Wagner growled, “If they’d only give me a few minutes alone with the sassy son of a bitch I’d get more than fool coin tricks out of him. Thanks to the sissy views you feds have about such methods, the son of a bitch is fixing to take a mess of secrets with him in a little while.”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “Don’t take it so hard. I got a swell confession out of an owlhoot one time without messing him up enough to matter. But the judge wouldn’t let us use it against him in court—you know how picky federal courts can be.” Then he shot a questioning glance at the guard and added, “I may as well have a look at him before they hood his fool face, if it’s all the same to you boys.”
One of the guards jumped a black checker with his red, laughed, and said, “Sure, go on back, Longarm. Our other boys are watching him too close for you to torture him serious.”
Longarm nodded and, knowing the way, strolled back to the cell blocks. Business had been slow of late, so most of the cells were empty. He found the cell he was looking for easily enough. A coal-oil lamp was burning on a box near a portly guard seated just outside the bars, with a sawed-off ten gouge resting across his fat thighs. His bullet head was lowered as close to his chest as the folds of his fat neck allowed. His eyes were closed. When Longarm howdied him, a sardonic voice said softly, “Don’t wake him up. He just now fell asleep.”
Longarm moved closer. He nodded to the short, shirt-sleeved figure standing inside the death cell and said, “I’m deputy Marshal Custis Long. It would be sort of dumb to ask who you might be.”
The condemned man laughed boyishly and replied, “The Great Costello, at your service,” and did a funny little dance he’d no doubt done on many a vaudeville stage, offering Longarm a full view of him, front, sides and back. Longarm wasn’t too impressed. He’d already been told the showman-turned-train-robber was sort of runty, and he was skinny as well. There was a hint of wiry strength in his almost girlish figure. The small hands attached to more muscular wrists likely accounted for some of the amazing things he was supposed to be able to do with handcuffs. The escape artist’s face was more masculine, or maybe just careworn. His black hair was starting to thin at the temples, leaving a sharp V hairline, and his face was a series of Vs from there on down. His heavy eyebrows formed a shallower but sort of satanic V, and his dark eyes swept up at the outer corners in an almost oriental way. His mouth was either smiling all the time or just another natural V. His jaw, a mite developed for such a small-boned gent, was of course another V.
When he saw Longarm didn’t seem amused by his flourishes, the Great Costello calmed down and asked what time it was.
Longarm hauled out his pocketwatch, held the dial to the dim light, and said, “Going on quarter after. Now, before we wake this other gent up, would you like to hand over the key or do I have to order a strip-search at gunpoint?”
The Great Costello sighed, reached above his own head, and materialized a key from thin air, asking, “How did you know?”
As Longarm took the key back he replied, “Lucky guess. It’s a good notion to sit farther back from the bars when you can’t stay awake on guard.” Then he tried the key in the lock, smiled despite himself, and added, “Now I want you to magic me the right key, Costello.”
The prisoner smiled back, called him a spoilsport, and gave him the three others he’d slipped from the sleeping guard.
Longarm made sure the impish prisoner hadn’t held out on him again. When one of the keys really turned in the lock he nodded in satisfaction, turned, and prodded the unconscious guard as he said, “Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty. It’s a good thing for you I’m not the officer of the day.”
The guard didn’t wake up, and when Longarm prodded him harder he began to roll off the chair. Longarm caught him in time to keep his skull from cracking on the cement floor. He lowered him to the same, more gently, felt the side of his fat neck to make sure he was still alive, and glanced up ominously at the innocently smiling prisoner to ask, “How did you do it?”
The Great Costello shrugged and asked, “Do I get a stay of execution if I tell you?”
“That’s not up to me to say and we both know it.”
“We professional magicians never give away the secrets of our craft. You’re pretty good, too, considering I don’t recall you as a member of our guild. A few more minutes and I might have shown you a really neat trick.”
Longarm rose to his feet, drew his .44, and fired it down the length of the cell block where the slug wouldn’t do too much damage. The Great Costello said, “All right. You’ve shown the audience your gun is loaded. What happens now?”
Longarm didn’t have to answer. For naturally, what happened next was the guards running back from out front, along with the railroad dick. As they all asked questions at once, Longarm shushed them with a wave of his smoking six-gun, and said, “For openers, this gent at my feet has been drugged and may need a doc. How about that, Costello?”
The prisoner shrugged and replied, “I’m an illusionist, not a killer. He’ll be all right, once he sleeps it off.”
Longarm turned back to the guards that were still functioning. “Carry him out front and see if smelling salts work. I’d still get a doc if I was you.”
One of them said, “We ought to have one any minute. They’ve borrowed an army surgeon to make sure of this other son of a bitch at six, and six won’t be soon enough for me!”
The Great Costello grinned out through the bars and told them he wouldn’t mind if they wanted to put things off until, hell, a month or more. The railroad dick growled, “Let me in with him. I want to see how sassy he can talk without no teeth.”
Longarm put his reloaded gun away as he soothed, “Let him enjoy his fool self, Wagner. Why don’t you give these other boys a hand with their heftier pard? I’ll hold the fort until we get more help with this ferocious runt.”
Wagner bitched about it, but even he could see the unconscious guard was a three-man load. As they toted the drugged man away, Longarm turned the vacated bentwood chair around, straddled it to face the cell door, and told the Great Costello, “I’ve been anxious to kill time. What other amusements do you have to offer as We await the rooster crow or the hangman, whichever gets here first?”
The prisoner said, “Well, I could show you some swell card tricks, if they hadn’t found that last deck of cards I had on me. Is it too much to ask just what you’ll be up to as I put on my last performance?”
“I’m here to make sure the final curtain comes down smooth. I have to confess I didn’t know, until just now, why they felt they needed extra help with you. How did such a slick cuss like you ever get captured, more than once?”
The Great Costello gripped the bars so he could shove one booted foot through them, saying, “This is no doubt the main reason I tend to stand out in a crowd.”
Longarm stared soberly down at the oddly shaped as well as expensive black boot on the man’s right foot. Its wearer said, “It’s not really a cloven hoof—That was MY press agent’s idea. But between a natural clubbed foot and my rather elfin Tuath Beag features, I suppose I was a natural for the part of Satan and-“
“Hold on,” Longarm cut in. “I understand all but that part about a Twabig. What are we talking about?”
The prisoner grimaced and said, “I didn’t think you looked Irish. The Tuath Beag, or Little People, were real. Long before the Celts arrived in the British Isles a smaller, darker race was in residence. Pockets of them still account for rather odd looking villagers in the Western counties and, of course, for the old tales of little people lurking about the bogs and under mushrooms. Clan Costello, of course, was Anglo-Norman to begin with. But many a Mayo maiden was pretty as well as small and dark, so …”