Ethan #2
The man lifted his gray hat and settled it, just so, on his head. He rose all the way up to Ethan’s six foot three. He stuck out a hand, the one with the scarred finger, and Ethan found himself shaking it.
“Name’s Jack Allen,” the man said. “Be careful with your friend in the bathroom there. Your boy has a railroad spike where his heart ought to be. But maybe a monster is exactly the sort of person you need by your side, considering your circumstances.”
“He’s not a monster.”
Jack Allen didn’t deign to answer. He crossed to the front door, tipped his hat. “Be seeing you, Mister Cross.”
How did the man know his name?
How did the man know his name?
Outside, Jack Allen climbed into a vintage black Buick that Ethan had somehow failed to notice in the parking lot until this very moment.
Like everything else about Jack Allen, from the gabardine suit to the matching hat to the old, old eyes, the car was strangely antiquated, or like something out of time entirely.
Jack Allen gunned the engine. Headed north. Toward Fort Stockton. Away from the route he called the Dust Road.
Ethan envied him that luxury, later.
The diner’s back door opened near Ethan’s end of the bar. It let in a flinty older woman and a lingering cloud of cigarette smoke. She wore a black apron, the kind with pockets for pens and order pads. “Sit anywhere, hun,” she said. She didn’t sound thrilled at the idea.
A radio behind the bar had come back to life: Barbara Mandrell, burning the midnight oil.
Ethan hadn’t realized the radio had been silent.
The clock on the wall said it was 2:03, but it must have been broken.
There was no way only a single minute could have passed during that conversation with the gabardine man.
Be seeing you, Mister Cross.
Hunter emerged from the bathroom a moment later, swiping his hands on the seat of his jeans. The rat-faced fry cook emerged from his distant corner of the kitchen, arriving at the short-order window just in time to see Hunter touch Ethan’s elbow.
“You all right?” Hunter said. “You look scared.”
The fry cook sneered. When Ethan said, “I’m fine, I think,” the cook let out a snicker loud enough to be heard over the hiss of the kitchen’s grease.
What a mistake.
There had been times, before they left Ellersby, when Hunter’s opaqueness had split open to reveal a sharp edge, a ruthlessness he’d directed at anyone who didn’t mind their own business.
It had gotten tense, once or twice. Sheriff Powell had even pulled Ethan over when he was returning from Walmart alone.
Wanted to give you a chance to talk one-on-one, the sheriff said.
Just in case you’ve got yourself in a bind with a man you can’t handle.
Ethan had waved this away. It’s not like Hunter ever actually came to blows with anyone. He didn’t start fights. He just ended them.
Was there anything sexier?
Ethan narrowed his eyes at the fry cook. “What’s funny?”
The cook turned up the temperature on the kitchen’s deep fryer, chuckling to himself, ignoring Ethan.
Never raising his voice, Hunter said, “My friend asked you a question.”
“We don’t get a lot of people like y’all out here, stud,” the cook said. “I guess we ain’t used to it.”
The waitress sighed. “Ignore Cleveland. I’ve fired him for worse and he keeps turning up for work.”
Hunter didn’t even glance at her. A dark light had started burning behind his hazel eyes, something Ethan had never seen before. It was like the first flicker of a black fire.
“What do you mean?” Hunter said. “ ‘People like us’?”
“You really need me to spell it out for you?” the cook said.
“I guess so. I’m not understanding.”
The rat-faced man looked up from his work. “Then you’re an idiot and a fairy and if I weren’t so busy I’d kick your ass.”
“Christ alive, Cleveland,” the waitress said. “What business is that of yours?”
Hunter stepped away from the bar, murmuring something in Ethan’s ear as he walked by. He proceeded outside.
The fry cook snickered again. “I scare him off that easy?”
Hunter was at their truck, rooting through the bags in the bed, his back to them.
The waitress looked sincerely mortified. She said to Ethan, “Whatever y’all want, it’s on the house. It’ll be the last meals he makes here. I don’t—Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Outside, Hunter found what he was looking for. He turned around. He returned to the restaurant.
He was holding Ethan’s old 12-gauge Remington pump-action shotgun.
Movement snapped Ethan to his senses. The old waitress hustled past him, making for the open end of the bar. Ethan understood what Hunter had murmured in his ear on the way outside.
Watch her—she probably has a piece.
Ethan didn’t think. When the waitress started running, Ethan hiked his boot onto a stool and heaved himself across the bar. He scanned the shelves beneath the cash register—trash can, a box of pens, a pocketbook.
There, glinting atop a small safe, was a Colt .357 Python.
Ethan grabbed the gun and raised it as the waitress reached the open end of the bar.
She froze, mouth wide, hands up.
Hunter strode inside, the shotgun braced in both hands. He walked behind the waitress, kicked open the door of the kitchen, raised the shotgun to his shoulder as Cleveland spun on his heel.
The shotgun was in the fry cook’s face. Hunter said, “Turn around. Now.”
A long moment of horror for all involved. A frozen gasp in time. Ethan’s stomach lurched. A cold sweat, a TNT heart.
He felt a terrible pressure in his jeans, shameful and wild.
In the kitchen, the fry cook turned around as Hunter instructed. The cook stared at Ethan through the window. No more spite. No more snickers. Every strand of hair trembling with fear. “I’m sorry, man, I just say shit sometimes, I—”
“Did I ask you to talk?” Hunter said. He never raised his voice. He never had to.
The fry cook went silent.
“Go back to what you were doing. Go on.”
“I—I was just heating the grease, man, I wasn’t—”
“Did I ask you to talk?” Hunter said again. He came up behind the cook and pressed the mouth of the shotgun against the back of the man’s skull. “Take a step forward.”
“There ain’t nowhere to go.”
“Do it.”
Terrified, bewildered, the cook took a step closer to the kitchen’s window. The Python still raised at the waitress, Ethan risked a glance down through the window. But at what? There was nothing in front of the cook except the long range of sizzling deep fryers.
Oh God.
“Tell me something, Cleveland.” Hunter’s voice still level. The eyes still burning with ruthless black fire. They landed on his name tag. “What hand do you use?”
“What?”
“What hand do you touch yourself with?”
The fry cook started to turn around, shocked, but Hunter pressed the shotgun into his scalp.
“I asked you a question, Cleveland.”
“You’re fucking sick. Who asks—”
Hunter pumped a round into the shotgun’s barrel: chunk-SHUNK. “Last chance.”
The waitress was rooted to her spot at the end of the bar. Her eyes were fixed on Ethan. Not on the gun in his hand. On Ethan.
“Dear God,” she said. “You’re enjoying this.”
Ethan ignored her.
Cleveland murmured, “M-my left.”
“Your what?”
“My left hand, you crazy fuck!”
“Then do it.”
Another silence.
“Do what?” the cook said.
“You know what. Do it.”
Cleveland was bewildered, then curious, then aghast. His eyes settled where Ethan’s had: the vats of amber grease roiling in the deep fryer.
Ethan finally felt reality catching up to him. “Hunter, you scared him fine. Let’s—”
“Don’t worry. It won’t take long. The best lessons never do.”
The grease let out a hot pop. Ethan could feel the heat from this side of the kitchen’s window. Those fryers must have been running at three-hundred-fifty degrees. Maybe four hundred. Maybe more.
The waitress spoke. “Oh, son. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?”
Ethan turned. The waitress was shaking her head. She didn’t look scared anymore.
She looked sad, the frown so similar to his own mother’s that Ethan almost pulled the trigger of the Python just to make it stop.
“You poor, poor boy,” the waitress said. “Mark my words. This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble you cain’t never get out of.”
“Quiet,” Hunter said from the kitchen. He tapped the cook’s head with the shotgun. “Do it.”
“Please, man, anything. I swear to God, I’ll do anything but—”
“Do it, or it’ll be your brains in that grease instead.”
With a horrible feeling—vertigo, or maybe the thrill of a bullfight—Ethan watched as the cook extended his left hand over the grease. The waitress closed her eyes. She made a low groan in her throat: resignation, horror, defeat.
Ethan looked at Hunter. At the black fire burning in those eyes.
Ethan said nothing. For a long time after, he’d wonder why.
Hunter said to the fry cook, “Do it.”
Cleveland let out a croak of horror. He lowered his shaking hand closer to the hot grease. Lowered it by an inch. Another.
And there it stopped, just above the grease, shaking.
“I can’t do it.” The cook was sobbing. “I can’t, man, I—”
Hunter took one hand off the shotgun. Wrapped it around the cook’s left elbow. Thrust the cook’s arm into the sizzling oil.
Ethan had never heard such a scream.
The grease seethed and hissed as it cooked Cleveland’s flesh.
The cook started to fight. Hunter struck him with the butt of the shotgun and stepped away.
Cleveland fell, stunned, to the floor. Curled around his hissing hand.
Watched the steam rising off his red fingers.
Cleveland made a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream.
Hunter knelt down, very close to his ear. He spoke in a tone that was almost loving.
“Now every time you touch yourself, you’ll think of me.”
Ethan didn’t think. Didn’t breathe. They piled into the truck and tore out of the parking lot, heading south. Headed down the route the gabardine man had called the Dust Road.