"Send the airline people to me, Sheriff Courtney," Harris continued smoothly. "For once our concern about poor publicity should coincide. I'll depend upon you to arrange for inconspicuous disposal of the bodies other than those of the plane crew. Have I made myself clear?"
"Yes, sir," the sheriff replied.
"I'll expect you to impress the need for silence upon deputies and other personnel on the scene here, Sheriff."
"Take care of that, Morgan," the sheriff said. Morgan strode to the jeeps. The sheriff's gaze swept the gamblers, lingering upon Candy Kane's lime-green-and-shocking-pink ensemble. "Of course you realize I don't have any control over these people, sir."
"I'm about to give you control, Sheriff. You have two buses here. I want this group split between the buses with deputies aboard each. I want one bus driven to Reno and the other to Salt Lake City. I'll arrange to have a charter flight at each municipal airport to take these men back to New York. These men are to communicate with no one before they leave, and there are to be no exceptions to the fact that they do leave. I'll hold you personally responsible. I intend that any stories floating back to Nevada in connection with this-ah-episode will be strictly in the nature of rumors."
"Yes, sir," the sheriff said again.
"These men lost a hell of a lot of cash, Mr. Harris," Duke Conboy spoke up. "What about that?"
Harris' flat gaze examined him coolly. "You've all had a bad day at the tables, sir. Better luck next time."
"You mean you're not going to-"
"I mean I've already pushed myself dangerously close to the limit of my authority. Please get your men aboard the buses." He walked toward the black limousine.
"Maybe we can get a line on something, Duke," Tom Weston muttered. "I'll call you in New York." He hurried after Neal Harris.
"I wonder if the Lord realizes he's been outflanked in this area of the world?" Duke said in a reflective tone as we watched the limousine make a sweeping turn in the sand and move away.
It so nearly reflected my own sentiment that I found it unnecessary to comment.
"You mean you were within two hundred miles when you were on the ground but you had to make another five-thousand-mile round trip to New York to get back here to the ranch?" Hazel demanded.
"That's what I mean." We were sitting in the kitchen of the Rancho Dolorosa, Hazel's spread twenty miles north of Ely, Nevada. I had just finished tucking in a meal of scrambled eggs and ham. "I got on the Salt Lake City bus because I knew it would pass within fifty miles of here," I went on. "I thought I could talk the deputy into letting me off, but I couldn't make a dent in him. That man Harris must really stamp his hoofprints all over anyone who doesn't do exactly as he says. I had to go to New York and take a commercial flight back."
Hazel started to laugh. She went to the stove and poured me another cup of steaming coffee from the big aluminum coffeepot. Her six-foot figure was clad as usual on the ranch in skin-tight Levis and a sleeveless buckskin vest that snugly encased her big breasts and left bare the smooth skin of her upper arms. Flaming red hair and cowboy boots studded with silver conches topped her off at either end. "I'd like to have seen your face when you realized you had to make another round trip to New York," she said.
"What's so damn funny?" I groused when she laughed again. "I lost your seventy-five thousand, didn't I?" And the remains of my own skinny bankroll, I could have added, but didn't. I'd had to borrow plane fare back to Nevada from Duke Conboy.
"It might have been worse," Hazel said. "Suppose they'd held you all for investigation? If they took the trouble to trace you before your arrival in Ely, you wouldn't be sitting here now."
"I thought of that when we were walking away from the airplane at that abandoned airstrip," I admitted.
"Who do you think the hijackers were?"
"They weren't syndicate types or anything like that. It came off more like a planned military operation. And then all the business about Jews-" I didn't complete it. "NR eight-one-three-three-two. How's your contact in the White Pine County sheriff's department these days?"
"We're speaking again. Why?" Hazel's shrewd eyes probed me. "And what's NR eight-one-three-three-two?"
"It's the registration number on the private plane that magic-carpeted the machine gunner away from the hijack. How about calling your man at the sheriff's office and asking him to trace the registration?"
"No, thank you," Hazel said firmly. "I'm not going to open up a can of worms that might force you to leave here if there's additional investigation. I'm just getting used to having you around again."
"There shouldn't be any problem," I argued. "The plane was probably hired, which would be a dead end, but if it wasn't, it might be possible to shake our money out of the tree just by knocking on someone's door."
"What do you mean our money?" Hazel asked alertly. "Did you tap out on this thing?"
"It probably didn't cost me any more than if I'd stayed with the action in Vegas."
"But you wouldn't have stayed!" she protested. "You know you're not that kind of gambler. Now you've got me feeling badly about this. I don't like to see you broke. You won't use my money, and now you'll probably get into trouble trying for a stake." She surveyed me gloomily across the table.
"You're not feeling badly about the seventy-five thousand?"
"No, I'm not. There were sixty witnesses on that plane that Tippy Larkin's money was sent to him. And if he'd been in New York like he was supposed to be and you paid him, and he was on the plane afterward, he'd have lost it anyway, wouldn't he?"
"Feminine logic," I said admiringly. "It's just great."
"Never mind my feminine logic. How much did you lose?"
"A couple weeks' rent. If you're so cut up about my losing my roll, why don't you make that telephone call and give me a shot at getting it back?"
"Because you'd get into trouble.
"If I ever find the guy, he's the one in trouble."
"I suppose you won't give me any peace until I do," Hazel sighed. She went into the next room to the telephone. "The sheriff's not there, but I left a message for him to call," she reported when she returned. "Another cup of coffee?"
"No, thanks. I'm awash now." I pushed back my chair. "I'm going upstairs for some sack time. I feel as thought I've been on airplanes for a week."
I climbed the stairs to the north bedroom.
I'd met Hazel four years before when I was in South Florida, trying to find out what happened to my partner and the swag from a Phoenix bank job. Both had disappeared. Hazel was a twice-widowed lusty female running a tavern in the area where I was doing my looking. We found we had a common racetrack background, and we'd hit it off in other ways. It had been a good time.
Then I tangled with a police roadblock while I was making my move to avenge my partner and recover the loot. In the shoot-out a car's gasoline tank exploded in my face. I was in a prison hospital for eighteen months before I promoted a little Pakistani plastic surgeon into making me a new face. I'd refused permission for Hazel to visit me because she didn't deserve to be involved in my problems. She gave up trying eventually and came back to her homeplace, the ranch in Ely.
When the time was ripe, I crushed out of the prison hospital without benefit of clergy and drifted to the west coast after a couple of eastern bank jobs that went wrong. I hadn't seen Hazel for two years when I finally decided that things had cooled down enough for it to be safe for her if I looked her up. When I reached Ely I was surprised to find that Hazel had a sixteen-hundred-acre spread there plus stocks, bonds, and cash left her by her husbands. We picked up where we left off, and except for a side excursion to Cuba, which turned out to be a really wild affair, we'd been together ever since.