Infamous by Suzanne Brockmann Page A

GALLAGHER AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH .
    The caps are theirs, not mine.
    I slipped past the curtain without paying—a benefit that came with being visible only to my great-grandson—and went into the back room that had held the stage where the local ladies of the evening had put on shows (and I use the term loosely, because none of ’em had all that much talent beyond the obvious).
    The movie folks were crawling all over the place, carefully packing and inventorying all of the “artifacts” that hung on the walls in the once festive room.
    They hadn’t gotten to the glass display cases yet, and I strolled past them, squinting to read the handwritten explanations that were pinned near each item. A chamber pot. A spittoon. Both believed to have been used by the great Silas Quinn when he crapped and/or hacked.
    And there, in a case of honor in the center of the room, were, indeed, my boots. The black ones that I’d abandoned, in order to make room in my saddle bag for more food and water.
    The once fine, tooled leather was dull and cracked, the silver tarnished.
    I hadn’t died in them, but I
had
been wearing them the first time I saw Mel. My life had irrevocably changed in that single moment, but it was more like a rebirth than a death. Although one could argue that in order to be reborn, a part of you has to die.
    A pair of young ladies carrying boxes nearly went right through me. As I danced out of their way, I spotted another sign, proclaiming ENTER HERE . It was at the door to the tiny room that had once been Big Sal’s handjob factory, where a mere five cents would get you a less satisfying variation on the theme of what you’d receive by taking one of the younger, prettier, and less contagious girls to her far more ornate quarters upstairs.
    I went in and saw that it had been transformed into a small theater. There were heavy shades over the single window andabout six or seven folding chairs set up in front of an old TV, upon which played a continuous video loop of an ancient and faded documentary about the notorious gun battle that had raged out in the saloon on that summer morning in 1898.
    It wasn’t—let’s face it—even a fraction as entertaining as Big Sal had been even after she caught the pox and knew that her future held a slow slide into madness.
    I went out through the back door—literally
through
it, seeing as how I no longer needed to open or close the damn thing—and into the narrow alleyway between the saloon and the marshal’s office.
    It was not a mistake that Quinn’s and the Red Rock’s back doors were in such close proximity. Quinn owned the saloon, owned Big Sal and all of the girls who worked upstairs. And whenever he was in the mood for a little afternoon delight, to quote a song that A.J.’s sister Bev had loved but me and Age had hated, he’d just knock three times on Sal’s back door. She’d clear out and give a whistle for Nancy or Irmine or sometimes the pair of ’em together, to come down and entertain the good marshal.
    And this I know not just because Big Sal told me so, but because I saw it happen.
    Not from inside the room, of course. I was flesh and blood back then and walls thwarted me. But I sat at the bar—that curtain wasn’t up in those days—and watched Sal leave and the girls go in and that door shut. I meandered back to the alley where—sure enough—Quinn came out some long minutes later, buttoning the front of his trousers, which was a clue that he hadn’t been in there reading those girls Bible verses.
    But I digress.
    As I wandered through Jubilation, I saw that the marshal’s office and the town stables where the blacksmith had done his business were just as they’d been, too. Most of the town had been preserved, apparently, by Quinn’s descendants, the Sylvesters, who’d realized in the 1950s that this ghost town that they still owned could become a tourist attraction.
    It never quite did—it was too far off the beaten track.
    But the latest