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listen above the beating of his own heart. Only the sickening blood stench and silence issued from the open door.
    Fletcher bolted out from behind the wall and swung his shotgun barrel into the room, squaring his shoulders and spreading his feet. The stench hit him like a fist, and then he saw the body lying about six feet back from the door, between a dresser on the right and a bed on the left.
    Dewey Granger lay on his back, arms thrust straight out from his shoulders. His denims and underwear had been pulled down around his boots. There was so much blood that Fletcher couldn’t tell exactly what they’d done to him, but it looked as though he’d been carved up like a field-dressed deer.
    Blood was still running out from the broad, grisly wound in his midsection and crotch and puddling on the floor around his body. Something protruded from his mouth, but Fletcher turned away before he could identify it, his guts clenching and throat contracting as though a stick dipped in fresh cow shit had been shoved down past his tonsils.
    He dropped to a knee in the hall, swallowing quickly to keep from vomiting. When his stomach settled, he ran a sleeve across his sweat-soaked mustache and peered toward the stairs.
    Fletcher had grown up on the frontier and had visited nearly every state and territory, even witnessed some Indian atrocities. But only once or twice, in Comanche country, had he seen a man treated the way the girl and her two cohorts had treated Dewey Granger.
    Fletcher curled his upper lip. “Murderin’ goddamn savages.” That they’d been so bold as to do their butchering practically in his face galled him keenly, kindling a hot fire at the base of his skull.
    He rose slowly, again gripping the shotgun in both hands. Taking a deep breath, quickly brushing sweat from his face, he began moving toward the end of the hall, where the stairs dropped to the saloon’s main room from which voices rose, including the screechy, contentious voice of the girl.
    He stopped well back from the top of the stairs, so he wouldn’t be seen from below, and peered down into the main saloon hall. No one on the stairs. He could see shadows moving ahead and left, sensed the tension of Norman Carstairs, who was probably still behind the bar, wondering if Fletcher had lit out for good like a donkey with its tail on fire.
    Fletcher took another deep breath and, holding the shotgun low and angled about forty-five degrees away from his body, started down the stairs.
    â€œHey, Captain Sykes, why didn’t you tell me you had the jack?” the girl yelled, her shrill voice echoing around the room’s adobe-brick, mud-chinked walls. “ Damn you anyways!”
    Someone laughed. “Well, now, Miss Cora—that ain’t exactly the way the game is played, is it?”
    â€œCareful, Captain,” said a deep voice rumbling up like an earthquake through a privy hole. “You wouldn’t go sassin’ Miss Cora if you was to see her doin’s upstairs!” There was the slap of cards on a table. “No, suh. I think I’m gonna have nightmares tonight jus’ thinkin’ about it!”
    As Fletcher dropped midway down the stairs, moving slowly on the balls of his boots but still making the rotten steps squawk and creak, the outlaws’ table slid into view before him, about fifteen feet from the staircase. They were all gathered around it now, the girl, the black man, and the man in the cavalry blues having joined the three of a kind.
    The girl was straddling the knee of one of the triplets—the one wearing the stovepipe hat—and she leaned back to kiss his cheek now as Fletcher gained the bottom of the stairs and began bringing the shotgun up, swinging it out from his belly.
    The black man was expertly dealing the cards while the others snapped them up, smoking or throwing back shots or, in one case, farting. The black man wore a large diamond ring on the outside of his