“Exactly,” Nesmith said.
For a second, habit made Clay look at Ezra. He got a shrug as the ball was tossed back to him. This was his play, good or bad. Fuck it. Gut instinct had led him astray before, but what the hell else did he have.
“Buchanan wasn’t working alone,” he said. “He had a woman—an ex-stripper with a shoulder tattoo?”
Nesmith shrugged. “We didn’t move in the same circles,” he said. “I’m glad he was loved?”
“Well,” Clay said. “She’s the one who got him killed. Her and her partner. They shot Buchanan in there—” He pointed over his shoulder at the restrooms. “—then set TJ up for it.”
“TJ said you did it.”
“I didn’t.”
“That is what you’d say,” Nesmith pointed out, “if you had done it.”
Clay clenched his jaw on his irritation for a second and took a deep breath. He didn’t have time for this, but he needed to get Nesmith on-side.
“Fisher had us checked out,” Ezra said. “We might be second-rate, but we aren’t amateurs. If we wanted Buchanan dead, we would have waited until he made the next check-in and we weren’t the obvious suspects. They told TJ that Clay had set him up to get him to run, and then they called you and told you where to find him. Right?”
“You blamed our neighborhood crooked cop,” Clay said. “But I fed you that one. Right?”
Nesmith finally lifted his hand off the gun. He leaned back and absently pressed his thumb into the palm of his hand as he glanced between them.
“It was a woman,” he said. “Could have been this Jones, for all I know. OK. So Buchanan stabbed Fisher in the back, ran off with his mistress, and then—I guess—got stabbed in the back himself. That’s… tidy.”
Clay shook his head. “You’d be surprised how untidy it’s got,” he said. “But our offer? We give you the mistress and her partner. If anyone knows where that money got to, it’s them.”
“And in return?”
“Three things,” Clay said. “A clean slate for us—”
“That’s up to Fisher,” Nesmith said immediately. “But I think he’d be amenable.”
“And you pull the men you’ve got watching the motel out of there,” Clay said. “You can give me the room number if you’re feeling generous.”
“What motel?” Nesmith asked calmly, his face unreadable.
“I know Buchanan wasn’t at the Lodge, so that leaves the Kettlebottom Motel and the Motel 6 on the road out of town,” Clay said. “It’ll cost me fifty bucks and some time to find out which. I can live with that, but you want this deal? I don’t want your people there when I drive up to whichever it is.”
Nesmith finished the beer. He set the bottle down on the table and picked up his gun to tuck it away under his jacket.
“That’s two,” he said. “What’s the third? You want me to cut TJ loose?”
Huh. That was awkward. Clay glanced over at Ezra, who shrugged.
“TJ stabbed me,” he said as he extended his arm over the table to display the dressing. “He got himself into this; he can get himself out of it.”
“What we need is four hours grace,” Clay said. “To clean up some loose ends.”
“Two hours grace,” Nesmith said. He stood up and shot his sleeve back to check the time. “That will give me time to check with Mr. Fisher about the clean slate. He will have his own conditions, of course, but I would put money on one of them being ‘keep your mouth shut.’ So bear that in mind. That said… I’ll call my people off the Kettlebottom. Give it ten minutes and they’ll be out of there.”
Relief wadded up like gauze in the back of Clay’s throat. He coughed and nodded.
“I’ll take it from there,” he said.
“Good luck,” Nesmith said. He paused and then added pointedly, “Because you donotget a second chance to let Fisher down.”
Nesmith turned and headed out. He stepped fastidiously over the bloody trail that his thug had left behind him. He stopped at the door and looked back.
