At that moment, Jarred yanked the phone cord out of the wall. The line went dead. “Have a good day,” I said, and hung up.
“Who the fuck was that?”
“Grandma,” I said. “She tends to worry about me.”
“She should worry about you, because you are fucked, Knighthorse. Fucked. Do you understand me? Fucked!”
“If I’m hearing you correctly,” I said, “I appear to be fucked.”
“Put your hands flat on the desk where I can see them.”
He caught me. I was inching toward my desk drawer, where I kept my Browning. I sighed, rested both hands on the tooled leather top of the desk.
“The oils from my palms might stain the tooled leather top of my desk.”
“Fuck your desk.”
Jarred had a sort of wild-eyed look about him. The sort of look my teammates had before big games, a look fueled by a lot of adrenaline and nerves and the certainty that you were going to hurt a lot of people in a few hours. Or be hurt. Jarred was still wearing his Rawhide-issued red cowboy shirt and jeans. He was sweating through his cowboy shirt. Must have gotten himself pretty worked up on the drive out here. His thinning hair was disheveled and his glasses had slid to the tip of his sweating nose. He didn’t push them back up.
“They were waiting for me outside my condo,” he said, spitting the words at me.
“They?”
He shoved the gun in my face, just inches from my nose. I could smell the gun oil, could see faint scratches along the steel barrel. “Don’t fuck with me, Knighthorse. The cops. The cops were waiting for me.” He snapped the gun away and started pacing in front of my desk, keeping the gun loosely on me. Jarred looked insane. He was sweating profusely now. Swallowing repeatedly. “Patty told me you spoke to her the other day. She must have told you something.”
“She told me you went back to the truck for water.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Except we have your prints on the gas cap, Jarred.”
“What do you mean?”
“We know you sabotaged the truck.”
He looked at me from over his glasses. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose, landed on my tooled leather. I would have to wipe that clean later. For now, I had bigger fish to fry.
“Give me the gun, Jarred.”
“I can’t.”
“If you shoot me, you get the death penalty.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”
I shrugged. “Where you stand now, a good lawyer talks the D.A. down to second degree murder.”
Jarred was shaking. I could literally see the sweat spreading from under his armpits.
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Say that to Willie Clarke.”
Jarred dropped into the client chair opposite me. The gun was pointed away from me. If I wanted to, I could lunge across the desk and wrestle it away from him. I wasn’t in the lunging mood. Besides, I didn’t think it would come to that.
“I didn’t mean to kill him.”
I said nothing.
“I just did it to scare him away, you know?” He paused, ran his hand through his hair. “I gambled on Rawhide. I visited there as a kid and fell in love with it. It stayed with me all these years.”
“Maybe it’s the cowboy in you.”
He ignored me. I was used to being ignored. He continued. “So when I was casting around for a theme for my masters, Rawhide naturally came to mind. It was a good fit. I had a true love for American history, in particular Western history. I did some research and discovered nothing of any significance had been done on the town, and I knew I had found my purpose. I sold my condo in Boston, moved out west. I’ve poured my heart and soul into that little town.”
“And then in waltzes Willie Clarke.”
Jarred instinctively gripped the weapon in his lap. “He was fresh out of graduate school, but there was a sort of-”
“Cockiness?” I offered.
“Yes. A cockiness to him that I found infuriating. Which is probably why I don’t like you.”
“Sometimes I don’t like me, either.”
“Seriously?”
“No; I love me.”
Jarred rolled his eyes. I think he might have thought about swinging his gun up to my face again, but decided against it. “Willie sounded so confident, so fucking sure of himself. As if he really thought he could unearth Sly’s identity.”
“Can’t have that.”
“Sly was mine,” he hissed.
“If anyone was going to discover Sly’s identity,” I said, helping, “it would be you.”
His eyes sparkled. “Yes! Exactly. Sly’s one of the West’s most intriguing mysteries.”
“So you removed the threat. The threat being Willie.”
“Hell, what the fuck was I supposed to do?”
“Not kill him. Work together. Share the glory.”
Jarred was shaking his head. “I worked too hard and long to do that. Still, I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to scare him. I didn’t want him to come back.”
“Sure,” I said. “You scared him to death.”
A shadow crossed under my doorway. The cavalry was here. Any minute now, they were going to barge in here, probably knock my door off its newly restored hinges. I couldn’t let that happen.
“Give me the gun, Jarred.”
He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose; they promptly slipped back down. He looked at me. His eyes were wide and reddish, perhaps irritated by his sweat. “I can’t go to jail. Father would be very disappointed in me.”
More shadows. It was going to get ugly in here. And I was still scrubbing the last of the bloodstains out of my carpet.
“He’s very renowned, you know. Teaches at Princeton. He didn’t approve of me coming out to Rawhide. Thought it was beneath us. Thought it was a mistake.”
“Boy was he wrong,” I said.
Jarred gave me a half smile and pushed his glasses up. “They’re coming for me, aren’t they?”
I kept my eyes on him and nodded my head slowly. I didn’t like the tone his voice had suddenly taken on. Somber and distant, a voice empty of hope.
“You were talking to the police earlier, weren’t you?” he asked.
“Just give me the gun, Jarred.”
“I think…not.”
“They’ll shoot you.”
“Now there’s a thought,” he said. “Would make things a lot easier, wouldn’t it? My parents would be disgraced, sure. But at least the matter will be done with short and quick.”
“Don’t do this, Jarred. It’s not worth it.”
“Not worth it? Oh, I think it is.” He looked at me, smiled. Pushed his glasses up. His eyes weren’t right. His lower lip trembled. “Tell my dad to fuck off for me.”
“Tell him yourself.”
“Later, Knighthorse.”
He swung the rifle around and, in a practiced motion, stuck the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the
