John Norman clung tightly to the shotgun as he walked through the door of Ray's. He nearly ran into the back of the man shuffling towards the front door in reverse. Ray, Jed, and Scott Andrews all let out little noises of surprise as John leveled the shotgun in their general direction. Andrews had a gun on his hands, but it clattered to the floor after John struck him across the face with the shotgun's butt. "Anybody makes a wrong move, they get shot in the head," John said cooly. He kept the barrel trained on Jed and Ray as he hoisted Andrews up by his shirt collar and pushed him towards the bar. He stumbled, but soon recovered after John prodded him with the shotgun. "You're fucking dead," said Jed. "I am going to personally snap your goddamn neck." "Ray," John said with a look towards the old man. "Open the safe in the backroom." "Go fuck yourself." He squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked and a round of pellets blasted Ray's leg just below the knee. He yelled out in pain and collapsed to the ground. John racked another round into the gun and looked at Jed. "Jed, open the safe in the backroom." With Ray bleeding out, Jed stepped over him and opened the door leading into the backroom. John escorted him and Scott into the small office and watched the big man as his shaking hands spun the combination back and forth. It snapped open and revealed an interior packed to the brim with cash and drugs. Jed poured it out on to the floor and spread it out for John to see. There was no papers, no files, nothing but cash and drugs. "No... where's the rest?" "That's it, motherfucker," Jed snarled. "Where's the blackmail Billy has on Parker?" "The fuck you talking about?" John felt his stomach go cold. Son of a bitch. Mike was right, this whole goddamn thing was a setup. He was about to say something else when he saw Jed flinch. A loud explosion, followed by a portion of the wall being blown into atoms, sent him down to the floor. Down but not out was Ray Champion. He lay on his side by the doorway, a large revolver in his bloody hands. John rolled away as another shoot boomed and blew off the side of Jed's face instead of his. Another cannon blast hit the back of John's leg and went into his upper thigh. He squared his shotgun up on the ground and shot Ray in the face with buckshot. Before he could turn, Sott Andrews' big hands wrapped around the shotgun barrel and tried to wrestle it out of John's hands. The two fought and tussled on the floor to get the gun from the other. Andrews let out a grunt as the barrel was shoved into his stomach and Scott pressed the trigger. The blast ripped through Andrews stomach and peppered the other side of the wall with his guts. John stood up and stumbled towards the bar as he heard Andrews calling for backup on his radio. -- "Calling all cars, calling all cars. We have a report of shots fired, officer down at Raymond's Social Club on the highway." Danny Johnson looked up from his desk at the scanner in the office he shared with Echols. The bored dispatcher from the 911 center repeated her words. Clint Land and four other deputies on patrol rogered that they were en route. Danny's partner was down the hall, grabbing coffee for the two of them. On both their desks were files on all the murders of the past week. And now, from the sound of things, something was going down again. "Mark!" He yelled as he stood. "We gotta get to Ray's!" -- John sat at the bar and drnk gin straight from the bottle. In the adjacent room he could hear Andrews dying, those last little gasps and rattles before death set in. In John's hand was Jed's cellphone, picked up from his dead body. It rang and he waited for the line to be picked up. "Jed?" Carol Johnson said from the other end of the line. "Where are you, baby?" John let out a little sigh, imagining it was he she called baby and not the dead man on the floor. "It's John." "John? Where's Jed? Why do you have his phone? What did you do, John?" He ignored the questions and instead said what he called to say. "I'm sorry about earlier. I didn't mean to hurt you. I always loved you, even from the time we were kids I loved you. Always will." He hung up as Carol was launching into another round of questions. John heard gravel on the parking lot outside Ray's and took one final pull off the gin bottle before rising, grabbing the shotgun, and limping towards the door. A small squad of armed deputy sherrif's met him outside, uniformed ones and two plainclothes detectives with pistols. "Drop the gun right now," they all said in a loud din of commands. John laughed and raised the shotgun up to his chest. On cue, the cops opened fire. In that last moment before the bullets tore apart his body he saw the truth of the whole damn thing. He was always going to end up like this. VIolence and untimely death were his birthrights. He was a Norman. Pickett County born, Pickett County bred, and now... Pickett County dead.