Free The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy

out.”
    “Most businessmen I know don’t wind up shooting no one.”
    “Everybody’s different.”
    “What you aim to do?”
    Tull aimed to put a stop to any nonsense between Mary Jane and Aunt Lou, and he aimed to charge Mary Jane a tax for the inconvenience of it all. The way Tull figured it, the man owed him about five thousand dollars. Call it a whiskey tax. He’d earned more over the years, and maybe Tull shouldn’t have let it go on so long, but there you go. The five thousand was a rough number Tull calculated after looking into Mary Jane’s expenses and spending. Helped to be in good with the town banker. Based on the numbers the banker and Tull came up with, Mary Jane had at least that much sitting around in a mattress somewhere, and Tull intended to collect it. Didn’t really care about Mary Jane’s life. Mary Jane had watched Ernest and Lee die for their part in the transgression, and he’d run off scared. He could keep running, far as Tull cared, but that five thousand, that was a chunk of change.
    He parked the Studebaker and stood smoking beside it and took in the scene: the slope of the garden down toward the woods, the logging trail to the bottoms, the crest of trees across the way where the land rose again from its trough. Though it was only the end of August, the tulip poplars had already yellowed from the heat and the late-summer thirst. In the garden by the house, beans and squash had browned on the vine, the peppers had been scorched red, and the tomato vines were bent over so that the fruit wasted away in the dirt. And they thought they could run a whiskey empire.
    She stepped onto the porch, shouted, “What you want?”
    “Mary Jane around?”
    “Hell no he ain’t. What you want?”
    “I want to find Mary Jane.”
    “He ain’t here, so go on away.”
    “Maybe you can help me,” he said. He walked up to the porch where she stood, still holding the screen open. “I believe he had some money for me. I just came to get it, and then I’ll leave you be.”
    “We don’t have no money.”
    She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun and squinted at him. Tull could see she might have once been pretty. Didn’t have the weary, worn-out look most of these farm wives had. Lord knew her life had been hard enough, especially now that she was in an affairwith a bumbling entrepreneur like Mary Jane Hopewell, but Tull had come to believe there was a strength to some people, and you either had it or you didn’t. Something you were born with, like integrity, the ability to endure. In rough times, some folks picked themselves up while others wallowed in their failures until the day they died. He’d known plenty of both, couldn’t say where it came from, only that if you were one of the latter, you couldn’t just up and decide to endure one day, as much as some philosophers liked to believe. People didn’t change, and there was nothing you could do for them except take their money in exchange for a drink.
    There was also the question of how much she knew of Mary Jane’s actions. Hell, she lived here, she had to know what was going on. Tull smiled at her and said, “My name’s Larthan Tull. You wouldn’t happen to have any coffee on, would you?”
    “I know who you are.”
    He waited. Then he stepped onto the porch, and she retreated to the house.
    “If he comes by, I’ll tell him you were looking for him,” she said.
    Tull reached for the screen. When she tried to slam the door in his face, he kicked it open and followed her inside. She cowered against a wall, eyed him with trepidation but not quite fear. The outside of the house hadn’t looked like much—needed paint, some shutters were loose—but the inside was downright homey. Warm wood paneling, daguerreotype portraits along one wall, each room clean if not spacious.
    The widow backed into the kitchen. “You and the sheriff both come by looking for him, but I’ve not seen him since last night. He left and didn’t come