Longarm said, “Well, first of all, I want some supper, then I want a bottle of whiskey. Then I want some cigars or some cigarillos, whatever you’ve got, and then I want to speak to Mr. Brown.”
The Mexican said, “The supper, the cigarillos, the whiskey is okay. I don’t know about Mr. Brown. I don’t think he wants to talk to you.”
Longarm said, “Tell him I’ve got a few things he needs to know. If he’s going to go about this business, I want him, for my sake, to get it right. Now, you tell him I want to talk to him.”
Longarm could feel more than see the Mexican shrug and then suddenly the peephole was shut and the door looked as solid as before.
It was a long wait, but at the end of it Longarm was given an idea about how he would be served and trusted. There came a knock on the door, he got up off the bed and went over and waited for the peephole to be opened. He could see the older Mexican’s face. The man said, “When we come, senor, you go way yonder to the back of the room. Then you lay down on the floor and put your arms out and you make no move or we shoot you. You understand? You don’t look up, you don’t get up, you don’t speak, you don’t nothing. Okay? You understand?”
Longarm said, “Yeah.”
The Mexican said, “You stay there until we tell you get up. Understand? We come pretty quick.”
“Yeah,” Longarm said, mimicking the Mexican’s Spanish-accented English. “I understand.”
He thought they were a good long time about it. He looked at his watch when they came in the room. It had been coming seven o’clock and now it was nearly eight. It had been a full half hour since he’d placed his order for food, whiskey, smokes and the presence of Mr. Brown. Finally, there came a faint rapping on the big door. He got up off the bed and walked over. Apparently the peephole didn’t open from his side and they weren’t going to open it from theirs. He yelled out, “What!”
A muffled voice said, “You go where we told you to go. You lay down on you face and you shut you eyes. Do not move, senor, understand?”
“Yeah,” Longarm said disgustedly. “I understand. I’ve been to school. I understand English even if you don’t speak it.”
“You go.”
“I’m going.” He turned and walked to the far end of the room and lay down beside the bed, his face pressed against the cold tile, his arms spread out. He lay listening. He could hear the door latch being turned, then he heard the heavy door swing open. Then he could hear the sound of boots as at least one man and maybe a woman—by the soft sound of low-heeled shoes—could be heard. He heard the sound of furniture being moved and then came the smell to his nostrils of some kind of food. He couldn’t tell but it seemed to be chicken or beef or maybe both. All he cared about was his visitors getting the hell out of his room and letting him have a meal in peace.
He heard the footsteps retreat and this time he was certain it was one pair of boots and someone in a pair of soft leather shoes. He heard the heavy door close and the key turning in the lock and then heard a thump that he took to be a bar being placed across the outwardly-opening door. Finally, he heard the tiny sound of the peephole being opened and a voice saying, “Okay. Go eat. You got whiskey, you got cigars.”
Longarm got up off the cold floor. He yelled as the peephole was closing, “Hey! What about Brown? I want to speak to Mr. Brown.”
The peephole reopened. The voice said, “You eat now. Maybe talk Mr. Brown later. Okay?”
“No, damn it!” Longarm swore. “I want to see Mr. Brown. I want to tell him a few things. Hell, you guys are fooling around with my life here!”
The voice said again through the peephole, “You eat. Maybe talk later.”
The peephole shut.
Longarm said, “Damn, damn, damn.”
The smell of food was too inviting. A table that hadn’t been there before had been set up in front of one of the straight-backed chairs in the room. On top of it was a covered tray. He could see all kinds of dishes and he hurried across and lifted the cloth that covered it. There was a bottle of good whiskey and a steaming plate of something that he didn’t quite recognize and a pot of coffee and a cup. There was bread and butter. There was another dish that he guessed was some kind of flan, Spanish custard that tasted like caramel. He didn’t care. Right then, he would have eaten grubworms if he could have gotten some ketchup to put on them.
He had meant to loosen himself up first with a drink of whiskey but he was too hungry. He sat down in the chair and fell straight to on the main dish. It was some kind of mixture of chicken and beef and pork in some kind of a cream sauce with peas and carrots and he didn’t know what all in it. All he knew was that it was larruping good, and once he got started on it, the only time he stopped was to butter a chunk of bread or to take a sip of coffee.
He finished the dish in a very short time and would have eaten another if it had been available. As it was, he had to content himself with eating a dish of mashed potatoes full of jalapeno peppers and chopped-up onions. He had never had mashed potatoes that way but they came out pretty good. Whoever was doing the cooking was a pretty fair hand at it. It wasn’t exactly Mexican food but it was a bit spicy and wasn’t much like anything he had ever had before. He finished up by eating the caramel custard and then the last of the coffee. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and lit himself a cigarillo. Even in such a short time he could feel some of his strength returning as a result of the meal.
With his cigarillo drawing good, he sat there, sipping at coffee into which he had poured a little whiskey. It made a fine combination. A friend of his had once called putting whiskey in coffee a long sweetening and he had come to think of it that way ever since. He remembered that friend. He was dead now. His name had been Coy, Buck Coy, and he had been a fellow deputy marshal. But he had been killed four or five years past. He’d had a beautiful young wife named Molly whom Longarm had gone to comfort from time to time. In the end, she had found a way to comfort him perhaps more than he was helping her. She was a wonderful woman, and if he had ever thought of marriage, it would have been with Molly, but she had declared that she would never marry another law officer. She lived in a small house on the Oklahoma border outside of Wichita Falls, Texas. It hadn’t been six months since Longarm had visited her. The memory of their lovemaking gave sudden rise to a rush of passion inside him. He fought it down. He was in neither the place nor the situation to be thinking such thoughts. If he was to get out of this mess, he was going to have to direct every one of his faculties to finding some sort of a key to either his prison or the people who controlled his prison.
As he sat turning the situation over in his mind, he caught a slight movement at the door and turned his head in time to catch the peephole open. Mr. Brown’s voice said, “You want to talk to me?”
Longarm got up quickly. “Hell, yes, I want to talk to you. I want to explain a few things about what you think you might be able to accomplish by using me.”
Brown said, “All right. I’ll listen to you, not that it will do you any good. Wait where you are for thirty seconds until I back down the hall. Then you can come and talk to me through the peephole.”
Longarm did as he was told, and when he got up to the peephole, he tried to glance through to see if he could catch a glimpse of the man, but the hallway had been darkened. He could barely make out Mr. Brown’s dim form.
Brown said, “All right. Start talking.”
Longarm said, “First, one thing’s got me curious. How come you’re so damn careful not to let me see you? You’ve let me see these Mexicans but you keep yourself completely out of sight. You blindfold me, you sit in the shadows. How come?”