The Gray Coat
The road into Salt Lake City smelled of dust and woodsmoke, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the sweetish rot of something that had burned a long time ago and never quite finished burning. Danny Gene noticed it the way a man notices an old wound aching before rain. He had learned to trust that smell more than his eyes.
His horse, a rawboned bay he'd traded two pistols and a lie for back in Wyoming Territory, stumbled over a rut and nearly went down. Danny didn't bother to correct it much. He was too tired to care whether the animal fell, and too tired, if he was honest with himself, to care much whether he did either. Three months he'd been riding west, sleeping in culverts and abandoned barns, eating what he could shoot or steal, and in all that time he had not said more than a hundred words to another living soul. That suited him. Words had a way of turning into questions, and questions had a way of turning into men reaching for guns.
The gray coat hung off his shoulders now like a flag nobody wanted flown anymore. It was stained dark at the collar with sweat and grease, torn at one elbow where a fence wire had caught him outside Laramie, faded at the shoulders to the…
