Except this had not been a good night for stories; in fact, it hadn’t been a good night at all, in Grant’s opinion. Oh, business was fine, the drinks were flowing and the kitchen was busy and it was all Grant could do to keep the popcorn machine filled, but everyone was tight-lipped and perfunctory with him, sometimes bordering on the outright rude. Around nine p.m. Grant quietly decided, To hell with it, and stopped trying to make small talk with the customers. Even the regulars seemed out of sorts tonight, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why: the guy at the end of the bar.

He’d come in around seven-thirty looking and smelling like he’d just crawled out of a grave. At first Grant assumed he was homeless, but after the guy downed two drinks in quick succession, placed a large dinner order, and paid for it up front with a fifty (one of many fifties the guy had in his pocket), that conclusion almost went right out the window. Almost. There was something undeniably disturbing about him, and Grant was glad he’d made the call to the sheriff shortly after the guy came in.

While waiting for his meal to come out of the kitchen, the guy picked up his backpack and went into the men’s room. No sooner did the door to the restroom close behind him than two more Hangman regulars entered; Sheriff Ted Jackson, perhaps Grant’s best friend in the world, and a man both Jackson and Grant knew only as the Reverend, who ran the Open Shelter in downtown Cedar Hill. The Reverend attracted more than a few uneasy glances himself whenever he entered a place; dressed in a traditional black clergy shirt and white collar, his long dark hair and sharply trimmed beard—both peppered with a not-unbecoming amount of gray—gave him an eerie resemblance to a post-Lithium Grigori Efimovich Rasputin…an eeriness that the Reverend was not above exploiting to the hilt when it came time to ask the city council for additional funding for the shelter every year.

“So where is he?” said Jackson, scanning the bar.

“Went into the men’s room just before you came in.” Grant poured the two men their usuals—a Bailey’s Irish Cream (on the rocks) for the Reverend, a Pepsi (with a wedge of lime) for Jackson—and gestured for them to sit down a couple of seats away from the end of the bar.

“I’m sorry that I had to bother you, Ted,” said Grant, casting a quick glance over toward the restroom doors, “but there’s something about this guy that…well, he doesn’t exactly give me the willies—or, hell, maybe he does, I don’t know—but there’s this…this air about him that’s been making everyone a little uncomfortable.”

“Hence the traditional bellow of conversation from the room,” said the Reverend. “That was intended as irony, by the way.”

“Sarcasm,” said Grant. “It wasn’t quite witty or observant enough to qualify as irony.”

“I beg to differ; in the dictionary sense of the word, ‘irony’ is defined as ‘…a type of humor based on using words to suggest the opposite of their literal meaning.’ I think credit should be given where credit is due. I was being ironic.”