Crossing the Line (14 page)

“Is that the table where we'll be playing?” she asked as she pointed to a large table that was sectioned off from the room by a partition that had been set up to keep bystanders to a minimum.

“It certainly is.”

“Then I'll most definitely be joining you,” she said.

As he followed Mack toward the back of the room, Clint figured Sadie was talking so much to put on a good appearance. He didn't think much of it until she began dragging her feet and slowing him down like an anchor that had been hooked to his elbow. When he was practically brought to a stop, Clint asked, “What is it? Do you want to leave?”

“You see that man back there?” she whispered. “The one getting up from the table?”

Clint looked at the table where Mack's game was being held and couldn't miss the portly gentleman wearing an expensive suit struggling to wriggle out from between his chair, the table, and the wall. “Yeah. What about him?”

“I think he knows something about what happened when Delilah was shot.”

Clint could tell the man wanted to get away from the table, but he could very well have needed to visit an outhouse. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

“His name's Tom Naderman, and usually he's always got a kind word for me. Carl told me he'd been getting friendly with George while building up a whole lot of debt at the tables. Since he's running like a rabbit instead of looking at me, I'd say he's got something to hide.”

Now, Clint looked over to Sadie. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

She shrugged and said, “I've lived here for years. You want me to tell you everything I know about everyone?”

“Well, come on. Let's see if ol' Tom's got anything to say.”

Mack protested the moment he saw Clint steer away from the table, but wasn't about to follow him and Sadie to the door. Fortunately, Tom Naderman wasn't a small man and probably couldn't have gotten away at a dead run with a ten-second head start. Even with Sadie in tow, Clint got to him before Tom made it to the door.

“Evening, Tom,” Sadie said cheerfully.

Tom whipped around and sucked in a breath. “Oh, uh, evening Sadie. Who . . . ahhh . . . who's this with you?”

“You know Clint. He won the last tournament.”

“Oh, yeah. I think I recall that.”

“You were in it,” Clint said. “I just remembered, you were sitting at one of the front tables and were knocked out early.”

Tom nodded and backed toward the door. “That's right. What can I do for you?”

While Clint may have had his doubts about Sadie's hasty assessment of why Tom was squirming away from the poker game, he didn't have any now. Everything from the shifting of Tom's eyes to the fresh streams of sweat trickling from his forehead advertised the fact that he was hiding something and was nervous as hell about it.

“Where are you going?” Sadie asked. “Weren't you gonna say hello?”

“Sure I was,” Tom said with a shaky laugh. “Just . . . uh . . . needed to step outside to answer the call of nature.”

“Outhouse is on the other side of the building,” Clint pointed out.

“Oh. So it is. Guess I'm a little nervous.”

“Still in your slump?” Sadie asked. “Carl told me you were into Delilah for a whole lot of money. He mentioned you and she had some unfriendly words after the tournament.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Clint could tell Sadie was bristling. Rather than let her sink her teeth into the portly man, he eased her back a few steps and said, “Why don't you buy us some beer? After all, we'll be doing our best to win some money at Mack's game and could use all the liquid courage we can get.”

Once she saw the intent glare Clint was giving her, Sadie nodded and headed toward the bar. She was still in his line of sight, but far enough away for Clint to speak without being heard. Once he stood toe-to-toe with the other man, they might as well have been in their own locked room. Within seconds, Tom was squirming to get away from him a whole lot more than he'd wriggled to get away from Mack's card table.

“Something tells me you're the sort of man who would rather not look at a woman than admit you took part in getting her brother killed,” Clint snarled.

“What?”

“You know she went to the sheriff, right? DeFalco must spout off a lot about something like that. I bet he didn't have many good things to say about Sadie, her brother, or Delilah, for that matter.”

“That was him talking,” Tom replied.

“But if she went to the sheriff, that means she's trying to drag the law into this mess even more than it already is.”

“The law isn't in it. Not anymore.”

That told Clint plenty. Since Tom wasn't so nervous anymore, it meant he wasn't trying to lie. It also made it a safe bet that he figured he wasn't in any danger at the moment. Clint didn't have to do much to change Tom's mind about that.

“You know why I sent her away?” Clint asked. When Tom glanced toward the bar, Clint said, “She's the sort of woman who attracts a lot of attention. She's also the sister of a man who's become quite the topic of conversation around here. That means everyone's watching her a whole lot closer than they're watching us. And that means I can do a whole lot to ruin your evening if you don't start talking straight to me, real quick.”

“I was just trying to take a piss,” Tom whined.

“You were trying to get the hell out of here the moment you laid eyes on me and Sadie. Now that I've heard about you owing money and being on friendly terms with George, that puts all kinds of questions into my head.”

“George who?”

Clint's hand snapped out to push Tom's back against the wall. It didn't take a lot of force to shove the man back an inch or two, but Tom nearly jumped out of his skin.

“George doesn't have a lot of friends,” Clint said. “The two I saw with him aren't in very good shape. From what I can tell, folks around here don't even know the names of those two. Maybe that's why you bolted for the door when you saw us.”

“No, that's not it.”

“Then why?” Clint snapped.

While Tom fumbled for his words, he glimpsed toward the empty table where Delilah and Carl used to work. “If you've got something to say about Carl, then say it,” Clint demanded.

Tom shook his head and stammered some more.

When Tom shook his head this time, he did it as if his life depended on it. Clint was definitely on the right track.

“I knew Delilah,” Clint said. “But only for a few days. You can say whatever you need to about her.”

Glancing about nervously, Tom saw that nobody was paying them any attention. Sadie was in the middle of a heated conversation with the bartender, which drew even more attention to her. Les was nearby, watching the argument the way he watched everything else in Pace's. Since the only one watching him seemed to be Clint, Tom let out the breath he'd been holding and started talking.

“I didn't do anything, I swear,” Tom said.

“Then why were you running?”

“Because you and Delilah were close.”

“She was a faro dealer,” Clint said. “Winners will love her and losers will want to kill her. You strike me as a loser.”

Like any man who'd come to Pace's to sit in on a game held by a professional like Mack, Tom took offense to that last statement more than anything else that had been said so far. His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed as though he might stand up to Clint right there. He didn't quite have the backbone to follow up on that, however.

“I lost my share,” Tom said. “I lost plenty, but I was winning again. I was winning big.”

“So why would you have anything against Delilah that you wouldn't want me to hear?”

“You don't know?” Tom snarled.

Clint was about to demand that the other man stop trying to steer the conversation in the wrong direction, when he realized he was the one who wasn't keeping up.

“That . . . woman put a wager on you during the tournament,” Tom said impatiently. “She bet with money that wasn't even hers that if you won, her debts would be cleaned out.”

“So you won enough to pull yourself out of a hole . . .” Clint said.

“Out of a hole and back into a profit,” Tom cut in. Just thinking about that was enough to give him the strength to fight for a bit of distance between himself and Clint. He shoved Clint back a step, but then immediately regretted it.

Since they still looked like they were just having a normal talk, Clint nodded and didn't make Tom pay for stepping out of line.

“That bitch owed me a healthy chunk of cash,” Tom said. “No offense if you were sweet on her.”

“Go on,” Clint told him.

“It took a whole lot of work to get out of debt, especially with how easily she pulls a man into playing one hand after another.”

Faro was a dollop of skill wrapped in a whole lot of luck. On top of that, a talented dealer could make any player seem as if he was on the verge of striking it rich. Delilah was talented at a lot of things, and dealing faro was most definitely one of them.

“I was on a streak,” Tom mused. “First I got flush, then I got ahead. Then I got ahead even more until that damn dealer started trying to push me off onto one of the other tables. I think that black fella was a good luck charm for me. Too bad he's as good as dead.”

“Watch your mouth,” Clint warned.

As soon as Tom saw the angry fire in Clint's eyes, he went back to the petrified state he was in a little while ago. “She made the offer to me and a few others that were ahead of her game at the start of the tournament. She watched you play that first game with George and got real confident you could win. She even pulled a few strings to try and get you to sit in that same chair so she could watch you play.”

Clint smirked at that. From the first instant, when Delilah had gotten a good angle to peek at George's cards, she'd been scheming to use it to the best possible advantage. Perhaps she'd been trying to steer him one way or the other for some reason, but Clint didn't care. No matter what angles she'd been working, she didn't deserve to be shot dead in her own saloon.

“She seemed distracted and desperate to find any way to get her bet going on the tournament,” Tom explained. “When Mister Pace heard what she had to say, he wasn't too happy about it. Then, she proposed a deal to me and some of the others who'd been wringing her dry. If her pick to win the tournament actually won, she wouldn't owe us anything. If you didn't win the tournament, she'd owe us double.”

The more Tom talked about the bet, the less nervous he became. It was the difference between a man dreading going into a battle and a man remembering how he'd lost that battle. The latter was a much more tired and resigned affair.

“I thought about turning down the whole bet,” Tom continued. “I may have been one of the last holdouts. Then she got even more confident and offered to pay out triple what she owed if you lost. If you won, we'd have to pay her half of what she owed us.”

“Triple, huh? Those are pretty good odds.”

Brightening up at the first sign of a sympathetic ear, Tom nodded. “Yeah, they were. With so many others in that tournament, and with all the things that could go wrong in any game, we figured she was just trying anything she could to get out of her debt. Me and one of the other fellas in on the wager thought she'd be desperate enough to fuck us to get out of paying up.”

Speaking from personal experience, Clint said, “That must have been tempting.”

“She was a pretty lady,” Tom sighed. “But you won and I was put right back where I started. In debt to Delilah. I had plans for that money she owed me. Even if she paid me in pieces here and there, it would have gone a long way toward settling my debts in other spots around town.”

“All of that goes down the river when I win the tournament, so you decide to get some payback on Delilah,” Clint said.

Tom shook his head. “I didn't know what was gonna happen to her. Honest, I didn't. George asked if I wanted a chance to earn some money to make up what I lost, and if that came with a chance to make her look bad, then so be it. She wasn't supposed to get shot. That was never part of the deal.”

“Wasn't George in jail?”

“He was let out to tend to his affairs every so often,” Tom explained. “Most of the times he drank himself stupid or bedded down with some whore, but he spent a lot of time here.”

Clint felt anger flush through his skin to make his face hot and his fists clench. It seemed Sheriff DeFalco was either one of George's best friends or he was simply one of the laziest lawmen in the country. Either way, Clint wanted to have another word with him. Taking out those frustrations on Tom, however, wouldn't do anyone any good.

Sadie was through arguing at the bar and was waiting patiently for her drinks, so Clint hurried up and asked Tom, “What was the deal you had with George?”

“I was supposed to figure out when that table was stocked with the most cash,” Tom said. “I play there so much that I'm damn near rooted to one of those chairs. George told me what to look for and how Delilah or that dark-skinned fella would act when they were sitting on a lot of money.”

“How would George know those things?” Clint asked.

“I don't know, but he did. He said to watch for the big wins or the big losses. Then he told me how to spot when Carl was getting ready to take a bunch of money to the safe in back. I passed on what I saw and a day later, George comes in with guns blazing.”