AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You want to go to the Depot? It’s right down the street. We can eat on the terrace. In the evening you can see the deer up on the hills above the train tracks. I always like this time of day.”
“You really worked for the Mafia?”
“Just one guy. His name was Sally Dio. Sometimes people called him Sally Deuce or Sally Ducks. Somebody put sand in the fuel tank of his airplane. He survived the crash, but he was turned into a french fry. Dave and I ran into him again a few years back.”
“Where is he now?”
“Sally Dee caught the car to Jericho. That’s an expression people in the life used in New Orleans years ago.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Jericho is a dead city. If you got on the streetcar to Jericho, you weren’t coming back.”
Maybe, he thought, he would scare her and she would go away. She got up from the stool and pushed a strand of hair away from her eye, her profile as perfect as a miniature inside a Victorian locket. She tripped in the doorway and fell against him, then blushed and apologized and walked with him into the twilight, neither touching the other.
They did not pay attention to a man leaning against a parking meter down the street. He was smoking a pipe and gazing at the freight cars pulling out of the train yard. His hair was oiled and combed back over the tops of his ears. He puffed on his pipe and let the smoke curl out of his mouth into the breeze. He seemed to take a special pleasure in the purple cast of the hills, backdropped by a sky that was the blue of a robin’s egg. He did not seem to notice Clete and the woman as they walked past him into the restaurant called the Depot.
A locomotive backed into the train yard, pushing a long row of boxcars ahead of it, the couplings clanging with such force that chaff from the boxcar floors powdered in the sun’s afterglow. The man leaning against the meter tapped the bowl of his pipe on his hand, ignoring the live cinders that stuck to his skin. Then he put away his pipe and entered the restaurant through the terrace and took a seat at the bar, staring with self-satisfaction at the face he saw in the mirror.
“What are you having?” the bartender asked.
“A glass of ice water and a menu,” the man said.
“You got it. Visiting?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Saw your tag through the window. How do you like Montana?”
“The state tree of Kansas is a telephone pole,” the man said. “Does that tell you something?”
TWO HOURS EARLIER, Gretchen had gone up to the main house and thrown a pebble against Alafair’s screen on the third floor. “Want to take a ride?” she said.
“Where to?” Alafair replied.
“A dump by the old train station.”
“What for?”
“To find Clete.”
“Call him on his cell.”
“He turned it off. If he’s doing what I think he is, he doesn’t plan to turn it on again.”
“Leave him alone, Gretchen. He’s a grown man.”
“Except he needs someone to strap a cast-iron codpiece on his stiff red-eye.”
“Do you know how bad that sounds?”
“I heard him talking on the phone to Love Younger’s daughter-in-law. Are you coming or not?”
They drove in Alafair’s Honda to the saloon where Clete sometimes drank. Gretchen got out and went inside while Alafair waited in the car, the motor running. Gretchen came back out and got in the car and closed the door. “The bartender said he left with a woman five minutes ago.”
“Gretchen, don’t get mad at me. What’s the harm if he’s with this woman?”
“Duh, she’s married? Duh, the Younger family would like to turn Montana into a gravel pit?”
