population?”
“Call it a hundred. Little better, actually.”
Johnny kept his face expressionless. “So we're supposed to trek up there an' go up against whatever passes now for law an' order in the place? Just the two of us?”
“You know there's got to be a hell of a lot more to it than that,” Thompson said angrily. His face was flushed. “They think they've broken me. There's a half-dozen people trying to run that town as a private preserve. I got in their way. I've got enough on them to hang them from the highest lampposts on the main street but I've got to be sure that I last long enough to be heard. I can prove what's been going on in Jefferson. They know it. That's why I look like this.”
“Where's your wife now?” Johnny asked him.
For an instant Carl Thompson looked blank. “My wife? Over at the Taft, with me.” His face cleared. “Did you think I'd be crazy enough to leave her up there available to them while I went back and tipped over their applecart?”
“It makes you a little less crazy that you didn't.” Johnny thought he had said it disarmingly but Carl Thompson burst up out of his chair and landed crouched forward on his toes. His chin was thrust forward pugnaciously and his small eyes glittered.
“You trying to needle me?” he demanded hoarsely. “I know what the odds are. I don't give a damn. All I want is one good man at my back. I'll pay the man's price. That plain?”
“Plain enough,” Johnny agreed. This guy is rocky as the Catskills, he thought. From the look of him he couldn't buy sugar for the coffees. “Plain's I'm goin' to be, Thompson. I'm not the man.”
“Why not?” the scarfaced man shot back belligerently.
“Because I say so, damn it! You know a better reason?”
Thompson brushed it aside. “Killain, I'll pay you-”
“Knock it off, mister,” Johnny growled. Irritation bubbled within him. “I don't even know you. Your troubles aren't my troubles. I work here. I like it here. I'm no goddamn mercenary. I'm not signin' up for any crusade. Any way you want to add it up the answer is still 'no'.”
The stocky man's heavy shoulders slumped at the point-blank refusal. Recovering, he attempted to pass it off jauntily but there was no resonance in his voice. “Man, man, I get so tired of seeing snake-eyes on the dice lately.” He struggled to right himself. His eyes swept around the room. “Maybe I should bring my wife over here,” he continued moodily.
“Maybe she'd be safer here. I have a feeling I'm being followed.”
By men in white coats, Johnny thought. He realized suddenly that if Thompson had a problem Thompson's wife had a damned sight bigger one. He looked again at the red-haired man's clothes. Despite the big talk of hiring a good man at the man's price, it was a hundred to seven the poor devil was tapped out. “How long you in town for?” he asked cautiously.
“Today,” Thompson said. “Tomorrow, maybe. Just until I-” He didn't try to complete the sentence.
Johnny walked to the bureau and removed a key from a clip on the band of the wrist watch lying on it. He tossed it to Thompson. “That's for the room here. Bring the kid over. I'd kind of like to see her again. There'll be no bill.”
Carl Thompson shoved the key briskly in a pocket. “I'll send her over right away, Killain.” The impatience was back in his broken face and in his voice. He edged toward the door. “She'll be right along. I've got to run now. Busy. Lot to do. You know how it is.” From the doorway he nodded jerkily and was gone.
Johnny removed the robe and returned it to the closet. He caught sight of his own expression in the bureau mirror as he came back and he had to smile. So Killain had rousted himself out of his own nest for a man who didn't even take the trouble to say thank you? So Killain was a first-class jerk. Nothing new in that.
He sat down in the armchair and stretched out his legs. Just why in the hell he should suddenly feel sorry for someone named Carl Thompson acting as though he had the weight of the world's prime vendetta on his mind Make that what's left of his mind, Killain.
Still, if Toby Lowell had given him Johnny's name Johnny found himself staring at the closed door. The more he thought of it the less it sounded like Toby Lowell. But how had Thompson found him if it hadn't been through Toby?
He heaved himself to his feet reluctantly, the towel leaving the leather with a damp, sucking sound. At the bureau he found his cigarettes and lit one, considered the curling ash at its tip, and from a drawer dug out a long unused notebook and carried it to the bed. The telephone rang practically under his hand, surprising him. He cleared his throat as he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”
“Rollins, downstairs,” the phone announced. “Stop off and give me a receipt on your way down.”
“Receipt?”
“For the envelope I sent up with Richie. Did you count it?”
“Count it?” Johnny asked. He continued hurriedly at the exasperated grunt at the other end of the line. “I had someone here, Chet. I haven't even had a chance to look at it. What is it?”
“It's the proceeds from a half-dozen previously uncashed payroll checks I pried out of you three months ago so I could close my books. I put it in the safe temporarily and you were supposed to pick it up. It must be nice to be so loaded you forget where your money's gathering dust.”
“If you think I'd forgotten it you're out of your simple mind, Chet. It's just that workin' the midnight-to-eight I don't get much chance to throw it around. Let me stick it back in the box an' one of these days I'll S.O.S. you. Right now I don't-”
“In another three months?” the auditor interrupted. “Our insurance doesn't cover employees' property, Johnny. I should never have had it here at all.” His tone changed. “How's the chest?”
“Good as it ever was.” Johnny scowled at the wall. “Why in the hell I let Doc Randall con me into takin' a month off I'll never know. One lousy week an' already I don't know what to do with myself.”
“Doc's still sore at you for leaving the hospital so soon.”
“Ahhh, I had to get out of that loony bin,” Johnny snorted. “A dozen years on the owl shift fixed me so I can't sleep nights, an' Grand Central was Tumbleweed Junction compared to that hospital room during the day.”
“You'd better stay out of his way,” Rollins warned. “And don't forget to stop in and sign my receipt.” He hung up, and Johnny replaced his own receiver. He glanced at the envelope on the bureau. He'd have to find a place for that.
Conscious of the notebook in his hand, he remembered his interrupted errand. He plumped up a pillow on the bed, eased himself down on his back, picked up the telephone again and propped it on his chest. “Long distance, Edna,” he told the switchboard operator when she came on the line. “I'll handle it and get you the charges.” He read off the five-figure extension when he was connected with his Washington number. He smoked two-thirds of his cigarette and spoke to three different people before he recognized Toby Lowell's thin, reedy voice. “Killain, Toby. In New York. What rat-holes you watchin' these days?”
“The labels change but the rats and the holes are remarkably similar,” Toby Lowell said. “What's on your mind, Johnny?”
“Any good reason I should've been hearin' your name taken in vain today?”
“None whatsoever.” The dry tone was emphatic.
“I thought so,” Johnny said with satisfaction. Swiftly he ran down the previous thirty minutes' conversation for the benefit of the other man. “The guy must really have sluffed his mainsail, Toby,” he concluded.
“Now just a moment. I do know a Carl Thompson.” A distinct change had come over the dry voice. “I don't understand this. What does the man who claims to be Thompson look like?”
“Medium height, heavy set, red hair goin' thin, voice like a sergeant major on dress parade-”
“That's Thompson, all right.”
“His face looks like he tied into the business end of a mule.”
“I don't know anything about that. The part about him being chief in Jefferson is right enough, though. My endorsement of him played a part in his originally getting the post. Jefferson's my home town. I can't imagine what happened. I would have thought I'd have heard about something as apparently serious as this.”
“He claims he got squeezed in a power play. You don't go for that?”
“I simply don't know, Johnny. There's no doubt of his- ah-mental condition?”
Johnny hesitated. “There's no doubt he's packin' a whale of a grudge that's got him tipped in the saddle. It'd
