by JR Roberts
“I’ve got my gun,” she said, “and I’ve got you. I’m ready.”
“Okay,” Clint said. “Let’s go.”
They went over to the saloon and walked right in like they belonged there. Clint ignored the looks of the men and led Molly directly to the bar.
“Mister,” the bartender—a big, burly-looking man with a lazy eye—asked, “are you lookin’ for trouble bringin’ her in here?”
“No, but I am lookin’ for somebody,” Clint said. “In fact, two somebodies.”
He described to the bartender both the colonel and Private Collins, but he didn’t describe either one in uniform.
“Have you seen anybody like that?”
“I see lots of men in here,” the barman said. “I don’t pay attention to them, only to what they drink. Now get your girlfriend out of here before one of these guys take a likin’ to her and you lose her.”
“Maybe,” Clint said to the bartender, “I’ll ask the rest of these gents if they’ve seen my friends.”
“Look,” the bartender said, “I have enough fights in here on good days. I ain’t seen your friends, and neither has anybody else.”
Molly was looking around the room while Clint concentrated on the bartender. She made the mistake of locking eyes with a man who was sitting in a corner with two friends. Obviously a dockworker with a cloth cap and an earring in his ear, he winked at her and grinned, showing yellow teeth where there weren’t gaps.
She looked away, but it was too late. The man said something to his two friends, and the three of them got up. Clint heard the scraping of their chairs on the floor. He turned just as they reached him. The bartender reached beneath the bar, but Clint pointed at him and said, “Don’t.”
The bartender froze.
“What do you three want?” Clint asked.
“It ain’t what we want, friend,” the man with the earring said. “It’s what your lady wants.”
“The lady wants nothing to do with you,” Clint said.
“That ain’t what her eyes was sayin’ a minute ago,” the man said. “She was lookin’ me up and down.”
“I was wondering how a man so dirty could have two friends sitting with him,” she said, sniffing the air. “Now I know. You’re all filthy.”
“What the hell—” one of the other men said. “The bitch has a mouth on her.”
“Let’s teach her—” the third man said, reaching for her.
All three men moved toward Molly so Clint had no choice. He threw a punch that landed on the jaw of the man with the earring, driving him back and into an empty table, upsetting it.
The second man he kicked in the shin, and when the man howled and bent over to grab it, Clint hit him in the jaw as well. The blow knocked him to the floor, where he saw him holding his leg.
The third man froze when Molly put the barrel of her Colt Paterson underneath his chin.
“The bitch has a mouth, and a gun,” she said to him, “and you’re only going to get to experience the gun.”
She cocked the hammer back.
“Molly!” Clint snapped. “Put it away.”
The bartender started to reach under the bar again.
“I said don’t!” Clint snapped, pointing his finger again. “I’m not as free with my gun as she is, but when I draw, somebody usually dies.”
The bartender froze. The other men in the place froze as well, except for one, who said, “Kill him, girlie. I owe him money.”
“I’m really tempted.”
“We just came in here looking for information on two men,” Clint said. He described both of them again in detail. “Have any of you seen one or both of them?”
There was no answer.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Clint said. “Molly, we’re leaving. Uh, try not to kill that man unless he forces you to.”
The other two men were on the floor, and were staying down, just in case she decided to kill them.
They worked their way to the door, Molly covering the room with her Colt.
Outside, Clint said, “Okay, put it away.”
Molly took a deep breath and let it out.
“I wanted to kill that man.”
“I could tell.”
She put the gun back in her belt.
“Well, that wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “We didn’t find out anything in there.”
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean one of those men must know something,” Clint said. “He just has to get away from the others so he can tell us.”
“And how’s he supposed to find us to tell us?” she asked.
“That’s easy,” he said. “We’re going to wait for him at the end of the block.”
He started walking away and she followed him, shaking her head.
Chapter Forty-Six
They waited at the end of the street for ten minutes then a man came out the front door of the saloon. He looked both ways, spotted them, and came walking toward them. He didn’t stop, though.
“Around the corner,” he said to them as he passed.
They walked around the corner and found him waiting in the doorway of a building.
“Those two men yer lookin’ for,” the man said. He was obviously a dockworker, short but burly, with short black hair shot with gray.
“What about them?” Clint asked.
“You willin’ ta pay?”
“Pay for what?”
“To find them!” the man said. “Whataya playin’ games or somethin’?”
“We’re not playing any games, mister,” Clint said. “If you want to get paid, I want to know what it is I’m paying for.”
“I can tell ya where ta find those two men yer lookin’ fer,” he said.
“And you want to tell me now and have me pay you, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And how do I know when I get there, they’ll actually be there?”
“Hey,” the man said, “I’m gonna tell you where I saw them. If they ain’t there when you get there, that ain’t my fault.”
Clint looked at Molly.
“He’s got a point.”
“Wait,” the man said, “you want proof I saw them, right?”
“It would help,” Clint said.
“What if I was ta tell you when I saw them, they was wearin’ Army uniforms?”
Neither Clint nor Molly had said anything in the saloon about Army uniforms.
“My friend,” Clint said, putting his hands in his pocket, “I think we can do business.”
The place where the dockworker had seen Collins and Tate was only two blocks away. An empty warehouse—not abandoned, but empty.
“Why would a perfectly good warehouse be empty on a busy waterfront like this?” Molly asked.
“Because somebody made damn sure it would be,” Clint said.
“The Army?”
“Or Tate himself,” Clint said. “What if he wasn’t in the Army anymore, but the word didn’t get around yet?”
“Wouldn’t that kind of thing get around fast?”
“Okay,” Clint said, “what if even the Army doesn’t know it yet. He’s out on his own, but hasn’t actually resigned his commission yet. Maybe he just … walked away.”
“And that’s why your contacts, and even Jim West, didn’t know about it yet.”
“He kept his uniform, and convinced Jim to send for me.”
“And Jim asked me to help you.”
“And Tate asked me to help him, and none of us knew he wasn’t in the Army anymore.”
“So what’s he doing, then?”
“Maybe,” Clint said, “he’s the one planning to assassinate the senator, and blame it on Dorence Atwater’s delusion that Harlan Winston is Henry Wirz.”
“And he has one man working with him?” she asked. “Collins?”
“And Collins may be the assassin.”
“And this warehouse is his headquarters in San Francisco.”
Clint put his hand on the door knob and said, “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
The door opened. That surprised Clint. He thought they were going to end up walking around the building, looking for a window to use.
“Quietly,” he said to Molly.
She reached for her gun.
“Leave it,” he said. “Don’t pull it unless you have to use it.”
“How will I know when I have to use it?” she asked.
“Because I’ll be using mine.”
They entered the warehouse, closed the door behind them. There was a flash of daylight in the interior, but they couldn’t help that.
Clint stopped just inside the door.
“What’s wrong?” Molly whispered.
“We need time for our eyes to get used to the dark,” he said. “The windows have been blacked out.”
“I thought it was kind of dark in here, given that it’s still light out.”
He put his mouth to her ear.
“No more talking.”
She nodded.
He could make out shapes in the interior of the warehouse, but couldn’t see what they were. His instincts told him the building was empty. Tate and Collins were out. Maybe they weren’t coming back.
He started forward, toward the shapes in the center of the large room. When he got there, he took a lucifer from his pocket and scraped it on his boot. It flared, startling Molly.
“Jesus!”
“Nobody’s here,” he said.
“How can you be sure?”
“I can feel it.”
In the light from the match they could see two cots with blankets, a desk, some chairs. On top of the desk was a handgun and a rifle. He tried the drawers, had to light another match to see that they were empty.
“Look here,” Molly said.
She had dug beneath the blankets on the cots and come up with two Army uniforms, one for a private, the other a colonel.
“I guess they’ve finally given up the Army,” Clint said. “The gun and rifle are U.S. Army issue.”
“Which doesn’t mean they don’t have some other weapons,” she said.
“Right.”
“So, if we telegraphed Washington, meaning it to get to Tate, we never would have gotten a reply, right?”
“Right.”
“How would he explain that?”
“He’d say he was too busy.”
“Would you have bought that?”
“No.”
She dropped the uniforms back onto the cots.
“Now what?” she asked. “We’ve got a few days to find them before the senator arrives.”
“First we have to get out of here.”
She headed for the door they’d used to come in.
“No,” he said, “we need another way out.”
“Why?”
“Because that door was left unlocked.”
“You think somebody’s waiting outside for us?” she said.
“Maybe even our dockworker friend and some of his friends.”
“We were set up?”
“I’m just being careful, Molly,” he said. “Come on, let’s find another way out.”
They moved through the warehouse until they found a loading dock. Clint unlocked the door next to the dock and they went outside that way. He closed it behind them.
“Now what?”
“Well,” he said, “we could go around front and see who’s waiting for us, but that would tell Tate we’re on to him.”
“Doesn’t the fact that we found the warehouse do that?” she asked.
“If there are some men waiting out front, the longer we let them wait, the more time we have without Tate knowing.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Talk to Atwater,” Clint said, “see if he’s working with Tate, or just being used by him.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m making it up as I go along now.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Fester was bored.
He’d been standing in a doorway across the street from Atwater’s paper—The Reporter—since morning, waiting for Clint Adams to put in an appearance. He was bored after one hour, so by now—several hours in—he was yawning and daydreaming.
When he spotted Clint, however, he came immediately to attention. The woman was with him, and they entered the building together.
Fester wasn’t sure what to do. Wait for them to come? Run and tell Bellows now? That would take a while, because he wasn’t sure where Bellows was. He wasn’t in the habit of making decisions for himself, but he decided he would just wait for Adams and the girl to come back out, and then follow them.
He was quite pleased with himself for making this decision. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as Bellows was always telling him he was, after all.
Atwater was not surprised to see Clint Adams approaching his desk, but decided to act as if he was.
“Well,” he said, “what brings you back?”
“Did you think I’d give up on trying to save you from yourself, Dorence?” Clint asked. “If you kill Senator Winston, your life will be over.”
“You don’t think my life was over the moment they sent me to Andersonville?”
“You didn’t have to let that ruin your life,” Clint said.
“Maybe you didn’t,” Atwater said. “I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
“Dorence—”
“If you’re not going to help me, Clint, you have to stay out of my way.”
“That’s just it, Dorence,” Clint said, sitting down. “I don’t think you need help. I think you already have help.”
“Really? From who?”
“That’s what I want you to tell me,” Clint said. “Do you know a newspaperman named Larry Gates?”
“I do.”
“He was killed yesterday.”
“That was actually in the newspapers this morning,” Atwater said. “Why do I get the feeling you knew about it before that?”
“He was helping me with something, and somebody killed him. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Dorence?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Do you have any photographs of Senator Winston here in your morgue?”
“Look around you, Clint,” Atwater said. “This is not The Chronicler.”
Clint took out the newspaper clipping he’d taken from Gates’s hand and put it on the desk.
“This was in Gates’s hand when we found him.”
Atwater picked it up, looked at it, and then put it back down. “It’s not a good likeness.”
“I know,” Clint said. “I can’t tell anything from it.”
“Too bad,” Atwater said. “If you got a look at the man, you’d agree with me, and help me.”
“Again, about your help,” Clint said. “Somebody has been shadowing us. You know anything about that?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you seen Colonel Tate in San Francisco?”
“Who?”
“Fred Tate,” Clint said. “He was a lieutenant when we were at Camp Sumter.”
“I haven’t seen Lieutenant Tate since we got out of Camp Sumter,” Atwater said. “Why would he be here?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Clint said. “There are entirely too many people interested in Senator Winston’s visit to San Francisco.”
“Maybe Tate knows that Winston is Wirz, too,” Atwater suggested.
Or maybe, Clint thought, he just wants Winston dead, for some reason. Since he didn’t pay much attention to politics, Clint had no idea what Winston was involved in.
“I doubt it,” Clint said, “but he’s got something on his mind.”
“So Tate is trying to kill Winston?” Atwater said. “I really don’t care who kills him, as long as he ends up dead.”
That wasn’t what you usually heard from somebody who wanted vengeance, Clint though
t. Usually in that case, the person wants to pull the trigger himself.
“Something’s going on,” Clint said, standing up, “and I think you know what it is. And I’m going to find out what it is. You can depend on that.”
Molly, who never said a word the whole time, turned and followed Clint back up the hall and out of the building.
Chapter Forty-Nine
“You see him?” Molly asked.
“I do.” Clint was impressed with how well Molly was able to check her back trail. Each time they’d been followed, she’d spotted it.
“What are we going to do about it?” she asked.
“I think this time,” Clint said, “we’ll find out who he is and who he’s working for.”
“So we grab him?”
“I haven’t decided,” Clint said. “We can grab him or we can tail him. Let him lead us back to whoever he’s working for;’
“You don’t think he’s working for Atwater?”
“Don’t know,” Clint said. “He could have been watching Atwater. Or been waiting for us.”
“If he was watching Atwater, would he leave him to follow us?”
“Depends on what his instructions are.”
“And that brings us back to our question, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Grab him or follow him.”
“Right.”
He thought a moment, then said, “Okay, I say follow.”
“Me, too,” she said, and then added, “just in case I had a vote.”
They lost their tail among the abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. The building housing the Reporter truly was one of the last of the occupied buildings in the area.
He was frustrated and confused, standing in one place but turning in circles, wondering which way to go. Once he figured out what to do, they would follow him.
If the man ever made a decision.
Fester was mad at himself.
He stood in one place, turning, trying to pick a direction. If he had to go to Bellows and admit he had lost Adams and the girl, that would just be admitting he was as stupid as Bellows always said he was.
Where the hell had they gone?
He stood still a moment, then admitted to himself that he had no choice.