sleeping there at the moment. Conrad tried the door. The knob turned easily in his hand. He and Frank stepped into a corridor.
A staircase landing was a few yards to their right. The stairs led down into a big room filled with heavy, rustic furniture dominated by a huge fireplace with a massive stone mantel. A fire crackled in that fireplace, casting a garish, flickering glow over the man who stood in front of it with a drink in his hand.
Dex Lannigan.
Conrad looked around the room. He didn’t see Winifred or the children, or any of Lannigan’s hired killers, for that matter. The man appeared to be alone in the room. The way Lannigan stared pensively into the flames in the fireplace seemed to confirm that hunch.
Conrad and Frank glanced at each other. Taking Lannigan prisoner would give them the upper hand. They could force him to turn over the children, then take him as a hostage until they were safely away from the lodge.
Moving in absolute silence the way living dangerous lives had taught them, Conrad and Frank started down the stairs.
They had just reached the bottom when Lannigan turned abruptly from the fireplace toward them. They lifted their guns, but Lannigan didn’t seem to be surprised to see them. He didn’t drop his drink and try to claw out a weapon of his own. He just smiled. “I was expecting you.”
“Don’t move,” Conrad warned as he looked at Lannigan over the sights of his Colt. “And don’t yell for your guards.”
“Or what?” Lannigan replied mockingly. “You’ll shoot me? What good will that do you? I have a dozen men who’ll be here in a heartbeat if they hear a gun go off. The only reason they’re not in here already is because I want to talk to you, Browning.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Conrad snapped, “except for you telling me where my children are so Frank can go get them while I keep you covered.”
“Your children,” Lannigan repeated. “
An ugly feeling had begun to crawl around inside Conrad as soon as he realized Lannigan wasn’t surprised to see them. It was like a snake in his belly, and it told him something was very, very wrong.
“Little Frank and Vivian,” he said. “Or David and Rachel, as you call them. You know good and well who I’m talking about.”
“Oh, I know.” Lannigan sneered. “But that doesn’t make them your children. They’re not here, anyway. They’re back in San Francisco with their mother. When I left there last night, I figured you’d follow me without ever checking to make sure I hadn’t left Winifred and the children behind.”
That was like a fist in Conrad’s gut. Every instinct he possessed told him Lannigan was telling the truth, about that part of it, anyway. The saloon owner had set a clever trap for him and Frank, and they had fallen into it. It hadn’t even occurred to him that Lannigan might have left the children behind.
But the rest of it had to be a lie. Conrad said, “Pamela Tarleton—”
“You’re about to tell me Pamela Tarleton is the twins’ mother, aren’t you?” Lannigan broke in. “How can you be so sure of that?”
“I was at the sanitarium in Cambridge where they were born. I talked to Dr. Futrelle—”
“Are you saying Futrelle couldn’t have been paid to lie to you? I knew Pamela Tarleton, I don’t deny that. When she set out to either destroy you or make your life a living hell, however it worked out, she tried to think of every possible contingency. She’s always been two steps ahead of you, Browning.”
Conrad shook his head. “You’re lying through your teeth. Pamela went to that sanitarium—”
“With her maid, who was about to have a baby but had no husband to go with it.” Lannigan shrugged. “I probably shouldn’t talk this way about the woman who’s now my dear wife, but at one time in her life she was rather free with her favors. When she found herself in the family way, it played right into her employer’s hands. Pamela hatched the idea of making you believe the child was yours. As it turned out, there were two babies ... but that just doubled the misery for you, didn’t it?”
Conrad’s pulse began to hammer inside his skull. He didn’t want to believe the things Lannigan was telling him, but deep down he knew it was possible. Pamela could have done it all: fixed things so it looked like she had the children at the sanitarium, rather than her maid; written the letter to be delivered to Conrad after her death; acted like
All along, for months, he had played right into the hands of her twisted scheme.
“How do I know this isn’t just one more of Pamela’s clever lies you’re telling me?”
Lannigan chuckled and shook his head. “You don’t. That’s the beauty of it, Browning. You’re going to die not knowing for sure.”
He looked up at the top of the stairs behind Conrad and Frank and nodded.
The roar of guns suddenly filled the big room.
Chapter 31
Lannigan’s nod was enough to warn Conrad and Frank. They were moving even as the guns began to blast, and their superb reflexes flung them apart, Conrad going left and Frank going right, as half a dozen slugs burned through the space where they had been a shaved fraction of an instant earlier.
Conrad landed on his shoulder, rolled, and came up on one knee with the Colt in his right hand and one of the revolvers he had taken from the guards filling his left hand. Flame spouted from the muzzles as he fired up the stairs at the hired killers who had been waiting for Lannigan’s signal to bushwhack him and Frank.
Two of the men staggered, stumbled, and doubled over as Conrad’s bullets tore into them. Another man went down with blood welling from the hole in the center of his forehead where one of Frank’s shots had caught him. Frank lay on his belly on the other side of the staircase, firing upward.
The gunmen retreated, driven back by the deadly accuracy of their intended victims. As the shooting entered a momentary lull, Conrad glanced over his shoulder toward the fireplace. Lannigan was gone. He had ducked out and left his men to deal with Conrad and Frank.
The men upstairs weren’t the only ones they had to worry about. The front door slammed open, and several guards from outside burst into the room, brandishing shotguns. Conrad surged up from the floor and threw himself in a diving leap behind one of the heavy chairs as a guard touched off both barrels of a Greener. The double load of buckshot smashed into the chair, blowing stuffing and splinters into the air. The impact of the charge toppled the chair backward onto Conrad, who was unhurt but pinned down for a second.
Frank took some of the heat off him by opening fire on the shotgunners from the other side of the room. He darted behind one of the thick posts holding up the ceiling and put a bullet through the brain of one of the guards. The man collapsed with his shotgun still unfired.
Conrad shoved the chair aside and tipped his Colt up. The man who had loosed the blast at him was reloading, but Conrad didn’t give him time to snap the Greener closed. He fired and sent a bullet ripping through the man’s throat. The hired killer went over backward with blood fountaining from his torn jugular.
That left two of the shotgunners still on their feet. Conrad rolled desperately to avoid a blast from one of them. A few of the pellets stung his hide but didn’t do any real damage. The gunman was smart enough to fire just one barrel, leaving him with another load of buckshot. He tried to track Conrad with that barrel.
The hammers of Conrad’s pistols clicked on empty chambers. He dropped one, holstered the other and powered to his feet, grabbing the buckshot-shredded chair as he came up. He heaved it just as the man fired. The chair blocked the pellets, then crashed into the gunner, knocking him back a step.
By then Conrad had drawn the Smith & Wesson. While the hired killer was off-balance, Conrad put a .38 round through his head. The man fell back on the stairs, which were painted by the blood and brains that sprayed from his ventilated skull.
That left one more man with a shotgun, but as Conrad swung around in search of that final target, he saw
