Free skeletons by Glendon Swarthout

He is out from under the Touring Car and upright in one reflexive effort.
    “Oh I’m burnt! I can’t fight no more!” he screams. “Mr. Wood I give up! Jesús Christ don’t shoot me!”
    Buell Wood advances on him from the Runabout. He moves to within ten feet of the Touring Car, raises arm, aims the New Navy, fires.
    It is an execution. He shoots George Pennington in the open mouth. The hard palate, or roof, of the mouth is fractured into slivers. The bullet then tracks through the soft palate and pharynx and the upper end of the spinal cord. Were it not severed, Pennington would drown in his own blood, for the palate and pharynx are highly vascularized.
    The attorney strides to the corpse of Tigh Gooding, nudges it with a boot to be sure of death.
    Mrs. Marsh speaks. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wood.”
    There is no response.
    “How is Mrs. Wood these days?”
    “Dead,” he says.
    He walks round the rear end of the Runabout and out the front door of the showroom.
    Gladys Marsh is to assert for the remainder of her life that she never understood why she stayed on her stool in the cage or why she addressed inanities to Buell Wood. But she has, and it will be she alone who can render, on the witness stand, a detailed, coherent account of the slaughter. In any event, when the attorney has left the Ford agency she rises from her seat, exits the cage, takes two steps, faints.
    Buell Wood hesitates in sunlight, matched pair of guns which had been a civic gift in his hands. He is a tall, handsome man with dark hair and mustache. He wears a black serge vest and trousers, white shirt, a black string tie. The street is silent as before. Men, women, children, horses, automobiles, wagons, buggies are fixed in time and space exactly as they had been. It is as though, for a staccato of minutes, the heart of Harding has ceased to beat.
    He looks left. Bill Pennington, his first victim, lies on the sidewalk in front of the Luna. He has come out of shock, and is on his side, groaning, his face slate, arms hugging his belly and the bullet in it, drawing up his legs, straightening them, drawing them up again. Hemorrhaging has by now flooded his abdominal cavity. The hepatic capsule about the liver has ruptured.
    Stepping on a snow of broken glass, Wood goes to the youth, lowers a revolver barrel to his temple, fires, puts him out of his agony.
    He pushes guns under his belt, walks then across the street to the buggy and Marmon sedan and watering trough, and stands for a moment over the body of his wife. A woman brings a bundle to him. It is his infant daughter, Helene, wrapped in a shawl, unharmed. He takes the child in his arms, carries her through the pure spring afternoon down the center of Gold Street to his office, opens the door, enters, closes the door behind him.

I I: I4
    I I: I4

But I was still burned about that speeding ticket. So instead of packing up and pulling out of Harding I hiked across the street from the courthouse to the lair of the local law, a new slump-block headquarters and hoosegow, demanded to see the sheriff himself, was thumbed into an office posh enough for Park Avenue. It was a toss-up which of us most disbelieved the other.
    My ensemble may have been responsible. A double-breasted Halston jacket in Ultrasuede over a rust polka-dot body shirt of silk jersey with a yellow ascot at the neck. Flared beige Cacharel slacks of cavalry twill over above-the-ankle Florentine leather boots in antique mahogany. Informal, perhaps, but quite correct for an afternoon in rural New Mexico searching transcripts and confronting the constabulary.
    But if he gave me a twice-over, I gave him a thrice. He wore neither star nor badge nor gun. His chino summer uniform was tailored to a T and creased to cut. His belt was hand-tooled and buckled with turquoise set in silver. His boots were custom-stitched. He was just my size and just as natty.
    “Sheriff,” I began, “I want to protest this ticket. Yesterday one of your—”
    He