Provided the Black Reapers were wrong.
And if they weren’t?
It was a question I refused to entertain. Anything of that nature had no upside. If the Reapers were wrong, it would confirm what I already knew. My father was a hero.
And if they were right?
Losing my father was devastating. Losing my father’s legacy...
Some things were just too unfathomable to even ponder.
* * *
Jess Walters
Maybe this will be the bar where I won’t get shot at.
It was a relatively benign beginning to my new job in a town far, far away from the last bar I’d tended to, which had burned down. If I never went back to Springsville, it would have been too soon. The place had its share of interesting stories, but I was tired of feeling like I was about to be in the middle of a shootout.
In a lot of ways, the bar I now worked at, Tom’s Billiards, was very similar to Brewskis. This one had a couple of pool tables, a couple of dartboards, and a full bar, but not a lot of seating or scenic views; it was the kind of place that very few people attended. No one would ever think to take a date there for a formal Saturday night, or even a casual one. It was the definition of dive bar, where gangsters and bikers came to play. There were a couple of tube TVs in there and only one credit card processing machine; it looked like a place that had been built in 1975 and had never been renovated.
As far as the town of Ashton, my new home, though I had seen some motorcyclists, the sight didn’t worry me. Bikers were a dime a dozen in California; seeing a bike and freaking out was akin to seeing a taxi in New York City and panicking. It made no sense. What did make sense, given the relative quiet of the town and its isolation from much of anything else, was the low crime rate, the older population, and the lack of modern technology.
The door swung open, and I assumed my standard pose—leaning forward, a slight smile on my face, my arms spread on the bar top. It was the kind of look that was a little flirtatious, but not so much so that it gave customers the wrong idea.
And then I laughed when the owner of the bar, an elder gentleman by the name of, not surprisingly, Tom, walked in.
“You changed your hair!” he said in surprise.
“I told you, I like to mix it up a lot!” I said.
That was true. At Brewskis, I liked to change it as much as I could as a way of relieving stress; it was an activity to take my mind off the danger of the bar.
But here, the straightening of my hair and the return to the natural dirty-blonde color was my attempt to return my life to normalcy—or, at least, my idea of normalcy, since I couldn’t exactly say that I had ever had a “normal” life.
“Well, it’s a good look,” Tom said. “You’re the type of girl I hope to see when I walk into my bar.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to show that I was a little unsettled by his words.
Tom had struck me as nothing more than a friendly man from a different era in the interview, and I wanted to believe that was the case. I still had my guard up just in case, though. The last owner had made some comments about how I’d be eye candy for the bikers and then never showed up again. He hadn’t even contacted me when Brewskis had burned down; I got my last paycheck, and that was that.
“I just wanted to come in here and give you a heads-up,” he said. “Got a call from a friend of mine. They’re coming here after a funeral, probably about a dozen of ‘em. So you may get slammed at an hour you’re not used to.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” I said. “Not like you have a unique setup to your bar here. I know where all the liquors and liqueurs are.”
Tom smiled and patted the bar.
“You know, small town like this, it’s pretty rare that we get someone as experienced as you,” he said. “How did you wind up in Ashton?”
I chuckled, trying to think of the best way to answer. Did I dare to tell the truth? That I had run away from home at fourteen, trying to make it on my own, and only recently had opened communication with my father—a decision I sometimes regretted to an enormous degree?
Or did I just tell a small lie?
“The last place I worked at burned down,” I said.
That wasn’t a small lie. But it was a deflection, a statement so outrageous and so bold that anyone hearing it would immediately lose interest in knowing anything else and want to know about that.
“Wait, what?” Tom said. “You didn’t say that in the interview!”
