Page 7 of The Drifter

"Hold that for me."

She took it in both hands like a casserole.

The room was dead quiet. Sixty years of men, and not one of them moving. The jukebox had gone to something with a fiddle in it.

"Sorry for the commotion, folks," I said. "Would somebody mind calling the sheriff?"

The old boy in the Marine Corps ballcap by the door put his hand up like we were in school. Then, he took his phone out of his shirt pocket and started dialing without ever once taking his eyes off me.

I got a handful of the unconscious one's collar and dragged him off the vinyl. The scarred one, I barely had to pull. He came along behind his own wrist, cursing me in a thin, wobbling voice, gray to the lips. I walked the both of them out through the door and its little brass bell and dumped them in a heap on the concrete in the shade of the building.

"Don't move," I told him.

He kept cursing. He didn't move.

There were two motorcycles nosed into the handicapped spot.

I leaned against the wall by the newspaper box and waited. The trucks went by out on the highway, and the heat came up off the lot in sheets even at seven in the morning, and the man on the concrete swore at me steadily. I let him. It seemed like the least I could do.

It took less than ten minutes.

The Tahoe that pulled in had a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it if it had one, and a dent in the rear quarter panel nobody was ever going to fix. A deputy got out of the passenger side, young, and stayed by the hood. The sheriff got out of the driver's side and took his time coming across the lot.

Mid-fifties. Gray in the mustache. He'd been a big man once and was a wide one now. He had the eyes of somebody who had heard every story there was and had believed about a third of them.

He looked down at the two men on the concrete. He looked at the pistol in my hand, muzzle down, magazine out, slide locked back.

"You the fella who took the trash out?"

"Yes, sir."

"Uh-huh." He got a boot under the tattooed one's shoulder and rolled him half over, took in the ruin of his face without any change of expression, and let him roll back. "Where you from, son?"

"Valentine."

He grunted. That was the whole of his reaction. It was plenty.

He looked at the door of the diner for a while, and then at the two motorcycles in the handicapped spot, and then, finally, at me.

"That girl in there's my sister's youngest. June’s her name," he said.

I didn't say anything.

"Heard what happened." He scratched his jaw. He let it sit. "You sure you don't want me to come back in a while?"

I grinned.

Texas. There is not another place like it on this earth. Hundreds of miles of scrub and heat in any direction you care to name, and one man in a dented Tahoe offering to drive around the block.

But I'm not a sadist. I've known sadists, I've worked beside a few. There's a line, and I know exactly where it is because I've stood on it. These two got what they had coming. They got it in front of witnesses and they got it fast and they'd each of them carry a piece of this morning for the rest of their lives. That's the ledger balanced. Anything past that is for me, and nothing is ever for me.

"No, sir," I said. "But I'd be glad to help you load them."

The one on the ground had started to stir. The sheriff looked at him.

"Nah." He hitched his belt. "Go on and finish your breakfast, son."

I went back inside.