A horse trotted past as we stepped up onto the creaky decking that ran along in front of the saloon. I stopped Bradshaw when we got to the swinging doors as the town drunk was thrown out into the road. The bartender walked out after him, wiping his hands on a linen cloth.

“And don’t come back till you can pay your way!” he yelled, glancing at us both suspiciously.

I showed the barkeeper my Jurisfiction badge as Bradshaw kept a vigilant lookout. The whole western genre had far too many gun-slingers for its own good; there had been some confusion over the numbers required on the order form when the genre was inaugurated. Working in westerns could sometimes entail up to twenty-nine gunfights an hour.

“Jurisfiction,” I told him. “This is Bradshaw, I’m Next. We’re looking for the Minotaur.”

The barkeeper stared at me coldly. “Think you’s in the wrong genre, pod’ner,” he said.

All characters or Generics within a book are graded A to D, one through ten. A-grades are the Gatsbys and Jane Eyres, D-grades the grunts who make up street scenes and crowded rooms. The barkeeper had lines, so he was probably a C-2. Smart enough to get answers from but not smart enough to have much character latitude.

“He might be using the alias Norman Johnson,” I went on, showing him a photo. “Tall, body of a man, head of a bull, likes to eat people?”

“Can’t help you,” he said, shaking his head slowly as he peered at the photo.

“How about any outbreaks of slapstick?” asked Bradshaw. “Boxing glove popping out of a box, sixteen-ton weights dropping on people, that sort of thing?”

“Ain’t seen no weights droppin’ on nobody,” laughed the barkeeper, “but I hear tell the sheriff got hit in the face with a frying pan last Toosday.”

Bradshaw and I exchanged glances.

“Where do we find the sheriff ?” I asked.