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High Hander

<h2>XIV</h2> Pinky Bronklin unlocked the door of the storeroom on the second floor of the Pink Lady, lighted a candle, and went in. Pushing a wooden box close to a tier of cluttered shelves, he climbed up to examine an array of bottles on the top one; carbolic acid, cough syrup, Dr. Partrey's Male Restorative and Blood Tonic, toothache remedy, Princess Cleopatra's Egyptian Love Stimulant, iodine, linament.... He selected a small blue bottle without a label, uncorked it, sniffed it. Holding it delicately in his crab-claw of a hand, he dribbled two drops into a shot glass. Two drops was the dose. It would hit quick, put a man out for hours. Pinky tipped the bottle again and added three more. Climbing down from the box, he inserted the shot glass into one of the special pockets sewn to the back of his bartender's apron. There were two of these, a small one inside a larger one. The small one was just the size of the doped glass and held it upright. You took a glass from the back bar and pretended to polish it on the apron. What you really did was drop it into the large pocket and bring out the doctored glass. Pinky snuffed the candle, locked the storeroom door, and went back down to the bar. It was the busiest part of the night with a fair crowd at the bar and a nice little business at the tables. Pinky motioned to the other two bartenders to move down and began to work the back end of the bar. After a few minutes, Pete Madrid came in and had a drink. As usual, he didn't pay. "You sure he'll come in?" Madrid asked, keeping his voice down. "No, I'm not sure," Pinky said irritably. "How can I be sure? But he almost always does. You got that crazy Willie out of the way?" "Gave him the night off." "Only thing is, Mr. O. might go to the Big Barrel. They serve him in there in spite of Willie told 'em not to." Madrid pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I'll drop in there," he said. "I'll see that they give him a couple of drinks and then cut him off. That'll bring him over here." Pinky's eyes followed Madrid as he sauntered to the door, his blue silk shirt shimmering in the lamplight, his fingers touching the ivory handle of his low-slung gun with every step. A dangerous man to have for an enemy, Pinky thought—and maybe dangerous to have for a friend, too. Not what you'd call a bright man, he was sure of his ability to kill, and of not much else. He needed somebody else to do his thinking for him, even about small matters, and so far he had seemed to realize this. God help us if he ever starts thinking for himself, Pinky mused. Half an hour later, Keef O'Hara showed up, and Pinky sighed inwardly. He didn't much like what he was going to do to O'Hara; but Mr. Jay wanted it done, and it would be. O'Hara came directly to Pinky's end of the bar. "Slip me a pint, ye black scoundrel," he said, "before Deputy Willie catches up to me." "I hear Willie's off duty tonight," Pinky said. O'Hara must have visited the Big Barrel first, he thought. The big Irishman had had a drink or two. "Willie off duty?" O'Hara looked alarmed. "First time that's happened." Pinky took a glass off the back bar and appeared to polish it on his apron. "It's a night to celebrate," he said. He made the switch and set the glass in front of O'Hara, along with a bottle. O'Hara looked uncertainly at the table in a far corner where he usually did his drinking. "Sure, if I've got the sense God gave geese, I'll walk out this minute while I've still got the use of my legs. Give me that pint, Pinky m'lad, and I'll be gone. With Willie off duty, I don't trust myself in this den of iniquity." Pinky looked under the bar and shook his head. "I got no pints out here. Have to get one from the back room. Sit yourself down, Mr. O'Hara, and I'll bring it to you." As he left the bar, he saw with relief that O'Hara was filling the glass. He entered the small downstairs storeroom and watched from its dark interior as the Irishman sloughed down the drink and then another. O'Hara looked vacantly around the saloon, started for a table, and just barely made it. He sat for a few seconds with his head in his hands, then slumped forward with his face against the tabletop. Pinky returned to the bar with a pint of whisky in hand. Nobody was paying any particular attention to O'Hara. Pinky gave him a glance and stowed the pint under the bar. "I guess he ain't going to need that," he said loudly. He busied himself with the customers, apparently giving no more thought to the unconscious O'Hara. After a few minutes, he consulted a watch that lay on the back bar. "Fifteen minutes to closing time, gents," he announced, chuckling. "Official closing time, that is. I reckon we'll run a bit over tonight." There was a low cheer of approval from the customers in the immediate vicinity. Pinky stared past them at O'Hara, making a little show of it. "Still here," he muttered and walked around the end of the bar. He shook O'Hara, spoke to him, shook him again. Finally, he gestured to a couple of the men who were watching. "Give me a hand, boys, and we'll tote him upstairs to my room, lay him on my bed." The bystanders set down their glasses and came over. Pinky helped them lug two hundred pounds of sagging Irishman up the narrow stairway. They took him to the large room that served Pinky as living quarters and laid him on the bed. Pinky lighted a lamp, turned it low. He muttered something about the need for air and opened a window wide. "He's a nice gentleman," Pinky said. "Just drinks too much sometimes." "He sure musta took on a hell of a load this time," one of the assistants said. "He don't even move." "He'll sleep it off," Pinky said. He herded the men back downstairs and bought them a drink, secure in the knowledge that O'Hara wouldn't move for hours. <hr class="tb" /> Whisky Willie woke and sat erect, panicked by the thought that he should be on the job. Then he remembered that Madrid had told him to take the night off, and he sank back with a sigh. A sixteen-hour night shift caught up with you, all right. You could doze a bit in the marshal's office between rounds, but that kind of sleep didn't do a man much good. Now, however, sleep failed to return. His room was above the stage office, smack in the middle of town, and the sounds of the saloons drifted up through his window. He consulted his watch and saw that it was after closing time. Peeved, he went to the window and leaned out. All the saloons were still showing lights. The piano in the Pink Lady was jangling merrily. Well, he decided, he wasn't going to make a fuss about it. He would close the window and.... His train of thought was interrupted by the sight of the mule at the Big Barrel hitching rack. O'Hara was down there, somewhere. He would be soused to the gills by this time, no doubt. Somebody had to see that he got back to the job. Willie dressed quickly and went down to the street. O'Hara wasn't in the Big Barrel, although a bartender said he had been in earlier. Willie gave orders to close up and crossed the street to the Pink Lady. As he pushed through the batwings, Madrid came clumping up the boardwalk and called to him. "What the hell?" he said, following Willie inside. "I gave you the night off so you could catch up on sleep." "I'm l-looking for Mr. O'Hara," Willie said. "That whisky-head engineer? I'll keep an eye out for him. You get your tail into bed." Willie surveyed the line at the Pink Lady bar. O'Hara wasn't there. He wasn't at any of the tables. Willie turned and walked into the street. Madrid ambled up to the bar and beckoned to Pinky. "You better close up, pronto." Willie checked the Silver Slipper and then the Western Star. O'Hara was at neither one. Pausing in the shadows, he watched Madrid saunter down the street to his office. Willie had a growing conviction that something was wrong and that the marshal knew what it was. The Pink Lady was closing, and little knots of men straggled out of it, making their way to other saloons or toward the road back to camp. Willie stopped several men and asked if they had seen O'Hara. Finally, he found one who had. "Hell, he's at the Pink Lady," the man said. "He passed out in there. Bronklin and some others carried him upstairs." By the time Willie reached the Pink Lady it was locked and dark. He rattled the door and got no response. He made his way round in back and had no better luck at the door there. There was a light in an upstairs room, and the window was wide open. Willie cupped his hands to his mouth to call but something warned him not to. He ran back to the street, crossing it to the Big Barrel, where O'Hara's mule still stood at the hitch rail. He untied the animal, mounted, and rode back to the alley behind the Pink Lady. Shadows crossing the lighted window told him that somebody was moving around up there. Gently, he worked the mule close to the wall, directly under the window. He carefully knelt and then stood in the saddle. This brought the windowsill within reach. He grasped it, and as quietly as possible he pulled himself up. <hr class="tb" /> When the last customer was out of the Pink Lady and the bartenders were washing glasses and tidying up, Pinky checked in the dealers. Each brought his cash in a canvas bag, which Pinky stowed into the heavy safe under the back end of the bar. First thing in the morning, Sam Lester would be in to count up. Pinky unbarred the heavy front door to let the dealers and bartenders out, then he swung this closed behind the batwings and slid the bar into place. Alone now, he returned to the bar, tipped up a bottle and took a long drink. He picked up a lamp, the last light in the place, and trudged up to his room. Keef O'Hara was breathing raspingly. He hadn't moved an inch, and Pinky chuckled softly at the potency of those knockout drops. Setting down the lamp, he moved to the end of the bed and took off O'Hara's shoes. This was a perfectly natural thing to do for a drunk you were taking care of, he assured himself. If the drunk happened to get crazy ideas in the night and wander around and fall out a window and be found with no shoes, well, nobody could criticize the man who had tried to make him comfortable. Pinky edged around to the side of the bed and rolled O'Hara off it on his face. Dragging so big a man to the window and stuffing him through it was going to be heavy work, but he guessed he could manage it. First, though, there was the other matter to be taken care of. A man falling from a second story window might injure himself quite a bit, but you couldn't quite count on it. "I don't want him killed," Mr. Jay had said. "There's no need for that. But I want him knocked off that job. Vickers' doctor isn't equipped to deal with anything complicated and he ships bad cases off to the Ellensburg hospital. That's where I want O'Hara to go." Mr. Jay had gone on to explain that it would take weeks for Ben Vickers to find another man who knew how to set up a compressed-air operation properly. Well, you had to hand it to Mr. Jay for seeing a thing through. Soon as he got word that his hired hooligans had failed to wreck the boiler, he had come up with this plan to knock O'Hara off the job. A smart, smooth operator, Mr. Jay. A good star to hitch your wagon to. Only Pinky wished he hadn't looked so tired and upset.... Pinky made a trip to the storeroom and came back with a two-foot length of iron pipe. He bent over O'Hara's feet, feeling the bones around the ankles. It wouldn't take much of a blow to break some of these. Two broken ankles plus any injuries that might be caused by the fall ought to put O'Hara in that Ellensburg hospital for a good long time. Probably be a good thing for the man, too, when you came to think about it. Keep him off the booze. Pinky slipped his claw of a hand under one of O'Hara's heels and lifted the foot. He raised the pipe over his head, and he about jumped out of his skin as a voice rang out behind him. "Hold it, you b-bastard!" Whisky Willie had one leg over the windowsill. Pinky flung the length of pipe. He flung it backhanded and it caught Willie on the shoulder as he dived into the room, falling flat. The pipe crashed to the floor and rolled toward Pinky, who scrambled after it. Willie reached a chair, flung it against Pinky's shins, and bounced to his feet. Pinky stumbled forward, reached for the pipe. Before he could get his balance, Willie was on him, knocking the pipe aside and aiming a blow at Pinky's head with the only weapon he carried. The bottle of lemon pop caught Pinky neatly behind the ear and dropped him like a bundle of rags. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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