“Give me one,” the Dark Man said.

Charlie reached one out from behind the register and slid it toward him.

The Dark Man took it and turned towards one of the booths, in the back of the room where none of the Pack were gathered. He gave absolutely no sign of intending to pay.

Charlie grunted, eyeing the Dark Man’s back, and then said, “You want to run a tab ‘till the end of the day, fine. But you’ve got to get more than that. This place is for paying folks only.”

The Dark Man looked back, not at Charlie, but at the girl, and he was frowning openly this time.

“He says we need to get something,” the girl said.

“What?”

“He says we have to buy—”

The Dark Man shook his head curtly, cutting her off as effectively as if he’d slapped her. “What am I supposed to get?” He jerked his hand through the air as the girl opened her mouth and turned his back on her. “Just get it,” he ordered, and went to a booth.

“Keep in mind,” Charlie called after him. “You stiff me at the end of the day and I’ll bust lead in your ass, son.” He came up with the shotgun and hefted it casually but deliberately in the Dark Man’s direction.

“Fair enough,” the Dark Man said, and did not look around.

Neither did Charlie, who put his shotgun away and fixed his baleful bartender’s eye on the freak-girl. “You whoring here tonight, honey?” he asked evenly.

The girl shook her head, one arm twitching as though wanting to rise and cover herself.

“Map’s three bucks. Beer’s two bucks. I got bourbon and I got rye and that’s what I got. You wanna smoke, I got some of that, too. I got no food and the phone don’t work. Advice is free and I got some for you, honey-tits: Stay away from my girls and don’t give me shit or I’ll ventilate your purple fucking head. Now. What do you want?”

“T-two beers, please.”

Fat Joey’s unease deepened even more. He’d lived his whole adult life in gangs, from the age of twelve on up until now, and he’d heard the coarse rhythm of their words. Even whackos like Pitbull and book-reading types like the Cow-Boy had the same indefinable sound to their speech.

This girl, tattooed and pierced and bare-titted in a goddamn bar, sounded at least reasonably educated. The Dark Man, Mr. Movie Poster for the Apocalypse, sounded like he’d ought to be reading the damn news at ten o’clock.

Fat Joey looked around the bar again, and this time, he made a real head-count. Eight low dogs, four with knives, two guns, two unarmed. Thirteen brothers, two with knives, one with a gun, four with both. Ratchet had a pistol. The Cow-Boy had two, gunfighter slung over his hips. Top Dawg had a pig-sticker and a .45. Sue-Eye had her knife and Charlie had his shotgun.

And all of a sudden, it didn’t feel like enough. Not enough by half.

Fat Joey watched Charlie pull out two dark bottles from the ice chest and slap them down on the bar. The girl took them with a breathy, “Thank you.”

Polite. Educated. Pretty.

Cammy used to be like that. It got beat out of her in a hell of hurry. Sheb brought her in when Cammy was thirteen and looked eighteen. Now she was eighteen and looked thirty. Pretty soon, Sheb would show up with another bitch under his arm and Cammy would find herself shit out of luck, food for the low dogs or working for Charlie. Cammy was what life looked like when young girls were rode hard.

This girl, for all the metal and purple hair, looked more like a life begun in the safety of a house with four walls, a life that dipped into danger here and there on some nice, well-lit streets. A life that had only recently put her in the back pocket of the Dark Man. She did not belong here.

Fat Joey glanced around at Ratchet and then at the Cow-Boy. Both were silent, troubled, immune to the hooting laughter of the low dogs. He watched the girl nervously square herself to face the room. Her shoulders hunched, her eyes dropped, and she went swiftly toward the booth where the Dark Man waited.

There was a bad moment when Hagen reached out to flip the girl’s skirt up, showing the full curves of her naked ass to the whole room, and Fat Joey looked wildly around in time to see the Dark Man’s eyes, like silver slits in the shadow of his face.

But it was the Cow-Boy, in a strangely high and startled voice, who snarled, “Jesus Christ, get your goddamned hands off her, you stupid son of a bastard!” and Hagen jerked back as though he’d been stung.

The Dark Man kept watching until the girl reached the booth where he sat, and then his eyes slid to meet Joey’s own and there they stayed, considering him in silence.

Fat Joey could hear the low dogs loudly discussing the girl’s ass and the Dark Man’s mental state—high as a fucking kite was the popular vote—but these were distant sounds, almost tinny, as if the whole room were falling away from him. He became immediately and unreasonably convinced that the twin mirrors he saw gleaming at him were not really eyes, that the Dark Man had no eyes, that if Fat Joey could knock off that hat and crack the man’s head open he would see just a whole lot of nothing, or maybe some shiny mist filled with stars.

Fat Joey imagined he could audibly hear the last of his nerves snapping. He got away from the door, out from the path of the Dark Man’s eyes, and went back to the center table, trying not to look like he was hurrying, but not really caring if he was or not. Ratchet and the Dawg joined him and they sat together, turned so they could see the Dark Man’s booth. Fat Joey’s eyes were itching; he had to force himself to blink.

“What do you think?” he muttered to the rest of them.

“Fella ain’t high,” Ratchet replied. “Just bad news.”

The Dark Man had gone back to the careful study of his map as soon as Fat Joey had left the doorway, and by the time the girl had set the beers down and slid into the booth opposite him, he’d even managed to unfold it and spread it out over Charlie’s worn, cracked table. The girl was hugging herself, looking around the bar with her anxious, frightened eyes, but she didn’t appear to notice the crude offers of the low dogs and she didn’t respond when some of them blew kisses at her. The Dark Man tipped his head to one side and stared down at the face of his map, scowling and without the appearance of comprehension, his far hand pressed flat on the paper, and Fat Joey again found himself wondering what in the hell was wrong with the man’s hands.

The girl hesitantly reached across the table and turned the map, an action that created a new swell of guffaws from Hagen’s corner of the room, and now the Dark Man’s eyes moved over it, reading it, gradually losing the light of exasperation but none of the intensity in his face.

Suddenly, the Dark Man looked up—a swift, feral pounce of the eyes—and Fat Joey swung to see what he was seeing, his hand flying to the butt of his gun. It was just Charlie, who had moved to fetch out more beer and bourbon for the low dogs, and the old biker stared right back at the Dark Man without flinching as he put the bottles down. The Dark Man watched without blinking as the low dogs set to drinking, and then turned a little to examine to the bottles his girl had brought.

“Get my pack,” he said, and the girl got up at once and went swiftly from the bar, out to the car still parked smack in the middle of the lot. The Dark Man picked up one of the beers while he waited, turning it in one hand (gleam of something at the fingertips; what’s the matter with his fucking hands?) and looking over the label without seeming to read it. He reached up, tugged at the cap, then twisted it, and finally opened it. He leaned in, as if sniffing at the contents, oblivious to the catcalls and helpful advice from the low dogs.

The girl came back to the bar and threaded her way through the tables with a small, black case in her hands, its thick strap dangling over one arm. The Dark Man took it, slid one thick thumb across it, and the top lifted up and moved back, as slick a trick as you see in the Bond movies. He had some kind of laptop computer set up in there, smaller and sleeker than anything Joey had ever seen anywhere. The Dark Man pushed a few buttons to make the screen light up in columns before pulling out a black gadget that looked a little like a very thick ballpoint pen. It uncapped like one, too, but instead of a pen, it had something like a scalpel at the tip, long and jagged and razor-sharp. The Dark Man stuck this end into the neck of the beer bottle and Joey took another long look at Ratchet and the Cow-Boy.