we’ll all weep but one of us.”
The man to Longarm’s left had a pair of jacks, the next man two kings and the dealer nothing stronger than a pair of treys.
Ben showed a pair of queens, but four of his cards were hearts. Obviously he’d been drawing two for the flush and paired up by sheer dumb luck. But not quite enough of it.
“Straight,” Longarm said, laying his cards down for all to see. “Six high.” Almost reluctantly he scooped the pot in.
“You cheating son of a bitch,” Ben snarled.
“You talking to me, son, or to the man who dealt the cards?” Longarm asked mildly.
“You know who I mean, damn you,” Ben spat back at him, pushing away from the table and pumping his right hand into a fist four or five times in rapid succession. He was not wearing a holster gun but there was a lump in the right front pocket of his overalls that could have been a revolver.
“I expect I do at that, sonny. Fact is, you’re wrong. I just hope you don’t insist on being dead wrong.”
“You cheated me! You…”
“Son, you’d best be careful how you use words like that. Say them to the wrong fellow and they can wind up caught in your throat, y’know?”
“I say you cheated, damn you,” Ben cried loudly. He sprang to his feet angrily. Behind him, the room full of tipplers and friendly card players scrambled to get out of the way.
Longarm was leaning back in his chair with his hands laced lightly across his belly. With his left hand he casually pulled his coat open to show the butt of the big Colt lying only a few inches away from his hand.
“I don’t want t’ hurt you, boy. Go home now, and next time don’t insist on bein’ stupid.”
“I say … I say…” The boy’s mouth gapped and closed, gapped and closed. He was sucking air like a trout in a creel. He was scared. Longarm could see the fear stark in his eyes. He’d gone too far now. The problem was that he didn’t know how to back water and get out of the situation he’d gone and created himself.
Somebody needed to give the kid an out, and it looked like there wasn’t anyone else around who knew how to do it either.
Longarm reached out with his left hand, slowly, and picked up an empty shot glass the man to his left had been using. “Here,” he said softly. He tossed the glass to the kid. Amber liquor sprayed high into the air. So, maybe the glass hadn’t been empty after all.
Ben looked startled and, out of automatic reflex, moved to catch the glass. He blinked and stared into it.
When he looked up again he stared all the harder. But this time into the gaping muzzle of Longarm’s .45. No one in the place, including Ben, had so much as seen Longarm’s hand move. One moment he was sitting leaned back in his chair. The next instant his posture was unchanged but now there was a dark and menacing double- action Colt in his fist.
If he needed an excuse to walk away, he damn sure had one now, Longarm figured.
“If it makes any difference to you,” Longarm said gently, “I never cheated you. Didn’t have to. Now go home, boy. Stop at the bar and have a drink if you like. Tell them I’m good for it. Then go home and tell your wife what you done with your seed money, or whatever it was you pissed away tonight. You hear me, boy? Go home.”
The kid gulped hard. His eyes hadn’t left the muzzle of the .45 since Longarm first showed it to him.
After several seconds of agonized indecision common sense finally broke through the irrational fog of his misery, and Ben turned and walked out into the night. He was still holding the small glass Longarm threw to him but did not stop to collect the offered drink.
“Jesus,” someone nearby muttered.
Longarm sighed, then reached out and pulled the cards into a pile. “My deal, I believe,” he observed to no one in particular.
Chapter 9
Longarm felt … silly. Dumb. On display. He suspected he now knew what it would feel like to show up for the party wearing a clown suit only to discover too late that it wasn’t a masquerade ball after all but a formal sit-down dinner.
That is pretty much what it felt like to him to be out on the street in public, in broad daylight, wearing a tight —and damnably hot—flannel baseball costume.
He’d have covered the thing over with a duster or a slicker except the heat would’ve melted him into a puddle of rancid sweat before he got halfway to the playing field. As it was he was forced to walk the whole distance with people staring at him every step of the way, never mind that there were more than a dozen other idiots dressed in equally stupid uniforms walking alongside him. Every eye was on him and him alone. He believed that. And he really did somewhere at gut level even if he knew better in his conscious mind. He really did feel like a showoff asshole wearing what he personally regarded as children’s clothes out where the grown-ups could see.
It was all part of the job though so the best he could do was grit his teeth and go along with it.
He dropped back in the pack to where the coach, who for some reason was called the manager and not coach, was speaking with the equipment boy, a kid with a club foot named Jerry something-or-other.
“Mr. McWhortle?”
“Douglas,” the manager corrected, “What is it, Short?”
For a moment Longarm couldn’t figure out where the short thing came in. Then he remembered that it was supposed to be his name here. He really was not feeling himself today. Likely, he guessed, the damn heat had cooked his brains and he would be useless ever after.
“Well?” McWhortle prodded.
