09 Apr Last Call at the Anchor and Gallows

Part I

The storm rolled in heavy over the Gulf, carried on winds that scraped shingles off rooftops and bent palm trees at the waist. Rain lashed the streets of Old Town, and the few people who hadn’t already taken shelter had long since vanished into shuttered hotels or locked-up bars. The only sounds that moved through the night were the guttering shriek of the wind and the uneven slap of wet shoes on slick concrete.

Wyatt Nash leaned forward against the gale, one shoulder hunched, soaked to the marrow. His boots squelched with every step. His breath came in sharp, unsteady rhythm, not from exertion but from the lingering effects of exhaustion—that slow, sinking weariness that comes from walking for too long with no destination in mind and no real reason to stop. His eyes, bloodshot and sunken, scanned the street with a kind of practiced aimlessness, the way a man looks when he’s past hope but still alive enough to flinch when something moves too fast.

There was a name he refused to speak. A place he wouldn’t think about. And a smell—burned pine and gasoline—that he couldn’t wash from the back of his throat no matter how far he ran.

The streetlights flickered as he passed. Most were dead already, their bulbs burst or stolen. Neon signs buzzed behind rain-streaked windows but offered no welcome. Wyatt passed them all without slowing. His shirt clung to his frame, and his coat, threadbare as it was, flapped uselessly behind him.

He ducked under a corrugated awning, hoping for just a moment’s reprieve, and when he did, he noticed the alley—a narrow vein of blackness between two shuttered buildings, one of them a derelict seafood joint, the other boarded from the inside like something had wanted out. It was the kind of alley that shouldn’t have been there. He was sure of it. He’d walked this part of town two nights ago, maybe three, and the space between those buildings had been no more than a crack in a wall.

But tonight, it yawned wide, just enough to swallow a man.

Wyatt stood at the mouth of it for a moment, blinking through the rain. Lightning flashed behind him, and in its brief illumination, he saw the crooked sign hanging at the alley’s end, swaying as though caught in a breeze that didn’t reach the ground. It hung from two rusted chains bolted to a wooden beam, warped from age and salt. The sign bore an emblem—an anchor looped through the eye of a hanging noose—and the words, faded and flaking, read: THE ANCHOR & GALLOWS.

Wyatt tilted his head. The name rang no bell, stirred no memory, yet something about it made him uneasy. He muttered under his breath—something about ghosts and bad omens—and moved toward the door, driven less by curiosity and more by the kind of fatigue that makes a man brave in the wrong way.

The building leaned slightly forward, as if straining to hear the ocean, though the docks were still blocks away. Its windows were black, the glass nearly opaque with grime. He reached for the tarnished handle on the thick wooden door, but before he touched it, the door creaked open, revealing the darkness inside.

Wyatt stood still for a long moment, listening. The rain fell harder behind him, driving his choice. With no better options and nowhere left to run, he crossed the threshold.

The air inside was thick with mildew, soaked in salt, and warm in a way that felt preserved rather than heated. The smell was overwhelming: damp wood, brine, ancient sweat, and a tinge of something like singed rope. The light came not from bulbs or fluorescents, but from small oil lamps mounted along the warped walls. Their flames danced low and steady, casting flickering amber shadows across the floorboards.

Wyatt blinked slowly, letting his eyes adjust. The space was deeper than it looked from the outside, the floor slanted just enough to suggest the building was listing slightly to one side. He moved forward, drawn in by the soft hum of electricity.

There, in the far corner, sat a jukebox—old and yellowed, its chrome dulled by time. The display didn’t list any songs. There were no buttons, no flickering digital readout. But it played all the same. The melody was faint and tinny. Wyatt recognized the tune almost immediately.

It was the same song his mother used to hum while cleaning, back before things went wrong, before his brother disappeared and the fire ate everything that used to matter. He hadn’t heard it in years, and it curled into his mind like smoke from an extinguished candle.

His throat tightened. He turned to the bar. No one stood behind it.

Dust motes drifted lazily in the half-light. The place felt less abandoned than expectant, as if waiting for something—or someone—to arrive.

He stepped further in, shoes dragging against warped floorboards. The door creaked behind him, then clicked shut. There was only one way left to go.

Forward.

Part II

Wyatt stepped carefully through the bar, letting his fingers trail across the lacquered surface of the nearest table. The wood was warm, almost fevered, and beneath the polish, he could feel deep, etched grooves—initials, dates, names scratched with pocket knives or bottle caps by hands that had long since stopped shaking.

He passed a row of stools, each one tucked with uncanny precision beneath the bar. On one of them sat an ashtray, full to the brim with long-dead cigarette butts, though no scent of smoke hung in the air. The mirror behind the bar was fractured in several places, and in those cracks, the light bent strangely, refusing to reflect the room exactly as it was.

Wyatt turned slowly, eyes moving from one end of the bar to the other, until he realized that he was no longer alone.

Behind the counter stood a man, half-lit by the flickering glow of an oil lamp hanging crooked above him. He wore a white button-down rolled to the elbows and a dark vest with brass buttons that caught the light in flashes. His gray hair was combed back, slick and neat, and though his face was unlined, there was something ancient in the way he held himself—shoulders squared, spine straight, head tilted in a way that suggested authority seasoned by indulgence.

He was polishing a tumbler with a rag that looked older than the bar itself, moving it in slow, patient circles as if no time had passed since he began. The glass gleamed, already spotless, but he didn’t stop.

“You’re late,” the man said without looking up, his voice smooth and rich, like molasses poured over broken stone. “Storm holding you up?”

Wyatt narrowed his eyes but didn’t answer. He took a half step back, then hesitated. The bartender looked up at him then, and when their eyes met, Wyatt felt something cold and vital shift beneath his ribs. The man’s gaze wasn’t unfriendly. In fact, it held a kind of mischief, a knowing spark, as though he’d been expecting Wyatt for some time and had no intention of explaining why.

“You serving?” Wyatt asked, voice rough from disuse.

“I’m hosting,” the man replied, setting the glass gently on the bar. “Name’s Tony. This place—she don’t open for everyone. Lucky you.” He nodded toward the nearest stool. “First drink’s on the house.”

Wyatt hesitated, then sat. The stool let out a low groan beneath his weight, but it didn’t tip or slide. He watched as Tony poured from a decanter that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. The liquid was amber, slow-moving, and poured without a splash or drip. The tumbler was placed before Wyatt with a kind of reverence.

He lifted it. The scent that met his nose was faint and peculiar—oak and citrus, yes, but also burnt rope, kerosene, the sweet smoke of pine needles catching fire on a dry day.

He drank.

The burn started low and wide in his chest. It wasn’t painful, but it unfurled like a memory long buried, shaking loose images he’d spent years burying. His mother humming as she folded laundry on a summer afternoon. The way the air outside his childhood home had smelled right before the rain came. The flicker of firelight against bare walls as someone screamed his name from the other side of the smoke.

He lowered the glass slowly. His fingers trembled.

“What is this?” he asked.

Tony smiled. “Just something to help you remember where you are. And maybe why you came.”

The words stirred unease, but before Wyatt could respond, a soft note drifted across the room—a single piano key, struck with precision and delicacy. He turned.

There, near the back of the bar, was a piano that hadn’t been there before. Its wood was black, high-gloss, and covered in a fine sheen of dust that hadn’t yet settled. Perched atop the bench was a woman dressed in a shimmering flapper gown of pale silver, one gloved hand resting on the keys, the other holding a cigarette she didn’t smoke.

Her lips moved to the tune she played, but the words didn’t come out in any language Wyatt recognized. They weren’t lyrics—they were tones shaped by grief, stretched into syllables like funeral bells rung through velvet. Her eyes were downcast, her hair curled just so, and when she finished the song, the air seemed to fold in around her like a curtain dropping after the final act.

“Annie,” Tony said softly, with a nod. “She sings for the ones who’ve nearly made it out.”

Annie looked up then. Her gaze found Wyatt’s with startling precision. Her eyes were the gray of beach stones turned over in moonlight, and she smiled—not with joy, but with a sadness so complete it looked almost elegant.

“Almost,” she said, her voice thinner than her gaze.

Wyatt didn’t know what to say. He looked to Tony for clarification, but the bartender had already turned his attention to something else. From beneath the counter, he pulled a worn deck of cards. The box was tattered, but the cards themselves seemed untouched, crisp edges glinting under the flickering lamp.

“You look like a man who’s got debts of the soul,” Tony said, fanning the cards slowly. “Lucky for you, we play for that kind here.”

Wyatt opened his mouth, closed it, then turned again toward the back of the room. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was impossible to miss—a card table in the far corner, round and covered in faded green felt. At one end sat a man in a sheriff’s uniform, his spine rod-straight, his shoulders square, and his hands folded in front of him like a preacher awaiting confession.

But his face—

His face was hollow. Not in the metaphorical sense, but in the literal. Where eyes should have been, there were only smooth expanses of scarred flesh. His nose looked sunken, nearly flattened, and his mouth, while closed, appeared stitched at the corners by something finer than thread.

He did not move. He did not blink.

“You’re welcome to play,” Tony said. “No buy-in. Just sit and play your hand. We’re all due one fair game before the tide rolls back out.”

Wyatt’s feet carried him forward before his mind gave consent. Annie watched him go, her head tilted just enough to be wistful, her cigarette now burning without flame.

As he reached the table, she whispered behind him, with a clarity that sliced through the quiet.

“You win, you walk,” she said. “You lose… well, you’re already here, aren’t you?”

Part III

Wyatt sat with the stiffness of a man entering a confessional, the chair creaking beneath his weight. The table before him bore a patina of age that defied measurement. The felt, once green, had dulled to a bruised hue somewhere between mildew and decay, its edges frayed and curling. Beneath his fingers, the surface was warm and soft, not quite cloth and not quite flesh.

Across from him, the Dealer remained unmoved. The man’s uniform hung heavy on his frame, thick wool and brass buttons dulled with time. His hat, an old campaign style, cast a perpetual shadow over the remains of his face. He didn’t so much as acknowledge Wyatt’s presence with a nod or a gesture. Instead, his pale, veined hands moved with impossible grace—no sound, no friction—producing a deck of cards that hadn’t existed a moment earlier.

The cards emerged from his fingers, not as if drawn but as if remembered into being. They fell into a neat stack before him, and he began to shuffle—not with the clumsy flourish of Vegas, but with the precision of a ritual long practiced. Each motion was clean and fluid, the soft whisper of pasteboard on pasteboard barely registering over the hiss of the jukebox still murmuring in the distance.

Wyatt studied the man’s face. The absence of eyes was worse than blindness; it was vacancy, a lack of design, like a wax dummy left unfinished. Yet there was something about him—something in the way he tilted his head slightly as he dealt, in the subtle rhythm of his hands—that suggested he didn’t need to see in order to know. The cards came to rest before Wyatt in a gentle fan.

Five cards. Clean. Crisp. Faceless until flipped.

To Wyatt’s left, a stool shifted. Tony sat down with a fresh drink in hand, leaning back with the posture of a man watching something he’d already seen but enjoyed each time anew. He sipped and sighed, setting the glass on the table’s edge with a soft clink.

Annie lingered nearby, half-seated on the edge of the piano bench, one foot arched elegantly beneath her, the other tapping a soundless rhythm on the warped floorboards.

“You play often?” Tony asked without looking at Wyatt.

Wyatt shrugged. “A few times.”

Tony chuckled. “That’s more than most who sit here. Cards ain’t really the point, but you knew that already, didn’t you?”

Wyatt didn’t answer. He picked up his hand, one card at a time, watching the suits and numbers appear with each lift: three of clubs, nine of spades, jack of hearts, another nine—this one diamonds—and a king of clubs.

He turned his gaze to the Dealer, who mirrored his movements with the same eerie precision. His hand was neither good nor bad. It was, as far as he could tell, honest. Which was more than he could say about anything else in the room.

Annie hummed. A few notes, low and sweet, drifted between them.

“I remember a man like you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “He came in with blood on his sleeves and a name he wouldn’t speak. Played two hands before the lights went out.”

Wyatt stared at her, his jaw tight. “And?”

She smiled, but not kindly. “He still plays. Just not from that side of the table.”

Tony leaned in then, resting his elbows on the felt. “Storm’s a bad one tonight,” he said. “And I don’t just mean the one outside. You’ve been running a long time, Wyatt. Rain can’t wash off what’s dried into the skin.”

Wyatt froze. The way Tony said his name—casual, familiar—struck deep, as though pulled from the marrow. He hadn’t told it. Not here. Not aloud.

He glanced at the cards again, then at the Dealer’s expressionless face. He could feel the temperature dropping. Not a chill, exactly, but a flattening of warmth, a withdrawal of energy that made the skin on his arms tighten.

The Dealer placed his hand face-up. Queen of spades, seven of clubs, seven of hearts, four of diamonds, jack of diamonds. Two pair.

Wyatt laid down his own. Nines over jack. Higher. He had won.

The Dealer gave no sign of acknowledgment. His hands gathered the cards and began to shuffle again, seamlessly, soundlessly. Tony raised his glass again in a silent toast.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond the lamps, a chair scraped gently across the floor. Wyatt turned just in time to see a man in a brimmed hat seated at one of the far tables. The man nodded once and disappeared into shadow.

Above him, something creaked.

Wyatt looked up to see a noose swaying slightly from the overhead beam. He hadn’t noticed it before—hadn’t thought to look—but now that it was there, it seemed as much a part of the bar as the floor itself.

He looked back down. Another hand was dealt.

This time, Tony and Annie whispered to one another, their voices overlapping in strange cadences, sometimes in English, sometimes not. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone chilled him more than the content ever could. It was the way they spoke—not like people recounting facts, but like actors reciting lines they’d never memorized. They said things that almost sounded like places he’d been. Streets he’d walked. Names he’d heard screamed.

Wyatt gripped his cards tightly. His eyes swept the bar.

The room had changed. He was sure of it. The lamps seemed farther apart. The walls, once close and crooked, now stretched out into darkened alcoves that hadn’t been there when he entered. The tables were more numerous. The stools now occupied. Faces sat in shadows. Some leaned forward in interest. Some sat still as stone. A woman wept silently near the jukebox, her dress the color of dried blood. An old man stared down at his hands as if he had forgotten what they were for.

Wyatt looked back to the table, and the Dealer was already waiting. Cards in hand. Silent. Expectant.

He played again.

This hand, he lost. The cards offered nothing. A busted straight. The Dealer’s flush took it easily. Still, there was no gloating, no sense of competition. The man simply collected the cards and began again.

Tony didn’t smile this time.

Annie stopped humming.

Wyatt felt a thin bead of sweat roll down his spine, despite the air growing steadily colder.

He looked from face to face, and in each he saw something that hadn’t been there before—not hostility, not exactly—but a kind of hunger held at bay by ritual. There were no stakes on the table. No chips. No money. But every card turned felt heavier than the one before. Every glance from the shadows carried an inexplicable gravity.

He didn’t know the rules.

He didn’t know how to win.

But he was beginning to understand what losing meant.

Part IV

The next hand came and went in a haze of silence. Wyatt barely registered the cards in his grip—some combination of low numbers and mismatched suits that might as well have been blank. When the Dealer laid his down—four tens, impossibly clean—Wyatt could only stare as the cards were pulled from beneath his fingers.

He leaned back in his chair, feeling the wooden legs groan beneath him. The oil lamps overhead dimmed, shadows reaching up from the corners of the room like mold blooming in the dark. The spaces between tables lengthened and the ceiling crept higher. The bar at his back, once a close and crooked line, now seemed to stretch endlessly in either direction, the mirror behind it beleaguered with new cracks.

Another hand followed. Another loss.

Across from him, the Dealer’s featureless face remained unchanged, but Wyatt could feel the pressure of a stare where no eyes existed. That eyeless void bore down on him with an intelligence that needed no expression. It wasn’t looking at him. It was looking through him.

To his right, Annie had shifted. She no longer sat poised on the piano bench like some flirty lounge ghost. Her posture had stiffened, her fingers curled against the ivory keys. Her skin, which moments ago had glowed with the softness of stage powder and memory, now held a pallor of waxy preservation. In the dimming light, her cheekbones had sharpened. Her lips, once rouged and full, now cracked at the corners.

She began to hum again, but the notes trembled, echoing with a distortion that hadn’t been present before. They dragged in strange intervals, dissonant, like a record spinning too slowly. Her voice echoed even when her mouth stopped moving, the sound escaping from somewhere deeper, from behind the walls or beneath the floorboards. Every note carried the brittle weight of a body too long buried.

Wyatt tried not to look directly at her face, afraid of what might happen if he stared too long.

Tony broke the silence.

“Georgia, wasn’t it?”

Wyatt blinked. He turned his head slowly, as if underwater.

Tony was polishing another glass, though it seemed cleaner than anything had a right to be. He didn’t meet Wyatt’s gaze, but his smile had faded. His voice, however, carried on, light and steady, as though recounting a dream he couldn’t quite stop remembering.

“Church just outside Macon. Little white one with a red roof. Looked like a postcard. Or it did, before it went up like dry pine in a furnace.”

Wyatt’s chest tightened.

“They said it was electrical,” Tony went on. “Short in the basement. Maybe a bad heater. But that’s not what you think, is it?”

“I didn’t—” Wyatt began, but hesitated. He hadn’t spoken in what felt like hours. His throat felt lined with ash.

Tony finally looked up. His eyes were dark and bottomless. They didn’t accuse. They simply knew.

“Fire moves fast when the doors are locked. Even faster when there’s accelerant in the seams.”

“I didn’t know anyone was inside,” Wyatt said, the words spilling out now, too fast and too hot. “I didn’t know—”

“No,” Tony said, nodding slowly. “You didn’t.”

Everything went still. Even the jukebox had quieted, the last strains of melody stretched to silence. Wyatt stood abruptly, the chair groaning behind him. The room swayed as he moved, the floor tilting slightly underfoot. He turned toward the entrance, where he’d come in.

There was no door.

Where once had been aged wood and rusted hinges now stood a wall of brick, the mortar fresh and clean, as though laid that very hour. There was no handle, no seam, no threshold. Just stone.

Wyatt approached it slowly, one hand extended, and pressed his palm against the surface. It was cool and solid and completely impassable.

“You don’t get to leave just because it’s uncomfortable now,” Tony said from behind him. “This isn’t the part where you run.”

Wyatt turned. The table had reset.

The Dealer sat as before, unmoving, timeless. But the chairs beside him were empty, and the light above the table had shifted from warm amber to a deep, desaturated glow, like sunlight filtered through six feet of seawater.

One last hand.

Wyatt didn’t need to be told. He felt it in the room, in the way the walls seemed to lean inward, in the hushed breathing of the patrons he could no longer see but knew were watching. He returned to the table and sat, a cold sweat forming on his brow.

The Dealer began to deal.

Five cards to Wyatt.

Five cards to the other seat.

But this time, Wyatt didn’t look at his hand. He stared at the figure now seated across from him.

It was a man. That much was clear. But the rest—

His clothes were scorched, stuck to his skin in places. The collar of his shirt had melted to the flesh beneath. His hands were blackened at the fingertips, the nails cracked and white. His face was the worst of it—eyelids seared shut, lips stitched crudely with wire or tendon, something pale and taut.

Wyatt felt the chair beneath him give slightly, as if recoiling. He looked at Tony, who stood now at the edge of the light, arms folded.

“You’re not gambling with us, son,” Tony said, voice grave and certain. “You’re gambling with the man you might’ve been.”

Wyatt’s mouth went dry. He turned again to the mirror of himself—this burned, silent version, slouched in shadow, waiting.

The Dealer lifted a hand.

It was time.

Part V

The deck no longer waited for hands. It moved with the slow certainty of gravity, its cards sliding into place as if compelled by something older than physics. The Dealer’s fingers hovered above the felt, not quite touching it, yet each card he drew seemed to rise on its own accord, lifting from the stack like ash caught in a column of heat.

The first card was the Ten of Spades, its edges rimmed in soot. When it landed in front of Wyatt, the sound it made was not the flick of cardboard against felt, but the heavy clang of a steel door slamming shut. Behind his eyes, a door from years ago opened in his mind—an abandoned shack in the Appalachian woods, a steel drum full of scorched insulation, and a man with no name crawling toward the light before vanishing behind flame.

The second card was the Queen of Hearts, but her face was wrong. The eyes were wide with terror, its mouth frozen in mid-scream. Wyatt flinched. That one he recognized. There had been a woman once—a hitchhiker in the Carolinas—who’d asked only for a ride but found herself weeping on the roadside after Wyatt, glassy-eyed and reeking of bourbon, had taken a turn too sharp and nearly flipped the truck into a ravine. She had screamed his name as he’d driven off, not stopping, not looking back.

The third card, Ace of Clubs, landed with a sound like dry wood splintering. It smelled faintly of smoke and motor oil. It brought with it the image of a broken fence, a mangled dog, and a quiet stretch of highway at dawn. Wyatt had buried that one deep.

Each card was a wound re-opened, not with blood but with understanding. There were no surprises. Only confirmations.

The fourth card came slower. Seven of Diamonds—a child’s drawing rendered in blood-red ink, the suit etched like claw marks. It carried the sound of coughing, the brittle clink of empty inhalers, and the memory of a motel room in Jacksonville where he’d locked the door from the outside and left someone behind.

The final card did not come from the deck. It rose from the table itself. The Joker. Not the garish clown found in cheap novelty decks, but a shadow drawn in charcoal, its face contorted in grief and rage. Its features flickered, shifting every second—his father’s face, then his own, then something scorched and eyeless. It smiled, but only because it had no lips.

Across the table, the Dealer placed his own cards.

Each one was blank.

But Wyatt understood.

He could feel the meaning in them, radiating like heat from an open oven. They weren’t cards. They were judgments.

He stared at his own hand, trembling now in his grip, and looked for patterns—something to hold on to, some hidden hierarchy that might suggest a way out.

Tony stood just behind him now. He said nothing.

Wyatt’s fingers crept to the edge of one card. He thought, If I slide this… maybe switch one out…

He reached toward the burn-smeared Joker and tried to slip it back into the deck. His other hand darted toward a new card, hoping to draw something that might save him.

Before he could complete the motion, the Dealer’s hand slammed down onto the table with a sound like stone striking iron.

The oil lamps died.

The bar went black, the kind of black that takes things with it—sound, breath, memory. Wyatt gasped, though he couldn’t hear himself. The felt beneath his hands pulsed once, then cooled. When the lamps returned, flickering weakly into life, the cards had vanished.

Across from him, the burned mirror version of himself was gone.

In the corner, Annie had risen from the piano. She stood beneath a guttering sconce, eyes glassy, her form beginning to shimmer as though viewed through rippling water. Her hands, long and pale, clutched the fabric of her dress near her chest, and when she spoke, her voice was thinner than before, straining through layers of time.

“I always liked it best when they tried,” she said, though the words were not for Wyatt alone.

As she stepped backward, her outline frayed. Her skin fragmented like dry paper, flaking upward. Her lips parted, but no further sound escaped. She drifted back into the dark without another word, and the piano behind her dissolved into dust that never hit the floor.

From somewhere deep within the walls, the building groaned. It sounded like the hull of a ship splitting beneath the weight of water, old wood and rusted nails tearing apart, yet the room held together. The floor trembled. The lights dimmed again.

Wyatt sat motionless.

Tony lifted his glass in a final toast.

“You had a good run,” he said, voice flat but not cruel. “But every harbor’s got its gallows.”

The Dealer stood.

Wyatt’s chair shifted beneath him, then twisted slightly, aligning with the arc of the table in a way that felt too practiced to be accidental. The pressure in the room changed. The other patrons—those he could now barely see—began to rise from their seats. They did so with the reverence of mourners leaving a graveside.

Tony stepped back into the shadows, his figure retreating toward the bar.

The room reset itself.

Wyatt blinked.

When he opened his eyes again, he was seated in the Dealer’s chair.

He felt no surprise. No resistance.

His hands rested lightly on the table. They no longer trembled. They moved without instruction, gathering the cards, shuffling them with an ease he had never learned.

He could not see the room as he once had. His vision came from somewhere behind his skull, not from eyes, but from sensation—shapes outlined in pressure, sound described in color. He knew where Tony stood, even though he could no longer picture his face. He could feel the exact spot where Annie had vanished, the air still carrying the echo of her presence.

The walls no longer breathed. They waited.

Somewhere outside, the rain tapered off.

Wind sighed against the windows, and the storm lifted its weight from the world.

The bricked wall was no longer solid. The door had returned and stood open.

From the alley, a silhouette stepped through the threshold. The newcomer was soaked through, shoulders slumped, his eyes darting in all directions as he took in the strange warmth of the bar.

He was younger than Wyatt had been. Not by much. Enough to matter.

His boots left a trail of muddy water behind him.

Tony, still smiling with the sadness of habit, gestured to the counter and began to pour.

The jukebox crackled to life again, this time playing a tune too old for anyone to know by name, but somehow familiar to them all. The notes clung to the rafters like cobwebs.

The young man blinked at the light, not yet sure if he was inside or still dreaming.

Wyatt waited until the man’s feet reached the edge of the felt.

Then he dealt the first card.