Don't too got pushed hard enough to send it into the wall jukebox. The jukebox that stone had spent three weekends repairing himself. Took a fist through its display panel. Anna stood behind the counter with her phone in her hand, recording everything. Hands were shaking, but the camera was steady because she pressed her elbows against her sides and breathed through her nose and told herself that Stone would want this documented.
And she was going to do that for him. Even the instinct she had was telling her to run. " You might want to put that down," Harrington said, walking toward her. " You might not," she said. He stopped 2 ft from the counter and looked at her with the flat depos measuring expression of man deciding how much further to push for a man with a very complicated history.
Harrington said, "It's going back 40 years. It would be a shame if some of that history created problems for the people around him. " Is that a threat?" Anna asked. " It's information," Harrington said.
Make better decisions when they have information. Looked at him steadily. She thought about every person in Mil Haven. She thought about every person in Milan sat down at one of these tables and been treated like a human being for the first time in a while. She thought about Dutch the mechanic whose stone had lent money to twice with no paperwork and no interest because Dutch was good people going through a bad patch.
Rosie's Diner too went. She thought about Rosie's Diner two blocks away where Rosie Alvarez had been quietly giving Harrington an envelope on the first of every month for the past 2 years because she was afraid of what would happen if she stopped. He thought about what Stone had said to her once about the vest on the wall. Bed he had said that patch doesn't mean what most people think it means. Most people it's a warning label to me is a reminder.
Man I ever knew who wore one was someone who had decided that loyalty was the only currency worth spending. She did not put the phone down. " You're being recorded," she said. thing that's happened in this bar in the last 9 minutes is documented. The audio, the video, and my own testimony.
Then you should probably know that. Harrington's expression shifted. Then something moved behind his eyes. Anger or recalculation or both. He turned without another word and walked out.
The damage they left behind was significant. Not catastrophic, but significant and entirely deliberate. Part was the display case. One of the officers, not Harrington, one of the silent younger ones, who Stone would later understand, had probably been ordered to do it, specifically had taken Stone's Hell's Angel's vest out of the display case, had held it up by two fingers. The way you hold something you consider garbage it on the floor.
Anna had it on camera. She picked the vest up carefully, folded it, and put it on the counter behind her. She called Stone. He picked up on the second ring. She told him what happened.
All of it. She did not soften any of it because she knew that was not what he would want. When she finished, there was a silence on the line. Stone said, "Are you okay?" " I'm fine," she said. "
He's fine. He came out of the kitchen when they left. He's cleaning up." Another silence. " I'm on my way back," Stone said. "
I'm on my way back, Anna." She heard something in his voice that she had not heard before in 4 years. It's not anger exactly. Anger was hot and fast. And Stone had always been the kind of man who ran cold.
This was something else. This was the sound of a man who had spent 15 years building peace and had just watched someone decide that his peace was a weakness to exploit. She said, "I'll be here." Stone drove back faster than he should have. Not recklessly.
He had lived too long to be reckless, but urgently in the way that a man moves when something important requires him. When he walked through the door of the Last Ride Tavern, he stopped. He stood in the doorway for a long moment and looked at what had been done. Was riding chairs. Anna was behind the counter.
Jukebox had a hole in it. Three tables had dents in them that were not going to come out. One of Eleanor's photographs, a frame black and white of the two of them outside a diner in in Colorado in Weinson 987 had fallen from the wall when a chair hit it and the glass had cracked across the middle, walked to the counter. He picked up the vest at it for a long time. Then he looked at Anna the footage, he said.
She handed him the phone. She watched it twice. All of it. He watched Harrington's face when he told her to put the phone down. He watched the officer hold up his vest like it was nothing.
Bon. He watched the deliberate systematic destruction of a place he had spent 11 years building. Handed the phone back. " I want copies," he said. Email cloud storage printed if you can manage it.
I want that footage somewhere they can't reach it. " Done," Anna said. I uploaded it to two accounts while you were driving back. He looked at her. Something crossed his face that was not quite a smile, but was adjacent to it. "
Good people, Anna Mitchell," he said. " I learned from someone," she said. Turned and walked slowly to his office. When a small room off the back of the bar that held a desk in a filing cabinet and a chair that had seen better decades, he sat down. He opened the bottom drawer of the desk.
Inside was a notebook where he had been for the past three days since Harrington's first visit writing down everything dates times what was said who was present what he had observed he had started it because something about that first visit had told him to men like Harrington didn't make a single visit to a place they intended to leave alone the notebook to a fresh page and wrote down Everything that had happened in the last hour. Then he opened the drawer further and moved the notebook aside was a small piece of paper folded twice. Not looked at it in 15 years. He did not need to unfold it to know what was on it. A name and a phone number.