His Own Home Town

In a sepia-soaked hamlet where the church spire and the courthouse cupola vie for the sky, Jimmy Duncan—ink in his veins, righteousness in his grin—inherits the sleepy gazette his forebears used to baptize sinners between the lines. He strides into the newsroom like a tent-revival preacher, ready to name, shame, and bankrupt the bootleggers whose brass-knuckled cadence echoes after dusk. Front-page exposés bloom like bloodstains; townsmen cheer, the mayor sweats, the brothel pianola skips a beat. Then the floor tilts: tip-line whispers sketch the silhouette of the real kingpin—his own father, the velvet-voiced reverend who can damn a soul at sunrise and launder its coin by sunset. Jimmy’s inkpot turns to molten lead in his throat; every headline he sets in type now bites the hand that once rocked his cradle. The final run is printed on the trembling dawn when father and son meet beneath the flickering gas lamp of the press room: scripture versus scoop, blood versus banner ink. One shot rings out, a paperboy yells an extra, and the town awakens to headlines that will never tell the whole truth, only the legend of how a crusading editor crucified his last remaining god.