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Pepper.”
    He laughed. “Sit down and have a beer.”
    Clint Pepper said, “I saw you talking to Flannery’s wife. She’s one nice piece of tail.”
    “She’s going to kill him someday, though,” Connelly said. “You know how you read in the papers sometimes a wife goes crazy and shoots her husband? I almost thought she was going to do that last night.”
    “Yeah, I heard you had dinner at their place,” said. “Heard you said a lot of nice things about me.”
    The name of the saloon was Thirsty. We were probably the only people in the place who weren’t talking about the coming storm.
    Connelly had two schooners of beer in front him. Saved him a trip to the bar for the next one.
    He shoved one over to me. “Drink up. And wasn’t the one running you down, Noah. You know me better than that. I love you like a brother. It was Pepper here. He was the one doing the dirt.”
    Pepper, the dapper master of the sneer, said, “I admit it, Ford. I’d had too much to drink and actually heard myself say a few unkind things about you.”
    “Downright uncharitable things,” Connelly said.
    “The first thing this morning, guess what I did?” Pepper asked. “I went straight to church and asked the priest to hear my confession. I told him that I had said several terrible things about the great Noah Ford.”
    “And Clint here’s not even a Catholic.”
    I shoved my beer back at Connelly and let them have their laugh. When they were done amusing themselves, I said: “I don’t drink alcohol anymore.”
    “You’re a regular altar boy,” Connelly said.
    “I have a letter back in my office in D.C. from a man named Milt Seltzer. And you know what it says?”
    Nothing dramatic happened. They didn’t glance at each other and start acting nervous. But Pepper did gulp and Connelly got that tic in his eye that came when pressure was suddenly put on him.
    “Mr. Seltzer says that he’s willing to testify in a court of law that two federal agents named Connelly and Pepper who were supposed to be investigating the murder of a federal judge—who just happened to be Mr. Seltzer’s brother—these two agents took a bribe to change the findings of their investigation and conclude that the killer was still unknown. Mr. Seltzer hired a Pink to investigate and the Pink got the wife of the killer to swear to the fact that he had murdered the judge because of a court ruling and that he paid these agents off to file a false report. Now that’s something that not even a United States senator could protect a federal agent from. Now Ihaven’t quite decided how to handle this letter. Maybe it’s something the boss should see.”
    Pepper said, “You always were quite the yarn-spinner, Ford.”
    Connelly said, “You should be a writer, you’re so good at yarn-spinning, Ford.”
    “So you wouldn’t mind if I wired Washington and told the boss where he could find the letter in my desk?”
    This time they did glance at each other. This time they did look a little nervous.
    “How would you have happened to come by a letter like that?” Pepper asked.
    “I happened to have worked with that judge once. He was a fine man. His brother remembered me.”
    A pair like this, they always had to have in the backs of their minds the fear that someday, some way, something they did, something they had probably put clean out of their minds, would come back on them.
    And there it was.
    I didn’t have any letter. I hadn’t known that particular judge. But another agent, who had done follow-up on the case, had told me his suspicions. Those suspicions were coming in damn handy.
    They were putting on another show for me. Anybody who knew anything about these two knew that they rarely took prisoners. If it was a woman involved, they raped her before they killed her. And if it was a man, they humiliated him before they killed him.
    “I know you boys are going after Chaney. I just want to make sure he comes back alive.”
    “Nobody said anything about