“Like every man in this room—cowboy clothes, six feet or so, slim. He wore his hat tipped forward, so you couldn’t get a good look at his face. I checked with wardrobe—the real Baxter didn’t check out a costume or weapon. Neither did his impersonator. This was very well planned.”

The director spoke up. “Why do you think it was planned? How would he know Baxter was sick? How would he know to sign in for him?”

“You have a point. I asked him to sign in, and there was only one blank space, next to Baxter’s name. But it was well planned enough for him to provide his own costume and weapons—he was wearing a six-gun, too.”

“Is there anybody in the room who talked to the fake Baxter or got a close look at him?”

The AD spoke up. “I placed him by the hitching rail in front of the general store, but I wasn’t really looking at his face. He was taller than I am, but then almost everybody here is.” The crowd had a good laugh at the short AD.

“Anybody else have conversation with him?”

Nobody spoke.

“Boris, is anybody mad at you?”

“Not that I know of,” Tirov replied. “At least, not mad enough to take a shot at me.”

“Anybody else have anything—anything at all—to contribute?”

Nobody spoke.

“All right, then,” the director said, “I’m going to assume that somebody brought the gun from home, and that it was already loaded with live ammo, and that this was an accident. I’m not going to call the police, because there is no reason to think that he was trying to kill Boris, and we’d likely lose a day’s shooting. Boris agrees with me—in fact, it was his idea. So we’re going to go back to work and right now. I want to get this scene done before we lose the light. Let’s go! Assume your previous positions in the street.”

Everybody filed out of the saloon and into the street.

The director approached Tirov on his way out. “Boris, do you really think this was an accident?”

“What else could it be?” Tirov asked. He had brought the bourbon with him and took a swig from the bottle.

“You’d think, wouldn’t you, that in a crew this size somebody would have an oxycodone?”

“You’d think,” Boris replied, taking another swig.

It was the director’s private opinion that if everybody on the set had had a pocketful of pills, nobody would have offered Boris one. He was that popular with the crew.

—

Boris didn’t resume his seat on the set. Instead, he went to his trailer, stretched out on his sofa, and got drunker. He had no intention of going to an ER, where a gunshot wound would be reported to the police, with all that that would entail.