The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 59
I gave the metal ring the slightest tug, then I let it go and his head snapped back like it was a tree branch. I stood slowly, the gun still leveled at Al’s two men.
Al rubbed the bad cheek and smiled with the other one. “One of these days, Del, someone’s going to bury you, and not a single living soul will be sorry.”
Wasn’t often I couldn’t come up with a proper retort to these western cunts, but Al batty-fanged me on that one. Of course, the old half-miner didn’t know about the doctor in Denver and the bump on my skull, but still—it was a cruel thing for one friend to say to another, and I stewed as I backed out of the bar into the street.
And now? Find Flynn and the young Dolan tramp and plant them where they stood. Collect five grand from Brand and ask about this Pinkerton he apparently hired and wanted dead. Or better, take the Pinkerton with me to see Brand.
I got a room with a girl in Wallace, but the situation had me lobcocked and she went to sleep unruffled. I was visited all night by visions: Bolin and the hobo’s neck and the pregnant girl in Spokane I drowned, on and on. At three, I sent the girl away and dressed to catch the first train back to Spokane. A cold dark walk to the station, no sign of Bolin or his apes.
God of morbs, pulling back into Spokane that morning I felt low, and I nearly wept as we eased into the station. Was I never to be free of this place? In the seat in front of me, a man said, “First time to Spokane?”
I just stared at him.
“Make sure you see the Auditorium,” he said. “Biggest theater stage in the whole—”
I leaned over the seat and punched him in the throat.
Hell with Spokane, hell with Lem Brand and his consortium of prigging gentlemen, with the doom doctor’s diagnosis in Denver, all of it. I had money from two weeks’ surveillance and the money I took back from Al Bolin. Maybe I could quit. Let Brand keep his bonus for the dirt baths. I had a daughter in Lexington, I’d go live with her and fish and read books to her boy. He’d be, what, five now? Eight?
Porters were helping the man I’d punched. I hurried off the train and went to my hotel. I had the clerk make a phone call to the Allied office in Missoula, to ask a favor of an eye who worked the Anaconda with me ten years ago.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked, heavy on the word doing.
I told him, and thirty minutes later he called back. He said Gurley Flynn’s Missoula speech had been canceled and his man at the train station had Dolan and Reston railing back to Spokane today, on the Great Northern 1356, scheduled to arrive at one p.m. I checked my pocket watch: eleven-forty.
And Gurley Flynn?
“Sent back to Butte to be with her husband,” the man said.
I felt a great lightening then, glad to be free of that woman. I have never liked killing the lesser sex and prefer not to. Half the world being women, you can’t avoid it, but still it unsettles me. Even a shrill dollymop like her, better for everyone if she’s making pasties in Butte and avoids my shadow the rest of her life.
I limped to a restaurant across from the Great Northern station and got a corner table by the window, where I could wait for the train from Missoula. I could at least drop the Dolan kid, fix that mistake, collect a thousand. If Brand wanted, I could even come back and do the brother when he got out of jail.
Fog had rolled in and the Great Northern 1356 was running late. The waiter delivered my eggs and I ate them as I watched out the window, carriages and autos beginning to pull up to the station. It had me imagining Lexington, my daughter greeting me.
The waiter came by to take my plate away, and I asked for a whiskey, but he said, “We have the luncheon out, sir,” and I said, “I know it’s lunch, I want a bloody whiskey for my lunch,” and him, “I’m not allowed, sir,” and my flush rose again, and that’s when I looked out the window to see people spilling out of the train station, porters loading bags onto hansom cabs, folks hugging on the street in front. I tossed my napkin on my plate.
But I was stumped. Gurley Flynn and Dolan were coming out of the train station together, her in a black cape with a carpetbag, him in that same ill-fitting suit with his bowler hat. So she’d come back after all. Well, that would be more money. But where was Reston?
I reached into my pocket for a dollar coin, dropped it on the table, and was about to stand when a shadow fell and I looked up to see Early Reston.
“Del Dalveaux,” he said, like we’d met before.
It is the strangest aspect of aging—how faces blur, a language you no longer speak. Up close this man seemed familiar, but perhaps the way a common face is reminiscent of others—thin, weary, plain—an age that might be twenty-five or forty-five, so ordinary in appearance that only another agency man would appreciate the difficulty of achieving such anonymity, like walking in snow without making a footprint.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said, my hand finding my .32.
“Oh, I doubt that,” he