Lovell jumped up, his cheeks scarlet and asked him what the hell he meant by a crack like that. Bender told him it meant any thing he wanted it to mean.
His enmity was brutal and open and Lovell choked with rage. For a minute it seemed that the old over-ripe hatred between police chiefs and Rangers would come to a head. Lovell was excited but Bender was impassive and relaxed because he knew the Rondora chief wouldn't start anything. To have done that would have been mutely to testify to something Bender already suspected—that he was on Botchey Miller's payroll.
Lovell finally decided there wasn't anything he wanted to do about it. He said, compressed: “All right... all right...” and walked out, slamming the door.
For a moment Bender stood there looking at the door, the inside of him rising and falling slowly like an infallible barometer that recorded trouble close at hand. With a lurch the inside of him settled and he felt heavy... and in the next moment energy flowed into him as if he had drained it from the floor.
He rushed to the door, flung it open and went downstairs. The driver was waiting.
“Let's go!” he said.
Three miles out on the Amarillo road stood a two-storied, high-gabled house alone in the open country. Once upon a time it had been a pretentious dwelling but now it made no pretense. It was a mile beyond the frontier of the drilling rig lights.
This was Pack Patton's notorious dive—the Fishtail Club and it was lighted from top to bottom, making no effort to hide the secret of what went on inside. It was pretty generally known that in the basement was a big still and that upstairs were rooms and gambling apparatus.
Bender went up the wide front stairs two at a time but at the front door he was met by three men who had their hats off. One of them, heavy-set and with thick jowls, intercepted him as he started inside and told him he'd have to show his card. The other two men crowded around him close.
Bender said he didn't have a card and asked him who the hell he was. The man replied that his name was Patton.