The Hangings by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

the gentle kind; according to Ivy, who thought she knew all my faults and weaknesses and took pains to tell me over and over what they were, that was one of the reasons I seldom went calling on "decent" women and had never married. A born bachelor, she said I was. Which meant that—before Hannah came back to Tule Bend, anyway—Ivy had thought of me as having the same sort of disinterest in the opposite sex, the same dried-up juices, that she had. I wondered what she would say if she knew just where I went and just what I did when I traveled down to San Francisco those three or four times each year. Maybe one day I would tell her. Be worth it to see the look on her face. . . .
    Never mind Ivy—what about Hannah? Best thing to do was to stop going to her house nights, make it easy for all concerned. That would quench the town's fiery tongues and eventually give me some measure of peace. But the prospect of not seeing her again except at a distance was almost too painful to think about.
    I began to feel restless, of a sudden. Time to make my Saturday night rounds. And as I set off for Main Street, I knew that sooner or later—if not tonight, then tomorrow night or the next one after—I would end up again at Hannah's house. The pull of my attraction to her was too strong to resist.
    It was a quiet Saturday, for a change. Everything peaceable at Swede's Beer Hall, the Elkhorn Bar and Grill, the Sonoma Pool Emporium, the cheaper resorts on the east side. Emmett Bodeen wasn't in any of those places—which I took as a positive sign—and he wasn't in his room at Magruder's. I still wanted to talk to him about his fight at the Swede's, but it could wait another day if he did not make any more trouble.
    Shortly past ten, I found myself on south Main. From there I could see that Hannah's lamps were still lit, as they usually were at this hour; she seldom turned in before midnight, she had told me once. I had called on her later than this, and been welcome. Well, then?
    I kept walking that way—and that was how I came to spot the prowler.
    Only reason I saw him was that I happened to be looking toward the livery barn as I passed it on the south side, and he picked that moment to come out of the willow thicket along the creek and run humped-over toward the livery. Which made him a prowler in my mind and no mistake. The front doors were closed; no lights showed anywhere. Jacob Pike, Morton's helper, lived in the barn—he had a little makeshift room fixed up in one corner of the hayloft—but Pike would have no reason to be skulking around out back at this hour. Neither would anybody else with legitimate business.
    We get our share of petty crime in Tule Bend, just like any other small town. I had arrested more than a few prowlers since my appointment as constable, half of them transients and the other half kids bent on mischief. No telling yet which this one was. But I damned well intended to find out.
    I moved off the street into the shadows along the board fence that enclosed the boat repair yard next door. The prowler was hidden now at the back of the livery. Doing what? Trying to get inside the rear doors? Or just waiting and listening, as I was doing, because he had seen me too? Well, whatever he was doing, he was being quiet about it. No sounds of any sort came from back that way.
    I went slowly along the fence, wishing I had bothered to strap on a sidearm before leaving the house. But I did not wear one as a rule, because it was so seldom needed. Not too many men around here wear sideguns any more, at least not in town; there had not been a shooting scrape in years. In all the time I had been a peace officer I had fired a weapon no more than four times in the line of duty, and never once with intent to harm another man. Still and all, a Colt Bisley or a Starr .44—the two sixguns I owned—was a good thing to have in your hand when you went to arrest somebody for trespassing and perhaps breaking-and-entering, especially a