He jerked awake at the outskirts of town. Some scruffy kids were splashing through the mud puddles in the road, screeching and hollering and giggling as they did so. He envied them. A pure perfect image came to him. He was eight and playing baseball with his brother in the front yard, and he had just hit a baseball farther than he ever had. And his brother, who'd never paid him much respect before—his brother's whole attitude changed right then and there. He never forgot it. His brother didn't push him around anymore. Call him names. Punish him. Prine still wasn't quite an equal, but he came damned close.
His poncho had started to dry off. He was completely sweated inside it. If they didn't have any luck here, he'd push Neville to stay over for eight hours, get some sleep, go at it fresh again. You could bet that was what Tolan and Rooney would be doing—if not here, somewhere down the line.
They went straight for the sheriff's office. A tough-looking, middle-aged Mexican in a sombrero and a serape sat on a bench outside the stucco building. His outsize badge was easy to see on the serape. So was the sawed-off shotgun laid across his lap. He was rolling a cigarette and watching them ease up to the hitching post.
"Welcome to our town, gentlemen," he said. "I'm Sheriff Gomez." He smiled with bad teeth. "If you're wondering how a Mex got to be sheriff in a white man's town . . ." There was something obscene about his laugh. "It's because the gringos are too scared to be sheriff themselves."
He finished rolling the cigarette, set it between his lips, produced a lucifer from inside his serape, and ignited it with a thumbnail. "How may I be of service?"
"We're looking for two men," Prine said.
"Your badge—these must be bad men, no?" There was a sardonic tone to his words that Prine didn't like.
"Their names are Tolan and Rooney," Neville said. "They murdered my sister." He'd clearly picked up on Gomez's sarcastic tone, too—and didn't like it. "My name's Richard Neville. If you haven't heard of me, you've heard of my father. I would recommend that you don't give me or my friend here any shit. Because if you do, I'll tear that fucking sneer off your face and then cut your heart out. You understand, amigo?"
Neville's bitter words didn't have much effect on Gomez. "Then I should be impressed and cower in fear?"
"You should do your job," Prine snapped. "We're looking for two killers, and we need to know if they've passed through your town here."
The front door of the sheriff's office opened and a man, also Mexican, emerged. He was the opposite of the other man. Tall, trim, handsome, well-dressed in a business suit, he stepped into the daylight and said, "Good morning, gentlemen. I was waiting for my stupid deputy here to explain to you his joke. I'm Marshal Valdez. This despicable creature here is my brother-in-law, whose presence has been forced upon me by familial obligations."
Gomez didn't seem the least embarrassed by this revelation. In fact, he yawned, stretched, stood up, and said "It is time for a hardworking man like me to have himself some breakfast."
"Remember what I told you about the whorehouse, Gomez," Valdez said. "If you get rough with any of the women next time you're drunk, I'll put you in jail for a week and take away your badge."
Gomez smirked. "Someday I will be wearing that badge. Then we shall see what we shall see." He made a pass at giving a bow but almost fell over on his face. For the first time, Prine realized the man was drunk. Gomez wandered off.
"Come inside, please," Marshal Valdez said, "and let me again apologize for the rudeness of Gomez. He lives inside a bottle."
The jailhouse was tidy, smelled clean, and was arranged into a front desk, two small offices in the rear, and four cells behind a locked door. The marshal's office was heavy with a large wooden desk, a bookcase filled with what appeared to be legal tomes, and a wall decorated with the minimal number of awards, citations, and photographs of the marshal shaking hands with people he obviously considered to be important. Prine didn't recognize any of them.
The marshal called out a name that seemed garbled—"Lucentia" was as close as Prine could get it—and two minutes later a fetching young girl of no more than eighteen appeared and blessed each man with a cup of steaming coffee. "My daughter, gentlemen. You can see why I am so proud of her."
The pretty girl was dressed in a white peasant blouse and skirt, looking more gypsy than Mexican. When she smiled, she also tried to speak. The sound made the back of Prine's neck freeze. She could not articulate the words she was trying to speak.
"That is our family shame," Marshal Valdez said in his formal, somewhat stiff way. "Three years ago we had some trouble here. A range war of sorts. The one side felt that I was too friendly with the other. They accused me, in fact, of being on the payroll of the other. A man in my position, he can't tolerate such slander, of course. So I myself—and my men, even Gomez—began riding against them. Since they insisted we were on the other side, then why not be on the other side. Of course, our friends were so happy to have us fight with them that they insisted we take money. Some people to this day insist that it was a bribe so that they could have the law on their side. I have tried to explain that many times to many people—that our intentions were only good and true—but you know how cynical some people can be. They're always looking for the worst in other people."
This guy had a line of bullshit that stretched clear from here to Buffalo, New York, Prine thought. He had to give him one thing, though. He was a dazzler. He could hold an audience with the best of them.
"But you are no doubt wondering what any of this has to do with my lovely daughter Lucretia. Too simple—and too tragic. They broke into our house one night. I am a widower. Lucretia was home alone. They cut her tongue out. Later, one of the men who helped to do this terrible thing, he told me that this would be worse than killing her. Because every time I looked at my daughter now, I would see what selling my badge had done. That was how the gentleman put it. 'Selling my badge.' I myself personally castrated him. I made sure that he remained conscious. Then I poured kerosene upon him and set him on fire. I did not do this to please my men. Or to appease some crowd of lowborns. I did it to avenge my daughter. I did this alone, with no one else around to see. I waited till he was nothing more than ash and bone, and then I threw him into a pit of rattlers I kept in the ground behind the jail. Sometimes prisoners do not want to talk. Showing them the snake pit can be a very effective means of making them more cooperative." He nodded to Lucretia. "This, then, is my tragic daughter."
The girl looked curiously angry as he told this story. Prine figured it must be having to relive the terrible events that led to her being mute. She'd probably appreciate it if her father wasn't always bringing it up. He'd be pissed off every time he thought of it. The girl curtsied and left the office.
Valdez got up and poured brandy from a fancy cut-glass bottle. Each cup got a strong dose of it. "The coffee is not to every palate. Jail coffee, what can you expect? The brandy is the best one can buy. It makes even this coffee bearable." Finished serving, he capped the bottle and sat down again.
"Now, gentlemen," said the splendid—just ask him—Mexican, "how is it I may serve you?"
"We're looking for two men. Tolan and Rooney are their names," Prine said.
"These are bad men?"
"Very bad men. They kidnapped Mr. Neville's sister and then murdered her."
Valdez was so dramatic in response to this news that he looked as though he might purely faint. "An outrage against all that is true and holy."
"They came this way," Prine said. "They may be in Picaro now."
The drama continued. The fabulous Mexican put his hand on his fist and shook his noble head. "It is a wonder that God above does not strike us all dead, the things we do to each other."
Prine was starting to feel faint from all the ham acting. He said, "We need your permission to look around town. We're not asking for anything official. We just want to check the hotels and the saloons, mostly."
"You do not want to use my men?"
"We don't want to sign
al them we're here. If your men start asking questions, it won't be long before they figure out that we're here looking for them."
"I see. A point well taken, my friend. But in such a heinous matter—I will be most cooperative in any way you suggest. And if these two should end up in my jail, I can assure you they will rot there."
Neville spoke for the first time. "We'll take them back with us to Claybank."
"Of course, whatever you wish. Cooperation is what I promised you, and cooperation is what you shall have."
Prine said, "We're pretty tired, but we're going to start looking for them right away. Then we'll get some sleep and some grub."
"Your poor sister," Valdez said. "She was young, Mr. Neville?"
"Twenty-three."
"A child—an innocent flower. These men will pay for what they've done, believe me."
"Thank you, Marshal," Neville said. "Now we need to get going."
Prine and Neville pushed up from their chairs. The brandy had made Prine groggy. He needed cold wind to cut his lethargy.
A man in a white apron over Levi's and a red wool shirt walked past the door, nodding. "Good morning, Marshal. This food is much better than they deserve."
It stood to reason that since everything else was so splendid about Marshal Valdez, his laugh would be splendid, too. On stage, it would carry well to all the highest seats in the balcony. Valdez the opera star.
"You say that every morning, Mr. Wiley."
"I say it because it's that good every morning."
Prine had the feeling that the banter was part of an entire ritual. A really boring one.
Wiley vanished. Prine heard the heavy door leading to the cells in back being opened and then closed. There would likely be a slot for food trays built into the cell doors.
"Remember, my friends, I will take every opportunity to help you."
Prine glanced at Neville. Neville looked as weary of this splendiferous speech as Prine was.
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."
Chapter Fifteen
There 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?"
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