Page 74 of Havoc

I'd forgotten what that does.

Around five, a man comes in wearing a Kings cut with a bottom rocker I don't know.

He's fifty, thick through the middle, and he stands at the far end and drinks two and looks at me for the whole of the second one.

Then he comes down the bar.

"You the one?" he growls.

"Depends."

"Walked in chapel."

The room doesn't go quiet, exactly. It goes about ten percent quieter, which in a roadhouse is the same as a scream. Junie stops with a rack of glasses halfway up.

"That's right," I say.

"Twenty-two years." He puts a finger on the wood. "My ol’ lady's been comin' around that buildin' since two thousand nine. She's had a patch on her back with my name on it since twenty-fourteen. She has never one time put a foot in that hall past the ice machine, 'cause that's the rule, and she has never once complained about it neither."

"Okay."

"So what makes you⁠—"

"Nothing," I say.

He stops.

"Nothing makes me," I say. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you I earned it, because I didn't. A man opened a door and I walked through it, and if your wife's angry about that then she's right to be and I'd take it from her. I'll take it from her all night. She's the one it cost something."

He looks at me.

"But she's not the one standing here," I say. "You are. And you're not mad about your wife, you're mad because a rule you like got broken and you want somebody to say sorry about it so it goes back to being solid. It doesn't work that way. It's broken. It was broken the second the door swung, and it's not going to un-break because I apologize to a man at a bar."

Nobody says anything.

Junie sets the rack down without a sound.

"I'll get your third one," I say, "and it's on me, and I'm not doing that to be nice. I'm doing it because I want you to sit down and stop looking at me."

He stands there for about four seconds.

Then he barks out one laugh, short and ugly and real, and picks up the glass I put in front of him.

"Hell," he says, and goes and sits down.

Gigi is looking at me over the top of a lime with her mouth open.

"Okay," she says. "Okay, no, I love her, we're keeping her."

"You don't get a vote," Junie says.

"I'm getting a vote. I'm taking one."

Gigi's phone lights up on the cooler beside her.

She turns it face down without looking at it and goes back to the limes.

Havoc comes for me at nine and the room does a thing when he walks in.