The waitress pressed her thigh against Sean’s and his body responded. She smelled nice, when she wasn’t blowing smoke in his direction. Sean had never been with a woman and wondered what it would be like.
“Maybe I’ll let you kiss me later.”
They watched blood drip off the edge of the Pinkerton’s seat and pool on the floor beneath him, but neither Sean nor the waitress said anything. When the other Pinkerton noticed, she sent the waitress for towels. Before the waitress could return with them, she turned to her traveling companion.
“Let me take a look, Butch. You might be bleeding out.” She reached for the knapsack to move it out of the way.
“Don’t touch the money.”
“We need to stop the bleeding.”
As she pulled the knapsack from his lap, the Pinkerton raised his .38 and shot her once between the breasts. “I told you not to touch the money.”
She collapsed beside him as the waitress returned with the towels.
“Give me those.” The Pinkerton waved his revolver at her. “Just toss them over here.”
She did as she was told before returning to the seat beside Sean.
The Pinkerton shoved the towels behind his back, and the pressure slowed the bleeding. He readjusted the knapsack in his lap and pointed his .38 across the lobby at the Sean and the waitress. “Don’t try nothing.”
They sat in silence until Sean asked, “Don’t you want to know where the money came from?”
“Don’t matter none to me, hon,” the waitress told him. She dug a bent cigarette from her pocket and straightened it. “But now I know why you’re running. You think whoever it belongs to might want it back.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“What about the Pinkertons? Were they really tailing you?”
Sean shook his head. “They didn’t know nothing about it until he got curious.”
She lit the cigarette with a paper match, inhaled deeply, and slowly let out the smoke. “They’re right, you know. You got a nice pile of going-away money. Money enough to go away somewhere and never look back.”
“I don’t have nothing but trouble.”
The Pinkerton’s blood loss had him fighting to retain consciousness. His chin hit his chest. He jerked his head upward and brought his revolver up at the same time. He saw that the waitress and Sean had not moved.
“I told you,” the Pinkerton said. “I told you—”
Sean and the waitress watched as the Pinkerton slipped from his seat and landed face first on the floor. Several minutes passed before they crept across the lobby, alert to any signs that the Pinkerton was breathing. He wasn’t.
Sean retrieved the knapsack.
“We need to leave, hon,” the waitress said. “If we stay, things will get worse.”
She had no idea. She didn’t know what he was running from.
“Where will we go?”
“Seattle, same as before.”
“But—”
“Stick with me, hon,” she said. “I know what to do.”
She walked to the ticket counter and then called back. “What’s your last name, hon?”
“Why?”
“I still got my wedding ring in my purse. We can tell people we’re married. They won’t know no different.”
“O’Malley,” he said.
“That’s a nice name,” she said as she prepared herself a one-way ticket to Seattle. “I think I’m going to like it.”
“Don’t you have stuff at home you need to get?”
“I came here with nothing,” she said. “If I leave with you, then I’m leaving with something.”
In the darkness outside, a snowplow roared past the bus station, clearing the street.
The waitress led Sean into the diner, where she took off her nameplate and dropped it in the trash. Then she removed the cap, apron, and detachable white trim from the sleeves of her uniform. After she unpinned her hair and let it fall to her shoulders, she no longer looked like a waitress. She looked like the kind of girl Sean might have taken to a sock hop if he hadn’t run away from home.
The former waitress dug through her purse, found her wedding ring, and slipped it on her finger. “Say, ‘I do.’”
“I do.”
“Good.” She kissed Sean’s cheek and he blushed. “We’re good as married.”
After she pulled on her galoshes and a heavy winter coat, she poured a cup of lukewarm coffee and put a three-day-old Danish in a bag. Sean followed her out the rear of the bus station, the knapsack gripped even tighter than before. They crossed the back lot through knee-deep snow, and they found the driver sleeping on a cot inside the maintenance shed, his uniform hanging on a peg beside the door.
They woke him.
“Is it morning already?” he asked as he sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Close enough.”
“I need to get some breakfast.”
The waitress handed the driver the coffee and the bag containing the Danish. “That’s all you’re going to get. The cook ain’t made it in this morning.”
“But—”
“And you best hurry up,” she said. “We let you sleep late as we could, but you got to leave in ten minutes.”
He drank the coffee, pulled on his uniform, and ate the Danish as they walked to the bus, then he settled into the driver’s seat.
Sean and the former waitress were the only passengers when the bus exited the station’s parking lot and headed west on Main Street. Several minutes later, with the town miles behind them, Helen leaned against Sean and looked out at the snow piled up alongside the two-lane highway. She took Sean’s free hand in hers and said, “Rain will be a nice change.”
Manitoba Postmortem
by S. L. Franklin
R. J. Carr
The police station was the newest and best-maintained building in Grand Fork, Manitoba, population 267, a four and a half hour drive north of Winnipeg along two lanes of blacktop. The four and a half hours included a couple of stops early on to break the monotony, but since the last sizable settlement we’d encountered lay a hundred fifty miles of wilderness to the south, I was ready to plead with the Mountie behind the counter to pass us through to the station restroom, under gunpoint if necessary.
The Mountie’s name was Sergeant James Hardin, early thirties in age, height five eleven, broad shouldered but otherwise slender beneath the blue uniform. No red coat and flat-brimmed hat. No horse or sled dogs either, none that I could spot near the station, anyway. An SUV labeled RCMP was the only mode of transportation in sight except our rental sedan.
Hardin invited us in, waited while we took turns in the lavatory, and got the three of us settled in a glass-walled office before saying, “Why you had to come all this way to hear about Tom Kostner, Mr. Carr, I really don’t know. I could have told you everything over the phone last week and saved you a trip.”
I shook my head. “I’m a private detective — or was. Retired at the end of 2008. Ginny—” I nodded toward my wife. “—used to help out once in a while if I needed some heavy thinking done. Neither of us, though, ever cared for telephone interviews. Also, I’ve got a client who wants a thorough job done. It’s complicated on that end but simple on this one, if you can just walk us through what happened.”
“Yes,” Ginny added, “with as much detail as possible, if you don’t mind. We’re... emissaries, I suppose, for people who feel hurt and shortchanged of an explanation.”