Waiter, There's a Clue in My Soup! Five Short Mysteries

  Chapter 3 - An Addley Offer

  I bounced the key in my hand and went to the corral guy’s store to start hauling out our gear so they could lock it up. When I came out, I heard someone call.

  “Mr. McKee!”

  The banker was heading across the street toward me, not hurrying. A man like him doesn’t hurry. I stopped and waited for him, and studied his nice clothes and his good hat, and the thin little mustache and sideburns. The way they joined up, it looked like a string tied across his face to hold his hair on. Kind of silly, but he didn’t look like a silly man. By the set of his jaw and the level in his eyes, he was somebody to be reckoned with.

  “I want to apologize for getting angry,” he said.

  “I can see how you’d be angry.”

  “We’re not used to help from strangers.”

  I grinned at him.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. He didn’t acknowledge it. He just kept on, serious and friendly in an official kind of way, like it wasn’t anything personal.

  “This sort of thing doesn’t normally happen to an Addley establishment.”

  I swung my saddle over to rest on the hitching rail, and looked at him.

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Robbery. Harassment.” He waved a hand in the air like it wasn’t much. He gave me a thin little banker’s smile to go with his thin little mustache. “We don’t take any of it.”

  I looked him over again, and did some quick rethinking. He was rich, and he bossed men like the security guy around. He watched me thinking, and he seemed to know which way my thoughts were headed. He waited expectantly.

  “Are you, uh...?” I started.

  “Mr. Addley?” he said. His smile widened and he shook his head. “I’m an Addley, but not that Addley.”

  The way he said it made it clear that he wasn’t called Mr. Addley at all. That title was reserved. And that he didn’t like it, but could live with it.

  “So you’re Mr....”

  “Mr. Montel. Montel Addley. I’m Lester’s brother.”

  He didn’t offer a hand, so I touched the brim of my hat in greeting. He didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Are you looking for work?” he said.

  “Not looking for it,” I replied. “Not running away from it either.” I turned back toward the corral, and gave a whistle.

  “Not eager for it?”

  I saw Casey pop up over the fence and come running, so I turned and looked at him again. He was watching me for a reaction. Smiling.

  “Depends on the job,” I said.

  “Nothing steady,” he began.

  “That’s good,” I told him, as Casey caught up, jingling and breathing hard from running so fast.

  “You want us to go after those guys?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, still looking at me. “That’s our fight. But now...well, we’re a little short of manpower.” He shrugged. “And that leaves us with a little problem.”

  If he didn’t want us in on the fight, I didn’t mind at all. I wasn’t eager to get mixed up in a range war, especially after what Mr. Po had implied about tangles in the situation. Casey, of course, looked doubtful. She just scuffed her boot, though, and kept listening. Montel watched us, and gestured toward the bank.

  “Come inside. We’ll talk about it.”

  I shook my head and pointed to my gear.

  “I gotta get my gear stowed,” I said. Just out of sheer peevishness, I smiled and hauled up my saddle and handed him my saddlebags. “It’s okay if we just talk back here, isn’t it?”

  There was a good chance that what he wanted to say was private, but I really did want to see the look on his face when he found himself toting gear for a saddle bum. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything. I just swung around and headed for the corral. Casey jumped when she realized she was going to be left out. She ran into the store and got her gear, and came struggling out in a hurry. She had a lot more than I did. I paused to admire the way she moved for a moment, but I realized I was getting distracted so I tore my gaze from her form and swung around to Montel again.

  “Would you mind giving her a hand?”

  She dumped another saddle bag and her bedroll on him, and he followed us. He had been surprised and a little flummoxed, but now he was getting mad, so as soon as we got back to the corral, I threw my saddle over the fence and took the saddlebags from him. Then I put my hands on my hips and looked him in the eye.

  “What kind of job did you have in mind, Mr. Montel?”

  He took out a hanky and wiped his hands. He looked back at me a little sideways, working his jaw. I could see he got the point. He wasn’t in charge of us, and he wasn’t doing us any favors. He put away the hanky and got down to business.

  “We need some protection for Mr. Addley’s daughter on her way to Quester Springs.”

  “Quester Springs?” I said. “Is she sick?”

  “Well, yes, in delicate health, but that isn’t it. We’d like to get her out of town for the moment. Things are heating up, and this isn’t a place for a little girl.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s nine years old.”

  “And she’ll have somebody along?”

  “Of course. She’ll have her aunt as nurse, and a driver.”

  I glanced at Casey in relief. Sometimes people thought she would do nursemaid work, and she won’t. Unless you want your kid tied hand and foot and strapped over the back of the saddle. Casey stood there looking at Montel with heavy suspicion. I turned back to Montel.

  “Why us?”

  He looked surprised, and then a little suspicious himself.

  “You’re handy.”

  “I suppose we are.”

  He smiled thinly again, and shrugged with a kind of frankness.

  “It’s Lester’s idea,” he admitted. “Hanks, my security man, told us about you....”

  “I don’t think Hanks knows much about us.”

  “Except that you rode with Harry Lowe, and you seem to have the respect for the law that implies. And that you can shoot.”

  I glanced at Casey. She had straightened up, her cheeks a little pink. The way to her heart was to compliment her shooting. But Montel hadn’t mentioned Casey by name, and his implication made it seem like he was talking about me. She had noticed that, and the pink in her cheeks was going to angry. I paused to admire her complexion, and considered making comments on the quality of her shooting, and wondered if she would just take it as patronizing, and get mad at me. Montel took the pause as a hesitation.

  “We really don’t expect trouble,” he said quickly. “My brother is concerned about kidnapping, but that wasn’t really much of a gang you saw today, and they took a heavy hit. And Hoonstra, if he’s behind it, is ready for a land war, but I don’t see him hurting a little girl.”

  No, just killing people all around her. And from what I’ve heard of Addley’s dealings, he wasn’t above hurting a child. But maybe that was just talk.

  “How much?”

  He paused, and I could see him measuring us.

  “Two hundred dollars,” he said.

  That was good. More than I expected. Still, it was reasonable, considering that Quester Springs was a long trip, and a little girl was precious cargo. I paused to let it settle a moment.

  “How much in advance?”

  He straightened and gave me a look. I looked right back at him.

  “If you can’t trust us with some money,” I said, “how can you trust us with that little girl?”

  He looked me over again, changing his mind about me in some way I wasn’t quite sure of. He smiled, though, and he reached in his pocket and pulled out a gold double eagle and tossed it onto a barrel head beside us.

  I left my hands where they were and looked at the coin. Then I looked at Casey. She didn’t bother to look at the twenty dollars, but she shrugged in a way that was almost a nod.

  “Okay,
” I said. “You’ve got yourself a pair of gunslingers.”

  He pulled back a little, and only then really looked at Casey. He gave her a little smile of amusement and then a bigger one. He looked at me, and seemed to have changed his mind again, but I still wasn’t sure how.

  “You’ll ride out to the ranch tomorrow morning, then,” he said. “The supply wagon will be here. You can go with them.”

  I nodded, and he touched his hat and left, glad to be gone. I let out a breath, and picked up the double eagle. Casey uncrossed her arms and took it from me.

  “I don’t like it,” she said, looking at the coin as if there were something wrong with it. She handed it back to me. “I don’t like him, and I don’t like working for Addley.”

  “I don’t like working for Addley either,” I said. “But it’s not that kind of job.”

  She stopped and considered that, her hands on her sides, elbows back, like she was protecting her kidneys.

  “I don’t know if I like the kind of job it is.”

  “I know. You’d rather be shooting.”

  I miscalculated on that. She wheeled around and punched me in the arm. I stepped back and spread my hands, and she backed off.

  “Come on, Case. It’s a simple job, and the pay’s good, and it gets us out of Addley territory.” I smiled and leaned in. “And we’ve never been to Quester Springs.”

  That was calculated just right. She wiggled and looked at the ground.

  “Quester Springs has a castle,” she said. She dropped her hands down loose, and dug in the dirt with her spur. “They say.”

  “That’s what I hear. And boiling water that comes out of the ground.”

  “And they probably have an opera house. With all them rich people.”

  “Probably.”

  She had a thing about opera houses. Her pa believed that they were the essence of civilization or something.

  “I still don’t trust Montel,” she said.

  “Me either.”

  She picked up her gear and started to stagger off under it, then she turned around.

  “Where are we puttin’ this?”

  I grinned and pulled out the key.