Ain't Talkin'

Bootheels scrabblin’ on the stray dry concrete the hunter made his way downtown. He’d passed through the white in an evening and come out the other side without a hair on his head astray. That was something most folks couldn’t do these days.

The yellow lamplight didn’t do much for the scenery and the alley itself didn’t have much to stand on to begin with. Parmiskus was a rag-tag shelter of a town way out beyond the Mojave desert. It was all ancient history even though barely a century had passed by, when the world turns so vastly and harsh the way it had these last hunnerd years, you did your best to move right along with it.

Sign hanging low over the sidewalk said Mutt’s and the hunter knew he was in the right place. He filched his way inside like a desert breeze and found a stool as easily as a waylaid fly might. The hunter waves a dusty glove over the counter and summons a bourbon with a beer back. He catches the ice cube in his teeth and cracks it in two loudly and swallows one half of the cube and the bourbon all at once. The hunter swigs off the beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his calloused hand staring into the mirror behind the bar. Staring into a reflection he barely recognizes ever since he started walking the ether and never looked back.

“Lookin’ for work, Roche?” A man sits beside the hunter, his coat is long and caresses the floor, his hat his wide and shades his face,

The hunter makes not remark, only a noise beneath his nostril in the deep part of his throat.

“Lots to be had out this way, I hear. Lad came by here looking for a planeswalker a day or two back but you was noweheres to be seen.” The man ordered himself a stiff, colorless drink.

“Work to be had comes to me, don’t need to seek it out.” Roche grated, his voice like charcoal.

“Aye, that’s the truth ol’ chap. What of it? Will ya take the boy?”

“What’s he to you?”

“I’m an inquiring mind is all, Mr. Roche, please don’t misunderstand. If you’d like I can show you my credentials.”

Roche, the hunter, stood for his barstool in the yellow of the desert daylight, the bar itself was sparsely frequented at all if ever and Roche wasn’t one for erring on the sides of civilian preferential care. He hung his head in a slattern, I don’t give a damn kind of way, his collar around his throat was buttoned wrong and loose. His denim and boots were dusty and worn to auld hell and his skin and hair was bleached so pale by the sun that he might have passed for a gunslingers ghost if he didn’t stand up, shit, drink, fuck and cuss with the rest of ’em.

“I want no trouble Mr. Roche, I assure you.”

“Want none, get none.” Before the man could have blinked Roche had pulled and drawn, cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger and reholstered the Ruger revolver at his hip. The only ringing memory was the sound of the gunshot and the sallow red hole in the man’s forehead when his knees buckled and he fell before Roche and crumpled and shit himself.

The hunter left a proper note on the barkeeps tab for the body he left behind and left Mutt’s bar the way he came in, through the front door. His bootheels clacked along the sidewalk all the same and he couldn’t quite remember for the nonce whether he had left the white behind or if he was running back to her dead, endless embrace. Roche just kept walkin;.

There was work to be had and a client to be held, but before aught else, there was blood to be spilled.