INT.--SUICIDE KINGS BAR--DAY

Most bars, Eldie reflected, don't use their bitters. Most bars, there's always one lonely little bottle gathering dust on a back shelf, used only to cure the random case of hiccups. Here, though, a bottle of Angostura barely lasted an evening.

The Rob Roys. That's what you drank at Suicide Kings.

Eldie herself was now drinking them, sans cherry. "That ain't a Rob Roy, then," Rene, the bartender, had growled when she fisrt timidly placed the order, "What you got there don't amount to cat piss."

Repetition breeds familiarity, and later, if you allow it, some degree of comfort. These days Rene merely slid the drink over to her with barely a sneer. Eldie liked to believe that Rene got some small pleasure out of her order; much had happened in the past two weeks, none of it pretty, and the locals were starting to make themselves scarce, but Eldie, and her cherry-less Rob Roy orders, remained.

Comfort, if you allow it.

Eldie swirled the drink in its chipped glass, downed it in one gulp. After a few more, all things would flatten, grow hazy at the edges, and the inevitable would be pushed to the back.

Eldie would have to go back to New Starchton. There were bound to be questions.

She wasn't sure what all was left behind in the trailer. She'd grabbed some things, things that were important, bundled them into a dirty towel, flung them from the overpass 2 miles away. The jewelry box, probably, and definitely the diary.

The diary.

Eldie still had the key. Before she's taken to the Rob Roys, she'd derived some comfort in clutching that key so tightly in her fist that it would leave its imprint on her palm, underscored by a row of tiny half-moons from her fingernails. At that sight, there was some release. Soon, though, she was doing it several times in the course of an hour, and it was then that she mustered the nerve to place that first order to Rene.

She would go back to New Starchton. Maybe even tomorrow. Eldie shuddered.

She raised her glass -- a signal to Rene for another Rob Roy.

END OF CHAPTER 2

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