“Honey,” Lancaster said, “I guarantee you he won’t be mad.”
Sixty-three
Lancaster was sitting behind the desk in the room when Roger Simon appeared in the doorway. He was a tall, handsome man with steel gray hair and a strong jaw. The position of his hands revealed something to Lancaster.
“If you got a gun stuck in your belt behind you, Simon, I wouldn’t go for it.” Lancaster touched his own gun, which was on the desk.
Simon’s hands twitched, as if he was surprised at Lancaster’s words.
“Where’s your daughter?” Lancaster asked.
“She’s upstairs,” Simon said. “You leave her alone.”
Lancaster had no intention of hurting the girl, but he said, “That’ll be up to you. Take the gun out and drop it in the hall.”
Simon hesitated, then reached behind him, produced the gun, and dropped it on the floor outside the room.
“Now come on in and sit down,” Lancaster said. “We need to talk.”
“You’re not here to kill me?” There was no fear in the man’s voice, just curiosity.
“Again,” Lancaster said, “that’ll be up to you.”
Simon came forward and sat down.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“I want to know why you hired three men to attack me and leave me to die in the desert?”
“You don’t know?” Simon asked.
“I have no idea,” Lancaster said. “I don’t even know you. Never heard your name until Sweet told me.”
“Sweet? Did you kill him?”
“I traded him his life for your name.”
Simon firmed his jaw.
“The other two men who were with him are dead.” Lancaster didn’t bother to point out he hadn’t killed them himself.
“Well?” Lancaster asked.
“Well what?”
“If you want to save your life, start talking,” Lancaster said. “Why did you pay three men to kill me?”
“You’re saying you really don’t know?”
“I’m saying I have no idea!”
“My wife was killed last year, in the Mojave Desert,” Simon said. “She was on a stagecoach with several other people when the coach was robbed. The horses were driven off, and the passengers were left on foot. My wife was not a well woman, and she did not survive the trek through the desert.” His eyes filled with tears. “She died out there.”
“What the hell has that got to do with me?”
“I paid a lot of money to find out who the leader of that gang was,” Simon said.
“And you came up with my name?”
“Like I said,” Simon offered, “I paid a lot of money for the information.”
“So because you paid a lot you believed it?” Lancaster asked. “Did you bother to check it out?”
“I investigated your background,” Simon said. “You were a gun for hire for a long time.”
“So that makes me a stage robber?” Lancaster asked. “Simon, I think maybe you wanted information so bad you were an easy target for some dangerous lies.”
Simon stared at Lancaster, but the expression on his face said he wasn’t so confident anymore that he’d paid for the correct information.
“Y-you can’t prove that you didn’t do it,” the man stammered.
“Sure I can,” Lancaster said. “You tell me when it happened and I bet I can prove I was elsewhere. But the proof may simply be in the name of the person who sold you the information.”
Simon swallowed with difficulty.
“Who was it?” Lancaster asked. “What was his name?”
Simon started to speak; then he realized Lancaster was probably right. He licked his lips.
“Let me guess,” Lancaster said. “The man who sold you the information was Sweet.”
Simon nodded jerkily.
“Then after you paid him for that, he negotiated a price to take care of me for you.”
Simon nodded again.
At that point Angie appeared in the doorway, holding her dad’s gun with both hands and pointing it at Lancaster.
“Let my dad go!” she said.
Simon turned and his face paled as he saw his daughter.
“D-don’t—” he stammered, holding his hand out to Lancaster. “Don’t kill her—”
“I don’t intend to kill your daughter, Simon,” Lancaster said, “but you better talk to her before she pulls that trigger and ruins her life—and mine.”
Sixty-four
Ardmore, Oklahoma, one month later
As Lancaster rode Crow Bait into Ardmore, he thought that he and the horse were finally together, in body and in mind. His memory had returned completely, his injuries were healed, he had returned everything he’d borrowed to Mal in Laughlin, but in the end he had not been able to give up the horse. He had his own rig—saddle, saddlebags, horse, and holster—and even Crow Bait’s bones weren’t sticking out quite as much as they had been.
Ardmore was small, hardly more than a stopover between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. But that was okay, because Lancaster only meant to stop over.
Since the night Roger Simon had successfully disarmed his teenage daughter, Lancaster had devoted his time to tracking Gerry Beck for Wells Fargo. He’d managed to convince Simon he had nothing to do with his wife’s death. Simon had then tried to hire Lancaster to kill Sweet, but with no success. And Lancaster had tried to convince him not to hire anyone else, either.
“Men like Sweet usually get what’s coming to them, Mr. Simon,” he’d said.
He didn’t know if Simon believed him, but it didn’t matter. He was done with the whole deal. His concern became collecting that other four thousand dollars from Wells Fargo.
He reined in Crow Bait in front of the saloon, dismounted, and tied him off there.
“Jesus,” an old man said from the boardwalk, “looks like he’s on his last legs.”
“His legs are just fine,” Lancaster said. “Don’t you worry about it.”
He had long ago overcome the urge to shoot anybody who criticized the horse. None of them knew what they were talking about, anyway.
He mounted the boardwalk and entered the saloon. He looked around, noticed a few of the other tables were taken. He collected a beer from the bar and walked to a table near the back of the room.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Gerry Beck looked up at him, frowning. “Lancaster? What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“Right now I’m just looking for someplace to sit and drink my beer.”
“Well, find someplace else to do it.”
“Naw,” Lancaster said, sitting down, “I’ll do it here.”
Beck sat back and stared at him.
“What the hell—” he said.
“It’s been a while, Gerry.”
“Yeah,” Beck said, “and if I remember right, you and me were never friends, so get lost.”
“I can’t,” Lancaster said. “I promised Wells Fargo I’d bring you in.”
“Bounty hunting now?” Beck asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Well, what, exactly?”
“I just sort of found myself in a situation where I had to take the job.”
“The job of bringin’ me in?”
Lancaster nodded.
“Well, it ain’t gonna be easy,” Beck told him. “I hope they paid you enough.”
“Don’t get paid until the job is done,” Lancaster said.
“Well, then,” Beck said with a steely grin, “I guess you ain’t gettin’ paid, are you.”
“Oh, I’ll get paid,” he said, pushing half his beer away. “So, how many men you got in here backing you up, Gerry?”
“What?”
“I know your style, Gerry,” Lancaster said. “You don’t go anywhere or do anything without someone to back you up. Let’s see.”
Lancaster looked around the room. There were five other men there, four sitting at tables, two of them looking back at him.