blocking. He laughed.
“You done broke the form!” Billy said.
“I believe I did.” He tossed the ruined hat onto the bar. “And it’s an improvement, you ax me.”
“You owe me a hat. I want six bits from you!”
“Six bits? Sheeit, you could buy a rack of hats like this fo’ six bits! Ain’t worth a nickel.”
Billy, who might have been passing drunk but not slowed from it, reached out and grabbed Stack’s Stetson and pulled it off. “Well, I reckon we trade, then.”
“Gimme back my hat,” Stack said.
“Nossuh, I ain’t gonna, till you give
“You will give me my hat back, or I will blow out your fuckin’ brains!”
“That’s what you say.”
Jay watched the next part carefully. It was a lesson in escalation of violence—and why drinking and arguing in a bad man’s bar was not a good idea.
Stack pulled a blue-steel Smith & Wesson .44 revolver from his coat pocket and clouted Billy Lyons upside the head with it.
Billy didn’t speak as he bounced off the bar and came back glaring at Stack. He hadn’t been hit that hard, but certainly it was hard enough to both stun and piss him off.
Things got real quiet in the saloon.
“You give me my hat
Lyons, still holding the hat in his left hand, jammed his right hand into his pocket, where, Jay knew, he had the borrowed knife.
He said, “You cockeyed son of a bitch, I’m gon’ make you kill me!”
There was a general stampede for the door as most of the two dozen patrons decided at that moment they had pressing business elsewhere. Men did pull guns in that part of town frequently and they did go off. That Christmas Day, there would be at least four or five other shootings in bars, poolrooms, and whorehouses within a couple of miles. Some of the shooters weren’t very good at it, and innocent bystanders had been known to collect bullets more than once. Bad enough to be killed for something you did; worse to be killed by a stray bullet by accident. Dead, either way.
Stack took three steps backward and pointed the gun at Billy. Jay stayed where he was.
Stack shot Billy. Just the one time, in the abdomen. The noise was very loud in the saloon, and the gray smoke that belched to join that of the tobacco had that unmistakable gunpowder stink.
Billy Lyons fell back against the bar, lurched to one side, still clutching Stack’s Stetson.
Nobody said anything. The few patrons and bartenders still there stood frozen. Nobody wanted to move and become a target.
Billy sagged against the bar, and dropped the hat. Stack stepped up to him. “I told you. You give me back my hat!” And with that, he bent down, retrieved the Stetson, and put it on.
Lyons slid lower. “You done killed me,” he said.
“You took my hat. It’s on you.”
With that, Stack put his gun away and walked out.
Billy, Jay knew, would linger on for a time. They would take him to the infirmary, and later to a hospital, where he would pass away at about four in the morning. Not a testament to his intelligence. What kind of man refuses to give a swiped hat back to its owner when staring down the barrel of a gun?
Well, the kind soon to be a dead man . . .
Stack, Jay knew, went to one of his houses—he had a couple—reloaded his .44 and stuck it in a drawer and, apparently unconcerned, went to bed. That was where the local police found both Stack and his gun at about three A.M., an hour or so before Billy Lyons died.
That was the true story of how Stagger Lee shot Billy.
No gambling late, Lyons didn’t win all Stack’s money, and while Lyons did have three children by a local woman, he wasn’t married to her or anybody else, so most of the versions of the songs that came later got it wrong. It was in St. Louis, not Memphis, nor Chicago, nor New Orleans. And how Stack Lee Shelton became any kind of hero after that was a puzzle to Jay. Cold-blooded murder over a hat didn’t seem like the stuff of heroic legend to Jay.
Stack Lee was tried twice for the crime. The first trial ended in a hung jury, with Stack’s white lawyer arguing self-defense, due to the knife in Billy Lyons’s pocket. But the lawyer, an alcoholic, died shortly thereafter following a drinking binge, and Stack’s next attorney apparently wasn’t as good as his first. The second trial, he was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years. After a brief parole, he was incarcerated again, and died in the Missouri State Prison Hospital, on March 11, 1912, of tuberculosis.
One of the most accurate of the songs that came from the Missouri riverboat roustabouts around the end of the nineteenth century had a final verse that Jay liked:If you evah in St. Louis
And you goes to the Curtis Club
Well, every step you walk in
You walk in Billy Lyons’s blood
Talkin’ ’bout a dead man
Kilt by mean ole Stagolee . . .
Jay watched the bartenders and bystanders haul Billy Lyons out of the club. What had he learned here? Well, not as much as he’d hoped, but at least it had been interesting. And maybe if he ever got tired of working for Net Force, he could go into the entertainment biz. He could tell and show a pretty good story. There was always a market for scenario-builders of his caliber.
Shoot, maybe even
18
It had been going so well, Carruth thought. Done and on the way out, and then, out of nowhere, that X-factor appeared, and royally screwed it all up. Some guy with insomnia or having to walk out a cramp or sneak a smoke, whatever, and all of a sudden he’s yelling and lights are coming on. . . .
Carruth had shut him up, but the cure—a round from his BMF revolver—was worse than the disease. He hadn’t thought, he had just pulled the piece and cooked, almost instinctively.
The gun was like a bomb going off, and anybody who was a light sleeper certainly sat up in bed when he heard that honker’s roar.
Now, as their truck careened around an S-curve two miles away from the base, a Hummer full of MPs chasing it, Carruth realized they were in deep trouble. Oh, they might outrun the MPs, but there was such a thing as radio, and when the Army got its act together, they would start calling for help. Yeah, they wanted to take care of their own business, but if Carruth and his men got away, their heads were gonna roll, and that was more important.
A roadblock of state cops sure wasn’t going to be helpful to Carruth’s situation.
Lying in the back of the truck, Stark wheezed around the M-16 round that was probably lodged in one of his lungs. Dexter had slapped a pressure patch on the hole to stop the bubbling, and hit Stark with a syringe of
