by Max O'Hara
Stockburn rolled the dead man out of the doorway with his boot, then stepped through the door and to one side. He opened his coat with his left hand and closed his right hand over the Peacemaker’s grips. “Where’s Dad?”
“Out of commission.” Comanche strode into the room’s deep shadows, toward the bar at the far end. She shook her hair back from her face, adjusted the patch over her left eye, then set a labeled bottle of Old Kentucky onto the bar. She’d taken the elaborate mahogany bar with a complete backbar and mirror out of the Bismarck saloon one of her former husbands had owned. She’d scavenged the elaborate piece of hand-scrolled and deftly chiseled woodwork when the cork-headed sot had lost the saloon to the bank, before the bank had officially taken possession.
“He took a bullet to the chest,” she said, regarding Dad Drago. “He’s dying upstairs.”
“He’ll leave the world a better place.”
“Getting so a fella can’t ride over here no more, Comanche. Not less ’n he wants to risk getting shot just drinkin’ your watered-down whiskey!” The speaker was one of three men sitting at a table near the room’s far wall from which the head of a pronghorn antelope stared down in glassy-eyed contemplation.
He was a tall, long-faced, mean-eyed cuss whose right hand was draped over the walnut grips of the Schofield. 44 holstered on his right thigh. He’d spoken to Comanche, but his colicky gaze was on Stockburn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max O’Hara lives in the Midwest, USA. This is his second novel. Look for the first western, WOLF STOCKBURN, RAILROAD DETECTIVE, on sale now.
