Showdown

Chapter Twenty-two

By the time they reached the town limits of Claybank, mist and fog had turned them into cold, unspeaking wraiths. They'd each nodded off from time to time. Hard to say who was more tired, the men or their horses.

"I'll be turning off here," Neville said. His face was slick with moisture. He stank of grime and sleep and dampness. "You're going to say no to this, Prine. But I don't want you to. I'll consider it an insult if you do, in fact. I'm drawing a check for a thousand dollars for you and having somebody from the bank run it over to the sheriff's office tomorrow."

"I wish you wouldn't."

"After all we went through? You sure as hell earned it."

"I was doing my job is all."

"You need more satisfaction than that."

"What sort've satisfaction will you get? Cassie's dead."

Even through the mist, Neville's smile was clear and clean.

"I got the satisfaction of killing them."

"Nasmith's right," Prine said. "I guess you're the only one who'll ever know if you killed those two in cold blood."

"For what it's worth, Prine, I didn't."

"I'm glad to know that." He cinched his hat lower on his head and said, "Well, good night, then."

"Good night, Prine. And remember, you're to cash that check." Neville swung away and disappeared into the murk.

An hour later, Prine, in long johns, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, sat in his bed feeling that the past couple days just might have been a dream. Or nightmare, actually.

Everything had happened too quickly to be understood in any comprehensible way. A girl was kidnapped, murdered, he and Neville had pursued the killers, and the killers had died trying to kill Neville, or they had died when Neville executed them. At this moment, Prine really didn't give much of a damn which way it had happened.

He'd sent Sheriff Daly a long telegram ahead indicating that Tolan and Rooney's bodies would be shipped back to Claybank by train in a day or so and that both he and Neville were tired but otherwise all right.

Now all he needed to do was relax and sleep.

When he realized that he was going over and over everything as a means of not facing what really worried him—telling Daly the truth about his plan to take advantage of the kidnapping and play the hero—he stubbed out his smoke and set his coffee on the floor next to the bed.

If he was going to brood on that, it might as well be in the dark, where he just might have a chance of getting tired enough to sleep.

As he walked to work in the morning, still tired from the past couple of days, Prine worked on the way he would approach Daly this morning. Bob Carlyle generally went to the café first, and that was around ten. He took fifteen, twenty minutes. This would be all the time Prine would have alone with Daly—if Daly wasn't called away or some unexpected trouble didn't take both of them from the office.

He'd say, I made a bad mistake, Sheriff. And I need to talk to you about it. He half-smiled about this. It would be like going to confession. That's exactly what he'd be doing this morning. He'd say the rest the same way—straight out. He wouldn't make any excuses. There were no excuses to be made. Then it would be up to Daly.

Just before Prine reached the sheriff's office, his stomach curdled and the rolling jitters passed up and down his arms. This sure as hell wasn't going to be easy.

"There he is now," Daly's voice said before Prine had even crossed the threshold.

A city man in a homburg and a dark blue suit stood, holding a briefcase. He was a formal, stiff-looking man of forty years or so. If he'd ever laughed, you couldn't prove it by his narrow, severe face or hard blue judgmental eyes.

Bob Carlyle was grabbing his hat. Daly walked over and yanked his off the peg, too. "Prine, this is Mr. Silas Beaumont. Remember Al Woodward, who was here investigating the Pentacle fire? Well, he still hasn't turned up. So Mr. Beaumont here, who's a vice president of the insurance company Woodward hired out to, is here to find Woodward and carry on with the arson investigation. I told him that you'd talked to Aaron Duncan and that you'd be glad to help him. Meanwhile, Carlyle here and I thought we'd grab us a cup of coffee."

It was almost comical, the way Daly and Carlyle were rushing out the door. The Mr. Silas Beaumonts of the world were difficult to deal with. They just assumed, you being small-town, you were stupid and probably corrupt.

"See you soon, Mr. Beaumont," Daly said as he half-dove through the door, slamming it hard shut behind him.

"Coffee, Mr. Beaumont?"

"I'm not here for a chat, Mr. Prine. At this moment, I should be in Lincoln, Nebraska, where the stockholders of our company are holding their annual meeting. Instead, I'm in your little burg trying to find out what happened to one of our freelance investigators. There's a train out of here this evening, and I hope to be on it. So no—no coffee, no chat, nothing extraneous. If I can get on that train this evening, then I can be in Lincoln in a day and a half. Still time to pay my respects to our stockholders."

No coffee? How about a cob to shove up your ass? Prine thought. He'd gone from a reasonably good mood—hoping Daly would understand and forgive him—to a dour one thanks to this pale, mannequin-like intruder who was as imperious as a well-connected politician.

Prine said, "Well, I'll have a cup for myself, if you don't mind."

As he was pouring his coffee, he said, "When's the last time you heard from Woodward?"

"Last week."

"He pretty reliable, is he?"

"We check our freelancers out thoroughly."

Prine, steaming coffee in hand, angled his bottom onto the edge of his desk. He kicked a chair with rollers on it over to Beaumont. Beaumont's bloodless lips pinched up in displeasure. He wasn't going to give this office a very good grade. Not that Prine gave a damn.

But Beaumont sat down, briefcase on lap.

"Do you know anything about Aaron Duncan, Mr. Prine?"

Prine shrugged. "That he used to be a successful businessman is about all I know."

"Used to be?"

"The last recession hit everybody out here pretty hard. Farm prices went to hell, and the railroad didn't make us a spur the way they'd originally promised. Most people were in a bad way."

"From what I'm able to gather, Aaron Duncan owns four businesses within a one-hundred-mile radius."

Prine sipped some coffee. "That, I didn't know. Then maybe the recession didn't hit him as hard as it did some others."

"Or maybe it did. This is the third business—the Pentacle Mattress Factory—to be destroyed by fire."

"I see," Prine said. And he did. "Did you pay off on the other two?"

"Yes."

"Nothing suspicious about them?"

"A lot suspicious about them. But nothing we could prove."

"But this time—"

"Three out of four businesses owned by one man go up in smoke? The probability is virtually zero."

"He sounds desperate."

"Desperate and sloppy. The last time we heard from Al Woodward was in a wire he sent. He said he was sure he could prove arson at Pentacle."

Prine remembered talking to Aaron Duncan a few days ago. How Duncan's wife had left the office angrily, following an argument of some kind. He also remembered the bartender saying that Woodward had been looking at a letter somebody sent him. Would Aaron Duncan's wife—if she was angry enough—cooperate with Woodward by sending him a note?

"Do you have any ideas, Deputy?"

"One. Maybe." He told Beaumont what he'd seen in Duncan's office, the wife so furious when she left.

"It could have been about anything—their argument, I mean."

"I agree. But I still think it'd be worth talking to Mrs. Duncan."

Beaumont didn't look happy. "Anything else?"

Beaumont's disappointment irritated Prine. Made him defensive. Maybe Mrs. Duncan wasn't such a great idea. But she was a better idea than Beaumont had.

Beaumont said, "You checked all the—"

"—hotels, saloons, boardinghouses. No trace of Woodward."

Beaumont stood up. "I have a meeting in twenty minutes with Aaron Duncan. Maybe I'll have a little more luck with him than you do. I'm a pretty good interrogator, if I do say so myself. In the big cities, knowing how to question a man and lead him into a verbal trap is a valued skill. We used to do what you do out here—just beat a man till he talks—but we've found a skilled interrogation to be much more useful."

"I don't beat the men I question," Prine said. "I usually set them on fire."

"My Lord," said Beaumont, "is that true?"

Prine smiled. "No. But you wouldn't have been surprised, would you, Mr. Beaumont? The way lawmen treat prisoners 'out here.'"

Beaumont looked both unhappy and uncomfortable as he made his way to the front door. As if Prine had suddenly revealed himself to be a mental defective of some kind. What sort of person made jokes about setting other people on fire?

Most disturbing, most disturbing, Beaumont was obviously thinking, as he put his hand on the doorknob and made a hasty departure.