finished.
Longarm knew that was true. He took a deep breath, let half of it out so his voice would sound neither too high or too low, and said, “That’s swell. Is there any way just the two of us could have a few words in private, Mister Thalman? What I wanted to talk to you about ain’t for any young lady’s delicate ears.”
Thalman gulped, told the pretty colored gal to run on home alone, and suggested the saloon catty-corner across the street out front.
As they headed across, the stars were winking on up above, and it was a good thing there was going to be a full moon rising any minute. For there were no street lamps and the light from the few places still open made for mighty tricky lighting. Thalman tried to hold out, but halfway across he stopped to blurt out, “Is it about Constable Payne and my Prunella?”
Longarm glanced around at the shifting inky shadows up and down the dusty street and quietly replied, “We’ll talk about it over in that saloon you suggested. I like to have my back to a wall when I ask delicate questions of any grown man.”
Chapter 17
As seemed usual in the once booming John Bull, business seemed as slow as hell in the dinky hole-in-the-wall establishment the druggist across the street had suggested. One old cuss with a drinker’s nose was holding up the bar with his belly as they entered. But as Longarm and the druggist took a table against the back wall, the oldtimer staggered past them through a beaded curtain, allowing he had to take a leak out back.
The barkeep came around one end of the fake mahogany to greet Karl Thalman as the regular he likely was. Longarm said they’d have the usual. As the barkeep went back to fetch whatever they were fixing to have, Karl Thalman stared soberly at Longarm and said, “They told you my Prunella fucks around. They told you true. Prunella would fuck a snake if somebody would hold its head down for her. I can’t tell you whether she’d been carrying on like that with either of those dead gunslicks. It wouldn’t have surprised me, though. Over the years I’ve caught her with total strangers from, say, fourteen to forty. She doesn’t like ‘em much younger or older than that. She says it takes a grown man’s dong moving with childish passion to satisfy her soul.”
Longarm said he’d read an article by some alienist in Vienna who said gals like that were driven by a desperate itch no mortal man could ever quite satisfy, so they had to keep trying.
Thalman nodded gravely and said, “Certain drugs help. That’s why despite all her wild ways she’s never really wanted to leave me.”
The barkeep came back with two shandies, half lemonade and half beer. Longarm thought that was a waste of either, but he’d said they’d have Thalman’s usual, so he had to be a sport.
As they found themselves speaking in private some more, Longarm asked Thalman, “You mean you don’t want her to leave you, despite what you say she is?”
The skinny middle-aged man sighed and replied, “Did I tell you she was built like a Greek statue, had a pussy as tight as a schoolboy’s ass, and never, ever gets tired of moving it just right? She only fools with other men because she just can’t ever get enough. On the other hand, any man married to a freak like my Prunella gets all he wants and then some, any time he wants it. She never invites any of her lovers to the house after I get off work.”
Longarm could see why Thalman liked lemonade in his beer. Talking about his wayward wife left a nasty taste even when it wasn’t your woman you were talking about that way.
Longarm spied two familiar figures entering the dinky saloon as he asked Thalman soberly, “Then you only had Amos Payne down as one of many?”
Old Oregon John and Buck Lewis, the ramrod from the Double Seven, nodded at Longarm as they bellied up to the bar. Thalman’s back was turned to them as he replied, “Amos and me were pals. He knew I knew. The two of us had shared other pussy in town in our day.”
“Like that, ah, assistant you were with just now?” Longarm had to ask.
Thalman never blinked as he nodded and replied, “Her too. But you should have seen the big Irish gal who left here with her own husband a few weeks ago. Six feet tall with red hair all over and she liked to get on top. As for our colored help, I don’t see why I shouldn’t screw some of them. Prunella sure likes to!”
Longarm said, “I follow your drift about your unusual marriage. Would you like to tell me where you were early this morning and, say, ninety minutes ago when I was coming out of the town hall?”
The older man thought, shrugged, and said, “This morning I was filling prescriptions and applying makeup to that dead girl in my cellar. You have to lay on just a little color at a time and let it dry or they wind up looking like dead dance-hall gals. As for ninety minutes ago … I think you’ll want to talk to Emma Lou Brown about that.”
Longarm said he’d take his word he’d been screwing in his cellar, figuring how long such a session usually took from start to finish.
So Thalman finished his shandy, they shook on it, and he got up to leave. As he did so the younger Buck Lewis invited Longarm to join them at the bar.
Longarm did so, sliding his own shandy across the sheet copper and asking the barkeep if he could have a regular beer. As the barkeep turned to do so, Longarm held off asking what Buck was doing back in town or why he’d exchanged his red shirt for a dark blue one. Longarm’s back teeth were suddenly floating and he said so, adding, “I didn’t know I had to piss this bad before I stood up just now. The crapper’s in the back, right?”
The barkeep said, “Way back. Across the yard. Try not to wet the seat.”
Longarm said he’d watch his aim, and ambled back toward that beaded curtain. Buck Lewis and his older companion exchanged glances and shoved away from the bar as if to tag after him.
It might have worked. But as Longarm approached the bead-veiled exit to darkness a stray current of air wafted the odor of a Gallo Claro cigar his way.
He knew neither he, Karl Thalman, nor the two behind him had lit any sort of cigar in recent memory, so he threw himself to one side and dropped between two empty tables as all hell busted loose.
As the barkeep would say he saw it later, Buck Lewis and Oregon John had just drawn, thrown down on Longarm’s back and opened up when that double-barreled Greener ten-gauge poked through the beaded curtain to blast Buck Lewis and spin him around like a ballet dancer doing a dance of the dying swan, while the second
