William W. Johnstone Read Online Free PDF Page A

travel with this show regular?” I asked.
    “Yeah, off and on. Sometimes they book a railroad tour and don’t need me.”
    Pretty quick the troupe drifted out of the opera house and the teamsters got them settled in their various quarters. That’s about the last I saw of any of them. It was as if Doubtful had swallowed the whole company. I watched rain slide down windows, and silvery puddles form in the clay streets and water blacken the backs of the draft horses, and the miserable travelers with soaked hair and wet shawls and muddied shoes slip into their rooms.
    I sure would have liked to follow them into Rosie’s House of Heaven. I don’t know what Rosie did with her regular girls, but now there were twice as many females up there. Maybe she’d be getting some stage-door johnnies knocking at the door as well as her regular johns.
    Wasn’t a very flashy life, this traveling with a variety company, I thought. Pretty much misery and weariness. I sure was glad I wasn’t stagestruck. I waited for the drizzle to slacken and then drifted over to the Puma County lockup and sheriff’s office back around the courthouse. My deputy Rusty was there, looking itchy.
    “Well?” he asked.
    “Wasn’t worth seeing. Few miserable mudspattered roustabouts, a fancy lady in taffeta who owns the outfit, a dude with her, and some ranklooking performers. One or two play music, and the rest—who knows?”
    “Better than what we’ve got around here,” Rusty said. “That Iceberg came in and looked around. He gonna be my next boss?”
    “He thinks he is, but not if I can help it. He’s hanging around, waiting for the supervisors to make up their minds.”
    “They ain’t happy with you?”
    “I got robbed. They call it a crime wave.”
    Rusty was smiling real mean. “Only crime wave I know of here is them politicians,” he said. “Anyway, Sheriff Berg from Medicine Bow County was poking around here, eyeing the jail, studying the place like he was fixing to own it.”
    “Maybe he will own it, the way things are going.”
    “What’s got him sniffing around?”
    “He’s asking eighty a month.”
    Rusty whistled. “Jaysas,” he said.
    “I think he plans to catch a crook just to show off, and there’s nothing like a variety show for that, I gather. I got that from Ralston himself. He said some of them outfits got real sticky fingers. Iceberg knows it and I’m guessing he’s gonna show off, make some pinches just to impress the supervisors.”
    “Can he arrest? He’s not a peace officer in Puma County.”
    “He’s got a star, and that’s all he needs.”
    “Want me to stick around tonight?”
    “Nah, we got more law than we need. There’s strangers in town, so I’ll be working the saloons. De Graff comes in at midnight, so we’re set.”
    I headed over to the Lizard Lounge looking for a bite to eat. Most people avoided the Lizard, because the rumor was they served horsemeat stew, but they were the cheapest joint in Doubtful, and I didn’t mind eating horse anyway. Some said they served mule when they were short of horse. I’d eat Critter if I had to. I set down in my usual spot beside a real glass window where I could keep an eye on Doubtful, and Mrs. Studebaker served me up a bowl without asking, just as always.
    This was just a regular night, nothing much happening, so I added some salt and spooned the gray stew into me and watched the puddles outside glimmer in lamplight. The streets of Doubtful could still turn into quagmires if it rained hard. Rumor was that a teamster had once vanished in a puddle right across from the Emporium. I doubted it, but I’d been up to my ankles a few times.
    There were some suspicious items in the stew this night, but I refused to believe they were horse apples. Boiled groundhog, maybe. Doubtful had better eateries, but none cheaper, and I had to stretch my forty a month as far as it’d go. The town sure was growing. When I’d arrived a couple of years earlier, it was still