The bar went quiet the second Craig Bowman kicked the door open. Every head turned, every hand froze, but under the corner table, pressed against the cold wooden leg, a 7-year-old girl held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut. She had crawled there 30 seconds before he walked in.
Duke Callahan hadn’t moved, hadn’t looked down, hadn’t said a word. He just wrapped one massive tattooed hand around his glass and stared straight at the man scanning the room with fury in his eyes. Nobody knew what was about to happen. Not Craig, not Pete behind the bar, not even Lily. But Duke Callahan had already made his decision.
The afternoon Lily ran into the rusty spoke. The sky above Harrisburg was the color of a bruise. It was the kind of October sky that pressed down on the Suskahana Valley like a lid, low, gray, and indifferent to everything happening beneath it. The last of the leaves clung to the oaks along Route 22, not because they wanted to, but because they hadn’t yet been hit hard enough to let go.
A cold front had moved in the night before, pushing temperatures into the low 40s, and the wind that funneled between the old brick buildings on Paxton Street smelled like diesel and coming rain. The rusty spoke sat on the far end of a strip that had seen better decades. a porn shop, a closed down laundromat, a tire place with a handpainted sign, and then the bar.
