Chapter 1: Ghost in Plain Sight
The air in the saloon was thick, a permanent stew of old wood, expensive whiskey, and the sharp, metallic ghost of gunpowder that no amount of polish could ever quite erase. Jess traced a slow finger around the rim of her glass, feeling the cool crystal beneath her skin. Downstairs, the saloon was a low hum of forced merriment—clinking glasses, the scrape of chair legs, the hollow lies men told each other after dark.
It was quiet. Just the rustle of silk when she shifted, and the minute crackle of the folded square of paper tucked against her thigh.
Ezra’s warning. Delivered by a scared kid with dirty nails two hours ago. She hadn’t needed to open it yet. The mere fact it existed was message enough. Ezra only wrote when the news was bad, and when Ezra’s news was bad, people tended to stop breathing shortly after.
She took a sip, letting the whiskey burn a path down her throat. Her eyes, a deep, unsettling green in the flickering oil lamp light, scanned the ledger open before her. Numbers. Supplies. Neutral things. The revolver lay beside it, disassembled, each part gleaming from a recent, unnecessary cleaning. A habitual distraction.
The door burst open.
It wasn’t a knock. It was an invasion of splintering wood and sudden, chaotic noise from the stairwell. The man who filled the doorway was all sweat-stained cotton and panic. He had the look of a rabbit who’d just heard the hawk’s screech—eyes wide and darting, chest heaving.
Jess didn’t jump. She simply turned her head, the feathery ends of her bangs brushing her brow, and looked at him. Her expression was placid, mildly curious, as if he were a peculiar stain that had appeared on her rug.
“Where is he?” the man demanded, his voice too loud for the confined space. His gaze swept past her, over her head, around the shadowed corners of the bar, looking for someone bigger, someone harder. Someone male. It slid over her like she was a piece of the furniture, an ornament in her impractical lace-trimmed gown the colour of burnt cream. “I need to see Colt. Now.”
She let the silence stretch. Let him hear his own ragged breathing. Downstairs, the piano missed a note, then stumbled on.
“You’re in his office,” she said finally. Her voice was quiet, a low melody against his rasp. “You’re seeing what’s here.”
He took a step forward, his boots heavy on the polished floor. “Don’t play games with me. I don’t have time. Where’s the man who runs this place? The informant. I need to find someone, and they say he’s the one who can point you true.”
Jess set her glass down softly on the ledger, right over a column of figures. She leaned back in her chair, the leather sighing beneath her. The movement made the silk of her dress whisper, and the lamplight caught the subtle sheen of it, the careful drape across her shoulders. She saw his eyes catch it, too, and a flicker of confusion cut through his desperation. This wasn’t what he expected. A woman, alone, in a den like this.
“Who says?” she asked.
“Everyone. The boys at the stables, the bartender at The Gutter… they all said come to the Colt Saloon, ask for Colt. He knows the movements of every bounty hunter, every mark, every price on every head from here to the salt flats. He’s a ghost, but he knows.” The man’s hands were trembling. He clenched them into fists. “My brother’s mixed up with the wrong kind. I need to find him before they do. Colt can tell me where to look.”
She watched him. The honest fear was there, sharp and sour in the air. It was almost touching. Almost. In her experience, honest fear usually got people killed faster than dishonesty.
“Colt gives information,” she said, her tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. “He doesn’t run a missing persons service. And he doesn’t work for free.”
“I have money.” The man fumbled in his coat pocket, pulling out a crumpled roll of bills. He slapped it on the desk corner, near the gleaming barrel of her revolver. “That’s half. You give it to him. Tell him I need a name. The group my brother’s with. A location. Anything.”
Jess’s gaze didn’t move to the money. It stayed on his face, studying the lines of exhaustion, the sheen of sweat on his upper lip. Her finger went back to the rim of her glass, tracing the circle. The paper against her thigh felt like it was burning now.
“The man you’re looking for,” she said, each word deliberate. “The one they call the Skinner. He runs a pack of deserters west of the river. They hole up in the canyon splits, the ones that look like a ribcage. They move camps every three days. Today’s day two.”
The man stared. His mouth opened, then closed. The information had come too fast, too specific. It wasn’t how he imagined the transaction going. He’d imagined whispers, shadows, a grizzled face in a dark corner.
“How do you…?”
“Your brother’s a fool if he’s riding with them,” she continued, cutting him off. Her voice hadn’t changed. It was still that calm, even stream. “The Skinner turns on his own faster than a river snake. Your money’s on the desk. Take it. You’ll need it for the funeral.”
The brutality of the last statement hit him like a physical blow. He flinched. The raw fear in his eyes curdled into something darker—anger, insult. His eyes flicked from her face to the gun parts, to the money, back to her. The puzzle pieces were there, but he was too frantic to put them together.
“You his… what? His secretary? His whore?” The words were meant to wound, to reclaim some footing. They hung in the close air, cheap and ugly.
Jess didn’t blink. She just looked at him, her deep-set eyes holding a patience so vast it felt like contempt. It was men like these who didn’t deserve Colt’s information, too small-minded to see big pictures. She, Colt, just told him what he wanted and he still didn’t understand that he had it wrong. That she was Colt. So she didn’t bother explaining more.
The man opened his mouth, likely to spew more filth, but a shadow fell across the doorway.
Another man stood there, having followed the commotion up the stairs. He was a regular—a rancher named Silas with knuckles like river stones and a quiet way of drinking that took all night. He leaned against the doorframe, blocking the light, his gaze fixed on the sweating fool.
“I wouldn’t go around calling young ladies that,” Silas said. His voice was a low, gravelly rumble, devoid of heat but full of weight. “There are men around these parts that don’t take kindly to disrespect to their women.” It was a threat and a warning, wrapped in the guise of folksy advice.
Most people in the town knew who Jess was, that she had her alias, but they didn’t point people toward her. They knew Colt would only help the people who deserved it. Silas’s presence was a fence, a way of saying the conversation was over.
The desperate man looked from Silas’s impassive face to Jess’s serene one. The cognitive dissonance was almost painful to witness. The information he needed had been given freely, with chilling precision, by the person he was insulting. The protector in the doorway was treating her with a deference that had nothing to do with gallantry and everything to do with cold, hard respect. The pieces finally, violently, clicked.
His face drained of its furious color, leaving a sickly grey. His eyes dropped to the disassembled revolver, the professional cleanness of it. To the ledger, where her whiskey glass sat like a paperweight. To her hands, which were now calmly stacking the banknotes he’d thrown, squaring the edges with a tap on the desk.
“You…” he breathed. The word wasn’t accusation. It was realization. A dreadful, humiliating understanding.
Jess stood. The silk of her gown fell in a whisper to the floor. She picked up the stack of money and held it out to him. Not kindly. It was a transaction being voided. “Your money. The canyon splits. Day two. You’ve already wasted an hour standing here.”
He took the bills, his fingers brushing hers. He flinched at the contact as if shocked. Without another word, he turned and shoved past Silas, his boots clattering down the stairs in a frantic, disappearing rhythm.
Silas watched him go, then tipped his hat brim an inch toward Jess. “Evening, Miss Mason.”
“Silas.” she acknowledged. “Tell Marie I’ll have that tonic for her boy by tomorrow.”
He nodded, a ghost of a smile on his weathered face, and melted back into the stairwell’s gloom.
The silence that returned was different now. It was charged. The interruption had broken her reverie, and the folded paper against her thigh was a live coal. She walked to the office door and closed it softly, shutting out the world. The lock turned with a solid, final click.
Back at the desk, she didn’t sit. She reached under the layers of silk and lace, withdrew the square of paper, and smoothed it open on the polished mahogany. Ezra’s handwriting was a frantic, spidery scramble.
Colt — Harlan Dusk has put paper on me. Don't know who he's sent. Whatever they're offering, I can beat it. I have names — Dusk's full ledger, the land deals, the sheriff up in Redrock. Everything. It's yours if you want it. That's not a favour. That's a transaction. You know where I'll be.
She read it once. Then again. The oil lamp guttered, making the shadows of the revolver parts leap on the wall.
Jess let the paper fall from her fingers. It fluttered onto the ledger, covering the numbers. She picked up the cylinder of the revolver, her movements reverent and efficient. She didn’t think about the sweaty man or his doomed brother. She didn’t think about Silas’s loyal warning.
She thought about canyons that looked like ribcages. She thought about a man named Cade asking questions not nicely. She methodically slotted each cartridge into its chamber, the click of each one a period in a silent sentence. The weight of the assembled gun in her hand was a familiar comfort, an old truth.
Downstairs, the piano started up again, a slightly ragged rendition of a popular tune. Laughter, false and bright, bubbled up through the floorboards.
Upstairs, Colt blew out the lamp. In the sudden, complete dark, the only sound was the soft, lethal snick of the hammer being cocked.