Owen McCreedy say in one of the ladder-back chairs by the window and watched the wood-framed clock above his desk. Carved and carefully decorated, the clock had been imported from Switzerland by his great-grandfather. His mother had hauled it from their original home in Massachusetts to Nebraska, and it was the only thing of hers Owen still owned.
It shouldn’t hang in this little jailhouse, he mused. It should be in his living room at home, but his wife’s family clock hung there, above the mantel. Owen had once thought his mother’s clock lent his shabby little office a touch of sophistication. He saw now, however, that teak-wood and brass and hand-tooled detailing looked about as appropriate in this room, with its rusty stove, battered roll top, mud-brick walls, and grungy puncheon floor, as would a tea set of Bavarian china. It served only to make the place look even more dour in contrast.
Why he was thinking this at the moment, however, McCreedy couldn’t explain. Maybe because he didn’t want to think of the time the clock registered—two minutes to noon. Two minutes till the time he was under orders from the judge to release Billy Brown if the girl had not shown, which she hadn’t. No, she and Prophet had not shown, and in two minutes, Owen McCreedy would have to produce his keys from his desk drawer and open Billy Brown’s cell, endure the grins and taunts and muttered threats and watch the little Irish bastard saunter out of the dingy little jailhouse with its out-of-place Swiss clock, free as the breeze.
McCreedy sipped his coffee and watched the minute hand click another minute closer to noon. It dawned on him now why the clock no longer looked appropriate in here. Once, it had represented all his hopes and dreams for the office of sheriff. Now it symbolized only failure— the naiveté of those dreams in a town dominated by a bottom-feeding scoundrel like Billy Brown.
Billy had won. Prophet and the girl probably lay dead in a ravine somewhere.
And that damn clock was coming down....
McCreedy had started to rise when his office door opened. “Knock-knock,” sang Hart Baldridge, who entered with his customary flare, clasping a fresh shirt for his client and the new edition of the Johnson City Chronicle in his beringed right hand. The county judge. Norman Howe, entered behind him—a compact man with a red face and turkey neck. The judge politely removed his slouch hat and held it in both hands.
McCreedy sat back down in his chair and heaved a heavy sigh. Baldridge inhaled deeply, but before he could speak, McCreedy said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s high noon. You know where the keys are, Baldy.”
“Uh ... that’s Baldridge,” the attorney corrected, heading for the desk.
When he’d gone back into the cell block, Judge Howe shoved his hands in the pockets of his brown suit pants and gave McCreedy a sympathetic scowl. “Sorry, Owen,” he said. “I wish I could’ve given you more time, but the law says—”
“I know you do, Judge,” McCreedy said. “Truth of it is, though, it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d have given me three weeks to get the girl here. She and Prophet are dead. I don’t have, and never would have had, a witness. It’s my own damn fault.”
“We could still call a trial ... call Perry to testify ...”
McCreedy shook his head. “We’d never get a conviction on circumstantial evidence, Judge. You know that as well as I do. And I’m not willing to lessen the charge. I want him to hang ... and I want all the trash he has working for him out of here. That’s the only way this town will ever civilize, become the place you and me and the rest of the law-abiding citizens want it to be.”
“Well ... maybe next time,” Judge Howe said, turning to gaze troubledly at the cell block door.
Once more McCreedy shook his head. “There ain’t gonna be any next time for me, Judge. I’m throwing in the badge. I’m gonna go get Alice, and we’re gonna gel the hell out of here.”
The judge turned his scowling eyes back on McCreedy. “Owen, you’re a good man. You’ll get Brown, sooner or later. You can’t leave this town. I won’t let you. You’re the first good sheriff we’ve had here. Why, without you ...”
“Without me, you might’ve gotten rid of Billy and his gang by now.”
“You’re selling yourself only half a load there, Owen.
This is a tough town ... always has been. You need to give yourself more time—”
The door to the cell block opened, and Billy Brown strolled in with his chest puffed out. He was grinning like a circus clown as he walked up to McCreedy, a cigarette wedged in the left corner of his mouth. His curly gray hair was combed back damp, and he wore a wrinkled vest over his fresh silk shirt. The newspaper Baldridge had brought him was folded under an arm. He held out his hand for McCreedy to shake.
“Well, it was a nice try, anyway, McCreedy. I’ll give you that.” He was fairly exploding with contained laughter.
McCreedy did not shake the criminal’s hand. He just gazed grimly, hatefully into Billy Brown’s cunning eyes.
Billy shrugged. “No? Well, okay, then. See ya around, McCreedy.”
He glanced at Baldridge, who stood behind him on his boot heels, proudly fingering his suspenders, and the two men headed for the door and outside. Apparently, several of Billy’s men were waiting by the hitch-rack. Loud whoops rose as Billy and the attorney walked out the office door.
McCreedy sat in his ladder-back chair, staring at the clock. Judge Howe stood before him and to one side, fists in his pockets, head bowed as if in prayer. When the whoops and congratulations faded outside, and Billy Brown and his entourage had wandered off to a saloon, Howe cleared his throat and regarded McCreedy soberly.
“Well, I hope you change your mind, Owen. I surely do. There’s always another battle... especially with a man like Brown.”
With that he turned slowly and walked to the door. Once there, he turned back to McCreedy and opened his mouth to speak. He stopped, shook his head, and continued outside, closing the door softly behind him.
McCreedy pushed himself out of his chair and set his empty coffee cup on his desk. He looked at the clock, pondering it for several seconds. Finally, he removed his badge from his vest, tossed it into a drawer, and reached up with both hands to remove the clock from the wall.
With the clock under his left arm, he left the office and headed west up Main Street, which was choked with carts and wagons loaded with dry goods and mining equipment. The boom was on—had been for a good two years now, which made the pickings ripe for a man like Billy Brown.
McCreedy had walked two blocks toward his house when commotion on the street behind him made him stop and turn around. About a block away, a man on horseback was yelling at a buckboard driver to get out of his way. When the buckboard had moved out from the loading dock before Metzenbaum’s Mercantile, the rider gigged his horse into a gallop past McCreedy.
Horse and rider, both sweat-lathered and out of breath, looked as though they’d come a long way at a killing pace. At first, McCreedy thought the man was a ranch hand fetching a doctor. But the man did not ride up to Doc Kyle’s place on the corner of First Avenue. He stopped instead before the Nuremberg, the most expensive hotel in town. Climbing swiftly out of his saddle, he gave his reins a few cursory loops over the hitch-rack, took the porch steps two at a time, and ran through the hotel’s double glass doors, nearly busting the glass out of one in the process.
McCreedy stood scowling suspiciously at the Nuremberg’s brick facade. It was in the Nuremberg that Billy Brown had his headquarters, in a posh, pile-carpeted office on the third floor. McCreedy often saw the crime boss standing out on his balcony, smoking cigarettes as he gazed down at “his” town, like some thick-necked, round-bellied lord, his pudgy hands on the wrought-iron railing, a self-satisfied cast to his arrogant gaze.
The rider had to be one of Billy’s men. If so, where had he come from in such a hurry, bearing what urgent news for Billy?
After about a minute and a quarter, the man reappeared through the double doors, turned left, and ran east down the boardwalk, tracing a circuitous route through the throng of shoppers and businessmen. When he’d run a block, he turned into Billy Brown’s favorite saloon— where Billy was no doubt celebrating his release from the hoosegow.
McCreedy stood there staring eastward down the street for several seconds, his brows furrowed with contemplation. Finally, he walked over to Miller’s Livery Barn, and got Miller’s son Fred to take a ride into the mountains looking for Perry Moon.
“Tell him I need him here pronto,” McCreedy told the raw-boned kid with a wavy thatch of bone-white hair. When he gave the kid directions to his deputy’s hunting shack, the kid said, “What’s the matter, Sheriff? Trouble?”
“Maybe,” McCreedy said, thoughtfully prodding a molar with his tongue. “Maybe not.”
He left the kid saddling a stout gelding, and headed back to the jailhouse with his clock.
“Mr. Brown! Mr. Brown!”
Billy had just tossed back a shot of Spanish brandy and was about to chase it with beer when he heard the refrain, and saw the man run toward him from the door, weaving between tables. The voice was so loud that everyone at Billy’s table—Baldridge, Billy’s segundo, Clive Russo, and several others including a few card dealers and pleasure girls Billy kept on retainers—turned to watch the man approach.
It was Dick Dunbar, looking wrung out and peaked, his bowler ready to fall off his head. Hadn’t he been sent out after Prophet and the girl?
Dunbar stopped and grabbed Baldridge’s chair back for support, staring across the table at Billy. “Mr. Brown ... we got trouble.” He was huffing and puffing like an old woman, and his unshaven face was drawn, eyes wild. It was a distasteful display. Billy didn’t like to see his men lose their composure like this, no matter what kind of trouble they’d gotten themselves into.
Grimacing like he’d swallowed camphor, Billy turned to Clive Russo and jerked his head to indicate one of the private rooms on the second floor. Scraping his chair back. Billy grabbed his half-smoked cigarette from the ash tray, and headed for the stairs at the back of the saloon. Dick Dunbar and Clive Russo followed Billy up the stairs and into one of the gambling rooms.
Billy dropped into an arm chair at the baize-covered poker table, holding his cigarette over an ash tray, and waited for Clive Russo to close the door. Dick Dunbar stood facing Billy demurely. Sweat and dust streaked his face. Suddenly remembering, he removed his hat from his head, and held it awkwardly before him.
“Okay, what’s this about?” Billy snapped when Russo had closed the door.
“I found the girl and Prophet,” Dunbar said. “But”— he sighed and shook his head, unable to meet Billy’s searing gaze—”you ain’t gonna like it.”
“Where’s your gunbelt?” Billy asked him, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. Immediately, he knew it was the wrong question to ask. It threw the man off. Obviously, he’d been relieved of the damn thing. “Forget it— what about the girl?”
Dunbar swallowed. He was thinking he should’ve just taken off after he’d run into Prophet, headed to Texas or California. Never should’ve gone back to Billy after he’d been bested by Prophet. It was just that the money was so damn good....
He licked his lips. “Well, me and Ralph and Donna, we was trailin’ Prophet back in the—”
“Skip ahead, skip ahead,” Billy snarled with an impatient wave of his hand.
“Well... I was the only one who made it out of there alive, on account of I’m right handy with my long gun, an—”
“Skip ahead!” Billy roared. “I have a beer, a bottle of Spanish brandy, and a plump whore waiting for me downstairs?’
Visibly shaken, Dunbar shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs. He stared at the table, the midday light reflected off the baize. “Prophet ... said he’ll turn the girl over to you ... for two thousand five hundred.”
Billy sneered, anger mottling his face. “He did, did he?”
“That’s what he said, sir.”
“Where is this exchange supposed to take place?”
“The old miner’s cabin in Miner’s Gulch tomorrow at noon. He said no sooner and no later.”
Billy raised his eyebrows, indignant. “Oh, he did. did he?” He looked at Russo.
Clive shrugged. “Thinks he can get more from you than he was getting from McCreedy.”
“Yeah, well ... he’s a bounty hunter,” Billy muttered distastefully. He sucked on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “Miner’s Gulch, eh?” he asked Dunbar.
“That’s right, sir. Miner’s Gulch.”
“Noon tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Billy was nodding.
“What do you want to do, Billy?” Clive asked through his Custer-style mustache. “Could be Prophet and the sheriff are in cahoots. Could be a trap.”
Billy shook his head. “Nah. I just left the sheriff. He’s ready to quit. And even if Prophet’s got somethin’ up his sleeve, he’s only one man, with a girl.”
Billy sat back in his chair, smoking his cigarette and staring at the wall above the door, his tiny eyes darting this way and that.
“We meet him,” he said with an air of finality, through the smoke hovering about his head. “And just in case it is a trap, we meet him with all the men we have—armed with Winchesters. Can you gather them all by tomorrow?”
“No problem, Billy.”
Billy got up and stubbed out his cigarette in the ash tray. Sidling up to Dunbar, he threw a brotherly arm over the man’s shoulders, and grinned in his sweat-beaded face. “Dick, tell me ... how’d he get your gun?”
Dunbar shifted uncomfortably, glanced at Billy, then at Clive, the corners of his mouth twitching a grin. “Well... I was creeping into his camp this mornin’, you see, an’ ... an’ somehow the son of a bitch winded me, an—”
Billy patted the man’s shoulder, cutting him off. “That’s okay, Dick. ’Nough said.”
He turned and grabbed the doorknob. On his way out, he glanced at Clive, then at Dunbar, and made a slashing motion across his throat.