Clive busied himself closing up the bar. He kicked his ladder across the floor, smashing to pieces the pink Barbie castle that stood in the Kiddie Korner. His mood was as black as the outside night, if not darker. His brow was a tangled mass of knotted furrows. How could they all be so goddamned stupid? Were these idiots in possession of functioning brains, or what? Clearly not. No matter. After all these years, it was finally coming to a head. Joe was back. That meant basically one thing. The paradigm was going to shift; it could go this way, it could go that way – who could tell? It was if events had taken control of themselves and fate had cast itself to the wind. Someone needed to guide it.
He slowly opened the door to his secret cabinet, the one place he could call his own. As he withdrew his .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda he knew intuitively that things would not, could not, ever be the same after this. Dull metallic silver, the firearm was preternaturally heavy in his hand. It felt good, right. There was a score to be settled. Perhaps several, he wasn’t quite sure. There was so much happening at once – Rowena was the only one who understood the big picture. But she was out there, out on the web, he couldn’t talk to her. It was against the rules, wasn’t it? He felt miserably alone.
Having packed the piece in an old rag, he picked up the phone and began to dial. There was nothing for it. Fate had just gotten a direction. He had to get hold of . . .

. . . Clive, the hunchback dwarf, who stood uneasily behind the bar balancing on his IKEA step ladder.
“Well”, Clive said, “you could start by saying hi to an old buddy.”
“Huh? Jesus, is that you, Clive? You’ve, you’ve grown – you’re full sized!”
Clive merely shook his head wearily. The things he had to put with.
“Ladder, Dude. I’m standing on a ladder.” He pulled out a bottle of St. Pauli Girl Special Dark, capped it and pushed it across the bar top. “If I remember correctly”, he said, winking. He leaned back a moment, almost toppling off the step ladder, but regained his balance with a graceful swipe and grab at a Heineken spigot. Bending over the bar he looked not unsympathetically into Joe’s eyes.
“From the looks of you, my friend, I’d say it’s time to bring out the heavy artillery”. With that he demounted his trusty ladder and began to rummage through his secret cabinet under the bar. “Here it is,” he mumbled to himself. Climbing up again, he slapped a dusty, 16-year-old Lagavulin single malt between them.
“This here? I bet myself that you’d be back. The others said no, he’s gone, but I said you’d be back. And I said to myself - when he comes through that door, we’re gonna do this baby. Like the old days.”
Joe took a long drag on his beer, and then took the filled glass that Clive handed to him. The whiskey sparkled with a wicked amber. He looked over at Violet and then demonstratively upended his glass. Turning to Clive, he said; “The last time I saw you, you were . . .