Panic!

Sullivan came down immediately, no smile on his freckled Irish countenance. Brackeen said, “Mighty hot,” the way he did every day when he came in, and took off his hat and put it on the bar face. He passed one of his big, knotted hands through his damp hair.

Sullivan said, “Yeah,” ritualistically.

“Draw a pint, will you, Sully?”

“Sure.”

“And put a Poor Boy in, I guess.”

Sullivan went away and drew the beer and placed one of the foil-wrapped, ready-made sandwiches into the miniature electric oven on the back bar. He was an old-fashioned publican, and he scraped the foaming head off the glass of beer with a wooden spatula before serving it.

Brackeen wrapped both hands around the cold-beaded stein, lifted it, his eyes closing in anticipation. He drank in long, convulsive swallows, filling his mouth with the chill effervescence before letting it flow tingling through the burning passage of his throat and into the unsettled emptiness of his stomach.

The glass was empty. He put it down on the bar and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. Jesus, but he had needed that! And the next one, too. He didn’t really want the Poor Boy at all, but he knew that when he had a hangover as bad as this one, he had to have something solid on his stomach; if not, he would conclude his tour at five o’clock by puking up stale beer, that was what had happened the last time he hadn’t eaten with hell going.

Brackeen looked for Sullivan and caught his eye, lifting the empty stein. When it had been refilled, he drank more slowly, looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. What he saw did not disturb him much. If he had been able, as a kid fresh out of the Police Academy, to look twenty years into the future and see himself as he was today, he would have been appalled at the vision; but as a kid, he had had ideals, dreams, he had had a lot of things that he no longer possessed. The fact that he had become a slob offended him not at all.

He ate the Poor Boy slowly, in mincing bites washed down with a third stein of draught. The beer was bringing him out of it, as it usually did. He called to Sullivan for a fourth draw, and while he waited for it he decided that he was strong enough to have a cigarette; he couldn’t touch them in the mornings after a night like he’d had in Kehoe City.

He smoked two cigarettes, one each with the fourth and the fifth glasses of beer, and he was feeling straight with himself again, feeling pretty good. The headache had abated, and his gut was not giving him any more trouble. But it was time to get back, because Forester took his lunch at one-thirty and Forester had big eyes and a bigger mouth, being a bright-face. Brackeen didn’t want to antagonize Forester, you had to pamper these young shits with their new-found authority, because if they went sour on you they could make a lot of trouble. And Forester had never made a secret of the fact that he disliked—disapproved of—Brackeen.

He thought briefly about taking a couple of cans of beer back to the substation with him—Forester was going on patrol again, after his lunch—but he shelved that idea immediately. He had almost gotten caught with a half-quart in his hand that afternoon two months ago, when the county sheriff, Lydell, had come in unannounced. He had learned his lesson from that; there was no point in tempting fate, no percentage in raising already poor odds. He would be able to make it through the day now, with these five beers under his belt—and if he did begin hurting a little later on, maybe he could slip out for a couple of minutes and get back here for a bracer or two, as long as things remained quiet.

He eased off the stool and put his hat back on, adjusting the Magnum on his hip. “See you later, Sully,” he said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Brackeen smiled loosely and went out into the sweltering afternoon without touching his wallet—the final segment of the bitter ritual he and Sullivan enacted almost every day.

Six

Slowly, inexorably, the desert sun traversed its ardent path across the smoky blue heavens. When it reached the lip of the western horizon, it hung there for long minutes as if preparing itself for the descent, radiating, setting red-gold fire to the sky around it. Then, abruptly, it plunged, deepening the red haze into burnished brass, adding salmon and pink threads to the intricate color scheme of a desert sunset. The horizon swallowed it hungrily, and the empyrean modulated to blue-gray, to slate, to expanding black as the shining globe vanished completely.

The first papery whispers of the night wind stirred the mesquite, the bright gold flowers of the rabbit bush, and nocturnal animals—badgers, foxes, peccaries, coyotes, hooded skunks— ventured tentatively from their lairs in search of food and water. Bats and horned owls filled the rapidly cooling air with the flutter of wings.