The Loner: Crossfire

by J. A. Johnstone

  Conrad turned to go after him, but the blonde leaped on his back. The unexpected weight sent him to his knees. She wrapped one arm around his neck and clawed at his face with the fingernails of her other hand. He jerked his head away from her and reached back to grab the pile of blond curls. Leaning forward he pulled, and the woman cried out as she slid over his back and went crashing to the floor. The chivalrous part of him hated to treat a female that way, but he ignored it for the moment as he sprang to his feet and leaped over her.

  The struggle had delayed him long enough that Monroe had gotten away. The door into the corridor stood open. Conrad snatched up his Colt, then raced through the door and looked along the hall. The door of the elevator cage was just sliding shut. As it did, Conrad caught a glimpse of Monroe’s frightened face through the narrow opening.

  Conrad made a dash for the same stairs that had taken him to the second floor. He bounded down them two and three steps at a time and got to the lobby just as the door of the elevator cage opened a few yards away.

  The look of fright on the face of the elderly black elevator operator warned him. The man flinched aside as Carl Monroe thrust a small pistol at Conrad and pulled the trigger.

  As the little gun cracked spitefully, Conrad threw himself forward and down. The bullet went over his head and ricocheted off the marble floor of the bank occupying the ground level of the building. While he was scrambling back to his feet, Monroe bolted from the elevator and made a run for the front doors with surprising speed for a short, fat lawyer.

  He clutched the pistol in his hand, and with pandemonium breaking out in the bank because of the shot, it was an unlucky break for Monroe that he was armed. The guard at the doors drew his own weapon, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson double-action revolver, and yelled at Monroe, “Hold it right there!”

  The lawyer didn’t slow down. It was impossible to tell whether he brandished his gun at the guard on purpose or if the muzzle just swung in that direction because Monroe was pumping his arms as he ran. Either way, as the barrel of Monroe’s gun rose toward the guard, he fired.

  And not just one shot. Thinking a bank robbery was taking place, the guard kept squeezing the trigger and emptied all five rounds in the Smith & Wesson’s cylinder into the lawyer’s chest. Monroe’s momentum kept him going forward even though his body jerked violently under the impact of each slug. His feet went out from under him as his nerves and muscles stopped working, and he pitched forward to land on his face with a soggy thud and slide across the slick marble floor until he came to a stop almost at the stunned guard’s feet.

  The guard slowly lowered his gun and stared at the dead lawyer with horrified eyes. “Holy cats!” he yelped. “That’s no bank robber! That’s Mr. Monroe!”

  As Conrad came to his feet, he felt sorry for the guard. The man had heard the shot, seen somebody rushing toward him with a gun, and hadn’t paid any attention to who it was. Thinking he was about to be gunned down by a fleeing robber, the guard had opened fire. Nobody could blame him.

  But they might blame Conrad for starting the ruckus. He long legged it back to the nearby stairs and went up them in a hurry, heading toward the still-open rear door of Monroe’s office. He could plainly hear the commotion downstairs and knew it wouldn’t be long before the law showed up.

  He went into the office warily, just in case that homicidal blonde was still there and might try to brain him again. He didn’t see any sign of her in either office. Clearly, she had realized a lot of trouble was about to come crashing down and had taken off for the tall and uncut while she had the chance.

  Conrad went straight to Monroe’s desk and started pawing through the papers on top. He was looking for a name he might recognize or any sort of communication with a San Francisco address on it. All across the country as he searched for his missing children, Conrad had run into traps set for him by Pamela years earlier. She had hired men to try to kill him, and he was convinced the latest attempt on his life was one more instance of that. Maybe Pamela had made the arrangements with Monroe directly when she passed through Carson City with the twins, but she might have used an intermediary in San Francisco to set it up. That was the name Conrad was looking for.

  Not finding anything among the papers on the desk, he jerked open the drawers and pawed through them. That proved just as fruitless, leaving only the filing cabinets in the outer office.

  He hurried in there and yanked open a drawer. He pulled out a handful of papers and started skimming through them, discarding them when he didn’t find any helpful information. The sheets of correspondence, bills, and legal documents drifted down and soon covered the floor around his feet.

  He was working on the third drawer when he found a stack of memorandums dated almost three years earlier. One of them bore the scribbled notation D.L. Golden Gate $5000 C.B. Below that, written in a slightly different colored ink, probably at a different time, were the initials E.G. and W.F., followed by $300.

  Ed Gillespie and Walt Farley, Conrad thought. Someone had paid Monroe $5000 to set up the ambush, and he had turned around and paid Gillespie and Farley the princely sum of $300 to carry out the killing. You get what you pay for, Conrad told himself, and Monroe hadn’t gotten much out of Gillespie and Farley except spectacular failure.

  And a final payment of five .38 caliber bullets in the chest from the guard downstairs in the bank.

  Conrad had no doubt the C.B. on the note meant him. And Golden Gate could certainly refer to San Francisco. The Golden Gate was the opening between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and it was also a popular name for businesses in the city.

  But who or what was D.L.? Conrad had no idea. Claudius Turnbuckle might be able to find out. Conrad would wire him with the information immediately, so Turnbuckle could start working on the problem while Conrad was on his way to San Francisco.

  He stuffed the memorandum in his pocket and turned away from the filing cabinets, the papers on the floor crackling and crinkling under his boots as he did so. When he came around to face the door, he stopped short and didn’t move except to raise his hands slightly.

  He was staring down the barrel of a gun.

  Chapter 5

  “Mr. Browning, you’re making it mighty difficult for me to extend the courtesy to you that I want to,” Deputy Wallace said in tightlipped anger from behind that gun. “There’s only so far your reputation as one of our former leading citizens will get you.”

  “Take it easy, Deputy.” Conrad didn’t know if Wallace had seen him slip the piece of paper in his pocket, but he didn’t intend to give it up unless he absolutely had to. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Carl Monroe’s lying on the floor of that bank downstairs, dead as a mackeral!”

  “I didn’t shoot him.” Conrad shrugged. “You can check my gun. It hasn’t been fired since that ruckus in front of the hospital earlier.”

  Wallace came farther into the office. “I know who shot Monroe. There are plenty of witnesses to what happened. I’m not going to lose any sleep over him getting ventilated. He was always too slick to get any blood on his own fingers, but he was part of plenty of dirty dealings that wound up with people getting killed. That doesn’t mean you’re in the clear here. Monroe got shot because he was shooting at you.”

  “That sounds to me like I didn’t do anything wrong, like I was the victim,” Conrad pointed out.

  “Blast it, I knew you were gonna come here! That’s why I didn’t tell you where Monroe’s office was and I tried to get the marshal’s permission to pull Monroe in for questioning as quick as I could. But you beat me here anyway, and now he’s dead!”

  “There’s nothing illegal about paying a visit to a lawyer in his office. Monroe panicked when I showed up and told him who I was. Seems to me that’s just as good as a confession that he was mixed up in that attempt on my life.”

  Conrad left out any mention of him pointing his gun at Monroe. The only other person who knew about that was the blond secretary, and
he had a hunch she was going to make herself scarce for a while. She probably knew about some of Monroe’s crooked business, and didn’t want to get mixed up in any investigation.

  “What happened then?” Wallace asked.

  “Can I put my hands down?”

  Wallace thought about it for a second, then shrugged and motioned with the barrel of his gun for Conrad to lower his hands. “You said Monroe panicked? What do you mean?”

  “He ran out of here before I could stop him. I went after him. He took the elevator, so I went down the stairs. We got to the lobby of the bank at the same time. He took a shot at me and tried to rush out. The bank guard thought Monroe was a robber and was trying to get away with the bank’s money. He opened fire. That’s all I know, Deputy.”

  “Yeah?” Wallace motioned with his gun at the litter of papers on the floor. “What about all this?”

  “It was like this when I came back up here,” Conrad lied. “Somebody must’ve come in here after Monroe and I ran out and started going through his papers.”

  “Somebody, eh? Who would do a thing like that?”

  “Maybe somebody who worked for Monroe, or some other business associate?” Conrad suggested. “You said yourself he was mixed up in plenty of crooked work. Someone could have been trying to find blackmail material, or something like that.”

  “I don’t know who was the slickest one here, you or Monroe,” Wallace said disgustedly as he holstered his pistol in a cross-draw rig on his left hip. “I’ve got a strong hunch you’re not telling me the whole truth, Mr. Browning ... but I don’t reckon I can prove it. Since there are more than a dozen witnesses downstairs who can confirm that you didn’t shoot Monroe ... just get out of here. You’re free to go.”

  “I suppose you want me to stay in Carson City.” Conrad was prepared to ignore that order if he had to. Now that he had a lead in San Francisco, even a small one, he wasn’t going to allow anything else to delay him.

  Wallace surprised him by saying, “No, I’d rather you get out of town. The marshal may not agree with that, but considering the hell that’s broken loose today, I think it would be in the interest of public safety for you to light a shuck out of here.”

  Conrad smiled. “That can be arranged.”

  “I warn you, though,” Wallace went on, “Monroe had a secretary, a woman named Lorraine Eastman. I’m going to find her and talk to her. If she tells a different story than you do, I may be issuing a warrant for your arrest.”

  Wallace could issue all the warrants he wanted, Conrad thought. By the time the lawman got around to doing that, he would be in San Francisco and that warrant wouldn’t mean a thing. If necessary, Conrad wouldn’t come back to Carson City.

  After all, it was no longer his home.

  It was just one more in a long line of places where people kept trying to kill him.

  With everything that had been going on, Conrad hadn’t had a chance to get to the train station and check to see when the next westbound train would be coming through. To his chagrin he learned he had missed the train by an hour.

  “But there’ll be another westbound at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr. Browning,” the clerk told him. “Would you like a ticket on it?”

  Conrad nodded. “Yes, thanks. All the way through to San Francisco.”

  The delay chafed at him, but the quickest way to reach the coast was to wait for the train the next morning. He went back to the hotel to wash up, change clothes, and eat a late lunch.

  He had almost accomplished the first two of those goals—he was buttoning up a clean shirt—when a knock sounded on the door of his suite, which were the best accommodations in the hotel. Considering what had already happened, Conrad figured it would be a good idea to be careful. His gun belt was draped over the back of a chair in the sitting room. He slid the Colt from its holster as he went to the door. “Yes?”

  As soon as he spoke, he stepped quickly to one side, in case somebody in the hall decided to let loose with a shotgun blast through the door.

  Instead, a voice he recognized as belonging to one of the bellboys replied, “I have a telegram for you, Mr. Browning.”

  Conrad started to ask who the wire was from, then realized the message was probably sealed up and the boy wouldn’t know. He tucked the gun behind his belt where it would be handy and opened the door.

  The bellboy’s eyes widened a little at the sight of the black gun butt sticking up at Conrad’s waist, but he didn’t say anything except, “Here you go, sir,” as he held out the Western Union envelope. Conrad took it, nodded his thanks, and handed the boy a silver dollar. He shut the door and tore open the envelope to slide out the yellow telegraph flimsy.

  A frown creased his forehead as he read the words printed on it in a telegrapher’s block letters:

  WILL KNOCK ON YOUR DOOR IN FIVE

  MINUTES STOP PLEASE TALK TO ME STOP

  There was no signature.

  Conrad studied the telegram for a long moment, then abruptly crumpled it and tossed it in a waste basket. He hurried back to his bedroom, finished buttoning his shirt along the way, and picked up his clean suit coat to shrug into it. He had brushed his hat as clean as he could, so he settled it on his head, then picked up the gunbelt on his way back through the sitting room. He pouched the iron and buckled the belt around his hips.

  His hand was on the butt of the Colt as he opened the door and stepped into the corridor, which was deserted at the moment. The hotel had elevators, several of them, in fact, but there was also a stairwell down the hall to the left, and the door to it was set back in a small alcove. Conrad went to it and stepped into that alcove, then stopped and edged his head slightly past the corner so he could look back down the corridor. He had a good view of the door to his suite. He wanted to see who was going to knock on that door in a couple minutes.

  He still had a lot of acquaintances in Carson City. None of them had anything to do with him now, though. It wasn’t like he had tried to keep in touch over the years. In fact, some of his former friends were probably still angry with him for making it look like he had died when his house burned down, then letting everyone believe that for months.

  The only other people he knew were Deputy Wallace and Dr. Liam Taggart, and neither of them would have sent him a telegram. If they’d wanted to talk to him, they simply would have shown up at the hotel and knocked on his door. There was something fishy about that telegram, and he wanted to know what it was. Staking out his suite door seemed like the best way to find out.

  He stiffened as a man emerged from the elevators and came along the corridor, looking at the numbers on the doors. He wore a gray suit and a black derby and sported a close-cropped beard. Conrad had never seen him before, at least not that he recalled. He put his hand on his gun butt again as the man paused in front of his door, then took a piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it for a second. He put the paper back, shrugged to himself, and raised his hand to knock.

  At that moment, Conrad heard the faint click of the stairwell door behind him, then a rustle of fabric. The cold ring of a gun barrel pressed itself to the back of his neck.

  “I knew you’d take the bait,” a woman’s voice said, as down the hall the bearded man’s knuckles pounded on the door of Conrad’s suite.

  Conrad moved with blinding speed, twisting away from the gun and whirling around. His left arm came up, hit the woman’s arm, and knocked it to the side so the gun was no longer pointing at him. He drove his body against hers, forcing her back against the wall of the alcove, and closed his hand around the cylinder of the little revolver so it couldn’t fire even if she pulled the trigger. He wrenched the gun out of her fingers. His other hand came up and caught hold of her chin, making her gasp. He knew he was probably hurting her and he regretted that, but he wanted answers.

  “I’m not the only one who took the bait, Miss Eastman,” he told the blonde he had last seen in the offices of the late and unlamented Carl Monroe.

  Chapter 6

/>   Conrad kept the pressure on Lorraine Eastman’s chin, preventing her from screaming or making even the smallest outcry. Her blue eyes were wide with fear as he pinned her to the wall. He was aware of the warm, full curves of her body under her dress, but at the moment they didn’t mean much to him.

  Down the hall, the bearded man continued to knock on the door of Conrad’s suite for a minute or so. Then the knocking stopped and he heard receding footsteps as the man walked away. A moment later the elevator door rattled as it closed and the cage started to descend.

  “We’re going to my suite,” Conrad told the blonde. “Don’t make a racket, and you won’t get hurt.”

  She hissed something unintelligible at him. He figured she was trying to curse him. Quickly, he shifted his grip on her, getting his left arm around her waist from behind and clapping his right hand completely over her mouth. She struggled in his grasp, but he was too strong for her. He pulled her out of the alcove and forced her down the hall toward his suite.

  He hoped no other hotel guests or employees came along before he was able to get her through the door. If they did, trying to force a young woman into his suite would certainly look bad for him. Luck was with him, however. The corridor stayed deserted long enough for him to open the door, which he had left unlocked. A hard shove sent Lorraine Eastman stumbling into the sitting room.

  She turned toward him and opened her mouth to scream. He grabbed her again and clamped his hand around her throat, stifling any outcry.

  “I know I’m not being much of a gentleman,” he told her, “and I’m truly sorry about that. But you’ve attacked me a couple times now, and I want to know why. If I take my hand away from your throat, do you promise not to scream?”

  She glared at him for a couple seconds, then a look of resignation came into her eyes and she nodded.

  Conrad didn’t believe her. “I can knock you unconscious before you manage to get a peep out, and I will if you don’t cooperate. I’ll try to pull my punch, but I can’t promise you won’t be injured. I have the rest of the day and all night if you want to be stubborn about this.”