Tam Hinkle's Last Sundown

by Richard Prosch

About the Author: Richard Prosch’s work has appeared in Down and Out magazine, Wild West, and online at ToughCrime.com and Boys' Life. He won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and a Will Rogers Medallion for short fiction. His Dan Spalding crime novels capture his love for jazz music and martial arts. His web site is www.RichardProsch.com.

Excerpt

The storyteller’s life isn’t as flush as it used to be, and I guess I was a thistlehead for not seein’ it sooner. The pulp magazines went to Boot Hill years ago and the digests are gone to dust. Cold war spies and moon rockets are all the rage, and the name Archie Echols doesn’t pull any more weight with the paperback mills. An old key-puncher like me spinnin’ yarns about cowboys and cattle drives can’t hardly make beans and board in the space age. Nothing I can do but lean on an inheritance from Agatha, my wife of forty years—may she rest in peace.

I can’t say I’ve penned any real prose in quite a spell.

More than once, I’ve considered chucking the old Smith Corona off under a Death Valley cactus and retiring to Vegas. Likely that’s where I’d be right now if an ad in back of one of the film magazines hadn’t put a bug in my head—and let me tell you, that varmint went to work churning up a deep well of memories, dark and brackish.

That morning, my breakfast table was a basement bar looking out a pair of glass doors at our hacienda patio and the arid California landscape. Before she passed, Agatha had the place decorated real nice in avocado green and yellow ochre and my velvet matador painting on the north wall nailed the Western mood.

I sipped at my vodka-seasoned orange juice, stared through wiggles of shimmering heat at the abandoned lot across the way, and pretended it was old Mexico and I was a rootin’ tootin’ six-shooter.

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