Jay smiled. Who would have ever thought of a firewall as a tobacco-chewing, lyin’ old fart who looked like a forty niner?
Jay was almost to the Wells Fargo depot when a big, swarthy black-haired man with a drooping handlebar mustache and a pair of holstered guns stepped out into the street in front of him.
“Hold up there, pard.” There was a definite air of menace about the man, who wore a black suit over his boiled white shirt and tie, and a derby hat instead of a cowboy hat.
Jay looked at the man. The guns he wore weren’t Colt.45 Peacemakers like Jay’s; they looked like Smith and Wesson Schofield .44’s, top-loaders with seven-inch barrels.
Powerful and accurate, damn fine weapons, but slow from the holster.
When it came to fast draws, size mattered.
Shorter was better…. Jay dismounted and led his horse to another hitching post, this one next to the whorehouse. Four horses were already there. There were three large windows on the second story of the big house, and three or four pretty women in colorful petticoats and underwear leaned out of the open windows to look down at the two men in the street.
Jay tipped his hat to the women.
“Afternoon, ladies,” he called out.
The women tittered. One of them waved.
“Come on up, Marshal!” Jay grinned, then turned back to face the man in the derby hat. He moved away from his horse so Buck wouldn’t be directly behind him.
“What can I do for you, amigo?” Jay said.
“Fact is, I don’t like lawmen. I think mebbe you need to turn around and head back where you came from.” The big man cleared his coat back from his holstered revolvers.
“It would be good for your health.” “You got a name?” Jay said.
“Name is Bartholomew Dupree. Folks call me Black Bart,” the man said.
Well, of course they do.
Jay dropped his hand next to the butt of his Colt.
“Sorry, Bart, I got business at the stage depot. Why don’t you just stand aside and let me pass?” “Can’t do that. Marshal.” He waggled his fingers, loosening them.
Definitely a firewall, and a tough one. So Jay was on the right track; his quarry had passed this way. And he wasn’t about to give up because there was a roadblock. Lonesome Jay Gridley hadn’t gotten to where he was by accident. He was the best.
“Make your play then,” Jay said.
Bart went for his guns. He was fast–but Jay was faster.
The.45 spoke a hair before the twin.44’s, a throaty roar, belches of thick white smoke erupting around tongues of orange fire.
Speckles of unburned propellant stung Jay’s hand.
He recocked the big single-action revolver, but it wasn’t necessary.
Bart dropped to one knee, guns falling from his suddenly nerveless fingers, then toppled to one side.
Dust splashed from the street, joining the stink of black powder smoke.
Jay uncocked, then holstered his gun and walked over to where Bart lay on his side in the dirt.
Got him right between the eyes. Jay noted with satisfaction.
Teach you to mess with Lonesome Jay. Pard.
He thought he heard music coming from the saloon behind him, a kind of echoing wah-wah-wah sound that was more synthesizer than upright piano.
He grinned. Too many Eastwood movies when he’d been a kid.
A dark-haired man in a gray banker’s suit and steel-rimmed spectacles came out of the arcade next to the house of ill repute and walked to where Jay stood looking down at the corpse.
“Perhaps you might have need of my services, friend?” He tendered a business card.
“Peter Honigstock, Attorney-at-Law,” it said.
Jay turned so his marshal’s badge was visible to the lawyer.
“Nope. Just the undertaker.” “Ah,” Honigstock said.
He turned back, nodded at the soiled doves in the whorehouse, then headed for the stage depot. And after that, he was gonna mosey on back to the sheriff’s office and have a few words with old Gabby.
The lyin’ bastard.
9 Tuesday, December 21/, 3:25 P.m. Washington, D.c.
In his study at home, John Howard leaned back in his chair, looked away from the terrain maps of the Pacific Northwest and glanced at his watch. He realized he was going to have to leave for the airport to pick up Nadine’s mother in about five minutes. The idea of fighting rush hour traffic made him be feel even more tired than he already felt, which was plenty tired enough.
He didn’t know what the problem was, or why he was so worn out lately.
He couldn’t get a pump working the weights, was winded so bad after a couple miles into his usual run he had to slow down almost to a walk.
And he wasn’t sleeping real well either– dropping off early, tossing and turning all night, then waking up tired and groggy. What it felt like was overtraining, but he hadn’t been working that hard, no more than maintenance stuff. And there wasn’t anything pressing at work: some training exercises in the high desert in Washington state coming up, and some winter work in the snow, in the hills of West Virginia, in mid-January. Other than that, nothing.
Could he be getting old?
No, he was only forty-two. He knew guys ten years older who could run him into the ground; it couldn’t be some thing that simple.
No? Some folks age faster than others, don’t they, Johnny boy? Remember your twentieth high school reunion? Some of the guys you graduated with had so much gray hair and so many wrinkles they looked old enough to be your father.
You’d pass them on the street, you’d never know who they were.
Maybe your clock is running fast…. Howard shook his head. He didn’t need to be going down that road, thank you very much. He didn’t even have any gray hair yet, and he looked better than he had at twenty, with more muscle. Maybe he just needed some vitamins.
He pushed away from the chair and stood. It wasn’t going to do anybody any good sitting here thinking about being old, not when his mother-in-law would turn into a black volcano spewing hot bile if he was late fetching her. That woman had a mean streak on her, and a mouth to go with it. He’d best get moving.
Nadine was in the kitchen, working on supper, and Howard started in that direction, to tell her he was fixin’ to take off.
Might as well stir up Tyrone while he was at it.
The boy was in his room. But instead of being glued to the computer chair as he usually was, he was lying on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
“You okay, son?” “I’m fine.” “About time to go pick up Nanna.” Tyrone turned his head slightly.
“I think I’ll stay here.” “Excuse me?” “I mean, I’ll see Nanna when she gets here.” Howard stared at his son as if he had suddenly sprouted horns and a tail. Not go to pick up his grandmother? What happened to the boy who used to chant, “Nanna! Nanna!
Nanna!” over and over, bouncing all over the car the entire way to the airport? Who’d practically knocked the old bat down, hugging her and dancing around like he was demented?
“She’ll wonder where you are.” “She’s gonna be here for a week.” It was that girl, of course. Girls turned boys into adolescent beasts struggling to crawl out of a mud pit of raging hormones.
And Tyrone was officially a teenager now, becoming quiet, sullen, withdrawn, and about as communicative as a fence post.
“You can have your calls forwarded–” Howard began.
Abruptly, Tyrone sat up, then stood.
“I’m going to the mall,” he said.
Howard felt a stab of anger.
“Wait just a second, mister.
You don’t tell me what you’re doing; you ask’.” Tyrone came to attention, executed a crisp, snappy salute, and said, “Yes, sir.
Colonel Howard, sir!” Rage enveloped Howard. He had to restrain himself from reaching out and slapping the boy. He was tired, he didn’t feel great, and he was about to spend an hour and a half going to and from the airport to pick up a woman who had never liked him and who had never been shy about telling him he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. What he sure as hell didn’t need was lip from a kid who thought his old man was a fossil who’d ridden to school on the back of a grass-eating dinosaur.
For a few seconds, Howard didn’t say anything. The rage abated just a hair as he remembered he’d once been young and stupid himself, sure that his parents couldn’t begin to recall through their aged fog how it had been to be young. But even so, if he’d pulled his father’s chain the way Tyrone had just pulled his… his Howard had a temper. Once, when he’d been about six or seven, his little brother Richie had snuck up behind him while they were playing cowboys and Indians and clonked him on the head with the butt of his toy revolver, to knock him out like they did on television. It hadn’t knocked him out, but it had sure pissed him off. He’d bellowed like an angry buffalo, He turned around, and chased Richie across the street toward their house, fully intending to brain the little bastard when he caught him.