Tyler Overton on the other hand …
Shit, Longarm didn’t know of any motive the lawyer might have to stop him from possibly helping Gary Lee Bell escape the hangman’s noose.
But he could think of a fair number of possibilities if he wanted to. Maybe none of them true. But who the hell could say?
For instance, Gary and Madelyn Bell were convinced her father’s mine at Talking Water was pretty well worthless. But what if their lawyer knew something about the mine that they didn’t? And wanted Bell dead and Maddy up to her pretty ears in debt to ensure that the mine would become Overton’s property by and by.
Or to run out another possible motive, maybe Overton and the pregnant soon-to-be widow were putting on a big act about wanting Gary Lee Bell saved but really wanted him dead, by the law’s cold hand and not theirs, so Overton could dump his mousy wife and take up permanent residence in Maddy’s overheated bed.
Or it could be that the tipster from the Medicine Bows was right and Windy Williams was down there alive and well and full of piss. It could be that Overton was being paid something under the counter by Williams so the old curmudgeon—which he damn sure was—could rid his daughter of a husband Windy did not approve of.
Or … or, hell, there could be a hundred other “or” possibilities.
And maybe not a one of them that Longarm could think of was true, but then maybe there was some other explanation, crazy to everyone else but perfectly logical and inescapable in the mind of Attorney Tyler Overton, that was in hiding needing only to be identified.
Longarm sighed. He could fret about the “why” of it all at leisure some other time.
Right now he was mostly interested in seeing to the “who” of it—which he sure as shit figured he had—and making damn sure there was no fourth, and perhaps successful, attempt on his life. Damn it anyway, though … “Tyler?”
“Yes, Long?”
“I’d be obliged if you would hold your hands kinda out t’ the side where I can keep an eye on ‘em. An’ you, mister. Hold that candle nice an’ steady. It wouldn’t much do for anybody t’ get confused and excited just now.”
“What the …”
Longarm ignored the engineer, his attention closely focused on Overton instead.
The lawyer, he had to admit, acted innocent as a duck in the henhouse. Which didn’t mean a damn thing.
“Keep ‘em right where I can see them, Tyler, while I shake your tree an’ see what kind of shooting irons fall out.”
Chapter 29
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Longarm complained.
“I think I am beginning to agree with you,” the engineer with the candle—the one who used to have a candle, that is, for the stub had long since burned away and the search had continued by the growing daylight—put in. “Are you going to finish soon so we can go have breakfast?”
“You’ll go when I say you can go, goddammit,” Longarm snapped.
But then his sleep had been twice interrupted too. And for a much more personal reason than any of these others.
The engineer saw the tight-kept fury lingering at the back of Longarm’s glare and shut his mouth.
The problem was that after stripping Tyler Overton buckass naked and searching every stitch of thread the man had been wearing, Longarm had not been able to locate so much as a sniff of the pistol that had been fired at him.
After searching Overton himself Longarm had searched through the hay in the vicinity of Overton’s makeshift bed.
At that point Longarm had figured he could fully appreciate the implications of the old saying about looking for needles in haystacks.
Which had not, of course, kept him from continuing the search.
He’d inspected first the man, then the bedding, and finally all the loose hay, the nooks and crannies, every possible place where a pistol could be tossed in the darkness by a man lying where Tyler Overton had chosen to make his bed.
He had not found shit. Yet.
“All right, dammit, someone has it. Let’s see about the rest of you. Delmer? Strip.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want your clothes.”
“But …”
“Look, either I inspect your clothes after you hand ‘em to me or I do it while you’re wearing ‘em. An’ if you make me go over there an’ play with your balls, Delmer, I’m gonna be even more pissed off than I already am. I might not be real gentle about it. You see what I mean?”
“Uh, yeah, I think I do.” Jelk began hastily pulling off his shirt and trousers.
After a few moments the others did too.
In light of Longarm’s cold anger the others did not object. Not even the dandy.
As before, though, there was no sign of any small-caliber handgun.
