"Yes, sir. Fair and square."
He looked at the players. At the redhead on the floor. At the big one on the gurney. At the scattered aftermath of five college athletes who'd chosen the wrong stranger in the wrong bar on the wrong night.
"Dumb kids should've known better," he said.
"They're kids," I said. "We all do dumb shit when we're young."
He grunted. Studied me again, longer this time. I could see the math behind it—the statements he'd collected, the bartender's account delivered flat as a police report, the unwritten code of the place itself. This was a Texas bar. Things happened in Texas bars. And when the wrong party lit the fuse and the right party put out the fire, there was a protocol to that. Old as the land.
"You held back," he said. Not a question.
"I hate A&M football, Sheriff. But like you said—just dumb kids. Maybe tonight taught them something."
He shook his head. The slow, tired shake of a man who'd heard every version of every story and believed about half. Then he tipped his hat, barely, and followed the last gurney out the door. Red lights swept the lot, tires ground gravel, and the night swallowed the sirens as they pulled south.
Quiet.
Bar staff moved around me—sweeping glass, righting furniture, putting the room back together the way you reassemble a face after a hard round. I pulled the towel from my head. Checked the blood. Pressed it back.
The bartender materialized in front of me. Five-two, maybe. Forearms that said she'd been slinging kegs since before these college boys were a thought. I held out the towel.
"Keep it," she said.
I set a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. "For the trouble."
She pushed it back. I pushed it toward her again.
"I insist."
She held my gaze. Then she fished a soft pack from her apron, shook a cigarette loose, and struck a match on the bar top—not a lighter, amatch—the old way, the way my grandfather used to. She pulled a long drag, tipped her chin toward the ceiling, and exhaled through a smile.
"I hate A&M football, too."
I grinned. First real one in longer than I could measure.
I left the bill on the bar and walked out into the night.
The air hit me like a cool cloth—dry, sharp, carrying dust and diesel and the faint sweetness of mesquite from somewhere miles off. The stars were enormous. The way they only get in places where the darkness hasn't been ruined yet. I'd missed that. You don't see stars where I've been. You don't look up much at all.
My rental was one of the last trucks in the lot. White F-150, bland as milk, parked under a light pole that buzzed and flickered like it was trying to decide whether to stay on.
There was a man leaning against the front grille.
Shit.
I stopped. Thirty feet out. Read the scene.
Big. Bigger than me, and I'm not small. Well over six feet, built like someone had taken a standard-issue human and scaled everything up by twenty percent. He stood with his arms crossed, relaxed, watching me approach with the patience of a man who'd been waiting a while and didn't mind waiting longer.
I closed the distance. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
At six, he spoke.
"Have fun in there?"
His voice was easy. Almost warm. But I caught the way he carried his weight — the distribution, the readiness coiled beneath the calm. And his eyes. I knew those eyes. I'd seen them in tactical operations centers, in the crosshairs of mutual recognition that happens between men who've done the same kind of work in the same kind of dark. Operator eyes. The kind that catalogued everything and advertised nothing.
"What do you want?" I said.
