At the end of a bloody trail, Johnny Redd finds an incredible secret. While struggling with a bullet in his chest, he crawls along the ground until he finds himself surrounded by a maze of quaint carnival tarps. Inside is a world of color, costumes, false hair, nails, eyelashes -- and a man who dresses like a woman. It’s a world of trickery, deception, and lies. Johnny makes it just inside the tent when his strength fails and he faints dead away. When he awakes, he’s reminded of the bizarre reality that surrounds him. It’s that he learns he has been taken care of by a man – er. woman -- by the name of Frenchy Starr. The name rolls from the tongue of this fallen angel, this princess of darkness, this twilight queen. She’s a mystery, a dangerously beautiful mystery, and Johnny slowly becomes ensnared in the trap which she sets. After one night of incredible love, a jealous fan shoots Frenchy. Thinking her dead, Johnny’s heart is broken and he leaves in search of something to fill the hole she left in his heart. Enter Kit Dalton.

Carnival Cowboy

And then it seemed as if Johnny went crazy, and began firing all around him. In the ground, in the trees, the bushes, and even in the sky—but not in Kit’s flesh.


With that, Kit walked up to him, wrenched the gun from his hand, and said, “You’re not a fuckin’ killer. I know that, and you know that. How the hell you ever got mixed up with that gang I’ll never know. Together we’re gonna stop this before you really get in trouble. Right now, you can pay for what you’ve done with only a few years in jail, but if you keep this up you’ll wind up killing someone, and then end up on the gallows somewhere with a hangman’s noose around your neck. I want to stop that before it happens.”


“You damned bastard. Why in hell did I get mixed up with you?” Johnny said as he slowly began to wilt. “It must have been the unluckiest day of my life.”


“Sorry you feel that way. Just rest a minute, and then we’ll go into town and get this over with.”


Chapter 15