Black Hats by Patrick Culhane

taking off down the street, leaving their owners exposed in the lot.
    Belly bleeding, Frank followed his horse, or tried to, staggered past Doc, stopping behind him and, on unsteady feet, his smile grotesque, aimed his sixgun across the brace of his arm at Holliday, saying, “I’ve got you now, you bastard….”

    “Blaze away,” Doc said, turning sideways, making a narrow target of himself and taunting in his drawl, “You’re a daisy if you do….”
    Frank got off a shot that creased Doc’s hip but that was all: Morgan, whose wound had sent him to his knees, fired at Frank and caught him under the ear. With that head shot, Frank should have been instantly dead, but he danced around mumbling to himself, although no longer shooting at anybody.
    As this happened, Wyatt had whirled to trade shots with somebody in a window at Fly’s, probably that goddamned coward Ike….
    At the same time Virgil, who’d also been hit in the left calf, staggered over to Morgan, and then Wyatt helped them both out into the street, while Doc was screaming at the finally fallen Frank McLaury, “The son of a bitch shot me! I mean to kill him.”
    Wyatt went to Doc and said, “Morgan beat you to it, Doc. Let it go.”
    Tom McLaury lay dying at the foot of a telegraph pole at Third and Fremont. Billy Clanton, shot to hell, was still alive, after a fashion—slumped against a wall, lamely, gamely trying to reload when Wyatt removed the weapon from his dying fingers, and tossed it to one side, not having the heart to take the kid’s last few minutes from him.
    Anyway, the Earps and Holliday were all out of ammunition, too.
    The firing had ceased, and a crowd was gathering. The gun-fight was over.
    But much else had only begun. Behan wanting to arrest Wyatt (“Not today, Johnny”). The inquest, jail time, the hearing, cleared, charged again, the assassination attempt on Virgil, maiming Virge’s arm……and one terrible night, several months later, when Clanton’s Cowboy assassins shot Morgan in the back, killed that sweet boy while he and Wyatt played pool.
    So many bullets. So much blood.
    And yet the Arizona landscape rolled by his window in all its rugged glory, looking like hell and heaven to Wyatt, as if to say, You’ve grown older, I’m unchanged .

    When evening came, Wyatt was seated in the steel diner, alone at a table for two, the car a modern marvel of indirect lighting and reflective surfaces, dark polished wood, gleaming metal, with a high, square-arched ceiling. For one dollar, he was served an eight-course meal: grapefruit, olives, salted almonds and radishes; consommé; filet of bass with cucumbers; lamb chops à la Nelson, with broiled fresh mushrooms; roast turkey with cranberry sauce; mashed potatoes and cauliflower; salad; and plum pudding, with cheese and fruit.
    And coffee.
    The big meal damned near made Wyatt sleepy, but the prospects of the lounge car woke him right up. A dignified dark-wood chamber filled with overstuffed leather easy chairs filled with overstuffed well-off males smoking cigars, pipes and the occasional cigarette, the lounge allowed Wyatt to enjoy a cigar himself as he made the acquaintance of a dentist, a banker, a mortician and a fellow who owned a Ford automobile dealership, in whose private compartment they all assembled for rye whiskey and a friendly game of poker.
    Wyatt’s name had been his calling card with these gents, and occasional remarks amid the smoke and liquor and cards would pertain to that.
    “Did you really shoot all those badmen in Arizona?” the banker asked, early on.
    “My share,” Wyatt admitted.
    “What was bad about them?” the mortician asked.
    “We were Republicans,” Wyatt said. “They were Democrats.”
    And that, in this group, had been enough.
    Wyatt, who drank only a small polite glass, came away with one hundred and fifty-two dollars, mostly extracted from the dentist, who was no John H. Holliday, at cards at least.
    Wyatt had the lower berth, and