“He’s old enough to drink, play cards, sleep with whores, and use a gun,” Jake answered. “That’s good enough for me. Besides that, he’s writing a book about me.”
“A book? About you?” The man guffawed. “From everything I’ve heard about Jake Harkner, that ought to be one hell of a read!”
They all laughed.
“You gonna write about all them whores and all the killin’s?” another man asked Jeff.
“That’s for you to find out when you read the book,” Jeff answered.
Jake laid his cards down. A pair of tens. The fat man had a pair of jacks.
“Thanks for your money, Harkner,” he told Jake. “You need to play cards with somebody who knows what he’s doin’, not a kid.”
Jake watched the man pull all the cards together. He handed them to the man sitting next to him. “Your deal.” He seemed nervous. They played cards for close to an hour, and Jake tried to make each shot of whiskey last, not wanting to drink so much that his aim might be off or his judgment impaired—yet just enough keep the men around him relaxed and amiable.
“You new in town?” he asked the fat man with the sweat-stained shirt.
“Maybe. What’s it to you?”
“I remember people, that’s all. I don’t remember seeing you here or anyplace else. You new to Oklahoma?”
“Might be.”
“Then how did you know about me? You said a book about Jake Harkner would be quite a read.” Jake looked at his hand and discarded one card.
“Hell, the whole country knows about Jake Harkner,” the fat man answered.
“Then you didn’t just hear about me recently—from someone looking to pay you to kill me?”
The room quieted again. Jeff squirmed at the sounds of some kind of wild lovemaking in a curtained-off room at the back of the tent. Obviously a whore was getting, or giving, her money’s worth to some man back there. Those sitting at the card tables didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by the sounds, including Jake and Lloyd, so Jeff struggled to be casual about it himself.
The fat man eyed Jake closely, still not responding to Jake’s last remark. “Hey, kid,” he finally called out to Jeff. “When you write that book, maybe you can end it with the name of the man who finally killed Jake Harkner.”
“And who would that be?” Jeff asked.
Suddenly there came a boom. The fat man flew backward and his chair fell over. Everyone jumped and backed away, including Jeff. Lloyd never moved.
“Holy sweet Jesus!” one of the players said, looking from the dead fat man, who lay sprawled with a hole in his gut and a pistol still in one hand, to Jake, who slowly set a smoking gun on the table.
“I wouldn’t mind playing a few more rounds,” Jake said, “unless another one of you is bent on killing me.”
Everyone just stared at him, clearly wondering how on earth Jake knew the fat man was aiming to shoot him under the table.
“That was…amazing,” Jeff half mumbled.
Jake shared a look with Lloyd, who glanced at the dead man. “Shit, Pa, you just made a mess. That piece of blubber has a hole in his gut six inches across.”
“Then somebody had better clean things up,” Jake answered casually, his cigarette at the corner of his mouth. He poured himself yet another shot of whiskey, leaving the still-smoking gun on the table. “Whose turn is it to deal?”
The bartender came over and asked another man to help him drag the body outside. Jake drank down the shot of whiskey.
“Trudy, get us some more beer over here,” a man at Lloyd’s table called out.
Jake and Lloyd both turned to see the woman named Trudy, who’d just come into the barroom from behind the curtain. Her hair was disheveled and her fancy gold dress buttoned wrong. “What the hell happened in here?” she asked.
“Jake Harkner just shot that new guy—Frank Gallus.” The man who answered nodded toward Jake, and Trudy sauntered up to Jake. She was perhaps twenty-five or thirty, with long, dark hair and the look of a Mexican about her.
“So, you’re Jake Harkner. I’ve heard about you.”
Jake looked her over. “Most folks have.”
“What happened to that handsome face?”
“Just a little disagreement with someone.”
“Looks like he won.”
“I beat the man to a pulp with a belt.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Well, there’s a novel way of beating on someone.”
“Some people make it their choice of punishment.”
Trudy stood behind him, running her hands over his shoulders and up and down his arms. “I’ll bet you’d never treat anyone in your family like that. Fact is, I’ve heard you have quite a nice family, over in Guthrie.”