Demon Night

fortify myself for the upcoming bullshit.”
    Just lovely. “Sure thing,” she said. Her sneakers crunched over the floor. How had they gotten the shells on this side? Flicked them over when she wasn’t paying attention? Gorillas.
    “Okay, so this cowboy, he walks into a bar and sits down, right? And then he realizes that it’s a gay bar, but he’s real thirsty, right? So he says, ‘What the hell, I’ll stay anyway.’”
    Charlie was better than this Stevens guy if she didn’t slam the refilled peanut bowl into his face.
    Telling herself that didn’t make her feel better.
    “And so he starts to order his drink, but the bartender, he says…Hey, Blondie, hold on. You should do this part.”
    Stevens’s hand came perilously close to hers, as if he intended to detain her. Charlie paused in the middle of scraping the broken shells from the counter into a small wastebasket and gave him a Look.
    She’d had to use it before. It was effective, that Look, even on drunks. A narrowing of her eyes, a tightening of her lips, and it said, Touch me and I’ll kill you .
    Or cut off their drinks, which was sometimes the more dire consequence. But Stevens and his friends weren’t yet intoxicated—just warmed and loosened.
    “Ah,” Stevens said, blinking slowly. His hand resembled a quivering mouse when he pulled it back to curl around his mug. “Do you want to do the bartender’s part?”
    No. But she knew from experience that a Look was one thing; outright rejection, another. Easier just to play along than risk them moving from obnoxious to belligerent.
    “All right.” She set down the trash bin, wiped her hands on the towel tucked into her lap apron. God, how many of these things had she heard? Not many with cowboys, though. Mostly priests and rabbis. She took a stab. “So the bartender says, ‘Before I serve you a drink, you have to tell me the name of your penis.’”
    Stevens’s mouth didn’t move much, but his eyes—slightly red, slightly watery—turned down into a frown. “You’ve heard this one.”
    “Well,” Charlie said, suddenly wary. The two drinks she’d given him over the past hour weren’t usually enough to inebriate a guy his size—but he might have been drinking somewhere else before meeting up with his buddies, and the alcohol was just now kicking in. “Yeah.”
    “Fuck. You guys, she’s already heard this one. That fucking ruins the whole joke. Forget this shit.” He tipped up his mug, looked down into it. Empty. “I need another one of these, Blondie. Try not to fuck that up.”
    The clench of her teeth could have ground peanuts to butter. Like hell she’d serve him more.
    “Yo, Stevens. Ease off, man. It isn’t her fault.” Her ally. His tie now hung limply around his neck, but she managed to restrain herself from reaching over and yanking it tight again when he added, “Listen to her. She’s sick or something. Couldn’t get off for the night, Blondie?”
    His tone was sympathetic, but his assumption scraped her already raw nerves, and the rasp in her voice deepened along with her frustration.
    “No.” Charlie pointed to the jagged white line crossing the bottom of her throat. She’d ripped out the sleeves and collar of her Metallica T-shirt, and the resulting boat neckline was low; she couldn’t believe they’d missed the scar. Unless she was wearing a turtleneck, she usually couldn’t get new acquaintances to look at her face. “The Emerald City Slasher.”
    His eyes widened; so did Stevens’s and the others’. “No shit? Thaddeus White, right?”
    She nodded. “Seventeen years ago. I was twelve.” Hopefully they were too loose and warm to recall that the Slasher had fixated on adult women, not kids.
    “How’d you get away?”
    “I had to saw through my ankle. Then I crawled to a neighbor’s.”
    “Holy shit.” The exclamation made the rounds, and two of the jerks actually tried to lean over the bar for a look at her legs. Did they think she’d pop off a prosthetic foot for them?
    A throat cleared behind her. Her savior had come. Charlie turned; Old Matthew’s determinedly solemn frown wrinkled his raisin-dark face. “You want to take that break now, Charlie?”
    “God, yes,” she muttered and limped past him. Just before she reached the “employees only” door, she heard him telling Stevens and company that, when probed too deeply, the memories of the Slasher were liable to send her into a psychotic rage.
    Good Old Matthew Cole. He’d