Now Playing: The Songbird of the West
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Episode One concluded with:
The laughter suddenly stopped. Laughing man had
heard Dehner approaching. As Rance drew closer to the lighted room, the door
was pushed open wider, creating a small carpet of light which also splattered a
murky tinge of yellow against the opposite wall.
The detective could hear anxious, erratic
breathing coming from inside the room. Someone was waiting for him.
Episode Two
Rance
Dehner stepped into the light and faced the man who had disrupted his sleep. He
was young, maybe twenty, and stood at a fraction under six feet. His hair was
sandy and his arms were muscular, ending in large hands. In one of those hands
he held a Colt .44. The gun was pointed at the floor.
“Howdy!”
He shouted at Rance.
“Hello.”
“My
name is Holt Conley. Ever heard of me?”
“No.
Can’t say I have.”
“Well,
you’re gonna! Say, you with the hotel?”
“No.”
“If
you were, I was gonna tell you not to worry none about that bullet in the
wall.” He pointed with the .44 toward a side wall. The gesture was casual. He
was using the gun as if it were a school teacher’s pointer.
“See,
I was practicing my draw. Gotta kill a man tomorrow. Know how much I’m gonna
get paid?”
“No.”
“Eight
hundred dollars! I ain’t foolin’.” Conley holstered his gun and pulled out a
billfold from a side pocket of his buckskin jacket. He yanked out a fistful of
bills and waved them at his companion. “Four hundred dollars! Get the rest of
it after the job’s done. Won’t have any problems payin’ to get that wall
fixed.”
As
he observed Holt Conley, the detective realized his earlier assumptions had
been wrong. The young man’s eyes and words did not speak of alcohol, but
madness.
Without
returning the money to his billfold, Conley stuffed both back into his pocket.
“When I checked into this hotel, I told ‘em to give me the finest room they
had. The clerk said he’d give me the room with the biggest window.” He pointed behind
himself with his thumb. “Bet you ain’t got a window that big in your room.”
“You’re
right!” Dehner noted that the window was unusually large for a hotel. The
curtains were red, thick, and clean, another unusual find.
Holt
Conley was obviously delighted by Rance’s concession. His eyes took on a
friendly, though condescending look. “I didn’t catch your name, friend.”
“Guess
I didn’t toss it to you. The name is Rance Dehner.”
The
friendliness left Conley’s face, replaced by an intense fire. “Well, now, we
got ourselves an interesting situation here, Rance Dehner.”
“What
do you mean?”
“You’re
the man I’ve been paid to kill.”
Monday: Episode Three
of The songbird of the West
