Two-Gun & Sun Read Free Page A

quick circles, trying to take it all in, trying to decide where to start seeking information. Leaning corrugated metal shacks and rotting logs, heavy iron pipes running between them, down low and up high, gave the whole place the look of a furnace room with the lights turned off. The road sign told me that this was Zero Avenue. Fitting. A nothing street. Not a leaf. Not a tree. The mountain that the navigator told me about rose through the mist, with a long tail of hills that whipped around the town.
    Some towns are marked by the cry of gulls or the clanging of streetcars. But this one’s music was a constant rumbling of coal carts along the tracks that skirted the tops of the hills.
    At my feet its dank centre, strewn with boulders, hunks of cement, buckets on their sides.
    Black motorcycles roared out of the fog, their silver-snouted sidecars squealing around me as I tried once, then twice, to dodge them and cut across the road. I had no idea these were taxis, that the black-booted thugs in goggles and tight leather caps were, in fact, the taxi drivers. Uncle never mentioned them when he came to visit. His talk was all about the newspaper. I didn’t see a single taxi last night. I realized what they were only when a man across the way flagged one down. And I noticed him only because he was relieving himself against the side of a tin building, a saloon by the looks of the swinging doors, and waved with his free hand, turning his spray into the street.
    In two long strides I had leapt out of his way, too.
    I pressed on, past the only building of any substance, the bank all stone and equally grey—at once the wasp was back in my guts, reminding me of my deadline. I pushed the thought away. Before me was the only promise of elegance in town, a skeleton of iron girders that formed a square frame and, lying on the ground beside it, a matching skeletal dome that one day might top the structure. Right now, there wasn’t a single worker on the site.
    I stepped off the boardwalk to cross the road at the corner, and very nearly put my boot into a black hole. I leapt back, heart pounding, hand at my throat, reeling around to confront the first person I saw. What was this doing in the middle of the road? Why wasn’t it blocked off? A child could fall in. I could bloody well fall in.
    But all I saw was swirling mist. Then I thought of that Chinese, how he had melted into the fog and how he could be a few feet from me right now, his rifle aimed at my head.
    I hurried on.
    The hotel café doors flew open and empty food tins were booted into the street, the clatter drawing stray pigs that charged around me for the rubbish and rooted gleefully, obscenely pink against the soot streets. There was news here, that much was certain. That group of men roping that boulder last night. That large man, absurdly dressed in white, hands tied behind his back. And that Chinese, that rifle.
    Words crammed into my mind. Headlines and subheads. Commentaries and stories. What torture to have the words and not the means because, without a newspaper, none of them would gain the heft of news. I darted around the pigs and turned back up the street to the General Store, where light was now spilling from the window.
    *
    Desk lamps with green shades lined the long counters. A thin man, balding, leaned on his elbows, his green visor staining the tip of his pointed nose and chin.
    Newcomer, Miss?
    Sinclair, I answered. Lila. I approached him with hand held out to shake his. He reached under the counter and dropped a package into my palm.
    Tea, the man said. What your uncle used to order.
    I nodded and pushed the package onto the polished wood counter. He knew exactly who I was, though my last name was different. Uncle was my mother’s brother. But word had spread. No surprise. In such a small place, I was news.
    Mister, I began.
    Parker, he corrected. Just Parker.
    You knew my uncle, I said.
    Well enough. A going concern.
    Until he met his