Free Showdown by Edward Gorman / Ed Gorman

California—I won't give things like the Nevilles a second thought. I'll be a different person."
    She thought—hoped—that he would kiss her again. But he didn't. He just started walking again, taking her along with him.
    She said, "You think you'll see her again?"
    "Oh, Lucy, please don't ask me things like that."
    "I guess you plan to, then."
    "We'll just have to see what happens."
    Madame Missy's was melancholy in the purple shadows of the growing autumn dusk. A player piano sounded ridiculously merry given Lucy's mood. And Madame Missy herself, who knew everything about everybody who was anybody in Claybank, peeked her Pekingese face between the parted curtains in the front window and took a gander at them.
    Lucy knew she'd come undone if she stayed here. She slid her arm from Tom's and said, "Well, I appreciate you walking with me."
    "Lucy, I—This is hard for both of us, but—" He stopped himself.
    "But what?"
    "It's just a selfish thought I have."
    "What sort of selfish thought, Tom?"
    "I—I just don't want you to leave town. But I can't make any promises if you stay."
    So finally it wasn't Lucy who broke away but Tom himself. He said, "You're a fine woman, Lucy. In all respects. Never forget that."
    And then he was gone.

Chapter Eight
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    P rine didn't sleep well. His dreams alternated between Cassie and Lucy. A man could get confused.
    Around three, he became fully awake and there was hell to pay. The nocturnal orchestra of the hotel where he boarded was performing a full symphony. You had your snoring, you had your hawking, you had your rolling, you had your tossing, you had your headboard creaking, you had your amorous sex dream moans, you had your muffled-scream nightmares, you had coughing, scratching, muttering, snorting, and gasping.
    What you had, in other words, was just about every kind of prohibition against getting back to sleep you could think of.
    Up and down the hall the symphony played, fading, then full again, unceasing.
    He sat up and smoked. He lay back down and scratched. He thought. He tried not to think. And then he repeated the entire sequence all over again.
    Dawn came haughty and gray, taunting him with the fact that he wasn't ready for this day. Flesh and bone and blood and sinew were not strong and eager. His mind was dulled, unable to focus sharply.
    He didn't need to see Lucy at the café. There was another one a block away. The food wasn't as good, but coffee was what he really wanted anyway.
    He'd seen a cartoon once of a man pulling his lower eyelid out and pouring a cup of coffee directly into the eye pouch. He remembered this as he sat in the café, bringing the first cup of coffee to his lips. On the table in front of him were four cigarettes. Last night, unable to sleep, nothing else to do, he went ahead and rolled himself twenty cigarettes.
    A number of people nodded to him, but nobody tried to sit down. He kept his expression grim as possible so nobody would be tempted. Carrying on a conversation would be too much of a strain at the moment.
    The day came alive despite his best efforts to keep it away. The people in the café headed for work; wagons rumbled on the street outside; a factory whistle blew; the Catholic church rang its bell.
    He got up, paid his bill, and forced himself to go to work.
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    "B oy, you look like shit, Tom."
    "Thanks, Bob."
    "I just mean you look plum wore out. Another romantic night?"
    "Afraid not. Just couldn't sleep."
    He spent the first fifteen minutes in the office going through the arrest sheets of the night deputy.
    "Not much there," Bob Carlyle said. "Lucky he was able to stay awake, a night as slow as that."
    One saloon fight. A lost dog (found). A wife-beating (husband arrested). Two public-drunkenness arrests.
    "See what you mean, Bob."
    Prine hadn't quite finished saying that when the door exploded inward and Mike Perry, the Neville ranch foreman, stood there with a Winchester in one hand and a Colt in the