Free City of Widows by Loren D. Estleman

floor, making wet sounds. I couldn’t tell how much of his midsection remained beneath the mess I’d made of the hide. I came around the bar and stooped to pick up the Greener. I knew of two lawmen who’d been killed by men already dead for neglect of that chore.
    The flap door opened. I swung that way, a shotgun in each hand. Rosario Ortiz stumbled in pulled by the weight of a Walker Colt as long as his forearm, a cap-and-ball model designed to ride in saddle scabbards and anchor rowboats. He had traded his overalls and cavalry tunic for a gray suit buttoned at the top of the coat and vest and nowhere else. His white-shirted belly hung out almost beyond the brim of his sombrero. The bent star sagged from the buttonhole in his lapel like one of his yellow roses.
    â€œHell’s fire, Marshal, don’t shoot one of us!” Junior stood cradling the bread tin in both arms.
    All the customers were eager to report what had happened. I left them to it and went over to retrieve the Army pistol from under Colleen’s table. The man in the duster had found a chair and sat in it now rocking to and fro, supporting his dripping right hand with his left and finding Jesus with every other breath.
    â€œI understand Bill Cody is hiring precision shooters for his exhibition,” I told Colleen. “You will need to practice some before you can pluck a half-dollar from between a man’s fingers.”
    â€œI hadn’t the luxury of taking aim. I wanted to hit the thickest part of him, but he hadn’t any.” She was frowning at the ruined reticule. “This one came from Monkey Ward’s. I waited three months for delivery.”
    â€œIt didn’t go with that rig anyway.”
    Having established that there was no need for it, Marshal Ortiz threaded the long barrel of the Walker Colt inside the waistband of his trousers, obliging himself to walk stiff-legged as he made his rounds among the witnesses. You had to smile at the sight. That swift-draw thing was mostly an invention of novelists of the Jack Rimfire stamp, but a man could have eaten the free lunch in the time it would take the fat Mexican to bring that big pistol back out into the open. He listened to the accounts with his head bent, nodding energetically when he comprehended something and lifting his sombrero to scratch at his forelock with a black fingernail whenever some point differed from the others. Several times he crossed in front of the man dying on the floor, being careful each time to avoid treading in the blood with his boots, which were old-time Mexican cavalry issue worn round at the heels but blacked to a high shine on the toes. At length he stopped before the wounded robber in the chair and said something in a polite tone that was too low to make out from a distance of six feet.
    â€œYou go to hell, greaser.”
    Ortiz straightened with a sad look and came over to me. “I need your help, señor. ”
    â€œIf you’re deputizing me to ride with the posse I’m not interested,” I said. “I left all that behind when I came south.”
    â€œPosse? No posse. I need assistance removing this man to the mission.”
    I wasn’t sure which man he meant. “Why there? Can’t the padre come here? I never heard where the Last Rites in a saloon didn’t take.”
    â€œYou misunderstand, Señor Murdock. San Sábado has no jail. When it is necessary to hold a man for the sheriff we use the mission cellar. It has a trapdoor. The old fathers and brothers hid women and children there from Indians in times past. The doctor can bind his hand here but I will require someone to help me get him down the ladder afterward. The shock, it makes a man weak.”
    â€œCan’t someone take care of that while you go out after the third man?”
    He scratched his forelock. “¿Por qué? Why? You have your money.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make what he did any less