He had meant to loosen himself up first with a drink of whiskey but he was too hungry. He sat down in the chair and fell straight to on the main dish. It was some kind of mixture of chicken and beef and pork in some kind of a cream sauce with peas and carrots and he didn’t know what all in it. All he knew was that it was larruping good, and once he got started on it, the only time he stopped was to butter a chunk of bread or to take a sip of coffee.
He finished the dish in a very short time and would have eaten another if it had been available. As it was, he had to content himself with eating a dish of mashed potatoes full of jalapeno peppers and chopped-up onions. He had never had mashed potatoes that way but they came out pretty good. Whoever was doing the cooking was a pretty fair hand at it. It wasn’t exactly Mexican food but it was a bit spicy and wasn’t much like anything he had ever had before. He finished up by eating the caramel custard and then the last of the coffee. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and lit himself a cigarillo. Even in such a short time he could feel some of his strength returning as a result of the meal.
With his cigarillo drawing good, he sat there, sipping at coffee into which he had poured a little whiskey. It made a fine combination. A friend of his had once called putting whiskey in coffee a long sweetening and he had come to think of it that way ever since. He remembered that friend. He was dead now. His name had been Coy, Buck Coy, and he had been a fellow deputy marshal. But he had been killed four or five years past. He’d had a beautiful young wife named Molly whom Longarm had gone to comfort from time to time. In the end, she had found a way to comfort him perhaps more than he was helping her. She was a wonderful woman, and if he had ever thought of marriage, it would have been with Molly, but she had declared that she would never marry another law officer. She lived in a small house on the Oklahoma border outside of Wichita Falls, Texas. It hadn’t been six months since Longarm had visited her. The memory of their lovemaking gave sudden rise to a rush of passion inside him. He fought it down. He was in neither the place nor the situation to be thinking such thoughts. If he was to get out of this mess, he was going to have to direct every one of his faculties to finding some sort of a key to either his prison or the people who controlled his prison.
As he sat turning the situation over in his mind, he caught a slight movement at the door and turned his head in time to catch the peephole open. Mr. Brown’s voice said, “You want to talk to me?”
Longarm got up quickly. “Hell, yes, I want to talk to you. I want to explain a few things about what you think you might be able to accomplish by using me.”
Brown said, “All right. I’ll listen to you, not that it will do you any good. Wait where you are for thirty seconds until I back down the hall. Then you can come and talk to me through the peephole.”
Longarm did as he was told, and when he got up to the peephole, he tried to glance through to see if he could catch a glimpse of the man, but the hallway had been darkened. He could barely make out Mr. Brown’s dim form.
Brown said, “All right. Start talking.”
Longarm said, “First, one thing’s got me curious. How come you’re so damn careful not to let me see you? You’ve let me see these Mexicans but you keep yourself completely out of sight. You blindfold me, you sit in the shadows. How come?”
“For your own good, Marshal,” Brown said. “There is a chance that you might recognize me. If you do get a look at me, I’ve got no choice but to kill you.”
Longarm said, “Then you be damn careful that you hide yourself well. Where would I have seen you?”
“Did you want to talk to me about what I look like or do you want to talk to me about your situation?”
“I want to talk to you about my situation. Brown, you’re going about this all bass-akwards. In the first place, they are not going to swap you an embezzler for a deputy marshal. In the second place, how are you going to prove to them that you’ve got me?”
Brown said, “You’re going to write them a letter. That’s the way they’re going to know I’ve got you.”
“Like hell I will! If I do something like that, I’d never live it down. Giving in to the demands of a common crook. Hell.”
“Suit yourself on that score, Marshal,” Brown said. “All the letter will serve to do is to confirm that I have you captured. It’s only a method of speeding matters up. I’m going to tell them I have you and then I’m going to send them your badge along with a letter from me. That and the fact that you can’t be found is going to be proof enough. A letter from you confirming the matter will simply hasten your release. I’m not asking you to beg them to go along with the swap—I know that you’re not the kind of man to do that—but I am suggesting to you that you can cut your prison time down quite a bit by a little cooperation.”
“Well, I tell you, they are not going to believe it and even if they do, they’re not going to do anything about it.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure they’ll believe it, especially with your badge. Your badge is famous for the low number it has on it. Is that a result of your having been a marshal for a long time?”
“No, it’s just the way it worked out. But your sending them the badge ain’t necessarily going to prove to them that I’m alive.”
Longarm could almost hear Brown shrug. Brown said, “If I can’t convince them that you’re alive, then there’s not much point in keeping you alive, is there?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I think a letter would convince them that you are alive and that you are being well treated. You savvy?”
Longarm thought for a long moment. “Hell, Brown. You’ve got me in a box here. I don’t much care for it.”
Brown said, “Make up your mind about that letter. I’ll get some writing material in to you tonight. I’m leaving in the morning and will be sending off my demands to the federal court and the federal offices in San Antonio. You can send the letter or not, as you choose.” He laughed slightly. “Hell, you might even be able to slip some clue by me as to where you are.”
Longarm said, “Brown, you’re a son of a bitch. You’re going to end up regretting this.”
Brown laughed. “Look, you’re going to get pretty desperate for a woman in there, as long as you’re going to be holding down that room. I know all about you and your women. I wouldn’t give me too hard a time, not unless you want to get mighty uncomfortable as the days go by.”
Longarm said, “Go to hell, Brown.”
