shooting at me to make me think I was chasing you?”
The Great Costello smiled modestly and said, “It was one of my girls. Once she had you pinned down, she only had to walk away in a ladylike way.”
Longarm grimaced and said, “We figured you just walked out the front door betwixt your uniformed helpers. How did you gun the real guards so silent after luring them upstairs with three of your whores?”
The Great Costello looked hurt and replied in an injured tone, “That’s not fair. I only had Maureen and one other girl in my troupe checked into the hotel. We both know why Maureen wasn’t able to help, but I’m broad- minded, as long as she says she enjoyed it. The other sweet child never spread her thighs for anyone but your friend, Guilfoyle. She was able to pick up each guard in turn, drug them, and go back down for another. She had to allow the last one, Guilfoyle, a chance to remember her more fondly, as an alibi, see?”
Longarm shook his head and said, “Not hardly. Guilfoyle said the one he’d picked up was staying there with one other gal. I failed to make the connection until later. That leaves three other rooms they couldn’t have been checked into. So to lure them other guards into unbooked rooms and leave ‘em safely locked away to be found by that chambermaid …”
The Great Costello smiled smugly and said, “I could tell you, but I’d rather let you guess.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Don’t have to. The chambermaid was one of your troupe. Such help is always hard to find at the wages a seedy hotel like that might offer. She got a job there, first, and that gave her pass keys and a free run of the upstairs as well as a vantage place as lookout for the others. But all the hired help there couldn’t have been on your side. How did she manage to gun them three unconscious men, after the rest of us had left, without her employers noticing?”
“It’s against all I stand for to give away tricks of the trade. But since I want you to know that none of the young ladies in my act are killers, I’d better confess that was Tommy O’Horan’s idea, too. He did it without consulting me, since I was still in that death cell when he did it. He never shot them, he killed all three of them with the same burglar tool.”
“A real sweet kid. Shoving spent bullets into the wounds with that same glorified screwdriver confused me considerable. I don’t believe he wasn’t told to do it, though. Like all your other razzle-dazzle, that was meant to send us sniffing one way while you made tracks the other.”
The Great Costello shrugged and said, “Whatever you say and, speaking of making tracks, am I supposed to just sit here chained to this bed, or were you planning to hand me over to the authorities sooner or later?”
“I’m an authority and I got to study on that,” Longarm said. “I figure you still have eight or nine arrows to your bow. Before you said nighty-night to ‘em just now, for instance, you’d have mentioned that the usual way a lawman in my position would proceed would be to lock you up in the local hoosegow until I could arrange to transport you back to Colorado.”
“Isn’t that what you intend to do?” asked his prisoner.
“Not hardly,” Longarm said. “Springing you from a patent cell again would be a lot harder, with me starting to get the hang of how you all work. But they’d likely try, and I don’t want to see anyone else hurt in a fight that ain’t their own.”
He fished out two smokes, gave one to his prisoner, and struck a light for the both of them as he mused, “There won’t be a train out for some time, and even that one’s headed the wrong way. Do you have a mount stabled downstairs, seeing we seem to have picked the same hotel?”
His prisoner snorted, “Surely you jest.”
Longarm said, “Thanks. I was wondering if you city dudes were in shape to chase us on horseback.” Then he reached in his pocket for the handcuff key. But as he got it out, the Great Costello raised his club foot to wave sort of show-off as he said, “Don’t bother.”
Longarm laughed despite himself and said, “All right, get the other link off that bed leg if you’re so smart.” And the Great Costello simply reached down and somehow did so. Longarm knew better than to ask how. He just took the set back with a nod of thanks, hooked them to the back of his gun rig, and said, “I may as well keep ‘em, anyway. You never know when you might want to cuff a more ignorant cuss. Now, get up. Slow. You may be too slick to hold with hardware, but I’ve yet to see a gent escape from the box once I put a round in him where it counts.”
The smaller as well as older man rose politely from the bed to say, “I’m at your service, with nothing up my sleeves.”
“There’d better not be. I don’t expect your fellow magicians to make their play before they figure where I mean to lock you up for the night. We’re going down the stairwell, now. If you try to bolt I’ll kill you, and no doubt many a hangman will heave a vast sigh of relief when they hear about it.”
The Great Costello promised to behave and did, all the way down to the side entrance. He asked why they were entering the stable instead of leaving the hotel. Longarm told him, “Because stables are where they keep horses.”
Then he frog-marched his prisoner inside, made him place both hands on the top rail of a stall, and told the surprised groom, “I’ll bet you ten dollars you can’t saddle and bridle my chestnut, saddle a livery nag the same way, and get us out of here in less than five minutes.”
He lost. Naturally the groom wanted to know where they might be going with the horse-for-hire and naturally Longarm told him, “For a ride. You have my word you’ll get your awful nag and fair saddle back. If I told you more than that you might have to lie under torture. So should anyone ask, feel free to tell ‘em what you know and don’t ask to know no more, hear?”
The groom said that sounded fair and wished them a safe hasta la vista, to wherever the hell they were going, as they rode off with Longarm covering his prisoner from the rear.
The Great Costello rode pretty good, albeit not as good as he might have on a faster mount than Longarm’s. After they’d ridden a few city blocks, the prisoner turned in his saddle to ask, “Did you have some particular destination in mind or am I just supposed to guess?”
Longarm said, “Swing east at the next corner. I’m taking you out to Fort Bliss. Your playmates will play hell busting you out of an army guardhouse once I tell the army what a distinguished federal prisoner I want ‘em to sit on for a spell.”
“I might have expected you to be so sneaky. What then, a choo-choo back to Colorado?”
