Everybody Had A Gun by Richard Prather Read Free Book Online

watched her she leveled it at the back of the house down below the window where I was standing, and the little gun went crack.
    What the hell was she doing? Shooting up the house? Four or five slugs in this heap and it would fall down.
    In her left hand she held a glass. She fired one more shot at the back of the house, then put the gun on a little table beside her, tilted the glass to her lips, and glugged away. She dropped the glass on the ground and calmly began reloading the little gun from a box of cartridges on the table.
    I wasn't sure, but there was a good chance I'd found me a queer one. There was a way to find out.
    I hustled down the stairs, out the front of the house, and around to the back where the old coot was. When I got to the back of the house where I could see her, I stopped just as she saw me. She waved the gun at me in a friendly sort of way—if a gun can ever be waved at you in a friendly sort of way—and I jumped a couple inches and said, "Hi!" in a voice that cracked through three octaves.
    She bobbed her head. Finally I decided she didn't intend to shoot me, so I walked up beside her.
    "Hello," I said. "Good afternoon."
    She said, "Good aft-ternoon," in the careful voice people use when they're teetering between the edge of tipsiness and the middle of a good old-fashioned drink. That hadn't been Coca-Cola she'd been drinking. She added, "Who are you?"
    She sat in the old overstuffed chair with the gun in her right hand and blinked up at me from her private haze. She wasn't really middle-aged yet. She was about forty trying to look twenty, but it was a cause long lost. It wasn't even a nice try. It was like shearing the snakes off Medusa and leaving the stumps; it made a difference, sure, but it still wasn't pleasant to look at. Her hair was frizzled into a bunch of curls dyed an indigestion brown, and the best curve she had was in her lower plate.
    The riding habit she wore gave an artificial swell to her hips, but it was obviously artificial. Either that or the deep wrinkles where the pants drooped inward meant she was in even worse shape than I'd figured she was. And she'd been riding too long; she smelled like the horse. Hell, she'd been riding longer than that; she looked like the horse.
    I finally answered her question, but I didn't give her my name. I lied glibly, "I'm a friend of Mr. Sader. Is he here?"
    She blinked at me and said flatly, "How would I know? I'm only the louse's wife."
    Well, she was sorry for herself. And so, I'll wager, was Marty. She mumbled a little when she spoke, and I couldn't make up my mind whether she'd said she was "the louse's wife" or "the lousy wife." I didn't ask her.
    Instead I asked, "You're Mrs. Sader, then?"
    "Yes," she said. "I'm. . ."
    Her voice petered out and she looked past me somewhere. I glanced over my shoulder where she was looking, but I couldn't see anything except sky. For no good reason, I shivered.
    "Hello," I said softly. I didn't want to startle her. Maybe she could see things I couldn't.
    She kept on staring bleary-eyed past me. Off into space, I guess.
    "Mrs. Sader? Are you there?"
    She looked at me and blinked.
    "You are Mrs. Sader, aren't you?" I said.
    "Of course I'm Mrs. Sader." Ah, she was back with me again. She went on, "I'm Mrs. Vivian Sader. Who are you?"
    Hell, I could tell this bat; she wouldn't remember. I said, "I'm Shell Scott. Marty here?" We were right back where we'd started.
    "No," she said simply.
    "When do you expect him, Mrs. Sader?"
    "Whenever he feels like it."
    "Well, thank you, ma'am," I said. "I'll be running along now. Uh—you know where I might find him? It's really important that I find him."
    She bent over and picked up the glass from where she'd dropped it on the ground. It had picked up some blades of grass and some dirt, but what's a little dirt? She bent over to the table, and I noticed there was a bottle of Seagram's and a pitcher of water there I hadn't noticed from upstairs. She mixed up a nice