bar was closed for business?
Big Belly rocked on the balls of his feet looking up
and down the bar. Saw a door leading to the back and
went down to it and tried the handle and when it
swung open he called again: “Wiss-key!”
But no one came and he grumbled to himself what
sort of son of a bitching goddamn two kinds of hell
was this place where a man couldn’t even trade a good
pistol for a drink of whiskey?
He never saw the man sitting in the shadows along
the wall with a gun pointed at him until it was too
late.
Jake found the Stone brothers coming out of Tall
John’s funeral parlor. They’d been going into every
business along Main Street asking after a stranger in
town—had any come in lately? His name is William
Sunday and he is a notorious killer of children and
has raped fifty white women and shot old men in their
beds while they slept and so on and so forth. And
we’re here to put an end to his reign of terror. It was
Zeb’s idea to make Sunday sound like the devil incar-
nate and instill fear in the listener hoping to gain
quick information.
Tall John saw them for what they were: goddamn
bounty hunters. What they didn’t know was that he
knew William Sunday from years back. He had
buried William Sunday’s wife and the man had pri-
vately paid him double his going rate for a first-class
funeral, asking only that he keep it secret that he’d
done so. William Sunday, shootist—and some said the
worst type of man there was—never showed the un-
dertaker anything but a quiet grieving for a wife lost.
“No, I never seen or heard of nobody like that here
in Sweet Sorrow,” Tall John had told the three. “I
mean if I had, I’d sure enough put you fellows on to
his whereabouts. This is a nice quiet town and we’d
not want any trouble, especially from notorious
killers of children and such.”
He could see their disappointment as they turned
and walked out.
“Hey,” Jake said, as he stood on the street.
They stopped as one.
“I found your man.”
They traded looks of suspicion.
“Yeah, where’s he at?”
“Not very far from here. Up the street at the old
saloon called the Pleasure Palace.” Jake nodded in the
direction of the place. He could see they weren’t buy-
ing it that easy. It was their nature to be suspicious;
men who hunted other men for a living generally
were wary. He anticipated their next question.
“How come you ain’t just arrested him and col-
lected that reward money for yourself if you know
where he is?” Zeb said.
“I’m not in the bounty-hunting business and he’s
not wanted around here for anything. You’d be doing
me a favor removing him from the town. But if you
boys don’t want him . . .”
“No, we want him, all right, and we aim to get
him.”
“What’s he doing?” Zack asked.
“What does a man usually do in a saloon?” Jake
said, and turned and walked away.
“What you think, Zeb?” Zack asked.
“I think it all smells like yesterday’s fish.”
“Well, we going to go get him, or what?”
“What choice do we have? That’s what we came
here for.”
The youngest, Zane, had already started walking
toward the direction the marshal had pointed out.
Zane wanted to finish it and get gone from his broth-
ers once they collected the reward money. He was
hearing voices in his head, figured it was God talking
to him, maybe angels, maybe the devil hisself. He
wanted to finish things up and go somewhere alone
and get the yoke of his sins from around his neck and
settle into a righteous life. He never again wanted to
do what they done to that woman, and he was sure
they would do the same thing again sooner or later.
The voices told him to go get that son of a bitch
William Sunday and kill him, mostly for what he did
by shooting that boy off a fence, but some for that re-
ward money, too.
“Look at that little cocker,” Zeb said of his kid
brother.
“Something’s wrong with him,” Zack said. “He’s
acting peculiar.”
“Maybe that thing with that woman took all the
shy out of him and finally made him into a real man.”
“Well, we better catch up or he’s liable to go in and
kill old Bill Sunday by his lonesome and try and claim
that reward money for himself.”
“Shit, that’ll be the day,” Zeb said as they hurried
off after their sibling.
Big Belly stood frozen. He could see a man sitting in
the shadows with just enough light on him to know
he was aiming his pistol at him.
“I just come in for a damn drink. I didn’t come in
to scalp nobody or fuck no white woman or nothing
