Maybe his reasoning had been wrong, Longarm told himself. He had thought that his line of logic ran true from point to point, but maybe he had missed a turn. It had happened before, rarely to be sure—but it had happened.
The next bag belonged to Matador’s rider. Longarm opened it, took out a set of silks, and placed them to the side. He found a quirt in the bag as well, and in the bottom of it a set of cloth-covered weights such as all the jockeys carried. With a sigh, he started to put the heavy, rectangular weights back in the bag.
Then he froze abruptly. He hefted the weights in his left hand, a frown appearing on his face. With his right hand, he reached into his trousers pocket and found his clasp knife. He brought it out, opened the blade, and with utmost caution pressed the sharp tip through the thick cloth. He cut a long slit with the knife, then put it away. Turning the weights over, he pulled the slit open.
The counterfeit printing plates slid out of the cloth cover into his hand.
After a moment, Longarm realized he wasn’t breathing as he stared down at the pieces of gray, ink-stained metal. Three good men, three fellow marshals, had died violent deaths back in Albuquerque for these plates. There was no way of knowing how many phony bills were floating around that had been manufactured by Edward Nowlan using these plates. As Longarm had told Julie Cassidy, in the right hands they were worth a fortune.
And thinking about Julie reminded Longarm just where he had found them.
“Son of a bitch,” said Longarm, quietly but fervently. He had been hoping he was wrong about his suspicions, but it looked like his hunch had been correct. One or both of the Cassidy sisters was mixed up in this, all the way to their pretty necks. He recalled that they needed money to get their horse ranch in Missouri back on its feet.
What better way to get money than to print your own?
He had been listening with one ear for the horses in the stalls outside, knowing that if anyone entered the stable they would probably make some noise and alert him. So far, they had been quiet. So it came as a surprise when one of the floorboards suddenly creaked behind him. His left hand tightened on the printing plates and his right darted toward the gun holstered on his hip as he started to turn.
A cold ring of metal—unmistakably the barrel of a gun—was jabbed hard against his neck, and a man’s voice said in low and deadly tones, “Don’t move, Marshal.”
Chapter 13
“Howdy, Leon,” Longarm said, forcing his voice to remain calm and steady. “Be careful with that pistol, old son. We don’t want it to go off.”
“That’s right,” said another voice. “We don’t want blood all over the floor in here. The horses might smell it, and you know how spooky the scent of blood can make them.”
Longarm closed his eyes for a second. There was a cold, hard ball of something—disgust, maybe—in his belly. All he had to go by were a few minor differences in tone and inflection, but he felt pretty confident he was right as he said, “Hello, Janice. I was truly hoping I was wrong about you.”
She laughed. “What do you mean, wrong about me? You didn’t have a clue what was really going on. My God, you arrested Senator Padgett! He’s probably the only man in the world dumber than you.”
“All right, that’s enough,” snapped Leon Mercer. “What are we going to do about this?”
“You know what we have to do,” Janice said. “We have to kill him. But I want it to look like an accident.”
Longarm heard another pistol being cocked. “I’ll cover him. You drag that old man in here.”
The gun went away from Longarm’s neck. Mercer reached around him and plucked the .44 from the cross-draw rig. “Just so you don’t get any ideas,” Mercer said.
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas, all right,” said Longarm. “Just wish a few of ‘em had occurred to me earlier.”
They didn’t know about the derringer in his vest pocket. That might give him an advantage later on, but whether or not it would be enough to save his bacon, he didn’t know.
He heard Mercer’s footsteps retreating, and he said to Janice, “Mind if I turn around? I sort of like to see whoever’s pointing a gun at me.”
“All right. But be careful. I honestly don’t want to shoot you, Custis.”
Longarm kept his hands where she could see them as he turned to face her. She looked as lovely as ever in the lantern light, but those blue eyes had lost any warmth they had once possessed. Now they were like chips of ice.
“You couldn’t stop interfering, could you?” she said, and he thought he heard a trace of genuine regret in her voice. “You had to keep poking around until we have no choice but to get rid of you.”
Longarm hefted the printing plates, which he still held in his left hand. “These are worth a lot to you, aren’t they?”
“They’re worth the world,” Janice said fervently. “They represent not having to struggle anymore. I can get away from that horrible horse ranch at last.”
“Julie feel the same way?”
Janice laughed humorlessly. “Julie actually likes horses. She doesn’t know anything about my … arrangement … with Leon.”
“Did he recruit you to help him out in Albuquerque, or have you been part of the counterfeiting ring all along?”
“Leon organized the operation,” Janice admitted. “He financed Nowlan with funds that he diverted from the senator’s campaigns. But we met back East, while I was in school, and we each knew immediately that we’d encountered a kindred spirit. Leon influenced the senator to buy Caesar so that we could use the racing circuit as a cover for distributing the money.”
Longarm knew the only reason she was telling him all this was because she didn’t expect him to be alive much longer. That was confirmed a moment later when Mercer dragged the body of the elderly watchman into the stable. The man’s hat had fallen off, and Longarm could see the swollen lump on his head where somebody had clouted him. Longarm hoped the old man was just unconscious and not already dead—although if Mercer and Janice had
