The Loner: Crossfire

Chapter 5

“Mr. Browning, you’re making it mighty difficult for me to extend the courtesy to you that I want to,” Deputy Wallace said in tightlipped anger from behind that gun. “There’s only so far your reputation as one of our former leading citizens will get you.”

“Take it easy, Deputy.” Conrad didn’t know if Wallace had seen him slip the piece of paper in his pocket, but he didn’t intend to give it up unless he absolutely had to. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Carl Monroe’s lying on the floor of that bank downstairs, dead as a mackeral!”

“I didn’t shoot him.” Conrad shrugged. “You can check my gun. It hasn’t been fired since that ruckus in front of the hospital earlier.”

Wallace came farther into the office. “I know who shot Monroe. There are plenty of witnesses to what happened. I’m not going to lose any sleep over him getting ventilated. He was always too slick to get any blood on his own fingers, but he was part of plenty of dirty dealings that wound up with people getting killed. That doesn’t mean you’re in the clear here. Monroe got shot because he was shooting at you.”

“That sounds to me like I didn’t do anything wrong, like I was the victim,” Conrad pointed out.

“Blast it, I knew you were gonna come here! That’s why I didn’t tell you where Monroe’s office was and I tried to get the marshal’s permission to pull Monroe in for questioning as quick as I could. But you beat me here anyway, and now he’s dead!”

“There’s nothing illegal about paying a visit to a lawyer in his office. Monroe panicked when I showed up and told him who I was. Seems to me that’s just as good as a confession that he was mixed up in that attempt on my life.”

Conrad left out any mention of him pointing his gun at Monroe. The only other person who knew about that was the blond secretary, and he had a hunch she was going to make herself scarce for a while. She probably knew about some of Monroe’s crooked business, and didn’t want to get mixed up in any investigation.

“What happened then?” Wallace asked.

“Can I put my hands down?”

Wallace thought about it for a second, then shrugged and motioned with the barrel of his gun for Conrad to lower his hands. “You said Monroe panicked? What do you mean?”

“He ran out of here before I could stop him. I went after him. He took the elevator, so I went down the stairs. We got to the lobby of the bank at the same time. He took a shot at me and tried to rush out. The bank guard thought Monroe was a robber and was trying to get away with the bank’s money. He opened fire. That’s all I know, Deputy.”

“Yeah?” Wallace motioned with his gun at the litter of papers on the floor. “What about all this?”

“It was like this when I came back up here,” Conrad lied. “Somebody must’ve come in here after Monroe and I ran out and started going through his papers.”

“Somebody, eh? Who would do a thing like that?”

“Maybe somebody who worked for Monroe, or some other business associate?” Conrad suggested. “You said yourself he was mixed up in plenty of crooked work. Someone could have been trying to find blackmail material, or something like that.”

“I don’t know who was the slickest one here, you or Monroe,” Wallace said disgustedly as he holstered his pistol in a cross-draw rig on his left hip. “I’ve got a strong hunch you’re not telling me the whole truth, Mr. Browning ... but I don’t reckon I can prove it. Since there are more than a dozen witnesses downstairs who can confirm that you didn’t shoot Monroe ... just get out of here. You’re free to go.”

“I suppose you want me to stay in Carson City.” Conrad was prepared to ignore that order if he had to. Now that he had a lead in San Francisco, even a small one, he wasn’t going to allow anything else to delay him.

Wallace surprised him by saying, “No, I’d rather you get out of town. The marshal may not agree with that, but considering the hell that’s broken loose today, I think it would be in the interest of public safety for you to light a shuck out of here.”

Conrad smiled. “That can be arranged.”

“I warn you, though,” Wallace went on, “Monroe had a secretary, a woman named Lorraine Eastman. I’m going to find her and talk to her. If she tells a different story than you do, I may be issuing a warrant for your arrest.”

Wallace could issue all the warrants he wanted, Conrad thought. By the time the lawman got around to doing that, he would be in San Francisco and that warrant wouldn’t mean a thing. If necessary, Conrad wouldn’t come back to Carson City.

After all, it was no longer his home.

It was just one more in a long line of places where people kept trying to kill him.

With everything that had been going on, Conrad hadn’t had a chance to get to the train station and check to see when the next westbound train would be coming through. To his chagrin he learned he had missed the train by an hour.

“But there’ll be another westbound at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr. Browning,” the clerk told him. “Would you like a ticket on it?”

Conrad nodded. “Yes, thanks. All the way through to San Francisco.”

The delay chafed at him, but the quickest way to reach the coast was to wait for the train the next morning. He went back to the hotel to wash up, change clothes, and eat a late lunch.

He had almost accomplished the first two of those goals—he was buttoning up a clean shirt—when a knock sounded on the door of his suite, which were the best accommodations in the hotel. Considering what had already happened, Conrad figured it would be a good idea to be careful. His gun belt was draped over the back of a chair in the sitting room. He slid the Colt from its holster as he went to the door. “Yes?”

As soon as he spoke, he stepped quickly to one side, in case somebody in the hall decided to let loose with a shotgun blast through the door.

Instead, a voice he recognized as belonging to one of the bellboys replied, “I have a telegram for you, Mr. Browning.”

Conrad started to ask who the wire was from, then realized the message was probably sealed up and the boy wouldn’t know. He tucked the gun behind his belt where it would be handy and opened the door.

The bellboy’s eyes widened a little at the sight of the black gun butt sticking up at Conrad’s waist, but he didn’t say anything except, “Here you go, sir,” as he held out the Western Union envelope. Conrad took it, nodded his thanks, and handed the boy a silver dollar. He shut the door and tore open the envelope to slide out the yellow telegraph flimsy.

A frown creased his forehead as he read the words printed on it in a telegrapher’s block letters:

WILL KNOCK ON YOUR DOOR IN FIVE

MINUTES STOP PLEASE TALK TO ME STOP

There was no signature.

Conrad studied the telegram for a long moment, then abruptly crumpled it and tossed it in a waste basket. He hurried back to his bedroom, finished buttoning his shirt along the way, and picked up his clean suit coat to shrug into it. He had brushed his hat as clean as he could, so he settled it on his head, then picked up the gunbelt on his way back through the sitting room. He pouched the iron and buckled the belt around his hips.

His hand was on the butt of the Colt as he opened the door and stepped into the corridor, which was deserted at the moment. The hotel had elevators, several of them, in fact, but there was also a stairwell down the hall to the left, and the door to it was set back in a small alcove. Conrad went to it and stepped into that alcove, then stopped and edged his head slightly past the corner so he could look back down the corridor. He had a good view of the door to his suite. He wanted to see who was going to knock on that door in a couple minutes.

He still had a lot of acquaintances in Carson City. None of them had anything to do with him now, though. It wasn’t like he had tried to keep in touch over the years. In fact, some of his former friends were probably still angry with him for making it look like he had died when his house burned down, then letting everyone believe that for months.

The only other people he knew were Deputy Wallace and Dr. Liam Taggart, and neither of them would have sent him a telegram. If they’d wanted to talk to him, they simply would have shown up at the hotel and knocked on his door. There was something fishy about that telegram, and he wanted to know what it was. Staking out his suite door seemed like the best way to find out.

He stiffened as a man emerged from the elevators and came along the corridor, looking at the numbers on the doors. He wore a gray suit and a black derby and sported a close-cropped beard. Conrad had never seen him before, at least not that he recalled. He put his hand on his gun butt again as the man paused in front of his door, then took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it for a second. He put the paper back, shrugged to himself, and raised his hand to knock.

At that moment, Conrad heard the faint click of the stairwell door behind him, then a rustle of fabric. The cold ring of a gun barrel pressed itself to the back of his neck.

“I knew you’d take the bait,” a woman’s voice said, as down the hall the bearded man’s knuckles pounded on the door of Conrad’s suite.

Conrad moved with blinding speed, twisting away from the gun and whirling around. His left arm came up, hit the woman’s arm, and knocked it to the side so the gun was no longer pointing at him. He drove his body against hers, forcing her back against the wall of the alcove, and closed his hand around the cylinder of the little revolver so it couldn’t fire even if she pulled the trigger. He wrenched the gun out of her fingers. His other hand came up and caught hold of her chin, making her gasp. He knew he was probably hurting her and he regretted that, but he wanted answers.

“I’m not the only one who took the bait, Miss Eastman,” he told the blonde he had last seen in the offices of the late and unlamented Carl Monroe.