Free The Deadline by Ron Franscell

long, loping strides, his secretary in tow.  He was drying his hands on a paper towel.
    “Carol, get Tommy on the radio and have him run back over to the Four Aces,” he instructed while she took a few notes.  “Arly lost his false teeth and I reckon he puked ‘em up in the gutter last night.  Poor old boozer can’t eat without ‘em.”
    Carol smiled wanly at Morgan and left the room.  As soon as the door closed behind her, Trey tossed the wadded paper towel in an elegant arc toward his trash can, sinking the shot like the natural, hot-handed forward he’d been in high school.
    “You never lose the touch,” he said, his wrist still cocked downward a few seconds after his flat-footed jump-shot hit its mark.  His eyes gleamed.
    “Well, for once, I can’t claim the assist,” Morgan joked.
    Morgan had been a starting guard for the Perry County High School Wolves back in 1975, their senior year.  He fed Trey Kerrigan the ball for most of the 323 baskets he sunk that season.  The future sheriff was named to the All-State team;  the future editor, whose passes were more accurate than his jumpers, barely got mentioned in the yearbook.
    Trey’s smile was obscured by his prodigious mustache, which curled around the sides of his mouth nearly to his chin, like Wild Bill Hickok’s.  Except for that, he was the spit and image of his father:  wide shoulders and a thick chest that narrowed to strong hips, with only a hint of a belly showing beneath his starched brown uniform.  A hand-tooled belt with a buckle half the size of a manhole cover held up his tight Wranglers, still a fresh blue.  He needed no gun and he seldom wore a hat, except in election years.  It was just for show.  Folks around Winchester liked to think their sheriff always wore a cowboy hat and a six gun, just like in the movies.
    Trey Kerrigan had been Morgan’s best friend when they were growing up, but lost touch after Morgan went off to Northwestern.  Kerrigan took a basketball scholarship at a junior college in Montana, studied law enforcement for a year, then came home to take a job as a town cop.
    Sometimes they’d bump into each other when Morgan came home for visits during and after college.  Kerrigan’s wife, Debbie, had brought two pies out to the house when Morgan’s father died seven years ago.  But Trey’s own father, Deuce, had died only a few months before — barely a year after he retired from law enforcement — and he couldn’t bear to attend Gray Morgan’s funeral himself.  Morgan understood, then and now.
    Morgan sat down in one of two chairs in front of the sheriff’s antique oak desk.  Trey Kerrigan settled into his cracked leather swivel chair and held up a campaign poster for Morgan to see.  Re-Elect Kerrigan is all it said, the dot on the “i” a white star against a red and blue background.
    “What do you think?  Pretty damn snazzy, huh?” he asked.
    “You mean you have to campaign?  I thought the name Kerrigan was carved in stone over the courthouse door.  Who’d waste their money running against you?” Morgan asked, only half teasing.
    “Ain’t it a bitch, Jeff?  Dad was the sheriff of Perry County for forty years, and I’ve been here for almost eight,” he said proudly.  “Now this town marshal who’s hardly had time to wash his dirty socks from the police academy wants to be sheriff.  That just sucks.”
    The election was around the corner.  Trey Kerrigan was pitted against Winchester’s town marshal, Highlander Goldsmith, who supervised the town’s three-man police force.  The primary was in August, just a few weeks away, but there were so few Democrats in Perry County, almost every race was decided in the Republican primary.
    Goldsmith’s main campaign plank was simple, straightforward and appealing:  After forty-eight years of Kerrigans in the sheriff’s office, almost half a century, it was time for a change.
    Morgan prayed his old friend wouldn’t ask for The Bullet’s