodded and there was a flicker of upward movement at the corners of his mouth. He was particularly proud of that part, I imagined, but men like him rarely smile broadly, finding it undignified.
“Fourth, you fooled a neutral party I trusted – Munro – into asking me to deliver the ransom. In exchange, you offered to get me off the hook for throwing Weed in jail. Separate strands, and again, they appear totally unconnected.”
I almost slapped my forehead but didn’t want to give them the pleasure.
Then it occurred to me that the more I kept Davis pleased with himself, self-absorbed, and marinating in self-congratulation, the better the chances were for my survival.
So I slapped my forehead.
“Then it was simple, I said. “Everybody figured I’d be on guard when I approached Table Top, but you and your men figured I’d be easy pickings when I was still hours away, distracted because I was trying to wind through a wooded trail, and traveling light because I had to keep a low profile. And who would be surprised when a man carrying a lot of money was murdered and robbed on the trail?”
I restrained myself from holding up my thumb to accentuate the fifth and last point, as that’s an ungainly gesture, so I folded my arms across my chest. I stepped back and leaned against the wall to the right of the cot.
I looked down and whispered in what I hoped was a convincing tone of bitterness and despair.
“Goddamnit, Davis, you covered all the angles. Even if someone were suspicious after my death, who would follow up? Gillis here would put himself in power and no one connected to Shadow Valley would be able to follow up even if they wanted to.”
I slumped a little more, feeling the scratch of the bricks against my shoulder blades, and spoke to the floor in a whisper that was barely audible even to me.
“And you know what the best part was?” I whispered.
Davis, irritated, turned what I would take to be his better ear toward me and took a step forward so he could glory in hearing about the best part.
“If Carmody survived the ambush, he wouldn’t be a deputy any longer, anyway. Elmira would be on the outs, too.”
I lowered my voice as much as you can while still making a sound.
“Judge Davis,” I whispered, “you’ve gotten your revenge. And you played me like Paganini played the violin.”
I liked the Paganini analogy. I’d never seem Paganini play, of course. He died when I was ten or so and as far as I know never traveled to America, but I’d studied a little about him and liked how he went about things.
A violin has four strings tuned to different pitches. You can play chords by playing two more strings together when drawing the bow over them, and you can play individual notes. If one of the strings breaks, you can, in theory at least, calculate what the note would be if played on another string and play using whatever strings are left.
Paganini was perhaps the greatest virtuoso who ever lived, according to what I’d read, and would intentionally play with frayed strings, hoping that one would break and he could dazzle the audience by finishing the piece on three strings.
He liked the risk. And he liked the thrill of playing on three strings.
I like it, too.
I’m not that tall, a little over six feet, but I have long arms and broad shoulders and big hands – an ideal build for a fighter, I’ve been told.
I held up my right hand and wiped my face from forehead to chin and shook my head in exhaustion, keeping my hand over my mouth and rubbing my chin and I wept my words into my oversized palm.
“And there’s one more thing.”
Even when a fighter gets his brains scrambled, which mercifully I had not, he almost always retains his sense of distance. By that I mean he can gauge to a fraction of an inch whether his fist will reach his opponent’s chin or gut.
“One more thing,” I whispered.
Davis leaned in by a half inch and I sprang forward and seized one of his fancy velvet lapels up high, near his neck. It was excellent fabric, feeling in my han
d to be as strong as tent canvas, and it held firm when I wrenched him forward.
His head hit the bars with such force that I could see flakes of rust and dust begin to snow down on us. Davis’s face, which one could charitably call fleshy, was now squeezed between the bars. His lips, nose, and ample cheeks were oozing through a bit, and I was able to slap the protruding parts with considerable vigor.
I put my face right up against his, our noses touching.
“Just so you know,” I said, “your daughter, who you were willing to sacrifice in a pawn’s gambit so you could kill me, wasn’t fooled. She told me you’re an asshole.”
And then I spit on him.
Chapter 49
Davis bucked in a rage. He was a big man, and when he struck the bars it looked and sounded like a bull going berserk in a rodeo chute.
I twisted Davis’s nose and he let out an enraged grunt.
Droopy and Stinky had stopped poking each other and watched the scene in slack-jawed wonder.
Tremaine’s hand moved reflexively toward his gun, but hovered an inch above the butt. He couldn’t kill me; not yet. Not until I’d told them where the money was hidden. And besides, his boss was between me and his bullets, and slaughtering your cash cow is bad for business.
Gillis pulled the keyring off the nail on the opposite wall, handed it to Stinky, and shoved him toward the door.
In order for this to work, I knew, somebody had to open that door fast.
Stinky, of course, fumbled with the keys. There were only three keys on the ring. Two were small and I still had no idea what they were for. One was large, and presumably most of the higher life forms on the planet could deduce that it was the key to the cell door, but Stinky pondered as though he were solving an equation in celestial mechanics.
Gillis seized the ring and fumbled with the lock himself.
I’d twisted Davis’s nose about as far as it would turn, so I went to work on his ear. Davis stuck both arms through the bars but he had no leverage and could only pat my shoulders as he flailed at me.