Free Ladies' Night by Jack Ketchum Page B

but the old man might.
    Got to be cool .
    He saw movement behind the counter and the familiar uniform finally! One of the bitches was on her way out here.
    But it was getting complicated now. The fucking old bag lady was out of her seat and moving in his direction. No good. You didn't want nobody near you when you pulled this shit. Only way to handle it was to pull his piece right now and say fuck it.
    Which was what he did.
    The timing would be okay. He glanced at the girl coming toward him behind the racks of burgers. He slid the gun out of his pocket and turned and pointed it at the bag lady.
    "Hold it, bitch!" he said and she did.
    Okay .
    He turned to the girl who had come up beside him at the counter, turned cool and calm and pointed the gun at her face.
    The girl was grinning.
    And her face was covered with . . . what the fuck . . .?
    . . . catsup .
    Unh-unh. That shit was blood!
    The girl's arms were long, a warm, light-colored brown. They reached out to him. The palms of her hands were dripping. Blood spotted the counter.
    He felt something knot up big as a man's fist inside his gut. Not fear — he had a gun on the girl for fuck's sake — but a shock of recognition, that old Jumma had maybe got outclassed by this one, that this bitch was bold as he was and a whole lot crazier, and all of a sudden he was wondering where the other bitches were and where the cook was and what the fuck was happening here.
    He was wondering that when the bag lady wrapped her arms around him and hugged him to her reeking body from behind and the gun went off in the counter-bitch's face so that she went down like a tree. He struggled, but the bag lady bitch only woofed in his ear and hugged him tighter.
    Damn! she was strong . He couldn't break her.
    He couldn't turn around!
    He saw two more girls coming out from in back, drifting toward him like a pair of goddamn crazy ghosts and he fired at them but with only his forearm free of the bag-bitch the shots went wild. He didn't know how many times he fired but all of a sudden the gun was empty.
    He squirmed and began to whimper, feeling righteous terror as the girls climbed up over the counter.
    Behind him the front door slammed. Somebody on the run.
    The girls reached out to him, their little brown uniforms and little brown caps splotched with blood — hands and faces too — and one of them had been reaching into something because her arms were wet and red to the elbow and that was not no fucking hamburger .
    He smelled fat burning and the urinal stink of the woman behind him.
    He began screaming when they opened the counter and hauled him back where the grill was, and then he was screaming so fucking loud one of them held his jaw open while the other reached inside.   Her polished red fingernails dug down and tore forward and he was looking at his tongue in her hand. He had stopped screaming and was spitting blood.
    The pistol dropped from his hand.
    When the faintness passed he looked up from the floor and saw the mess on the grill and knew what had happened to the cook. He felt the heat of the grill as they lifted him up and pressed his face slowly down.
    Bitches, I was only gonna rob you! he thought. For that you gonna fry me?
    The grill and Jumma sizzled.

Headcounts

    Bailey was sure now. He'd never seen a bar like this. Not New Year's, not Christmas. Never . He felt a black flash of vertigo.
    The bar spoke only in murmurs, in subtle waves of heat. Even the juke was silent. In some ways that was worst of all. It occurred to him that he'd been waiting for somebody to get up and feed it a quarter for fifteen minutes now.
    Whatever was happening here he was part of it — the nervous part .
    MacInery's had gone from crowded to damn near deserted in record time — and it was early yet, but nobody was coming in. He'd watched single guys and couples walk out the door, glancing around in what looked to Bailey like some weird sort of superstitious dread. And when his