He opened his jacket and revealed his Beretta 92F for the whole bar to see. Then he looked directly at Rudd. “There’s a crowd formed on the corner of Whitewood and Palmer, not a mile from here,” he said. “Some son of a bitch tossed a brick through my windshield and I had to plow right through them. I might have hit somebody; I don’t know for sure, but I almost hope so. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d had the top down. No bullshit now. The day is upon us.”

At this Osmond, gagging and heaving, bolted from his stool to the restroom. Langston’s eye followed him for a second but returned quickly to Fenton.

“Fenton?” he asked, crisply, militarily.

“That’s right,” asserted Rudd, standing. This was going to be his show-he could feel that now-and it would go easier all around if that were made clear right from the start. “This is Langston,” he said to his friend. “I’ve told him as much about you as I have you about him. Have a seat, Langston.” He snapped back down on his stool without any further look at Langston, who did indeed sit down, on his left in fact.

“Drink!” barked Langston at the bartender.

The bartender paused a beat, wrapped up in the television as he was and beginning to wonder whether fetching a Glenlivet for Langston was the best use of his time right now, in light of the events unfolding on screen and, evidently, in street. But he got the drink. Brought the bottle, too, set it on the bar next to Langston’s drink. The Glenlivet, it said on the label, unblended—twelve years old.

“What the heck is this for,” said Langston though he already knew the answer.

“Whitewood and Palmer?” said Rudd.

“We were just there,” said Fenton.

“Well?” demanded Langston anyway. He looked up, chase, try to meet the eyes, that bartender.

They all looked at the bartender. A circle of red, formed on his chest, was growing in the white cotton of his shirt. They saw it, then they remembered hearing the sharp crack-not a shatter, more a click-of a pane of glass being pierced. The bartender’s knees folded, and he crumpled dead to the floor.

Jill screamed for the first and last time of her adult life. It was the next sound to follow the glass, or would be in the record of Rudd’s memory. He looked at her. She was looking at him and she stopped as if embarrassed, which she wasn’t. “Back here,” she said to him.

To him she said it, and for that reason he never thought about not going to her. He left his stool, passed Langston and Fenton, both already risen and on their way around the bar to assist the bartender though everybody knew beyond doubt that he was dead, like the riot had supercharged things, turning the very air into a medium of communication. He noticed Osmond, frozen, staring from the corridor that led to the restrooms. Rudd wanted to slap him into some kind of activity, and he wondered at the sudden proliferation of such thoughts in his head, when and why exactly it began. It had begun, not long ago but it had. There was a duty here. Impossible to perceive the world except through one’s own senses.