ONE
Red dust lapped at her feet as she approached the tavern. She’d passed it several times before when crossing the valley, but never had she entered its worn wooden doors, colored a sickly orange from dust covering it over the years. It seemed that everything around these parts fell to a similar condition, no matter how many times someone would run an old rag along their splintered surface.
She signed as deeply as she could, bandana covering the lower half of her face and all, a small drop of eagerness rippling in her chest at the thought of clearing the dirt and grime from her lungs with a glass of something strong. Oh, how she longed for a straight glass of whiskey, poured lazily in the heat, the sound of the wind sweeping the empty ground outside. It’d been a very long while since she’d had the luxury of experiencing something half as sweet.
She opened the cracked saloon doors and stepped in, the stench of rot hitting her senses before she could even reach up to take off her hat. She immediately pressed a hand against her bandana, covering her dry lips to stifle a gag that threatened to make the bar smell more disgusting, if that were even possible. Around the room lay several scattered bodies, slumped down like puppets cut from their strings. A small man wearing a dark suit sat in the corner booth, alone, only his (presumed to be his, at least) hat and tattered, brown leather suitcase graced his company. In the other back corner lay a blonde woman, face down, her clothes and the floor surrounding her stained a dull crimson from the bullet hole cut into her back. Closer to the entrance, three men lay in various positions around a table, their ragged button-downs eaten up with moth holes and their pistols dormant in slacked holsters. A woman, maybe a few years older than she, was draped over one of the men’s laps. It was likely enough that she’d been entertaining them until she dropped dead.
The woman paused her slow gait to the bar for a moment to consider the phrase, “dropped dead”. Nobody ever really drops dead, she thought, they all die one way or another. She nodded to herself, as if she’d thought of something new or profound. Just one of the side effects of being alone for so long, really. She’d only be reminded of how unaccustomed to society she’d grown on the occasions she’d meander into one town or another and try to make small chat with the locals. They’d look at her quizzically, untamed brows pointed in all kinds of directions, trying to decipher the awkward words which would come bumbling from her cracked lips.
Mayhaps that’s what exactly went down. Mayhaps theys all shot each other over some strange misunderstanding, she wondered as she made her way over to the table with the dead men and the draped woman, the dull ache in her throat subsiding against the pull of curiosity. She glanced over the table; the many littered glasses that spread over its piney surface, the old condensation rings imprinted forever on the wood, having too long been left upon it and now seeped in. One of the men had sagged onto the pine, his face having knocked over a glass long ago. Had she been more trained in health aid and whatnot, she might have been able to tell when they died. All she could say was that it’d been quite a long while, a week or two at least, that they’d been dead and lying there. The man on the table’s nails had begun to sag and slide off his fingers, his face pressed on the table in a grotesquely purple shade, eyes unblinking and bulging out of his broken skull, which had been caved in harshly, his bone given way to whatever he’d been struck with. Poor fellow, no good man deserves to have his skull beaten in like that. In that vein, mayhaps he wasn’t the best of men then, with his decomposing brain leaking out of his cracked head like spilled soup.
The woman’s stomach rumbled. Soup would be real nice just about now, but she doubted she’d much like consuming something just as hot as the wind that wrestled its way into her lungs. She wasn’t no smoker, but she could mighty pass as one, dirt and grime having coated her windpipe for some five years now. She’d settle for whatever booze the barman had kept stowed away, there wouldn’t be no soup nowhere for another fifty miles.
Behind the bar, which was even more stained and beaten in than the patron’s tables, lay the barman, flies buzzing ’round his corpse. But even with the stench of death looming pungently around the bar, she could still sniff out some harsh firewater. No smell could ever overpower that, much less hide the effect of it burning up one’s nostrils with a single whiff.
She’d found shelves of hot beer that lay lonely- clearly this saloon was running low on booze. No doubt the fault of the three men, as the short man in the back booth didn’t quite seem like the drinking type. Well, when he was alive, at least. It would be some more shifting around of miscellaneous brown bottles until she found the good stuff, nestled in the way back on the bottom shelf. No wondering about why that was; the bar dogs ’round these parts have a tendency to keep the expensive mixin’s hidden away. Rowdy customers, sneaky maids saying they’d be gone to air the paunch and steal away a good night’s earnings and the likes. Can’t have none of that in a bar that’s to be respected, though there’s nothing much respectable ’bout seven patrons dead all to pieces, now, with likely more bodies hidden in the rooms for rent on the second floor. Ain’t no way just seven dead’uns could stink this bad.
Bottle of whiskey in hand, she made her way to the back booth. Mayhaps the man was carrying some kind of valuables and such in his briefcase, or even some bona-fide gold. Wouldn’t that be lucky. Money was hard enough to come by as it is, even harder when one’s makin’ an honest living like a regular Alfalfa Desperado. Not that she was much for honest living, but every time she’d begin doubting her vocation and all the stigma it carried on, she’d think of her sister and reckon she’d done just fine for herself. Well, clearly not as fine as the nicely dressed man, but she’d soon enough be seeing his tier of living.
The man’s table was clean, no ringlets suggesting a drink and no cigar butts littered anywhere nearby. It would be an honest assumption to say he wasn’t drinking nor smoking, yet he was dead all the same. He’d taken a bullet to the brain, likely from the same person that killed the face-down man from the angling and such, but that sort of fiddling with the facts was best left for the real police, not some dust-covered wanderer who stumbled into a bar. Nevertheless, she’d put her mind to doing some cut-rate investigatin’ so that’s what she’d be doin’. She followed the man’s arms down to his hands, finding his dramatically expensive hat in his left hand and his right stuffed into his pocket. He must have really wanted whatever he’d been grabbing- likely drugs, ’specially ’round these parts- with his hand having broken the seam of the pockets of his suit (tailored, it looked, by the stitch work) to cram his small fist into the closed pocket space. She tugged gently at his wrist, slimy with every disgusting fluid what comes seeping out at his stage of death, pulling it gingerly out of the pocket in case there lie something dangerous in there. Like scorpions. She hated scorpions.
Instead, upon slowly digging into his pocket, she found a small note, with an even smaller inscription: “Full Pay. Noon delivery. Leave Aina. -B”. She could only speculate about the man’s own name, there were so many Bills, Billys and Bucks in these parts she didn’t know why people even bothered giving their sons first names anymore, everyone just used family names for clarity nowadays. Despite that immediate dead end, she recognized the name Aina just as quickly. There was a slim chance it would be the person she thought it was, but she knew that whatever suspicions she had would be put to rest by what was in the briefcase. Or, ideally, what wasn’t in the briefcase, if it was that Aina.
She now gave her full attention to the brown leather in front of her, stuffing the note in her back pocket. If nothing else, she might be able to strip the man of his clothes, give ‘em a few good washes and sell his possessions for a fair price. Not like he’d be doin’ much with ’em now, him being dead and all. She could probably swing near fifteen dollars for the briefcase alone, if she sold it right. Well, that would only be if she could pop it open and see if there wasn’t something more valuable inside.
She pulled her knife out from its modest sheath at her side- she’d fastened it herself many years ago, when she was still a young girl- and jammed it purposefully into the dip of one of the latches. It didn’t pop like she wanted, but with some less-than-graceful twists and shoves with her blade the latch finally snapped open. She did the same to the next one, though it required significantly less tasseling with than the first, and opened the briefcase, the smooth leather gentle against her calloused hands. Inside, she imagined, would be a bar or two of solid gold. Maybe a train ticket to get out of this dusty-ass desert. Even just a pair of quality working gloves was enough of a promise to get her heart fluttering. Her mittens had been worn thin with wear and working gloves cost folk an arm and a leg, especially when sellers know there’s a mighty wide demand for ’em.
Instead, she found an empty case.
“Damn,” she coughed out, her voice cracked and raspy from not having talked none in a day or two. She pulled down her bandana, hacked a few more times, and spat grey into the spitoon nearby. Bit nasty to think about, knowin’ it’d be sitting in a room o’ dead people for a long while, but there wasn’t no changing that now.
Empty case, huh? Well something must have been in it at one point or another. Smart hand would bet that whoever killed Short Stack would have taken his things as well. Smarter guess would say that whoever dumb enough to kill a person without robbing them wouldn’t have such a mental capacity to turn around and unlock that person’s briefcase. No, the short man was robbed from someone that knew him. Probably not the person he’d been delivering the paper slip to, there wasn’t no towns, gunslingers or even cattle drives this far out, much less people to make deliveries to. People only found themselves out this way when they’d be comin’ and goin’, never as a final destination, so that leaves out anybody he’d been working with (or for, even) to rob him. Mayhaps he delivered the contents to someone else for safekeeping or a quick buck.
No matter what the scenario, his bag was empty and someone else had what was inside. Damn indeed.
