Longarm smiled slightly. “No federal prison. Unless you ask for it.”
“What’s that? Unless I ask for it?”
Longarm nodded. “Yeah, you never know. It might be just the place you’ll want to go.”
Bodenheimer still looked puzzled, but Austin Davis patted him on the back, winking at Longarm as he did, and said, “Now Otis, me and you done got to be pretty good friends in a pretty short time, ain’t we?”
Bodenheimer nodded dumbly. “I guess,” he said hesitantly. “You said I could trust Marshal Long. You said it was the only way out for me.”
“Well, can’t you see that? You don’t want to get hurt. You don’t want to have that bunch tear you in two between a team of horses, do you? Now you already told me a good bit of it. Whyn’t you go ahead and unburden yourself to the good marshal here. He’ll see you right.”
Longarm stared at Davis. He thought that next he’d be offering Bodenheimer a shoulder to cry on.
Longarm said, “If you got anything worth telling, now is the time to do it. I want to know who is behind all this robbery. It’s organized. Don’t take no U.S. senator to know that.”
Bodenheimer glanced over at Austin Davis. Davis nodded. Bodenheimer said hesitantly, “Well, I guess you’d have to say that the mayor and the president of the bank and Dalton Diver was at the bottom of it.”
Longarm stared at him. “The mayor? The president of the bank?”
“Yeah, it was them two come to me and said what they had in mind. Said it was Dalton Diver’s idea to help the county with some fresh money. But they said it wouldn’t work if the gang couldn’t count on a safe place to light between robberies. They said it was going to be a pretty rough bunch and I’d be a lot better going along with it rather than getting killed. They said that would happen for shore, and they’d just put somebody in my job who would carry along, so what was the use of my battling agin it.”
Longarm said dryly, “Naturally you saw the sense in going along with that.”
Bodenheimer said, a whine in his voice, “I couldn’t fight all of ‘em, could I?”
Longarm gave a disgusted snort, but Austin Davis patted Bodenheimer on the back and said, “Marshal, let him get it out. Be good for him. This man has had a hard row to hoe. Go light on him.”
Longarm looked up at the sky and shook his head, but didn’t speak other than to tell Bodenheimer to get on with it.
Davis said, “Now when was this, Otis?”
Bodenheimer shrugged. “Little over two year ago. The mayor said the way it was going to work was they’d bring in some pretty tough boys to do the actual work, but they’d get some Mason County boys as part of it so the home folks would feel like they was a part of the doings and wouldn’t kick up no sand.”
Longarm said, “Who was going to bring in the professionals?”
“That would have been Mister Diver’s doin’ on account he knowed some.”
“Who is Vince Diver?”
The sheriff hesitated for a second, and then looked down at the ground and shook his head. “I don’t know. Never heered the name.”
“Then what were the names of some of the toughs they brought in?”
Again the sheriff shook his head and studied the ground. “I don’t know. They thought it best if I wasn’t on to the name of nobody.”
Longarm made a disgusted sound. “Oh, bullshit! How was you supposed to know who to leave alone if you didn’t know who they were?”
Bodenheimer looked up. “They just said to leave everybody alone. Just go on like I had been.”
“Which hadn’t been much to begin with.” Longarm stared at the man a moment more. Finally he said, “What about the Mason County boys? Who are they?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Nobody much. Just ne’er-do-wells that mostly hung around town and played cards and drank whiskey. The Goustwhite brothers, Amos and Emit. Then there was Ernie Abshier and Lester Gaskamp, though it be hard to say if Lester was a Mason boy or not. His folks had moved away a long time ago. Then there was Bolton Surges and Tom Wilton. Wilton got kilt. And I think Surges didn’t care for the business. But none of them amounted to a hill of beans. They was all in the back and never took no hand in the planning of matters.”
“What about Wayne Shaker? He is supposed to be a Mason boy as well as the leader of the bunch.”
The sheriff shook his head. “I’ve heered the name, but I’ve never clapped eyes on the man.”
“What’s the banker’s name?”
“That would be Mister Crouch, Mister Ernest Crouch. He’s the president of the bank, the Mason State Bank.”
“What in the hell is a banker doing mixed up in this?”
Bodenheimer looked up surprised. “Why, how else would we spread the money around so it would do ever’body some good? Folks go to the bank an’ Mister Crouch, he loans ‘em money against hard times, like we been havin’ lately. Or he loans some to the city and the mayor sees it gets spread around. You see how it works? Makes it good for ever’body. That’s plain as paint.”
Longarm said, “How about the folks in the other towns where the robberies took place? Does it make it good for them?”
Bodenheimer frowned. “Well, that would be their lookout, wouldn’t it.”
“Yeah. And mine. What did you get out of this, Otis? I’m about to figure out who the big winners were, but
