So much had changed, but Vic’s looked just as it had before the giant fell. Hell, it still looked just as it had the first time David had gone inside as a kid, tagging along with his dad, who would meet up for beers with Dale and Ben Senior every Friday night. The cousins David, Jason, and Ben Junior, and Spady tagging along, would get Cokes and try to play pool, though they were barely tall enough to see up onto the table. He’d felt a vague sense of discomfit: the sour smell of alcohol, the raspy laughter of old farmers . . . But he kept coming, and eventually it felt like a second home.
Brooke had decorated a bit, taping up photos of Jason. Ones from high school. A baby photo. One from just a few years back, a summer fishing trip with Jason proudly holding up his catch: a four-inch trout. Jason’s barstool sat empty, his number 33 Little Springs Chiefs jersey draped over it, a beer and a shot of whiskey on the bar, as if waiting for him.
It seemed the whole town crowded inside. Old Town, anyway. No outsiders had been invited. And while Brooke gave a wry smile at David when she saw him arrive with Sunny, she didn’t complain. Any guest of David’s was welcome.
Spady clapped him on the back and tugged him to the bar, where Vic was waiting.
“We drink this place dry,” Spady said. “For Jason.”
David accepted a shot. “For Jason.”
They drank slowly at first, one beer after another. Locals trickling in and out, cigarette smoke wafting. There weren’t any speeches, just old stories traded in small clutches of people. Jason’s legendary feats, athletic exploits, embarrassing misadventures. The time he dressed up as an inflatable dinosaur for his twins’ birthday party, then came to the bar straight afterward, still in costume.
There were older stories, too, ones that involved the four of them—Jason, David, Spady, and Ben Junior—and David for a moment felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t invited Charlotte. But she wouldn’t have come. Would she? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to worry about it. Not tonight.
Listening to the stories, Jason seemed almost mythological. At one point, David found his thoughts meandering out of the bar, away from the revelry, to the printed-out emails the FBI had turned up between Jason and Phoebe, the woman he’d become involved with. Emails that told an entirely different story, of a vulnerable man who felt trapped under life’s pressures. He couldn’t forget the words of one:
I wish we could run away. I want to leave this place forever. Start new, just you and me. No baggage. Just the road.
David did nothing to puncture the crowd’s image of his cousin. Mostly he listened and laughed to the stories, the absurd feats his cousin had managed, the brazen pratfalls. God, it felt good to laugh. He laughed until his abdomen ached.
Sunny sat beside him, listening in, absorbing the stories as she sipped at a vodka and soda. She smiled at him as Clint Black’s voice crooned from the jukebox.
“I like you when you’re drunk. You actually talk.”
David was just about to respond when all at once Spady was beside them.
“You know much about this guy here?” Spady asked, sloshing his drink at David.
His voice slurred heavily, and his eyes twinkled mischievously.
“Honestly, no. He’s pretty quiet,” Sunny said.
Spady grinned.
“Always has been. I suppose he hasn’t told you about skinny-dipping in the river then?”
David’s eyes widened with a warning as Sunny giggled.
“Don’t,” David started to say, but Sunny was already demanding to hear the story.
“No. No he has not,” she said, leaning in to Spady conspiratorially. “Do tell.”
“Do not dare tell,” David warned.
“Oh, no, this one is too good!” Spady crowed.
Spady was happy again, in his element. David pulled his hat as low as it would go over his eyes.
“Well, this one summer, we were what, fourteen?” Spady started.
“Thirteen,” David corrected. “You tell the story, at least get it right.”
“Thirteen. Anyway, we would ride our bikes down to the Old River Bridge and go swim in the Platte. We were always daring each other. See who could do the most stupid thing. For some reason, that day, we decided to go skinny-dipping.”
“No!” Sunny said.
“Oh yes,” Spady kept on. “But that wasn’t enough for us. Pretty soon we were swimming out into the river. Like always, it becomes a contest. Who can swim the farthest out?”
David took a deep drink and shook his head.
“We’re lucky no one drowned,” he muttered.
Spady ignored him.
“David, he’s the quiet one, but he’s always going to push the farthest. This whole county, there’s nobody as stubborn as him. We all know it. Jason swims halfway across and back. So, of course, David says he’s going all the way over. Mind you, that’s damn near a quarter mile. We say fine, let’s see it. He takes off, splashing, and it takes him half an hour, but I kid you not, he makes it all the way across the damn river, and he’s up there on the far bank, waving at us like he won the Olympics.”
“Wow,” Sunny said.
“Oh, it was something. But now he’s got to get all the way back across, because he’s naked, so he can’t just streak across the bridge. He starts to swim, his head buried down in the water.”
Spady pantomimed the motion as best he could with only one arm. David tilted the brim of his hat even lower, hiding as best he could.
“Did he make it?” Sunny asked.
“Must have. But Jason and Ben and me, we couldn’t say for sure, because while he was churning water, we got dressed and hopped on our bikes and took off. With David’s clothes in tow.”
Sunny squealed as she clapped her hand to her mouth.
“No!”
“We sure did,” Spady said, his smile wide. “A while later, he comes riding into town on his bike, one hand on the handlebar, the other one cupping his balls.”
“Oh, I made it,” David grumbled. “Assholes.”
David shook his head again. His cheeks burned.
“Assholes.”
Sunny laughed so loud she snorted.
“Oh my God. That’s incredible. Poor little David.”
“Little David is right,” Spady said, elbowing his friend.
“Fuck you all,” David said.
He started to wave to Vic for another drink, then gave up and climbed halfway over the bar to grab a bottle of Jack Daniels. He popped the cap and took a long pull.
“Especially you,” he said, toasting Jason’s picture. “God, I’m gonna miss him.”
Spady’s smile dissipated.
“You and me both,” Spady said.
They drank, told stories, drank more. David’s yearning for Sunny to tell him what she knew, whatever the secret was, at some point faded, replaced by a yearning just to be with her, to enjoy the night together, to hear her laughter. The night became an ellipsis of staccato moments.
He was showing her line dancing steps as he drained the whiskey bottle dry, and she gamely followed along.
They were dancing to a slow song. Johnny Cash.
She was wearing his hat. When had she taken it?
He was in the bathroom at the urinal, pissing half on the floor, struggling to stay on his feet.
They were back at the bar, leaning against each other.
There was Erickson, with a hand on David’s arm. “Maybe it’s time to call it a night?”
And then they were outside, and somehow David was getting into his truck, but on the passenger side. How? It was moving. Who’s driving? Oh. Sunny. They were stopped at a green light.
“Is it a left or a right?” she was asking him.
He summoned as much focus as he could, looking around them. Even drunk, in the dark, he knew this road. They were close to his apartment.
“That way.”
Then she was helping him out of the truck and up his stairs.
Then she was easing him down into his bed.
Then, blissfully, nothing.
The old FBI man saw the sheriff and a woman off into a truck, then he headed down the side street along the bar and back into a small, gravel alley that ran behind it, with a clutter of dumpsters, stacked wooden pallets, and empty gas tanks.
The man watched this. And he watched the drunken revelers spill out of the bar, all so casual and unaware, acting as if they thought that this world was safe for them. It was time to remind all of them that they were mistaken.
He came around the edge of the building, clinging to the shadows, stepping carefully so as to not upset the gravel, to keep from making any sound. The FBI man trudged along, moving slow, wearing his exhaustion as if it was a cloak.
This part was always his favorite. The hunt. That electric charge that fired in the base of his skull, that raced down through his whole body.
He felt the solidity of the blade, the way it seemed to cut even the air as he stalked forward from out of the shadows.
The FBI man had reached his car, which he had parked in the alley. He was reaching for the door, his back to the man who moved steadily closer. Closer. The urge screamed inside him for release. He lifted the blade. Just then, gravel crackled beneath his foot.
The FBI agent turned, his reaction shockingly swift given his age and shuffling demeanor.
His hand shot into his pocket—a gun? He looked up with an expression that described recognition, confusion, and surprise.
“You?”
The man thrust the blade forward, saying nothing. The FBI agent’s hand came out of his pocket, but it was too late.
The blade plunged straight through his chest, splitting the sternum in two, ripping the heart free of its arteries, crackling through bone as it punctured out of his back.
A sort of whimpering sigh came from the agent’s mouth, then his eyes darkened as blood erupted from his chest.
The body slid backward, gravity pulling it from the blade and to the ground.
There, the lifeless eyes held open, fixated on the man as he began his work.
The blade seemed to move itself, gliding across skin, scrawling the patterns. Large loops circling into smaller loops, and smaller, never ending.
With each slice, the thrumming in his head lessened, a steam valve releasing pressure.
Someone would be coming. He needed to go.
But it refused to listen, this urge inside him. The work needed to be done. People needed to see. To understand.
Please, his conscious mind shouted. Stop. Run.
The blade stopped.
He stood then as the melody of a sad country song echoed out through the back of the bar and reverberated across the cool spring air.
It was only then that he looked at the agent’s hand at his side, still clenching whatever he had drawn from his pocket. His hand held not a gun but something small, glinting metal. A cigarette lighter.
The man reached down, pried the lighter free, pocketed it, and walked off into the night.