But this late in the game they had all learned a lot, and it wasn’t long before Miles was returning fire from behind the bar.

Langston screamed, thrashed. It was impossible to determine if he knew what was happening. Rudd was close enough to Jill to push her back into Langston’s booth. He crouched low and handed her the bottle which he had not for one second forgotten was in his hand.

“Stay down and do what you can for him with this,” he told her, for Langston was still the priority; his condition was what they all feared the most, what they would all be most likely to unite against. Rudd took up a position in a forward booth. “Fenton!” he cried over the relentless pounding. “Get that scotch under cover before you do anything else!”

“Is that what’s called for, Rudd?” said Fenton, currently too pinned down by his proximity to the door to rise even to a crouch.

Rudd, his Walther locked open just that fast, pulled out his Glock and emptied it at the door. There was a brief lull in the outside fire and Fenton, who like all these men had seen enough to recognize an opportunity, stood straight up and gathered the three remaining glass bottles-two scotch and one liqueur-leaving the less breakable juice containers to stand the next round of fire.

Rudd, reloading, caught sight of him going the long way around the bar. “Good,” he said, “don’t risk the jump. Put ‘em in the sink. Gently–”

Again he was cut short by a spate of shooting, but Fenton had safely made his position behind the bar. He set the bottles in the sink and unholstered his own Glock. Miles was glad for the support on his flank and took the opportunity to snap another clip into his Colt Gold Cup. He turned, nodded at Fenton, slid down a few feet and was able to retrieve the two plastic juice containers from the top of the bar. Jill was doing her best with Langston, who now cognizant of the bottle being placed at his lips was calming somewhat. He made a feeble motion to sit up, but Jill pushed his arm back down and hushed him. The busboy was standing in dry-storage, not so much afraid as uninvolved. No one had heard from either of Osmond’s two forty-four-magnum Smith & Wesson model twenty-nines, though the shooting showed no sign of letting up.

“Somebody’s knockin’!” screamed Langston from the floor of his booth, using a southern drawl, which nobody present had ever heard him use before.

The shooting stopped, as if just as surprised as the rest of them at this half-assed speaking in tongues.

“Hah!” yelled Langston, claiming credit of sorts but more likely too delirious to know or care.

It only seemed to precipitate more shooting, and perhaps it really did. More than anything it broke Rudd-temporarily, it had happened before when things went spinning far beyond his control-broke his temper.

“Jill! You either shut him the fuck up or I’ll put a round in him myself!” With that Rudd, in disregard of the continuing gunfire, stood like some driven demigod, a Patton or a Robert Duvall, a pop-culture icon impervious to harm but one whose legend would never leave this room. He walked so straight and sure to the booths that Jill covered the oblivious Langston with her own body, fearing for a moment that he might have meant it, might now be on his way to shoot this man, her charge, through the head.

But Rudd only walked by, a strained “I mean it” issuing like steam from between his clenched teeth. “Osmond!” he bellowed. And again upon arriving at that man’s booth, his still inert body so drunk, so very passed out, “Osmond!” A bullet pierced Rudd’s thigh, clean through the flesh, harmlessly if such an occurrence can be described in such a manner. Nobody noticed, not even Rudd, so intent was he on righting this wrong, on awaking the passed-out-on-a-cheat Osmond and bringing him to this battle. Not that its course would have been altered by Osmond, but the fearsome bark of his twin forty-fours would have been a welcome voice in its sporadic refrain.

Even as he approached the booth and squatted with his left hand contacting his own fresh wound Rudd failed to notice either pain or blood. Not until he placed his hand, now covered in his own blood, on Osmond’s back, shaking him violently in an effort to revive him, did Rudd see the blood. And because what he saw first was blood on Osmond he assumed then that the blood on him came from Osmond and this was his first, both true and false, sign that something was wrong with this large man beyond being dead drunk.

Rudd stared at his hand. He stared at the blood on Osmond’s back. He even stared at his thigh, saw the wound or at least the hole in his pants, and thought for a perverse moment that if he was destined to stain his pants with Osmond’s blood then wasn’t it propitious to have done so in the same spot where they’d been torn anyway.

Then Jill was behind him. Langston had fallen silent and there was a lull in the shooting. In fact the shooting had stopped, Jill was sure of it.