Free The Deadline by Ron Franscell Page A

endorsement.  Even though he hoped Trey Kerrigan would keep the office he’d dreamed of holding all his life, he worried that his journalistic roots weren’t yet deep enough in Winchester’s political soil to make such pronouncements.  And he knew Kerrigan wouldn’t understand.
    “You gonna endorse me, old buddy?” Kerrigan blurted out.
    Morgan’s answer came slowly.  Too slowly for his old friend.
    “Trey, I don’t know if I’m even going to do endorsements.  It’s not you, because you know how I feel about you.  It’s just that I haven’t been back here long enough ...”
    Trey Kerrigan gave a disappointed little smile and looked down at the neat piles of paper on his desk.  He made Morgan feel as if he’d let his childhood pal down.
    “It’d sure help me if you did,” Kerrigan said.  “Old Bell stood behind my dad all the way, and behind me, too, even if it was only because of my dad.  I’d sure like to have somebody support me because of me, and you know me better than anybody except my wife and my mother.  We were like brothers.”
    That last little bit stung Morgan.  They had been like brothers.  Neither one had siblings at home.  They’d defended one another on the playground like brothers, and fought each other like brothers.  But Morgan sensed there was something distinctly political about Kerrigan’s bringing it up now.
    “Give me some time, Trey,” Morgan said.  “I’ve got to worry about the paper right now.  Nothing personal, but people have to trust me before it means anything.  I hope you understand.”
    “Sure enough,” he said, far from satisfied.  He tipped back in his creaky, overstuffed chair, propping one of his shiny brown cowboy boots on an open desk drawer.  “But you didn’t come here to talk politics with your ol’ buddy, did you?”
    The secretary waddled in.  She carried Arly Bucknell’s false teeth between her outstretched thumb and forefinger, as if she were delivering a dead mouse.  Certainly, the look on her face couldn’t have been more disgusted if it had been a dead mouse.  She dropped Arly’s teeth on the sheriff’s desk and left the room without speaking.
    “Now poor Arly’s got to eat jail food,” Kerrigan chuckled.  “I ain’t sure the punishment fits the crime.”
    Morgan took advantage of the comic relief Arly’s false teeth provided in a tense moment.  He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees. 
    “Trey, I need some help on an old murder case,” he said.  “If you’ve got it, I’d like to see your file on Neeley Gilmartin, back in ‘forty-eight.”
    Kerrigan stretched a rubber band between his fingers.  He didn’t look up, nor did he look particularly surprised by the request.
    “The parole board called me a few weeks back and told me he was out of the Big House, so I looked him up.  He killed a little Indian girl a long time ago.  Big case back then, but I reckon most folks have forgot about it by now.  What’s your interest?”
    “I’m just curious.  There are a few things I’d like to know.  That’s all.”
    “Personal or for the paper?”
    “Does it matter?”
    The sheriff tossed his well-worked rubber band on the desk and eased back further in his chair, rocking slightly and looking at the ceiling.
    “A life sentence is a joke,” he said.  “This old boy kills a little girl, pleads guilty and now he’s out on the streets.  It’s a fuckin’ joke.  Everybody whines about crime, but nobody’s got the balls to stick an admitted baby-killer in the chair and fry his ass.”
    “Forty-seven years in prison is still a long time,” Morgan said.  “It’s a lifetime.”
    “If he ain’t dead, it ain’t life,” Kerrigan said, thwacking his index finger angrily against his desk.
    “No, it isn’t,” Morgan agreed, but to no avail.  Kerrigan wasn’t going to be any help.  “But what’s done is done.  I just want to see the file on the case, if I could.  No harm in that,