He laughed out loud. Hell, here he was carrying on when he didn’t know if he could go as long as eight hours without a drink and he was planning a dry future for himself.
He sat back in his chair and looked at the pages in front of him. He felt pride. The same kind of pride he’d had as a young man getting scoops in Chicago.
He was so absorbed in reading his words that he didn’t hear the door open behind him. Wasn’t aware of another presence in the room until the killer had taken two steps across the threshold.
Then, shocked, O’Malley turned and met the eyes of the person he’d been writing about. They seemed to gleam in the shadows beyond the glow of the lantern.
“You dropped something when you paid me a visit.”
O’Malley was unarmed. No reason to carry a gun when he was in his own room. Unarmed—and there could be only one reason the killer had come here.
The killer came up to the edge of the light. He held a business card in his hand. The card identified the paper and the owner Parrish. Parrish didn’t think enough of O’Malley to have his name printed on them.
“I doubt it was Parrish who was there. So that leaves you.”
O’Malley’s eyes began searching the darkness for some way to avoid the inevitable. The killer had not yet shown a gun but it was certain he had one. Inevitable. What could O’Malley do? All he could think of was diving at the killer’s legs, surprising him, knocking him over and then running to the door and the hall and shouting for help. There were people around at this hour. People with guns. People who might not care for him but who would protect him on general principle.
But the body had been abused for so long, what if he tried to make a dive and did nothing more than land at the killer’s feet? His situation would be hopeless then. But then, he thought, what was it now?
“How did you figure it out?”
“I saw you one day and got curious. How you handled something.” What was the point of pretending anymore?
“How I handled what?”
So O’Malley told him. How the killer’s behavior had made him curious about the break-in at the woman’s house. How the man had watched the woman.
And then how O’Malley had begun studying the man every chance he got. In the old days when he’d worked on the big-city papers he’d begun making a study of people arrested for crimes. A lot of them would never be suspected. Nice normal ordinary people. Or so they seemed. But at their trials O’Malley began to see what they’d kept hidden about themselves. And how clever their masks were.
“I’m impressed, O’Malley. I figured you were just one more drunken reporter. It seems your kind always like the bottle too much. But you must be a lot smarter than I realized. How long have you suspected me?”
“Ever since the break-in. But I wasn’t sure and I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t have any real evidence until I found that box under your couch. It’s kind of funny, keeping all those things of hers. Sort of sad, too.”
“Shut up. I don’t want you talking about her. Somebody like you shouldn’t even mention her name.”
He’s crazy, O’Malley thought. He’s crazy as a loon.
“I want the box, O’Malley.”
“I imagine you do. But I can’t give it to you. I’ve already given it to Fargo.”
“Fargo? You’re lying.”
O’Malley supposed it was a pretty pathetic lie. The box was sitting on the nightstand by his bed. The darkness hid it.
The killer brushed past him then. The room was so small that he was able to reach the bed and the nightstand in seconds. His harsh laugh told O’Malley that he’d found the box.
“So Fargo has it, huh?”
O’Malley was turning around in his chair as the killer cinched on his black leather gloves and stepped forward. O’Malley didn’t even have a chance of defending himself. The killer’s hands were so powerful that they snapped the trachea instantly. There was no problem then in finishing the job.
After he was sure O’Malley was dead, Deputy Pete Rule tucked the box under his arm and hurried from O’Malley’s hotel room.
14
As soon as Helen Hardesty heard a horse approaching her cabin, she ran for the rifle she had left leaning against the large oak that stood near the garden she had been tending. At age sixty-four, Helen had survived two husbands and the death of three of her nine children. She lived alone now by choice because in her later years she no longer wanted the complications of human relationships. Even when you loved someone, he or she could be burdensome. Her intimates now were her pinto, her wolfhound and her four cats. She had birdsong for music and magnificent mountain sunsets for beauty.
And until recently she’d had safety and comfort.
If only she hadn’t been tramping through the thin stand of jack pines. . . . She hadn’t meant to see him or what he was doing. In fact she tried to run and hurry away from what he was about to do to the terrified young man she recognized as Clete Byrnes. She had seen him around town when she went in for supplies. He was now tied to a slender oak. She also knew the man holding the gun on him. She knew she could not get involved. He would kill her for sure. She would have to pretend that she didn’t know anything about it. And so be it. She probably didn’t have that many years left and she wanted to live them out peacefully. With her mountain sunsets and her animals.
But as she started away her foot found a hole and threw her into the bushes. The noise alerted the man with the gun. He came for her. He slapped her over and over again until her knees buckled and he had to drag her to her cabin.
“I’m going to take care of some business here, Helen. It’s business that don’t concern you. And it’s business you’d damned well better keep to yourself or I’ll kill you. You understand me, Helen? I’ll kill you and I’ll get away with it, too. And you know I will.”
The funny thing was he didn’t even sound angry when he said all this. He was just stating a fact.
“Now you just sit here and I’ll do it quick and get it over with. And you stay away from that spot by those trees down by the creek. No need for you to see what I done. You understand, Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody’ll come by soon enough and find him. And they’ll come and ask you if you know anything about it and you know what to say. You understand, Helen?”
“Yes.”
“You tell them you don’t know anything about it.”
“No.”
“Because if you did tell them anything, I’d have to kill you. And I think you know me well enough that I wouldn’t want to do that. You know me that well, don’t you, Helen?”
“Yes, I do, Pete.”
And then sitting there when he went away. And five minutes later the explosion of three gunshots. And then a terrible mountain silence.
And now, three days later, nervous every time she heard a horse on the trail that angled by her land.
By the time she could see the rider, she had her rifle up and aimed and ready to fire.
Fargo his name was. The man on the big Ovaro stallion. The man with those striking lake blue eyes. A good man, she’d sensed the other day, but a man who asked too many questions. A man who could get her in trouble. He was golden in the moonlight, a creature of myth as in some of the books she’d read as a little girl.
She shouted, “You better stop right there!”
This was pretty much the same situation Fargo had faced when he’d first laid eyes on Helen Hardesty. The harsh shout. The belligerent face. The rifle.