The Old Gray Wolf

by James D. Doss

  There would be. (All three.)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  SUITABLE LODGING FOR A LADY

  Louella Smithson eyed a helpful sign that advised the tourist that she was about to enter Granite Creek’s city limits; a following sign put the limit at forty-five miles per hour. After a glance at the speedometer, she eased off the brake pedal until the aged Bronco was chugging along at a velocity just under the specified maximum. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the local cops by getting a ticket. Which concern reminded her of something else to worry about … I hope Granddaddy remembered to call the local chief of police before he wandered off to his favorite fishing hole. Old folks (bless their fuzzy minds) were prone to forget about really important business, like looking after their granddaughter’s urgent interests. And not only that … What does he need with a string of smelly old fish to clean when he could buy some nice fillets at the supermarket?

  The young woman’s idle musings about the unfathomable eccentricities of a certain senior citizen were interrupted by the sudden appearance an iconic Holiday Inn sign. This familiar logo, combined as it was with the alluring neon glow of a VACANCY therein was irresistible. The weary traveler turned into a large parking lot that was almost filled with vehicles, the majority being pickups of various description—not a few with rifle racks mounted across the rear windows, many of which prominently displayed a Winchester carbine or a deadly serious look-alike. Capped at either end in cowboy boots and wide-brimmed felt hats, rough-looking men strolled about this way and that. A few of these tough customers had not yet seen forty winters, but most were slightly bowlegged, early models with unfiltered cigarettes hanging limply from their lips or wads of Red Man tobacco bulging in their jaws.

  Miss Smithson blinked. What’s this—some kind of old-time cowboy jamboree? A response to her query was immediately provided by the small marquee under the hotel’s the main entrance (which was missing an apostrophe):

  WELCOME

  ROCKY MTN CATTLEMENS ASSOC

  AND

  WESTERN STATES BRAND INSPECTORS

  She managed a wan smile. Granddaddy would fit right in here. And for that matter, so did the little girl inside her who’d grown up on her grandfather’s small West Texas ranch. But her nostalgic thoughts were suddenly elbowed aside by an unnervingly sinister realization that the assassin who wore a cowboy hat might take this opportunity to melt into a crowd of genuine westerners. He might even decide to check in here at the Holiday Inn. Fear feeds upon itself. Worse still, he might’ve arrived a few hours ago. And if he had, then … Cowboy could be loading his pistol in the room right across the hall from where I’ll be unpacking in a few minutes.

  But how long were the odds of such a ghastly coincidence?

  Of all the hotels in town, there’s no reason to believe he’d pick this one. A sensible and reassuring conclusion. But it was impossible to dismiss the obvious fact that wherever the so-called Cowboy hung his hat in Granite Creek, it would be far more difficult to spot the hired gun among hundreds of real-McCoy convention cowboys who would be meandering around town, half of them looking like the black-hat hardcase in a grade-B Western who’d come to Dodge City to gun down clean-cut, clear-eyed U.S. Marshal Dillon. Or … Miss Kitty.

  Since there was nothing she could do about that, the would-be bounty hunter addressed a more mundane issue. Pulling in to check-in parking at the main entrance, the edgy traveler left the Bronco engine idling unevenly and dashed inside to make sure the Vacancy sign could be relied on. She was assured that there was room at the inn; but there were only three left to chose from and these would likely be occupied within a quarter hour.

  Louella Smithson promptly selected an accommodation at the rear of the hotel, where (she was advised by the helpful desk clerk), “You won’t be disturbed by traffic noise, ma’am.” She crossed her fingers as the dapper young man swiped her almost-maxed-out Visa card and held her breath until the plastic rectangle was accepted. The clerk gave Miss Smithson a pair of room keys, a map of the premises—and a gracious invitation to a complimentary buffet breakfast in the Gold Rush Sun Room. Capping this hospitality off with a genuinely friendly smile, he advised the famished guest that coffee, tea, and cookies were available 24/7 at that same location.

  Keys and map clutched tightly in hand, Miss Smithson hurried back to her Bronco, drove around to the rear of the hostelry, and parked on the yonder side of the lot by the creek bank. As often happens when a worn-out traveler reaches her destination, she was suddenly overcome with a mind-numbing fatigue. Indeed, the longing to lean back and close her eyes was almost overpowering. But I can’t sit here in the car or I’ll fall asleep. This being so, she emerged from the Bronco with the pink laptop computer tucked under her left arm, a shabby pink suitcase firmly gripped in her right hand, and the hotel map clenched between her teeth. Oh—where did I put those room keys? In her jacket pocket she believed. Hoped. The groggy traveler did not actually remember putting them there, but … That’s where they’ve got to be.

  And so off she went, her face set toward the rear entrance. A playful gust of chill wind snatched her breath away. Oh, it’s so cold! Moreover, snow was flurrying around her pale face like tiny white moths. Which reminded the tourist that her fleece-lined raincoat was in the Bronco. Not a problem—I’ll come back for it after I get the room unlocked and unpack some things.

  Not a problem. One of those phrases that we toss off so casually. On occasion, almost flippantly.

  LOUELLA SMITHSON’S PROBLEM

  The assassin, of course.

  The vehicle that had tailed her into town was parked about fifty yards away. Lights out. Engine idling like a purring cougar.

  As the intended victim entered the hotel, a pair of serenely calm eyes regarded Miss Smithson with the detached, professional interest of a cleaver-wielding butcher about to dismember a side of prime beef. Between a pair of finely tuned ears, the alert brain considered the laptop and small suitcase and made an informed conjecture: No woman travels that light. The head nodded knowingly. She’ll be back for something else. Under a perfectly straight nose, the compressed, thin lips smiled without a hint of mirth. And when she does, I’ll be waiting for her. Cowboy was confident that this day’s quota of bad luck had been used up. This time, no meddlesome cop will show up to foul things up.

  Perhaps.

  But what about two meddlesome cops—who are already in the neighborhood?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  HAVE A GOOD TIME AT THE SUNBURST PIZZA RESTAURANT!

  No, this is not an advertisement provided in exchange for a free meal and beverage, tip included (except on Saturday evenings)—and anyone who suggests otherwise is an envious rumormonger. The headlined Granite Creek eatery happens to be the high-class feed trough where Scott Parris and Charlie Moon were dining with their lady friends when the chief of police (now officially returned to duty) grudgingly took a call from Dispatch. Possibly because he detested the interruption, Parris’s share of the conversation served as an admirable model of lucid brevity: “I’m here.” Six-heartbeat pause. “Got it.” Disconnecting, he directed a sheepish smile at the lady sitting beside him in the booth. “Sorry, sweetie—I’ve got to run.”

  “Oh, pooh!” Tiffany effected a pretty pout. “Official police business?” (This proud holder of an earned PhD is a very discerning lady.)

  Parris nodded at his knockout date, who was an assistant professor of English literature at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic. He cast a glance at Charlie Moon. “But nothing that’d interest my deputy.” Grinning thinly at the lean Ute, he added, “This is strictly top-drawer stuff—way beyond Charlie’s pay grade.”

  The intrepid poker player saw the grin and raised with a show of pearly teeth. “That’s right, pardner.” Parleying a hunch, Moon laid his ace of hearts on the table—faceup. “You go take care of the lady.”

  Well, that was a low blow! Parris stared like an about-to-be-poached buck caught in an unscrupulous hunter’s pickup hea
dlights.

  Four pretty, mascaraed eyes widened.

  Tiffany’s pair glared at her blushing date, who was scowling at his Indian friend. She repeated Moon’s provocative phrase: “The lady?”

  “Well, she’s a woman.” Parris shrugged his big shoulders. “I don’t know if she’s necessarily a lady.…” His blush deepened. “What I mean to say is—”

  “What Scott means is that she’s not necessarily a shady lady.” The merry Ute winked at Tiffany. “Let’s just say she’s a stranger in our fair city—someone special, who needs to be escorted around town and generally looked after by a big, strong, hairy-chested man.”

  It is not an unwarranted exaggeration to assert that Chief of Police Scott Parris was severely miffed at Moon, or that Professor Tiffany Mayfair was speechless.

  Sensing an imminent explosion, Patsy Poynter hastened to defuse the tension. “My goodness, this visitor sounds very mysterious.”

  “Oh, she is.” Moon’s sophomoric grin had graduated to the status of a happy, about-to-accept-a-sheepskin nine-hundred-watt smile. “You could twist Scott’s arm into a pretzel and he wouldn’t say a word about who the stranger is—why she’s in town—or what motel she’s checked in to.”

  This upping-the-ante provocation was sufficient to loosen Tiffany’s tongue, which—when circumstances called for it—could be as sharp as a barbed obsidian arrowhead. Initially, all she could manage was one word, but she spat it out like a gourmand ejecting a distasteful morsel of overcooked seaweed. “Mo-tel?”

  Defeated, Parris nodded glumly and repeated the information provided by his dispatcher: “Holiday Inn, room 215.”

  With a look at her boyfriend that curdled the undigested anchovy, green chili, and pineapple pizza and Coors Lite that had previously been so satisfyingly settled in Scott Parris’s stomach, she said, “I think that I should like to meet this ‘Strange Lady in Town.’” (Among her other virtues, the lettered scholar was a devoted Frankie Laine fan.)

  Did the big, brawny cop stare his gorgeous date down and remind the brainy lady who was in charge and what was what?

  Hah! (Enough said.)

  Now beet red and knowing that he was a stone-cold-dead, shot-in-the-head six-point buck, Parris said, “All right. If you really want to meet Miss Smithson, then come along.” He made the offer figuring that … She won’t.

  Poor, clueless cop. Of course she would.

  “Thank you for the gracious invitation,” saith Tiffany with cucumber coolness. Then, patting Miss Poynter’s hand: “You come too, Patsy—this should be fun!”

  Moon’s intended was loath to involve herself in a potentially flammable dispute between Scott Parris and his high-strung girlfriend, but after a hopeful glance at her fiancé (whose wooden-Indian face showed not the slightest hint of objection), Patsy could only assent to Tiffany’s invitation.

  And wherever Miss Patsy Poynter goeth, Charlie Moon is obliged to follow. Which, one might suppose, might have led the humorist to conclude that his little joke had backfired. If so, one would suppose right.

  As Scott Parris’s blush had lightened to his facial skin’s normal, healthy ruddy tint and his scowl was replaced by a “now you get yours, buddy” smirk, one might also reasonably deduce that the chief of police was not entirely displeased with this unexpected turn of events. Right again. And whatever moralists may say about the dark side of mean-spirited, petty revenge—it does create a transient sense of satisfaction. Matter of fact, Charlie Moon’s presumed discomfort settled Parris’s indigestion with all the soothing effect of an effervescent, fizzing Alka-Seltzer tablet.

  No. Even better than that.

  Make it a full pack—two effervescent, fizzing A-S tablets.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  A RATTLED “STRANGE LADY IN TOWN”

  (Not rattled just yet, but she is about to be.) We refer, of course, to the lady in room 215 at the Holiday Inn, who was deeply absorbed in a Microsoft Word file labeled ALIASES.doc on her pink laptop when someone in the hallway rapped his five-cell flashlight on the door.

  Headbanger flashlight: Bang-bang-bang!

  Rattled strange lady: “Yikes!” Quick recovery. “Who is it?”

  “Wild West room service,” Scott Parris bellowed. “Open up before we kick this door down and start tossin’ tourists and furniture around!” (Why is he feeling so danged good? On the way over, Tiffany had given him her sizzling all-is-forgiven kiss, which is enough to make a corpse get up and dance.)

  What the hell … The present occupant of room 215, who had no intention of being tossed around, got up from her prissy little pink computer and strode across the carpet to peer through the peephole and see a veritable crowd of people on the other side of the door. (If three qualifies as a crowd, so must four.) Their faces were hard to make out, but she sized the situation up right away and (as a lady is apt to do) concentrated her attention on the male contingent of the mob, one a broad-shouldered fellow wearing what appeared to be an old-fashioned fedora, the other a remarkably tall, skinny man topped off by a broad-brimmed black cowboy hat. These roughnecks were accompanied by a pair of shapely females who could’ve been poster girls for the Las Vegas chapter of the National Cocktail Waitress’s League. Must be a couple of drunk cowboys and their streetwalker girlfriends who’ve come to pay a call on some other cowboy drunks and gotten the wrong room. “Whom are you looking for?”

  Mr. Broad-Shoulder’s voice boomed through the hardwood door: “We’re lookin’ for you, ma’am.” She watched a sharkish grin split his face. “I’m Scott Parris, the local Wyatt Earp, and this dangerous Indiana”—he jerked his elbow to indicate Mr. Tall-and-Skinny—“is Charlie Moon, my trusty sidekick who shoots low-down varmints first and asks questions after they’re pronounced dead.”

  “Oh.” Of course. Chief of Police Scott Parris and Deputy Charles Moon. She had not expected to meet them so soon or under such unnerving circumstances, but there was nothing to do but open the door just enough to eyeball the party of four. “Hello.”

  “Howdy, ma’am,” Parris said.

  The taciturn Indian merely nodded and removed his John B. Stetson lid.

  At an elbowing from Tiffany, the chief of police also doffed his hat.

  As the ladies smiled, the chief of police looped his muscular arm around one of the presumed cocktail waitresses and said, “This is Dr. Tiffany Mayfair, professor of something or other over at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic.” He nodded to indicate Moon’s date. “The other pretty lady is Granite Creek’s all-American reference librarian, Miss Patsy Poynter—soon to be Mrs. Patsy Moon.” Whereupon the aforesaid librarian leaned affectionately against her prospective husband. Taking note of the blank look on the stranger’s face, Parris glanced at the numerals on the door again. It’s 215, but maybe I didn’t hear the dispatcher right. “I hope I didn’t bang on the wrong door.” He grinned like the mischievous little boy within him. “If you’re not who I think you are, then I’ll tell you how sorry I am and we’ll be gone before you can spit in my eye twice.”

  “Oh, you have the correct room,” she said. But there was a but coming up.

  Scott Parris was relieved to hear this. “Well then, Miss Smith—”

  “Shhh!” The lady touched a finger to her lips. Also shook her head.

  “What?” Parris said.

  METAMORPHOSIS INITIATED

  The out-of-towner whom Parris had almost addressed as “Miss Smithson” smiled. “There was no way you could have known, but I would prefer that it was not bandied about that I’m in town. When I’m working on”—she paused to find just the right phrase, and did—“a sensitive project, I find it helpful to conceal my true identity.”

  “Oh.” Parris nodded knowingly. “So you’re in Granite Creek incognito, huh?”

  “That was my intention.”

  Miss Smithson’s smarter than her grandfather gives her credit for. “So what’s your alias for this sensitive project?”

  “For the duration of my business here, I shall be S
usan Whysper. It was my maiden aunt’s name, though our family called her ‘Missy Whysper.’” Addressing the chief of police, she said, “I suggest that you address me as ‘Miss Whysper.’”

  “I’ll do that.” Scott Parris preferred the abbreviated alias to Susan Whysper and Charlie Moon did, too.

  Professor Mayfair considered the whole business of using an alias unnecessarily dramatic … unless she’s some kind of secret agent working for the government.

  Glancing at Charlie Moon, the woman who preferred to operate incognito said (with just the hint of a sly lady-cat smile), “Or, if you prefer … Missy Whysper.”

  * * *

  So she said, and so they would do, and so shall we. A strange lady in town on serious business has a right to assume any name that suits her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE LADY MAKES A FATEFUL DECISION

  “It is very thoughtful of you to drop by,” said Miss Whysper as she opened the door wide. “How did you know where I was staying?” Even as the words were slipping between her lips, she realized that … I shouldn’t have asked.

  Parris’s face crinkled into an amused, almost supercilious smile. What an amateur, and she writes books about crime. “I notified every hotel, motel, and flophouse in town—and asked them to notify me when you showed up.” And every cop on the force was told to be on the lookout for an old Bronco with Missouri plates—for all the good that did. “The bright young fella at the front desk recognized your name when you checked in—which was also on your credit card—and he called GCPD right away.”

  Miss Whysper sighed and rolled her eyes. “Then even the Holiday Inn is in cahoots with the local police force?”

  “You betcher boots.” Parris chuckled. “Anyway, the dispatcher called me, so here I am with alla my friends to say, ‘Welcome to Granite Creek.’”