Unbury Carol(62)

“Now, Bunny,” Garland said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “You’ve got me thinking.”

Bunny laughed. A single high-pitched clap, and the bartender turned his head.

At the bar Hickory made a slight moaning sound.

Bunny raised once more and then so did Garland and the men put their cards down. Bunny turned his over like an excited child, his thin hair wet on his head, his glasses reflecting the cards on the table.

His mouth smiled but his eyes did not and Garland shook his head as Bunny made sense of the cards.

“Bunny,” Garland said. “I done told you that pile was gonna look nice on my mantel.”

There was a moment of silence before Bunny slammed his fist hard on the table and pointed a finger at Garland and shook it. His face was tomato red. Then Hickory coughed again and Bunny, breathing hard, flattened his hair to his head, adjusted his glasses, and said, “Nice playing with you, gentlemen.”

He took his brown suit jacket from the back of his chair and walked to the bar.

Hickory stood half a foot taller than the Trail-watcher.

“What is it?” Bunny asked.

“Smoke.”

Bunny did not respond.

“You want a drink, Bunny?”

“I don’t drink.”

“He’s following James Moxie.”

“I know that, you idiot.”

“Hey, Bunny. I’m just—”

“When we do this, Hickory, when you come in here and I come over here and we get to talking about the things we talk about, just give me the facts and move on. Understand? You think I don’t know where Smoke and Moxie are?”

“No, sir, Bunny, I—”

“None of this chitchat. No explanations. Understand?”

“Hey, ease up, Bunny.”

The bartender approached and Bunny glared at him and he turned away again.

“She just wants a report, Bunny. Lafayette just wants—”

But Hickory stopped talking because Bunny was staring at him like he was gonna slap him.

“You know what to do, Bunny,” Hickory said. Then he downed his whiskey and nodded and left the tavern.

Bunny sat at the bar. The bartender brought him a lemonade.

Smoke.

Bunny knew Smoke was the craziest pig-shitter on the Trail. Most hit men were afraid of him. Nobody liked talking to him. It was impossible to have anything like a conversation with the man. In his deck, Smoke was the Two of Storms. Two for the two tin legs, Storms for the darkness surrounding the crazed hatless triggerman. James Moxie was the King of Bullets. Bunny liked the irony—a man becoming King of Bullets for not firing his gun. The picture cards were reserved for the big names, and though it’d been nine years since James Moxie rode the Trail, his was a hard name to lessen. But while the Trick in Abberstown might have been the greatest feat the Trail had ever known, James Moxie didn’t have the teeth some of the others did. There was something…soft about him to Bunny. And yet his name still chilled.

Mystery. Or mysticism.

Magic.

That King of Bullets had sat on the bottom of his deck for a very long time. Lately it’d been moving up, toward Harrows. And the Two of Storms had been following. Some ten cards away still, but certainly closing in.

Bunny laughed and downed the lemonade.

In a way he was the boss of these terrible men. All of them knew him. All of them…so tough. Yet not one would like the job of following Smoke on the Trail.

Smoke had some stories. And Bunny had heard them all.

He wiped his mouth with a napkin from the bar. He felt for the deck of cards in the pocket of his brown jacket, then slipped the jacket on and walked to the table where the three outlaws still drank.

“Bunny,” Bernie Garland said. “You look like you got something funny on your mind.”

Bunny glared at them. These three.

Sometimes outlaws didn’t like being watched. Smoke surely wouldn’t. But these bastards needed babysitting. Why, if a man like Edward Bunny wasn’t around, the Trail would be mad carnage chaos and only the law would see any of the money.

“What is it, Bunny?”

Bunny just stared at them, sweat dripping down his cheeks. Then his mouth smiled and his eyes did not, and his black shoes clacked on the tavern’s wood floor as he exited through the saloon doors.

The sun was out in Portsoothe, but not very high. Smoke was near. Bunny knew this because Bunny knew more about these pig-shitters than any of them wanted him to.

He headed up Portsoothe Street, thinking of the gradual climbing of the slow-moving Two of Storms and that long-slumbering King of Bullets.

As the sun made waxy his sweating face, Bunny could practically feel the pair moving in his pocket. Lafayette wasn’t the only one who wanted to see to it that they collided.





Farrah hadn’t stopped drinking since finding Carol on the slab in the cellar. Clyde was doing all he could to calm her, to help her, but the only thing that was making any progress was a series of bottles. And yet she wasn’t drunk. Not entirely. As if the horror of seeing her lady die, and the confusion of seeing her so lifelike in the storm room, refused to be washed away.

She stepped out of the general store, a fresh bottle of whiskey in hand, and saw Sheriff Opal rise from a bench along the boardwalk.

“Evening, Missus Darrow.”