The Raincatcher Saloon holds the midday heat like a kept secret. Dust drifts through the slats of light falling from the west windows, and a fly makes lazy circuits around the lamp that won't be lit for hours yet.

William Stokes works the counter with a rag, drawing slow circles on the oak. Behind him, the mirror gives back the whole room — the empty card table, the sheriff's back, the bottles ranked like soldiers on the shelf. His eyes move across it all without seeming to settle anywhere.

Lucy Dorset threads between tables with a tray balanced on one hand, all easy laughter and quicker pours. She sets a whiskey down in front of the man at the end of the bar and lingers a half-second past necessary, smiling at something he didn't say.

That man is John Damme. He drinks like a man with nowhere to be — small sips, unhurried, hat low, though his gaze keeps returning to the bar. Or to what's behind it. Or to what's on William's vest. Hard to tell.

At the corner table, Sheriff Jack Vigil sits with a cup of coffee he's let go cold, his revolver resting plain as day on the wood beside his hand. He watches the room the way a man watches weather on the horizon.

Near the hallway to the storeroom, Gum Carney slumps in a chair that isn't his, blinking slow, a mostly-empty glass sweating in his grip. Every so often his head turns toward the back, toward the door with the padlock on it, then back to nothing.

By the window, Bella Caren sits with her boots up on a second chair and a glass of something she hasn't touched, watching the street like it owes her a story.

And at the card table, Violet Turner shuffles. Not for anyone. For herself, maybe. Her hands don't stop — cut, riffle, bridge, cut — and her eyes flick up from the cards every time the batwing doors so much as breathe.

The doors swing inward, spilling white noon light across the floorboards, and every pair of eyes in the Raincatcher comes up at once — then scatters, quick as spooked birds, back to drinks, back to cards, back to weather-watching.