He wasn’t in any mood for back doors.
When Quinlan flipped open the spy panel and peered out, the barrel of Herne’s Colt poked between the Irishman’s eyes.
‘You got five seconds to open this door or you’re a dead man.’
It took three and a half.
Quinlan stood well back with his hands in the air and an expression of impish glee on his face that Herne failed to understand.
‘Well, now,’ said Quinlan, ‘if we’d known you were plannin’ on giving us the pleasure of your company we wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to find you ourselves.’
‘Happy to oblige,’ snarled Herne through his teeth. ‘Now take me to your boss and remember that if you try any tricks on the way, this gun isn’t going to miss.’
Quinlan winked and led the way across the main gaming room towards Daniels’ office. They were on the stairs below the roulette wheel when the office door opened and Daniels came out. He looked a lot less worried than he might have done. His eyes were steady as he gazed down at Herne and there wasn’t a crease in his dark suit or a scuff mark on his shoes. A tie pin glistened on his chest. He looked like a man who’d just won ten thousand dollars and knew that that was only the beginning.
‘Mr. Herne, who’d have thought you’d have come back so soon—and of your own accord?’
‘Never mind the smart talk, Daniels. You won’t be looking so cool and pleased with yourself when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.’
‘Really, Mr. Herne? Well, if you insist. Although if I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be so confident.’
Herne gestured to Quinlan to continue up the stairs and stand at the far side of the roulette table. Daniels watched with an amused detachment which was getting Herne worried. The gambler had more than aces up his sleeve and as yet Herne didn’t know what.
Then he did.
She came out of the office, a drink in her hand, a cigarette posed at the corner of her mouth. Veronica Russell was wearing a lime green gown that her dressmaker had sewn onto her body just before she left the house. Her dark hair was swept up in a chignon and held in place with a diamond clip in the shape of a moon.
She looked very beautiful and very dangerous.
‘Veronica here has a story to tell, don’t you, my dear? How you came back to the Russell house in the middle of the night with blood on your hands and clothes and her younger sister drugged and helpless in your care. How you told her you’d broken into Ray Bellour’s house because of your infatuation with Cassie, quarreled with Bellour and slashed his throat with a broken bottle.’
Herne didn’t know whether to laugh aloud at the absurdity of the story, or simply shout Daniels down. But then he looked into the dark of Veronica’s eyes and something that he thought he saw there chilled him. If she told that story to the law and he only had his own word to stand against her, who were they likely to believe?
Daniels hadn’t finished. ‘The policeman in charge of the case is a man named Wallace. He’s good at his work. He doesn’t like stray ends. He’s also a good friend of mine. How else do you think I keep this place open without being raided and my customers harassed? Wallace does well out of me—very well. If I hand him Bellour’s killer all neatly tied up, he’ll have the rope round your neck so fast it’s doubtful you’ll know what’s happening.’
He laughed his smug, self-satisfied laugh. ‘But then, cowboy, you don’t really know what’s happening here anyway, do you? You should have stayed out West with your cattle rustlers and stage robbers and simple things you can handle.’
He laughed again and walked the short distance to Veronica and took hold of her hand, squeezing it as he kissed the side of her neck.
Herne looked for a sign of distaste in her eyes but saw nothing.
Quinlan giggled and gave a little clap with his hands.
‘You’re forgetting one thing, Daniels. I know this laughing fool here and that mountain you keep around were the ones who carried Bellour’s body out of the house and dumped him in the bay.’
‘Really?’ Daniels raised an eyebrow. ‘And can you prove that?’
‘With witnesses. Two of them.’
Daniels shook his head. ‘I wonder who’d believe them. But even if the court thought it true, what would it prove? Disposing of a body is not the same thing as murder. Unless these witnesses of yours saw that too …?’
Herne opened his mouth to say something, but the words failed to come. He knew that he was having the floor pulled out from underneath him; he knew that if Veronica would swear that he’d admitted to killing Bellour everything was going to stand against him. He was the outsider, the man who’d stuck his head where it wasn’t wanted and didn’t belong—stuck his head into the dark and now they were going to drop a noose about it and pull it tight.
They …
Daniels, Quinlan, even the dead Bellour … even Veronica.
He wondered how long it would be before the law arrived and his chances of getting out of San Francisco were more or less blocked out. But he still had the Colt in his hand and there was no one preventing him from turning round and going back through the same door he’d entered.
Except that he didn’t like what was happening to him; he didn’t like the frame he was being trapped inside; he didn’t like what that too-perfect looking woman was doing to him. That woman who …
He stared at her and remembered the shape of her breasts against his body, the softness of her mouth and the twisting of her tongue.
Daniels leered at her green-encased body and for a second his tongue appeared between his fleshy lips.
‘Have you told her about the money you were trying to get from her father, Daniels?’ Herne said angrily, moving a couple of treads up the stairs. ‘Have you told her about that?’
Daniels moved away from Veronica and flashed him a warning look but Herne wasn’t about to be warned.
‘Tell her how you tried to get a couple of thousand dollars from a dying man.’
Veronica was looking at him now, those dark eyes staring at the gambler’s fleshy face.
‘You said they were gambling debts, but that wasn’t the truth. The major didn’t believe that, but he didn’t know the truth. Part of him didn’t want to know but the rest of him couldn’t stomach getting drawn into the kind of rottenness that you and your kind live their lives in. That was why he sent for me. To lean on you, stop you if I could … and if not throw things out into the open, get it over somehow, some way.’
‘He’s a brave old man and no matter how far his bones have decayed he’s still got more spine that you’ve ever had. You don’t need backbone to blackmail a dying old man. And that’s what it was, wasn’t it. Blackmail.’
Herne was slowly going forward, his eyes fixed on Daniels, waiting for him to make some kind of a move.
‘If he paid up regardless, then so much the better. You’d count your money and laugh about it and then there’d be another note and then another. And if he didn’t pay, you’d send him one of Bellour’s nice little pictures. Cassie in a little girl’s frock, playing on a swing. Cassie in her crib. Cassie dressed up in her wedding veil.’
‘You’re insane, Herne! You’re babbling! There isn’t any truth in what you’re say’
Herne squeezed back on the trigger of the Colt and the roulette wheel jumped and spun.
Daniels jumped backwards, one pudgy hand moving too slowly towards his coat pocket.
Herne fired again and this time the slug embedded itself into the wall less than a foot to the right of the gambler’s head.
‘You best tell the truth, Daniels. Tell Veronica. Let her hear it. Tell her about the notes you sent the major. Tell her!’
Herne stopped walking and aimed the .45 at Daniels’ heart.
The gambler’s mouth dropped open and both hands swung forward, palms outward, begging Herne not to shoot.
‘Tell her!’
‘I thought … I wanted … Hell, he’s got so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s not going to miss a couple of thousand, is he?’
Daniels was looking at Veronica, his head turned towards her, his voice more and more imploring. She continued to stare back at him, through him. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking; if she was thinking at all.
Herne waited for her to say something, react.
Finally she swished the green gown as she moved a pace towards Herne and said: ‘Is that all you’ve got to say, cowboy?’
Quinlan laughed his high-pitched laugh and rubbed his hands with glee.
Daniels stopped sweating and a glint came back to his eyes. ‘You’re out on a limb, Herne. Right out on the end and here comes the man who’s going to saw it right off.’
Daniels was looking past Herne, down towards the main room.
Herne swung his head for an instant, expecting to see the policeman with the bowler hat and the plaid coat. At first he saw no one and then, bulking against the curtain by the door there was the Chinaman.
Quinlan rushed him.
Herne spun fast and the barrel of the Colt caught the Irishman on the side of the jaw and swung him round. Quinlan fell awkwardly, cannoning off the roulette table and back against Herne’s legs. A fist drove hard into Herne’s groin. His eyes watered and he doubled forward. The little man’s head smacked into his nose and blood spurted freely.
The steps close at his back shook with the weight of the running man.
Again Herne tried to turn, but the Irishman was clinging to his legs as if his life depended upon it. A fist the size of a man’s head slammed against Herne’s ear and he couldn’t prevent himself from falling. The back of his skull struck the thick leg of the roulette table and colors exploded and faded fast at the back of his eyelids.
Something metallic slammed hard against his temple and the colors turned to black, the black became a tunnel and he fell down it.
His head felt as if it had been on the receiving end of a charge from a five hundred pound bull. At least one of the wounds from the last time Daniels’ men had worked him over had opened up again. He could feel the dried blood that had coiled around his ear and down the side of his neck. He could feel the tightness of the ropes that kept his arms tight at his back, his ankles locked against one another.
Someone was singing off-key deep inside his brain.
Gradually words seeped through the pain of the song. Voices he recognized as belonging to Daniels and Veronica. They were in the room next to his and the door was ajar. Herne figured they’d carried him upstairs out of the way. There was a bed over to the side of the room and through the slit in the door he could see an armchair, a leg lightly swinging, the top of it encased in lime green. The smell of cigarette smoke and good bourbon.
The song stopped shrieking enough for him to hear what was being said.
‘ … sort of deal did you and Bellour have figured out?’ It was Veronica’s voice, relaxed, almost warm, a deep purr.
‘He needed contacts to sell his merchandise. He met them through me. Here. I put him in touch with people and in exchange he gave me a cut. Twenty per cent.’
‘You’re a shrewd man, Cord,’ she said admiringly.
‘I try to be.’
There was a clink of glass against glass, the spurt and hiss of a match. Herne tried to ease his wrists inside the rope but it was useless.
‘How about girls, Cord?’ Veronica asked. ‘Did he meet any of those here?’
A pause. Then: ‘One or two. Once in a while, I’d introduce him to someone pretty, young. The kind he liked.’
‘Cassie?’
The pause was longer. ‘Cassie? He may have met her here, I don’t know.’
Veronica laughed and the sound chilled Herne, whatever effect it had on Daniels. ‘Relax, Cord, you know there’s no love lost between Cassie and myself. She’s always run wild. That’s the way she is.’
Daniels chuckled. ‘You’re right. She’s wild okay. According to Ray, once she got going there wasn’t any stopping her. Why, she had ideas that even he hadn’t thought of.’
He laughed some more and the glass clinked again as the decanter poured out the last of the bourbon. There was a sound that was unmistakably that of two people kissing.
A few moments later there was Veronica’s deep voice again. ‘You’re a clever man, Cord. You introduced Bellour to his clients and his girls which meant you had both of them at your mercy.’
‘What do you mean, Veronica?’
‘I mean, Cord, my dear, that in the fullness of time you were in the position to blackmail the whole damn lot of them!’
The laughter of the couple merged together and only faltered when Daniels stood up. ‘I guess I’ve been drinking too much. I don’t know how you women hold it like you do. I’ll be right back.’
His laugh was shut off by the closing of a door.
Herne looked up and Veronica was standing there in the doorway. This time there was no doubting what was in her eyes. The hate itself was almost enough to burn through his ropes.
Inside my right boot,’ he said urgently, ‘there’s a bayonet. You can—’
She put a finger to her lips, silencing him. When she knelt beside him, he could feel the warmth and slight trembling of her body. The bayonet slid from the boot into her hands and she began to saw at the rope at his back.
In the other room the door opened and steps came close across the carpet.
‘Be quick!’ Herne hissed.
She was not quite through the first strand when Daniels came through the doorway. It took him a moment to realize what was happening and as soon as he did his face went white and he fumbled inside his pocket for the derringer he carried there.
Veronica stood up and faced him. The bayonet was still in her hand and there was less than four yards between them.
‘You do a very good job of changing sides,’ snarled Daniels.
The derringer was tight in his fist and the skin between the knuckles was stretched taut and white. His face was flushed now with anger, its pallor disappeared.
‘You realize, Veronica, you have just thrown away a great deal.’ He raised an eyebrow and looked pityingly at Herne. ‘And why? For that simple-minded cowboy?’ He threw back his head and laughed and at that moment Veronica started to walk towards him.
‘Veronica, don’t be stupid!’
The blade of the bayonet was thrust out before her, lifting higher the closer she got.
‘Don’t!’
Sweat swung from Daniels’ brow as he took a half step back against the door frame and fired.
The .22 slug tore at the green of Veronica’s arm, plucked at the skin. Blood bubbled out and down, dark on the green.
Not for a second did she stop staring at him. Quite still now. Watching.
Daniels waited for her to fall, drop the bayonet, run.
Instead she went forward.
The gambler lifted the derringer, sweat running down into his eyes, his hand beginning to shake. He willed himself to use the gun a second time but his finger refused to move.
Veronica’s eyes held him trapped, sweating, gibbering, terrified.
When the blade pushed against his heart he opened his mouth to scream. Veronica clutched the end of the bayonet with both hands, leaned her weight against it, pushed some more, twisted, and was done.
She stepped back and watched as Cord Daniels shivered against the door and his body began slowly to sink towards the floor.
A thin trickle of blood ran from his still open mouth.
Sounds gargled out, wordless, without meaning.
Veronica continued to gaze at the lengthening line of blood, at the way his shirt darkened around the blade, the twitch of his hands and the irregular drumming of his feet.
‘That’s for Cassie, you bastard!’
Her hands tightened back around the bayonet and she heaved it clear. Blood followed heavily in its wake. She didn’t stop to wipe the blade clean before using it to cut the rest of Herne’s bonds.
As the final one was severed, the body of Cord Daniels fell sideways onto the floor, his face wedged against the carpet, and didn’t move again.