Zion by Dayne Sherman Page A

cigar box without a lid and a half pint of Old Crow. He pulled them out and placed them on the seat, and then he shined the light underneath the passenger side, squinting to see, his cheek pressed against the floorboard. He saw a cotton bag, similar to a flour sack. He reached in and got it. It was chunky feeling and hard. He opened the sack and saw his father’s watch, as well as a nickel-plated derringer with two barrels, which he immediately cracked open. It was loaded with a pair of .22 rounds.
    Tom gritted his teeth. At that moment he was flushed with enough rage to go inside the bar and kill Sloan with his fists—beat him where he sat on a barstool drinking himself stupid. Tom rubbed his left hand across his jaw and down his neck over his Adam’s apple. He stood up thinking. Then he leaned back inside the Scout cab and stuck the cigar box and whiskey back underneath the seat. He carried the cotton sack in his left hand, and shut the Scout door and got back into the truck with James Luke. He dropped the flashlight and sack on the seat. Right then he decided not to hang onto the little pistol, but to throw it out later for safety’s sake.
    “You find it, man?” James Luke asked.
    Tom held up the bag like a prize.
    “You want to go get him?” James Luke had his hand on the column shift.
    “Yeah, I do but not yet. Let’s get out of here before I change my mind and kill him,” Tom said, his anger welling. But then he took the pocket watch from the sack. He rubbed the gold cover with his thumb, wondering why Sloan would rape his wife, take the watch, and now sit on a barstool thinking he had gotten away with all of it.
    James Luke pulled the transmission out of neutral and put it into reverse. His left foot held down the clutch. “We ought to go confront his sorry ass now,” James Luke said. “You know full well he stole the watch out from your house when he tried to kill Sara. Just walk into that bar and shoot him down. Provoke him and end it.” He hit his hands on the steering wheel to emphasize the point.
    They sat a while in the truck cab, talking, debating how to address it all.
    “I think I need a drink. I’m a little dry,” James Luke said.
    “Me, too. Let’s go see if he’s in there,” Tom said. He was a teetotaler, never drinking a drop, and he didn’t even know where the words came from.
    James Luke smiled. “Good. Now you’re talking.” He turned off the Chevy engine.
    Tom knew he’d spoken out of moral weakness. They soured the taste in his mouth as he walked toward the barroom doors. He yielded to anger and hate. When James Luke opened the sagging door, the stench of stale beer, smoke, and rank urine knocked Tom in the face. The bar was not much brighter than the parking lot, as opaque as a snake hole at midnight.
    There were a half-dozen people sitting at the bar, another two played at the pool table. A patron stood at the jukebox pushing in nickels. A tune by Wynn Stewart, “Another Day, Another Dollar,” careened off the walls.
    Sloan Parnell sat at the far end of the plywood bar talking to a woman, the only woman in the room. She wore an amber blouse barely covering the tops of her breasts.
    James Luke motioned to Tom, and they took a table against a wall away from the dull glow that issued from naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
    The barkeep came over to the table where they sat. He was a one-eyed man named Huey Jenner from Traylor Branch. “What y’all drinking?” he asked.
    “Beer. Two bottles of Jax,” James Luke said.
    The barkeep smiled. “Y’all come way out here to meet up with somebody?”
    “Sort of,” James Luke said. “You might say that.” He lit a cigarette.
    “Beer’ll be right over,” Jenner said.
    “Thanks,” Tom said.
     
    For an hour they drank beer, speaking hardly a word between them. Tom hadn’t drunk a swallow of alcohol since he was a teenager, and the beer created a light buzz in his head. They watched the bar where Sloan placed