"Hell, he's at the Pink Lady," the man said. "He passed out in there. Bronklin and some others carried him upstairs."
By the time Willie reached the Pink Lady it was locked and dark. He rattled the door and got no response. He made his way round in back and had no better luck at the door there. There was a light in an upstairs room, and the window was wide open. Willie cupped his hands to his mouth to call but something warned him not to.
He ran back to the street, crossing it to the Big Barrel, where O'Hara's mule still stood at the hitch rail. He untied the animal, mounted, and rode back to the alley behind the Pink Lady. Shadows crossing the lighted window told him that somebody was moving around up there. Gently, he worked the mule close to the wall, directly under the window. He carefully knelt and then stood in the saddle. This brought the windowsill within reach. He grasped it, and as quietly as possible he pulled himself up.
When the last customer was out of the Pink Lady and the bartenders were washing glasses and tidying up, Pinky checked in the dealers. Each brought his cash in a canvas bag, which Pinky stowed into the heavy safe under the back end of the bar. First thing in the morning, Sam Lester would be in to count up.
Pinky unbarred the heavy front door to let the dealers and bartenders out, then he swung this closed behind the batwings and slid the bar into place. Alone now, he returned to the bar, tipped up a bottle and took a long drink. He picked up a lamp, the last light in the place, and trudged up to his room.
Keef O'Hara was breathing raspingly. He hadn't moved an inch, and Pinky chuckled softly at the potency of those knockout drops. Setting down the lamp, he moved to the end of the bed and took off O'Hara's shoes. This was a perfectly natural thing to do for a drunk you were taking care of, he assured himself. If the drunk happened to get crazy ideas in the night and wander around and fall out a window and be found with no shoes, well, nobody could criticize the man who had tried to make him comfortable.
Pinky edged around to the side of the bed and rolled O'Hara off it on his face. Dragging so big a man to the window and stuffing him through it was going to be heavy work, but he guessed he could manage it. First, though, there was the other matter to be taken care of. A man falling from a second story window might injure himself quite a bit, but you couldn't quite count on it.
"I don't want him killed," Mr. Jay had said. "There's no need for that. But I want him knocked off that job. Vickers' doctor isn't equipped to deal with anything complicated and he ships bad cases off to the Ellensburg hospital. That's where I want O'Hara to go."
Mr. Jay had gone on to explain that it would take weeks for Ben Vickers to find another man who knew how to set up a compressed-air operation properly. Well, you had to hand it to Mr. Jay for seeing a thing through. Soon as he got word that his hired hooligans had failed to wreck the boiler, he had come up with this plan to knock O'Hara off the job. A smart, smooth operator, Mr. Jay. A good star to hitch your wagon to. Only Pinky wished he hadn't looked so tired and upset....