Read Online Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) by Jack Ketchum - Free Book Online

Bill rolled yet another Durham and lit it with a twig aflame. The horses snorted, chilled in sleep.

    “We better get us some rest, boys,” said Canary Joe. “Long way to ride yet tomorrow. I’ll gather us up some more of that mise’ble firewood I guess, get us through to morning.”

    He rose to his feet and stepped slowly into the waiting dark.

    “
You watch out for Little Dick West, now
,” said Faro Bill laughing and it was then that they heard the echo of his words from the mouth of Chunk Herbert dying against thejuniper tree, clear this time and no mistaking them, not
I-ill
or
Lily
but
Li’l Dick West, I shot Li’l Dick West in Dodge City, Kansas
and the fusillade seemed to come from everywhere at once and ended Chunk’s luck and their own along with it for good and ever.

The Haunt

    I found the place just off East Sunset, only three blocks from the sea, and I got it for a song.

    Lauderdale had been hit by a big one again the year before and on the first floor the water damage was extensive. It was no real problem though. I had money. We crewed the place through spring and summer and by start-of-season it was looking fine. I called it the Blue Parrot, after Sam.

    And Sam was the main attraction for a while. Drinks are drinks when you come right down to it, even though Shiela and Cindy had instructions to pour stiff ones, to leave the shotglasses under the bar for the time being and buy back for the regulars. As for the girls, you’d be hard pressed to find a waitress or barmaid anywhere near Sunset who wasn’t halfway gorgeous. So that left Sam our novelty.

    As novelties go I’ve seen worse. He’s an attention-getter for one thing, blue as the Caribbean with a bib of pure white across his chest. And he’s big around as the thighs on Schwarzenegger.

    We hung a high perch for him to the far left of the bar and if you were sitting over there you could toss him a salted peanut and watch him pluck it out of the air, toss it back like a shot of Cuervo and turn to you with that myopic-looking one-eyed stare and croak, “
thanks, big boy, think can you afford another?
” People swore he sounded like Bacall, though actually he’d learned that line from a hooker who used to come into my first place in Miami. If you threw too wide or low you got the same baleful stare only longer, and then after a while the bone-yellow beak would open. “
God damn drunks
!”

    He was ten years old and had plenty of lines by then, so he was good at the bar. But naturally I had ambitions for the place. As Florida goes Lauderdale’s a pretty wide-open town. The college kids do that and the gays. So a year later we went topless. We left Sam where he was and put a raised stage on the other side of the bar. The upstairs room was all tables but you could stand at the brass railing and look down at the dancers and at the same time cruise the bar.

    We did it right, too. Most of the girls were college girls so the turnover was high but that also meant you had dancers who were young and pretty and wholesome-looking, not beat-up hooker-types. There were a handful of local girls but I stayed away from them in general. Down here you never knew when somebody’s drunken boyfriend from Fort Meyers or Punta Gorda was going to come barreling across Alligator Alley with a shotgun in back of his pickup, bent on saving darlin’ Maisie from a life of squalor. They brought in a nice crowd, mixed, men and women and mostly young.

    We did real well with the wet teeshirt contests and the Best Buns contests and by the time we were open two years to the day I could count on packed houses three nights a week and no real slack time at all. We held our own off season, too, while other places closed down altogether.

    Sam got fat. I fell in love with the new bartender.

    Bernie was her name and she was older than most,thirty-four, and she’d been married once the same way I’d been married, which was badly. For me home was a block away, right on