Powder Keg by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online

killing this Chaney, anyway,” Connelly said.
    “Most folks around here think he’s a hero,” Pepper said.
    “We’d be in deep shit, we killed somebody like him. Everybody here looks up to him,” Connelly said. “I don’t see any reason he couldn’t be brought back peaceful as all hell, do you, Pepper?”
    Pepper laughed. “See, Ford here looks happy already.”
    “I just wanted to make sure we had an understanding,” I said.
    “Hell, yes, we have an understanding,” Connelly said.
    “We’ve got understanding up the ass.”
    I stood up. “I guess I’ll hold off on sending that telegram to the boss.”
    I was pretty sure I saw the moose head above the bar wink at me as I passed it on my way out.

Chapter 10
    I was walking through the tiny lobby of my hotel when somebody behind a newspaper said, “Noah. Over here.”
    Blue eyes peered over the top of the paper. I hadn’t come to Tom Daly; he’d come to me.
    About four feet from him the smell became familiar. He had always used the same kind of slick stuff on his thinning hair. That, combined with the smell of the rye he preferred, gave off an unmistakable aroma.
    I sat in the leather chair next to him. “These are nice digs, Noah.”
    Men who drink the way Daly did are never quite sober. Even after a couple of days off the bottle, you see a faint trembling in their fingers and whiskey sorrow in their eyes. Even the big, loud drunks who always seem to be having such a great time when they’re up there—in their rooms in the hangover mornings they’re scared, confused, stomach-sick little children who ache to stop but can’t.
    “There’s a train out of here at six tonight, Tom.”
    “Not in this weather there won’t be.”
    “The storm hasn’t hit yet.”
    “The direction that train’s coming, the storm’s already there. There won’t be a train along for a couple days now.”
    “You been hanging out at the depot, have you?”
    Then he surprised me. “I checked it out, yeah.”
    “You going back?”
    He put the paper down, folded it in half, laid it carefully on the stand next to him. Even half-sober, he was a fastidious little man.
    “I wired Susan. Told her I was coming home.”
    “I’ll be damned,” I said. “So Tom Daly has finally come to his senses.”
    “Maybe it’s not what you think, Noah.”
    “I guess I don’t follow you. You’re going home, right?”
    “Yeah, I’m going home. But I’m going home with something I stole from one of Pepper’s bags in his hotel room.”
    The whiskey and the years had caught up with him. There in the sunlight-robbed lobby, sitting among the smells of stale cigars and dusty carpet, he looked small and old and finished.
    “You know what I took?”
    “This could be dangerous, Tom.”
    “Yeah, dangerous for them. I took his bank statement from this bank over in Maryland. You should see it, Noah. He’s been on the take for years. The deposits are as much as two thousand dollars at a time. You know how we’ve always heard they were in the blackmail business? Well, this proves it. This is better than shooting them. This means a long time inprison, Noah. And you know what else? I’ll bet I can talk the D.A. back there into getting them to admit they took the information the boss thinks I took.” The whiskey-wasted little fellow sat up straight, grinned and said in the happiest voice I’d heard him use in years: “They go to prison and I get my name cleared. I should’ve thought of this a long time ago.”
    It made sense. The D.C. police and D.A. weren’t going to worry about how he got Pepper’s bank statement. All they’d care about was that it was authentic and that they could use it to show a jury that no rank-and-file federal agent could make that kind of money and still be honest. You didn’t become a federal man to get rich.
    “You wanna go have a drink with me and celebrate?”
    “Why don’t you celebrate by not taking a drink, Tom?”
    “You would’ve made a hell of a