Page 6 of The Drifter

Not bad. A tremor, low and steady, running through the fingers when they were at rest. His right hand was fine. His right hand was a rock. So, it wasn't drink and it wasn't nerves and it wasn't age—it was nerve damage, or it was a bad break healed by a man with no license. Either way, his left hand was a liability he'd stopped thinking about.

The tattooed one caught me looking.

"You got a problem, cowboy?"

I looked at him.

That's all. I didn't smile and I didn't nod and I didn't take my eyes off him. I set my fork down and I looked at that man across two booths of a diner in a town whose name I hadn't bothered to learn, and I gave him nothing at all.

Some men can't stand that. They can stand a fight. They can't stand a wall.

He laughed. He leaned over and said something to his buddy with his hand up beside his mouth, and they both laughed. He pointed a finger at me the way you'd point at something in a zoo. Then, he turned back around.

And that was that. I was nothing. A big, quiet nobody in worn boots, eating his eggs.

Maybe that's the end of it, I thought.

It's never the end of it. The world is sprinkled with bullies, and there is exactly one thing a bully has ever listened to in the history of the species. It isn't a stern word from a man in a feed cap.

I went back to my breakfast. Slow.

June came out with their plates a few minutes later, and by God, they were charming.

The tattooed one was up out of his chair helping her set them down. He was apologizing. Ma'am, he was saying, and hand to God, and we been on that road four days, and ain't seen a pretty girl in about a year and I plumb forgot how to act. The scarred one had his palms up like a man at church. They were going to tip her extra. They were going to tip her real good.

She smiled. She didn't want to. Then, she did. I watched her shoulders come down off her ears. She said it was fine, it was fine, don't worry about it.

She thought it was over.

That's the part I'd have taken back if I could take back any of it. Not what came after. That she stood there for four seconds and believed the world had corrected itself.

She turned.

The scarred one's right arm came around her waist, and his hand came up over her breast, and he pulled her down toward his lap.

I was already moving.

One stride. That's all it was—one long step out of that booth, and I had his wrist.

I peeled his hand off her the way you'd take a wrench off a bolt. I put my other arm out and moved her behind me, gently, the flat of my hand at her shoulder, and she went. She went easy. By the time she was clear, I'd taken that hand up and over and back into an angle God did not draw. The scarred man's whole body went up onto its toes trying to follow it.

The tattooed one came up out of his chair.

He was fast. He wasn't nearly fast enough. He was still finding his feet when my right hand crossed the space between us. I put it through the middle of his face and out the back.

You don't punch a nose. You punch a spot four inches behind it.

The cartilage went with a sound like a boot in gravel. He sat down in that booth and he kept going, sliding sideways down the vinyl with his eyes rolled white and his arms loose. He was out before his shoulder hit the wall.

The scarred one's eyes came open wide. His free hand—the good one, the right one, the rock—started across his body for his left side.

I finished the wrist.

It went with a crack you could hear at the register. Wet and final. He howled, a high, split-open noise that didn't belong in a room that smelled like bacon. Both hands forgot about everything except each other, and he curled toward the pain.

I hauled him up out of the booth by the collar. I reached down inside the waistband of his sweaty jeans, left side, cross-draw, right where I'd put it eight seconds before I needed it, and I came out with a little black 9-mil with a worn-through finish.

I dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber into my palm, and held the whole works out to June.