What the Dead Men Say by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online

and in a fight down the street, and I had to bring him back here to cool him off for the night, and during that night he told me all about this man who’d hired him. I got a good notion of who that man would be, Mr. Ryan.”
        Ryan continued to stare at him. There was no reading those eyes, no reading them at all.
        “You were the one who hired him. And I know why, too. You had him backtrackin’ the men who killed your girl. And that eventually led him here. Isn’t that about right, Mr. Ryan?”
        “I’d be a foolish man to interrupt a sheriff as well-spoken as you.”
        “So now you’re here, Mr. Ryan, and there can only be one reason for that.”
        “And what would that be, Sheriff?”
        “You plan to take the law into your own hands. You plan to kill those three men.”
        Ryan sat back in his chair. “Are you going to arrest me, Sheriff?”
        “Wish I could. All I can do right now is warn you. I’m not a man who abides vengeance outside the law. I grew up near the border, Mr. Ryan, and I got enough lynch-law justice in my first fifteen years to last me a lifetime. I seen my own brother hanged by a pack of men, and I seen an uncle of mine, too. It’s one thing I don’t tolerate.”
        Ryan kept his eyes level on Dodds’s. “Oh, I expect there’s a lot you don’t tolerate, Sheriff Dodds.”
        “And why the hell’d you bring that boy along? If I ever seen a sweeter young kid, I don’t know when or where it’d be.”
        “Maybe that’s his problem. Maybe he’s too sweet for his own good.”
        “So you invite him along so he can see you kill three men?”
        “You’re the one who keeps saying that, Sheriff, about me killing those three men. Not me.”
        Dodds’s chair squawked as he leaned back. “I make a bad enemy, Mr. Ryan. I’m warning you now so you won’t make no mistakes about it. When I took this job twenty years ago, it wasn’t safe to walk the streets. My pride is that I made it safe and I mean to keep it safe.”
        Ryan drained his coffee and set the cup down on the edge of the desk. “That about the extent of what you’ve got to say?”
        “That would be about it, Mr. Ryan.”
        “Then I guess I’ll get back to my nephew. Promised him a fancy dinner and a good time in your little town.”
        Dodds pawed a big hand over his angular face. “If you’ve got proof they’re really the killers, Mr. Ryan, give me the proof and let me take them in. I’d be glad to help hang the men who murdered your daughter.”
        Ryan stood up. “I appreciate the offer, Sheriff. And I’ll definitely think it over.”
        With that, he tilted his derby at a smart-aleck angle, nodded goodbye to Dodds, and went out the front door.
        
***
        
        Dodds listened to the front door close, the little bell above the frame tinkling. He sat there for a time thinking about Ryan and his brown eyes and what those brown eyes said. Sorrow, to be sure; and then Dodds realized what else-it could be heard in his laugh and seen in his smile, too-craziness, pure blessed craziness, the kind you’d feel if somebody killed your little girl and got away with it.
        

3
        
        It was a place of Rochester lamps whose light was the color of burnished gold; of starchy white tablecloths; of waiters in walrus mustaches and ladies in low-cut organdy gowns. Several tables away from where James sat with him Uncle Septemus, a pair of men got up to resemble gypsies walked around the restaurant, dramatically playing their violins. Even though nobody paid much attention- and even though some of the men looked damned uncomfortable with such displays of passion and emotion-the would-be gypsies lent the place its final touch of sophistication.
        “They kind of make me nervous,” James confided.
        “Who?”
        “Those gypsies.”
        “Why