The bad teeth once again. "I wouldn't bet on it, Rooney."
Chapter Nineteen
Prine and Neville reached Junction Gap at eight o'clock that night. A light, cold mist gave the town an ominous look. Ground fog was up to the hips.
On the trail, they'd debated whether to ask the local law for help. They'd decided against it. Get the local law involved and somebody would immediately start thinking about the reward. And the prospect of all that money would make them secretive rather than cooperative. They'd fix it up so a friend or relative of theirs made the arrest and could claim the reward.
They found the livery stable. Their animals deserved food and a rest. It'd been a difficult trek. Not only the terrain. They'd been running the horses fast and hard. They described Tolan and Neville, but the liveryman didn't recall seeing such a pair.
"'Course, Junction City, an awful lot of people come and go," the liveryman said. "You'd best try the saloons and the hotels. That's where most fellas end up when they come here."
Prine remembered something. "You got a roster?"
"Roster?" The moon-faced man wore a sheepskin, had a red scarf wrapped around his neck several times, sported heavy blue earmuffs, and had his hands snugged into mittens. The temperature was still in the low thirties. Prine wondered what the man wore when deep winter came. Maybe he didn't leave his house.
"A list. All the horses you put up today."
"Say, I never thought of that."
The liveryman led them back to a cubbyhole with a desk and two rickety wooden chairs. There was no escaping the acid smell of horse dung. In a confined space like this livery, the stench could make your eyes sting and water.
"Here you go."
Plain piece of paper. Date at the top. Nine names had been entered today. Tolan and Rooney wouldn't be foolish enough to put down their real names. The earliest they could have gotten here was just after dawn. The trouble was, the names weren't accompanied by the time a given horse was brought in.
"That help you any?" the liveryman said.
"Afraid not. Well, thanks. Guess we'll be going."
"I sure don't envy you goin' out on a night like this one," the liveryman said, huddling down into his sheepskin and batting his mittened hands together. "Like to freeze your tail off."
"Yeah," Prine said, "and just wait till it gets down into the twenties."
They went to the railroad station.
"Wish I could help you fellas," said the middle-aged man at the ticket counter. "But I just come on here a while ago. You'd want Vance. He works the seven-to-three shift. He might be able to help you."
"When's the next train due in here?"
"Supposed to be about an hour from now. But we got a telegram sayin' they're runnin' a little late. Some cattle got on the tracks. Lucky the train stayed upright. You run into four or five beeves when you're doin' sixty, you got some fine mess on your hands."
The ticket agent yawned every two minutes or so. And got both Prine and Neville yawning, too. Any other time and circumstance, Prine would've found this pretty funny.
"How many hotels in town here?" Prine said.
"Four."
"They all on the main street?"
"Yep. Two on the same little block, in fact. Good place for you fellas to put in for the night. A real friendly place, Junction Gap."
As they walked away from the railroad station, Neville said, "We could always sit here and wait for them to come to us."
"I was thinking of that, too," Prine said. "But what if they change their minds and decide to go on horseback? We'd be sitting in that railroad station a long time."
"Well, since there are four hotels, you take two and I'll take two. How's that?"
"Fine." Prine searched the misty gloom. The lights in The Good Meal Café promised warmth and a full belly and relaxation. He could easily imagine him sitting in there, taking it easy. After this was all over, that would be his first stop.
"All right," Prine said. "And if we don't turn anything up, we meet back here in an hour."
"If we don't turn anything up, I'm going to be damned disappointed," Neville said.
As Neville started to turn away, Prine grabbed the sleeve of his sheepskin and said, "You just remember our agreement. We want to take them back alive. Sheriff Daly'll have a lot of questions for them."
"I'll remember that," Neville said. "And you remember that Cassie was my sister and that I loved her more than I've ever loved anybody." He pushed Prine's hand away from his sleeve. "I'll abide by the law, Prine. But if I find them and they give me any grief, I don't make any promises."
"That's fair enough," Prine said.
And with that, they set off to start searching the hotels.
Prine checked the saloons on his way to the hotels. He didn't see Tolan. He asked the various bartenders but found himself up against the bartenders' code of silence. Prine reasoned that all saloons should have a sign that said "Bullshit Spoken Here" up behind the bar. It would save lawmen, wives, and process servers a whole lot of time.
The one bartender who claimed to have knowledge of such men said that he wanted ten dollars for the information. The sly way he said it told Prine that this man, too, was speaking the universal bartender language of bullshit.
The first hotel he tried had a desk clerk who couldn't quite make up his mind if Tolan was there or not, a twitchy little man in a celluloid collar that left raw chafe marks around his chicken neck.
"The way you describe him," he said to Prine, "it sounds like he could be the man in 201."
"I'll check it out."
"On the other hand, the way you describe him sounds like he could also be the man in 111."
"They look sort of alike, huh?"
"Sort of. But then, the man in 206 also looks a little like the way you describe him."
"Looks like I'm going to be busy."
"But last week—last week we had a man that looked exactly like him."
"Last week Tolan would've been in Claybank."
"Well, I guess I didn't mean exactly, anyway, come to think of it. This Tolan, he doesn't have a limp and a glass eye, does he?"
"I don't think so."
"Well, then it wouldn't have been the man in here last week, anyway. He looked exactly as you described Tolan except—"
"—except for the glass eye and the limp."
"Right. Exactly."
Prine sighed and started checking up on rooms 201, 111, and 206.
The problem was, Prine decided when the door to 201 was opened, the desk clerk shouldn't be so vain about wearing his glasses. Big, thick glasses. And he was apparently so blind that he should wear them twenty-four hours a day. Even when he slept.
The man who opened 201 was a scrawny redhead with a cigar jammed into the corner of his mouth and a half-naked woman on his bed. She was rubbing her crotch. Hard to tell if the rubbing was for pleasure or because she had a disease.
"Yeah?" the man said.
"Sorry to bother you. Looking for somebody else." The guy nodded to the woman behind him on the bed.
"I finally get her to go along and you have to come knockin'?"
"I'm sorry."
"You can stuff your sorry as far as I'm concerned," the man said.
And he slammed the door.
The man who opened the door at 206 was at least fifty years old, bald, and was in the process of hawking up enough phlegm to fill a reservoir.
"What the hell you want?" he snapped between green gooey snorts.
"I must have the wrong room."
"I'm snufflin' my guts up and you have the wrong room? Get the hell outta here."
He caught ill when he went back downstairs.