He nodded, studying me. “Are you planning on breaking this case before the New Year?”
I sipped my coffee and looked at the other three men in the room as I sat the mug on top of the ring it had made on the stained worn surface of the table, thereby freeing my hand. “Yep, I am.”
13
Harvey’s hand slowly dropped to his side as I skimmed my words across the surface of the table like the card that had floated on the cushion of air at the casino. “Hey, Richard . . . You don’t have any tattoos, do you?”
He smiled a grin that was high and tight as he yanked the big .357 from his shoulder holster and pointed it at me precisely at the same time I leveled the long barrel of the Colt Walker across the table at him, both of us cocked and ready to shoot. We were both tall men with wide arm spreads, so the two revolvers stretched past each other. He looked down the barrel of the .44 and whistled. “Damn, did you find the grave of Wild Bill Hickok over there in Deadwood and dig up his gun?”
“South Dakota DCI’s got my regular accompaniment.”
He continued to smile. “Because of the dead guy?”
“Because of the dead guy.”
Lucian leaned forward and looked back and forth between the two of us, finally resting his eyes on me. “What the hell are you two idiots doing?”
Harvey breathed a short laugh but kept his eyes on mine. “Seems to me you’re kinda on a rampage, Sheriff.”
I gestured, ever so slightly, with the Colt. “Gee, you think I’m done?”
His eyes stayed even with mine. “Not by a long shot.”
“If you were actually a corrections officer in New Mexico, I find it hard to believe you never heard of Asociación Punto Muerto.”
His eyebrows slowly crouched over the bridge of his substantial nose. “APM, the killers’ union?”
“Yep.”
“Well hell, I never heard of it in English.”
Lucian swiveled his head, finally resting his attention on Harvey, and smoothly pulled his .38 out, shoving the barrel into the detective’s ribs. “Buster, you better start coming forward with some of the correct answers, and that right soon.”
I was mildly surprised and relieved at the New Mexican’s response, mostly because it was what I would’ve said in like situation. “Why the hell is everyone in this room pointing a gun at me?”
“I think you know more about this subject than you’ve been letting on.”
His eyes flicked to Lucian and then back to me. “You got any evidence along those lines?”
I nodded toward the big handgun he was still pointing at me. “Three hundred and fifty-seven thousandths of them.”
He glanced at the pistol in his hand, slowly directed it away from me toward the ceiling, and then thumbed the hammer down, carefully resting it on the table. “Look, why don’t we all calm down here?”
“Talk.”
He aligned his mustache with a forefinger. “I might’ve got personally involved with the case.”
I kept the Colt on him. “Do tell.”
He made a pointed glance at my weapon and then Lucian’s. “You fellows mind puttin’ those damn things away?” He gestured toward the Walker in my hand. “Especially that one, since they have a tendency to go off kind of unexpected like.”
I rolled the long barrel of the Walker up beside my face and lowered the hammer, setting it on the table in front of me. “There.”
The detective glanced at Lucian’s .38 still in his ribs, but the old sheriff’s hand didn’t waver. “The hell with you, mine goes off when I tell it to and you haven’t said anything yet to convince me that it shouldn’t.” Lucian nudged him with the muzzle. “Gerald Holman was a friend of mine.”
Harvey sighed in exasperation. “He was a friend of mine, too.”
“Prove it.”
Harvey laced his fingers and rested them in his lap. “The person I’m trying to protect is not involved with this.”
“Okay.”
“I did some things I maybe shouldn’t have done—covered up some evidence and cleaned up a few files . . .”
Lucian nudged him again. “Hurry it up, you son of a bitch.”
Harvey’s head snapped around to the old sheriff. “Your buddy, your friend Gerald Holman, was dirty, you crotchety old bastard.”
Lucian’s face hardly moved when he replied. “The hell you say.”
“He was cleaning up his messes, and things were starting to pile up against him so that he finally didn’t have anywhere else to go but blow his brains out.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth. He was suppressing evidence and rerouting the investigation so as to not draw attention to himself. I’ve got the files hidden away, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to take the fall on this just because I’m trying to protect his name.”
I interrupted. “Where are the files?”
“Back at the office.”
I thumbed Vic’s cell phone from my pocket. “Where in the office?”
Richard Harvey stared at me.
“Where in the office.”
“In the bottom pizza box on the shelves as you come in from the stairwell.”
—
Dougherty picked up on the first ring, and I told him where to look; he did and reported back. “It’s the interviews all right—looks like much longer than the ones transcribed into the computer files.”
“Read ’em and call me back.” I tucked the phone in my pocket, gesturing for Lucian to lower his weapon. “It’s all right, Dougherty’s got the files.”
The old sheriff didn’t move. “Who’s Dougherty?”
“The patrolman I borrowed from the Gillette PD.” I glanced at the detective, his eyes widening just a touch. “You know him?”
“Yeah, isn’t he the one that was fixated on Linda Schaffer?”
“Maybe.” I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve got just one question.”
“There’s a woman involved.”
I sighed. “There usually is.”
“But she doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“If that’s the case then why are you sitting here with my old boss’s revolver in your side?”
He leaned back in his chair. “She—”
The sound of the weapon going off within the confines of the Sixteen Tons Bar was enough to turn your head and make you duck, which I did, and then immediately grabbed Lucian’s gun hand and pulled it into the air along with him. “What the—”
“It wasn’t me, damn it!”
We both looked at the detective as he clutched the lower part of his face, blood, tissue, and teeth scattering across the front of his shirt onto the table. He fell off his chair as another shot whizzed between us. I released my grip on Lucian, and he turned his .38 toward the bar.
I grabbed the Walker just as another round struck the table, sending splinters into the air, and I whirled in time to see the bartender attempting to take better aim. Lucian fired and hit the man in the upper right-hand quarter of his chest, spinning him around and throwing him into the bar-back with a crescendo of shattered glass before he slid to the floor.
Figuring I could count on the old sheriff to check his shot, I shoved the big Colt in my belt at my back and kneeled down by the wounded detective—the round had shattered his jaw but had exited through the other side. He was still clutching at the ghastly wound as I yanked a bandana from my back pocket and attempted to slide it beneath his fingers, the blood going everywhere.
He tried to speak as his eyes glazed over, and with the amount of blood in his mouth, I was afraid he might choke. “Don’t try and talk; it didn’t get your throat, so you’re not going to bleed to death.” I held the material against the side of his face. “Hold on to this; he got your jaw. Keep your mouth shut and just lay there and try to not go into shock.”