Longarm closed his eyes for a second. There was a cold, hard ball of something—disgust, maybe—in his belly. All he had to go by were a few minor differences in tone and inflection, but he felt pretty confident he was right as he said, “Hello, Janice. I was truly hoping I was wrong about you.”
She laughed. “What do you mean, wrong about me? You didn’t have a clue what was really going on. My God, you arrested Senator Padgett! He’s probably the only man in the world dumber than you.”
“All right, that’s enough,” snapped Leon Mercer. “What are we going to do about this?”
“You know what we have to do,” Janice said. “We have to kill him. But I want it to look like an accident.”
Longarm heard another pistol being cocked. “I’ll cover him. You drag that old man in here.”
The gun went away from Longarm’s neck. Mercer reached around him and plucked the .44 from the cross-draw rig. “Just so you don’t get any ideas,” Mercer said.
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas, all right,” said Longarm. “Just wish a few of ‘em had occurred to me earlier.”
They didn’t know about the derringer in his vest pocket. That might give him an advantage later on, but whether or not it would be enough to save his bacon, he didn’t know.
He heard Mercer’s footsteps retreating, and he said to Janice, “Mind if I turn around? I sort of like to see whoever’s pointing a gun at me.”
“All right. But be careful. I honestly don’t want to shoot you, Custis.”
Longarm kept his hands where she could see them as he turned to face her. She looked as lovely as ever in the lantern light, but those blue eyes had lost any warmth they had once possessed. Now they were like chips of ice.
“You couldn’t stop interfering, could you?” she said, and he thought he heard a trace of genuine regret in her voice. “You had to keep poking around until we have no choice but to get rid of you.”
Longarm hefted the printing plates, which he still held in his left hand. “These are worth a lot to you, aren’t they?”
“They’re worth the world,” Janice said fervently. “They represent not having to struggle anymore. I can get away from that horrible horse ranch at last.”
“Julie feel the same way?”
Janice laughed humorlessly. “Julie actually likes horses. She doesn’t know anything about my … arrangement … with Leon.”
“Did he recruit you to help him out in Albuquerque, or have you been part of the counterfeiting ring all along?”
“Leon organized the operation,” Janice admitted. “He financed Nowlan with funds that he diverted from the senator’s campaigns. But we met back East, while I was in school, and we each knew immediately that we’d encountered a kindred spirit. Leon influenced the senator to buy Caesar so that we could use the racing circuit as a cover for distributing the money.”
Longarm knew the only reason she was telling him all this was because she didn’t expect him to be alive much longer. That was confirmed a moment later when Mercer dragged the body of the elderly watchman into the stable. The man’s hat had fallen off, and Longarm could see the swollen lump on his head where somebody had clouted him. Longarm hoped the old man was just unconscious and not already dead—although if Mercer and Janice had their way, it wouldn’t really matter.
“I was thinking that there might be a fire here in the stables,” Mercer said as he straightened from his task. “A regrettable thing, of course, but at least some of the horses will survive. Too bad that Marshal Long and the watchman here will both die in their valiant effort to free the horses.”
Janice nodded. “I like it. That way any evidence will be destroyed in the fire.”
“Exactly.”
It could work, Longarm realized. Folks would be bound to wonder what he had been doing out here at the racetrack when disaster struck, but it would go down as an unanswered question. There would be nothing linking Janice and Mercer to his death.
“I want Caesar left in here to burn with Long and the old man,” Mercer said. He laughed harshly. “Not only is Padgett locked up for something he had nothing to do with, but he’s going to lose that precious racehorse of his too.”
Janice shrugged. “Some of the horses won’t make it out of the fire. It’ll look more realistic that way. I don’t care if Caesar is one of them. I want Matador out, though.”
“I thought you didn’t like horses,” commented Longarm.
Janice looked squarely at him. “I won’t hurt Julie if I don’t have to.”
“But if she got in your way, then she’d have to die too, right?” Janice lifted the pistol in her hand. “That’s enough out-“
Then Mercer yelled, “No!” as Longarm’s hand dipped suddenly toward the pocket where the derringer was hidden. He slashed at Longarm with the gun in his hand. Longarm twisted aside from the blow and drove his left elbow into Mercer’s side. Mercer gasped in pain and staggered to the side as Longarm palmed out the derringer.
Janice fired her gun at that moment, and what felt like a giant hand slapped the side of Longarm’s head. He toppled to the hard-packed dirt floor of the stable, the derringer slipping out of his fingers as he fell. Waves of darkness rolled toward him.
“Hurry!” he heard Janice saying, as if from a great distance. “That shot may draw attention! We have to hurry!”
He felt hands grab him and start to drag him, but then the darkness caught up to him and washed over him, wiping out everything else.
He woke to a loud crackling and the frantic whinnying of terrified horses. Thick, acrid smoke stung his nose and eyes. Blinking rapidly against the tears that filled his eyes, he rolled onto his back and kicked his way into a sitting position. He had already figured out that his hands were tied together behind his back.
Longarm’s head hurt like the very blazes, but his thinking was clear enough. Janice’s bullet must have creased him, he thought, clipping his head just enough to knock him senseless for a few minutes. He could sense that he had not been unconscious for long. Long enough, though, for the two of them to tie him up and start the fire that was even now consuming the stable around him.
He was sitting with his back toward the building’s entrance, he realized. As he started trying to turn around, someone suddenly grabbed his hands. A woman’s voice shouted over the roar of the fire and the screams of the horses, “Be still, Custis! I’ll have you loose in a minute!”
Longarm twisted his head and saw her kneeling behind him, and thought for a second that Janice had relented and come back to free him. Then, as a knife began to saw at the ropes around his wrists, he realized that it was Julie rescuing him, not Janice.
“What are you doing here?” he bellowed.
“I followed you!” Sobs wracked her even as she worked at his bonds, and he suspected not all of them were caused by the smoke. “I wanted to see what you were doing that was so mysterious! I … I almost wish I hadn’t found out!”
Longarm knew what she meant. She must have overheard the conversation he’d had with Janice and Mercer. Julie had to know now that her sister was part of Mercer’s murderous schemes.
The ropes parted under the knife in Julie’s hand. She had only nicked Longarm a couple of times while she was cutting him loose. As he pushed himself a little unsteadily to his feet, she caught hold of his arm and gestured toward his head with her other hand. “You’re hurt!”
Longarm knew she was pointing at the gash on his noggin where Janice’s shot had grazed him. “It’ll be all right! he assured her. “Now, you’d better get out of here while you still can!” He began looking around for the unconscious watchman.
The man had regained consciousness, but he was trussed up the way Longarm had been, and there was a gag in his mouth as well. His rheumy eyes were wide and bulging with fear. Longarm took the knife from Julie, bent over the watchman, and began cutting the ropes. Over his shoulder, he said again to Julie, “Get out of here!”