Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

Author's Note: Another piece from the fourth Star for BK 'zine.

Epilogophilia—McCormick's Bar and Grill

Sonny Daye, Mark's lounge-lizard, absentee father, wins the deed to a bar in a poker game. He decides to take a stab at making things right with his son by giving him the property.

Mark is astonished, and a little suspicious of the gesture, even more so when he, Sonny, and the judge discover that it's a run-down and long-abandoned establishment. They've just made up their minds, though, to have a go at resurrecting the place, when the guy who lost the deed shows up and makes Sonny a generous offer to buy it back.

Sonny waffles, but finally holds firm. He's sticking tight for his kid. With Hardcastle's financial backing, and a short track to a liquor license, the three partners go to work turning the place into an sophisticated, homey, Irish, singles, Vegas, old-timey, jazz sort of place.

The transformation is almost complete when Sonny drops out of sight, leaving Mark convinced that he's cut and run yet again. Instead, it turns out he took a beating from a local mobster, who is also trying to reacquire the property.

Further digging reveals that not all the stiffs in Mark's new establishment are sitting at the bar—they're also behind the wall, and in the basement. The place had been used as a charnel house by the mob.

The guys soldier on bravely to a very special opening night, with Sonny at the mic, and Mark and the judge hosting. The mob shows up to . . . um, well, who knows? Not draw attention to the place by shooting it up, perhaps? But they don't get away with it because every other patron in the bar is an undercover cop.

In the end Sonny hits the road again—another night, another tacky lounge crowd to conquer. Mark and the judge get t-shirts to remember him by.

Epilogue—by L. M. Lewis

Ten years later

"That's it? You mean it, really?"

Hardcastle was frowning. He didn't want to say anything prematurely. He was still reading the fine print. "Yeah," he held it a little closer, parsing out the sub-clauses, "here, take a look, see what you think."

He handed it over. McCormick seemed almost reluctant, then snatched it from him, as if on an impulse to get it over with.

"Whereas," he mumbled, then moved his lips, rapidly forming a few more silent syllables, then forced them together tightly, his eyes still scanning quickly down the page until they came to a halt, ten long paragraphs later.

He closed his eyes for a moment when he was finished, as if he were forming a brief but very sincere prayer. Then he opened them again.

"Yes." His gaze jerked back up. "Looks okay to me," he said a little less cautiously. "It looked okay to you, didn't it?"

Hardcastle nodded, almost afraid to say it out loud—and he was not a guy who scared easily.

"Yeah," he finally breathed it out. "Looks like it's all in order."

Not that they hadn't been this close before, only to have the final goal vanish like a chimera. Across a full decade, through seven civil suits and twenty-eight criminal cases, the establishment briefly known as "McCormick's Bar and Grill" had spawned a stack of paperwork that now occupied its very own file cabinet in the basement of the main house at Gull's Way.

Never mind that it had existed for only one glorious night before sailing, Titanic-like, smack into the iceberg of bureaucracy. It mattered not that it had been, for the firm's younger partner at any rate, an introduction into some of the more arcane aspects of California criminal and property law. Litigation relating to statues on the disposal of human remains, building code violations, zoning regulations, and jurisdictional disputes, had jockeyed for position like flies on a bloated corpse.

Now it was once more free of any encumbrances or entanglements. It was also free of all of its interior fixtures, paneling, non-structural walls, and floors, except for the joists. It had, more or less, been cleaned off, down to the skeleton, in an attempt to establish and document the extent of the criminal activity that had taken place there.

Mark sat back on the edge of his desk, still staring at the long-sought final judgment, as though if he took his eyes off it, it might transmute itself into another bit of false hope.

"Now what?" he finally said.

Hardcastle looked at him, steady on, then finally shrugged. Both of them had been mired in this for so long, that they hadn't really thought past the spot that they believed would never arrive.

"I suppose you could fix it up again."

Mark looked at him, aghast. "You mean 'McCormick's Charnel House and Grill'? There were dead people in my bar, Judge."

"Okay, then sell it."

McCormick looked glum. "Everybody knows what it was. This is what the real estate people call astigmatized property."

"'Stigmatized'? Hah. Tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail is more like it."

"Yeah," Mark said. "Exactly . . . well, I suppose we could just leave it alone until everyone forgets what happened."

"Nah, it's a damn hazard. Some kid'll sneak in there on a dare and fall through the joists."

McCormick frowned, then a moment later brightened in thought.

"Maybe we could give it away. A charity."

"Who'd want it the way it is?"

"Okay, so, we'll have it torn down and then give the lot away."

"A run-down neighborhood like that, not sure anyone will want to build."

Mark didn't answer that time. He had a fixed, but rather distant expression on his face, as though some notion had caught him and he was entirely focused on it.

"What?" the judge finally asked, after he'd stayed frozen like that for a long moment.

"A lot," McCormick said slowly. "We had a few of those where I grew up. We played in 'em. Kicked cans around, played stickball, you know? And then eventually they'd come and build something, and we'd have to find another one."

Hardcastle didn't know, except that he'd seen kids like that in LA, from way back, though there weren't many empty lots anymore.

"A play lot." Mark smiled. "You know, with swings and stuff. That'd be nice. We could fix it up and deed it over to the community organization."

"The one that keeps calling us up and threatening us with a suit for attractive nuisance?"

"Yeah," Mark said, "but I don't think they'd ever have won. There isn't anything 'attractive' about the damn place." He was grinning broadly now. "Listen," he leaned forward, starting to sketch it out with his hands, "we could put in a jungle gym, and a sandbox—"

"McCormick's Monkey-bars and—"

"No," Mark said suddenly. Then there was a nervous pause before he added, "The Sonny Daye Community Play Lot." Then he was frowning, looking down, as though he wasn't quite sure where it had come from.

Hardcastle tried not to look surprised. He cleared his throat and said, "Yeah, sounds like—"

"It was the one thing he ever got right," Mark said quietly. "Maybe the only thing. I dunno if it makes up for all the rest, but I'd kinda like to remember that he tried." He looked up again. "Is that all right?"

"Sure," the judge said with a firm nod. "Sounds like a great idea. That neighborhood could use a park. Nice little wrought-iron fence. Some flowers."

"The gift that keeps on giving." Mark smiled.

"As long as it's not giving us any more headaches," Hardcastle said, "it'll be okay by me."