The lobby smelled of leather and polished steel. It was filled with ornate antique furniture and floating particles of dust but otherwise as deserted as the street. Still, a few voices floated in from behind closed doors and a hotel-keeper was leaning his elbows against a polished counter, flipping through the pages of a book. He paid no mind, but when Fenimore was a few steps from the counter, “Morning, there. Rooms available. Creative forms of payment accepted,” he said without taking his eyes off his reading.

“I need a room for tonight. I’ll have money tomorrow.”

“That’s not creative. That’s freeloading.”

“I’ll pay twice your regular rate.”

“That’s freeloading thinking you can take advantage of my greed.”

“I give you my word.”

“Got lots of those right here. Don’t need more.”

Fenimore growled and put the hootin’ gun on the counter. “There’s my promise, to go along with my word.”

The hotel-keeper slid his gaze from the book to the gun, and squinted. The gun piqued his interested. “Haven’t seen one like that before. It German?” Fenimore piqued his interest, too. “Haven’t seen one like you before, either. But you don’t look German at all.”

“The gun’s yours if I don’t pay by sundown tomorrow. And there’s a horse outside. Not a pretty horse, but it walks well enough when it’s sober. If I don’t pay, the horse is yours, too.”

Neither the horse nor the gun were Fenimore’s to bargain with, but on the other side of both was the timepiece, and that was Fenimore’s to bargain with, and he wanted the timepiece back, so he didn’t consider it wrong to let the hotel-keeper close his fingers on the hootin’ gun and hide it under his desk.

“Tomorrow by sundown,” he said.

A slight black-haired boy bolted down the hall, stopped in the lobby long enough to stare at Fenimore’s face, and scurried outside. Definitely one of the town’s scorpion tormentors, Fenimore thought.

“Don’t mind him,” the hotel-keeper said. He’d gone back to reading his book. “He’s everywhere.”

“The horse is tied up outside,” Fenimore said.

“Don’t care about the horse.”

Fenimore drummed his fingers on the hotel-keeper’s desk, right above the hotel-keeper’s book. “I care about a room. You going to give me a key?”

“Don’t suppose you care one way or the other where I put you…”

“As long as it has a tub and the possibility of it being filled with hot water, I suppose I don’t.”

The hotel-keeper reached below his desk, pulled out a key with “13E” etched onto it, and slid it toward Fenimore’s impatient hand. “Second floor, good view of the square.”

The key looked banged up. “And suppose I’m superstitious?”

“Then I can’t put you in any room above the first floor, and the first floor’s all booked.”

Fenimore wasn’t superstitious, but there was something about the hotel-keeper’s disinterested manner that made Fenimore want to spit stomach acid in his face. “Suppose you put me in the room next to 13E.”

“Would that be 13D,” the hotel-keeper said, looking up from his reading with a smirk, “or 13F?”

Fenimore dropped his hand from the table.

The hotel-keeper did the same.

With their hands hovering, hidden, above their respective firearms, they met eyes like men are sometimes wont to do: in silent, masculine and primitive battle—waged between male creatures since before the time men were turtles. To look away was to lose. To win meant to fill one’s eyes with more cold potential for bloody and merciless violence than one’s opponent.

Fenimore narrowed his eyes and snarled, and the hotel-keeper looked away first.

Both men raised their hands back to the desktop. The battle was over. The two turtles had established their hierarchy. Civility could ensue. The hotel-keeper flipped to page one hundred twenty three of his book. “Every time someone gets killed in one of my rooms,” he said, “I change the room number to thirteen. Such is the Ironlaw. Isn’t a room above the first floor that’s not thirteen.”

“Strange law,” Fenimore said. “Dangerous hotel.”

“Dangerous times.”

Fenimore swiped the key from the desk and put it in his pants pocket. It clanked against his seven coins. “Have somebody bring me up enough hot water to fill that tub.”

He climbed the lobby stairs and walked the second floor hall until he found 13E, into whose lock he inserted the banged up key after making sure he was the only one around. When he turned the key, the lock clicked like a successfully cracked safe, and Fenimore walked carefully inside. He kept the door open, however, until he was sure the room was empty. After he closed it, he slid off his poncho and tossed it onto the bed.

The mattress was hard.

Thick curtains were drawn across the window. Fenimore parted them to let in a hazy volume of morning light. The hotel-keeper had been right, the room did have a good view: of the back of Rafael Rodriguez’ ample thighs and his big ass and all the square around both, which was as empty and forlorn as when Fenimore had left it. Immediately below the window the Starman’s horse swayed on its four unsteady legs, having drank all the water in the trough in front of it.

Fenimore pulled off his boots, took off his shirt and stepped out of his pants. The boots he left where they stood, but he tossed the shirt and pants next to the poncho.

Being nude in the shady comfort of a hotel room was much different than spending four long days naked under the burning desert sun while being pursued by a deadly gang of double crossers. Only one of those nudities was pleasant. Fenimore tramped to the room’s small bathroom and, for the first time in weeks, looked at himself in the mirror.

The face that stared back wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t the face he remembered. It was a dark face, ragged, with an unkempt beard and vengeance weather-beaten into its taut cheeks. It wasn’t the face his mother had loved—a son’s smiling innocence—but a man’s face, motherless and not to be trusted.

Fenimore spat into the sink and turned toward the tub, which was made of metal, and heavy. He grabbed an edge, sighed, and dragged the tub out of the bathroom, into the main room, where he positioned it next to the uncovered window. The only thing better than a long overdue bath, he told himself, was a long overdue bath with a view.

When he’d finished the dragging, he was so out of breath he realized that tiredness was taking its cumulative toll not only on his face but on his entire body. Still, the thought that tonight he would finally sleep long and well kept him sufficiently awake. Tomorrow he would make money, and making money was the first step of his plan. That his plan so far consisted of only that first step and a vague coda—the destruction of each of his six grimy coins—didn’t bother him. Patience was a virtue. Neither did it bother him that he didn’t yet know what he would eventually do with the seventh, pristine, coin.

Someone knocked on the hotel room door.