I could see the Hotel Tremaine’s sign over a narrow door between two store fronts, both empty — an old two-story walkup. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be a sleazy cotton lace and its bedsprings would stick into your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine, I had slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might yet get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.
The beer parlor was on my side of the street. I went back to the Chrysler and got inside it while I moved my gun to my waistband, then I went along the sidewalk.
There was a red neon sign — BEER — over it. A wide pulleddown shade masked the front window, contrary to the law. The place was just a made-over store, half-frontage. I openedthe door and went in.
The barman was playing the pin game on the house’s money and a man sat on a stool with a brown hat on the back of his head reading a letter. Prices were scrawled in white on the mirror back of the bar.
The bar was just a plain, heavy wooden counter, and at each end of it hung an old frontier.44 in a flimsy cheap holster no gunfighter would ever have worn. There were printed cards on the walls, about not asking for credit and what to take for a hangover and a liquor breath, and there were some nice legs in photographs.
The place didn’t look as if it even paid expenses.
The barkeep left the pin game and went behind the bar. He was fiftyish, sour. The bottoms of his trousers were frayed and he moved as if he had corns. The man on the stool kept right on chuckling over his letter, which was written in green ink on pink paper.
The barkeep put both his blotched hands on the bar and looked at me with the expression of a dead-pan comedian, and I said: «Beer.»
He drew it slowly, raking the glass with an old dinner knife.
I sipped my beer and held my glass with my left hand. After a while I said: «Seen Lou Lid lately?» This seemed to be in order. There had been nothing in any paper I had seen about Lou Lid and Fuente the Mex.
The barkeep looked at me blankly. The skin over his eyes was grained like lizard skin. Finally he spoke in a husky whisper. «Don’t know him.»
There was a thick white scar on his throat. A knife had gone in there once which accounted for the husky whisper.
The man who was reading the letter guffawed suddenly and slapped his thigh. «I gotta tell this to Moose,» he roared. «This is right from the bottom of the bucket.»
He got down off his stool and ambled over to a door in the rear wall and went through it. He was a husky dark man who looked like anybody. The door shut behind him.
The barkeep said in his husky whisper: «Lou Lid, huh? Funny moniker. Lots a guys come in here. I dunno their names. Copper?»
«Private,» I said. «Don’t let it bother you. I’m just drinking beer. This Lou Lid was a shine. Light brown. Young.»
«Well, maybe I seen him sometime. I don’t recall.»
«Who’s Moose?»
«Him? That’s the boss. Moose Magoon.»
He dipped a thick towel down in a bucket and folded it and wrung it out and pushed it along the bar holding it by the ends. That made a club about two inches thick and eighteen inches long. You can knock a man into the next county with a club like that if you know how.
The man with the pink letter came back through the rear door, still chuckling, shoved the letter into his side pocket and strolled to the pin game. That put him behind me. I began to get a little worried.
I finished my beer quickly and stood down off the stool. The barkeep hadn’t rung up my dime yet. He held his twisted towel and moved it back and forth slowly.
«Nice beer,» I said. «Thanks all the same.»
«Come again,» he whispered, and knocked my glass over.
That took my eyes for a second. When I looked up again the door at the back was open and a big man stood in it with a big gun in his hand.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there. The gun looked at me. It looked like a tunnel. The man was very broad, very swarthy. He had a build like a wrestler. He looked plenty tough. He didn’t look as if his real name was Magoon.
Nobody said anything. The barkeep and the man with the big gun just stared at me fixedly. Then I heard a train coming on the interurban tracks. Coming fast and coming noisy. That would be the time. The shade was down all across the front window and nobody could see into the place. The train would make a lot of noise as it went by. A couple of shots would be lost in it.
The noise of the approaching train got louder. I had to move before it got quite loud enough.
I went head first over the bar in a rolling dive.
Something banged faintly against the roar of the train and something rattled overhead, seemingly on the wall. I never knew what it was. The train went on by in a booming crescendo.
I hit the barkeep’s legs and the dirty floor about the same moment. He sat down on my neck.
That put my nose in a puddle of stale beer and one of my ears into some very hard concrete floor. My head began to howl with pain. I was low down along a sort of duckboard behind the bar and half turned on my left side. I jerked the gun loose from my waistband. For a wonder it hadn’t slipped and jammed itself down my trouser leg.
The barkeep made a kind of annoyed sound and something hot stung me and I didn’t hear any more shots just at the moment. I didn’t shoot the barkeep. I rammed the gun muzzle into a part of him where some people are sensitive. He was one of them.
He went up off me like a foul fly. If he didn’t yell it was not for want of trying. I rolled a little more and put the gun in the seat of his pants. «Hold it!» I snarled at him. «I don’t want to get vulgar with you.»
Two more shots roared. The train was off in the distance, but somebody didn’t care. These cut through wood. The bar was old and solid but not solid enough to stop .45 slugs. The barkeep sighed above me. Something hot and wet fell on my face. «You’ve shot me, boys,» he whispered, and started to fall down on top of me.
I wriggled away just in time, got to the end of the bar nearest the front of the beer parlor and looked around it. A face with a brown hat over it was about nine inches from my own face, on the same level.
We looked at each other for a fraction of a second that seemed long enough for a tree to grow to maturity in, but was actually so short a time that the barkeep was still foundering in the air behind me.
This was my last gun. Nobody was going to get it. I got it up before the man I was facing had even reacted to the situation. He didn’t do anything. He just slid off to one side and as he slid a thick gulp of red came out of his mouth.
I heard this shot. It was so loud it was like the end of the world, so loud that I almost didn’t hear the door slam towards the back. I crawled farther around the end of the bar, knocked somebody’s gun along the floor peevishly, stuck my hat around the corner of the wood. Nobody shot at it. I stuck one eye and part of my face out.
The door at the back was shut and the space in front of it was empty. I got up on my knees and listened. Another door slammed, and a car motor roared.
I went crazy. I tore across the room, threw the door open and plunged through it. It was a phony. They had slammed the door and started the car just for a come-on, I saw that the flailing arm held a bottle.