Less experienced or intelligent fugitives are prone to the mistaken belief that they must find a hiding place where they are entirely unknown. Experience and intelligence quickly realize what's wrong with that.
Where nobody knows you, you necessarily know nobody. And amongst all those coming and going people and the passers-by, whom you do not know and can't keep track of, whose ways and habits are unfamiliar to you and, therefore, you've got no way of spotting when something is wrong, anybody at all might recognize your face. This is trouble enough in itself. Then you consider how much room it creates for paranoia and you start to see just how many problems you create for yourself, when you decide you want to go where nobody knows your name.
It hardly seems coincidence, then, that Dylan turns off the street, through a door little different to any other between the shut-up night time stores, that the sign he passes under reads, Santé.
His advice, to all those accused wrongfully (or at least unjustly – there's no denying he and his have taken the odd liberty with the law) and forced to run, find a new familiarity. Find friendly parties who will offer shelter and, ideally, reasonably priced scotch. Find a spot where the bartender watches the front door and knows the score when it comes to letting you out the back. It helps if there's an extensive and global operation watching your back. There's some argument amongst the Horsemen, who have moved on and forgotten and are too grateful for the safety of this little basement bar to question it too deeply, about whether Danny found the matchbook that brought them here first or the matchbook found him.
In essence, it's only this – find a new comfort zone. Find it for nights like tonight when, all these practical and legal considerations to one side, forgetting the trapdoor in the back room down the sewers and the mirror over the bar showing the stairs to the street, Dylan just needs the comfort.
The booth at the end is shielded by the bar and, on busier nights, the cluster around the pool table and the TV mounted above it. But because this night has been nothing if not unhelpful, it isn't busy. No cluster. Dylan can see Danny and Merritt already waiting from the turn of the staircase. And they can see him too, can lean out tapping watches, swaying heads, mock-disappointed… Mock – those pantomime looks on their faces raise the echo of an all-too-recent shudder up Dylan's spine.
"Don't mind me," Merritt calls, just as soon as he's within earshot. "It's cool that you're running behind. Fashionably late. I respect that, in light of your refusal to be fashionable in any other way. Don't you waste one fashionable thought on me, friend. I'm not suffering any psychological distress arising from my current familial situation whatsoever-" Judging by the length of his S-sounds and the forced eloquence, these heartaches are already well on their way to numb. Nonetheless the rant goes on even while Dylan is stopped at the bar. "You take care of yourself. I wouldn't want to left alone with Danny for any length of time either, oh, wait, I have been, how terrible for me. Don't let that bother you, though. No, no, I'm sure you had important things t-"
So on, so forth. And maybe it's hypnotism or maybe the guilt Dylan starts to feel is real, but he lets it continue, because it is loud and harmless, and it covers up the dire warnings he mumbles to the barman, covers the ugly pause while he struggles to find the word in French for something he doesn't like to name in English, something he doesn't like to even think about… "Deux… bouffon? Comprends? Uh… what's the damn word… Shit, it's just clown, isn't it…" That's it; he knows it because his heart skips when he says it. And because the bartender stares at him like that couldn't possibly be what he meant. "Je sais, oui, je sais, mais… tu se fais la guet de… les… clowns…?" His warning concluded, the perplexed stare goes on. Whether it's the subject matter of just his French, Dylan doesn't know anymore. The bartender sets the round in front of him, each of the three glasses in clunking turn. The suggestion is very much that Dylan needs all of them. "You know what?" he says, before he can admit that he agrees, "Forget about it."
He picks up the glasses – and hears them clink together. Everything has gone very quiet behind him. Merritt's solo raving has dropped into a hissing duet, and with a colleague at the other end of the bar the bartender is hissing too. Dylan sighs. He carries the drinks around the pool table and, before he can even set them down.
"Clowns?" Danny says. Dylan doesn't like the sharpness of it, the speed with which he reaches across for his drink. "Is… Is that what you said? Were you just talking about clowns?"
Stop talking about them!, but Dylan bites his tongue, "It's not important."
"No, please," and there's that speed again, those clipped little syllables which are supposed to sound harsh, even angry. All too often they mean fear, nerves. "Please, I want to talk about clowns."
"You're late because of clowns?" Merritt mumbles, those few drunken seconds behind the rest of the conversation.
Glass half-emptied at a swallow, Danny bites, "I want to talk about anything but this."
"At the moment of my greatest personal darkness since the last great personal darkness induced by my brother, did you go to the circus, oh great and fearless leader?"
"I was not at the circ- Danny, how many has he had?"
A shrug, a helpless, flopping hand, "I found him like this. Me, by the way, just me. I'm the only one who's heard about the great personal darkness already. Several times."
"Where's Lula? And Ja- Never mind, I just answered my own question…"
That's the moment Dylan accepts, he's on his own with this one. Help isn't coming. Atlas has never been any good with feelings other than his own (with which he is even worse) and who knows when the other two will show up. No, despite his own still-fading distress, it's time to step up, to accept that sarcastic mantel of 'brave and fearless leader' and do something. That's it. That's what's required of him. No point to argue. Nothing to it but to do it.
If only he knew what to do.
The moment he turns his attention to Merritt, the accusation comes, "Was it at least a good circus?"
"I wasn't at a circus," and because this seems to make some sort of impact, "I promise, hand on my heart, I really wasn't. Did… Did you hear any more about this techni-?"
"Technicality, my ass!" Merritt bawls, the sudden venom and volume such that Dylan draws back. At the edge of his vision, Danny's glass flashes up and comes down again empty, comes down clacking hard. The topic of technicalities must have been covered already, along with great personal darknesses. "How he got the DA to visit him in the first place is beyond me but I don't think anybody here gets any prizes for guessing what happened when he did. And suddenly this wonderful, upright lawman digs up some teeny little piece of planted evidence in some ancient and unrelated case and then he's –" and here Merritt slides out of his usual impression of erudition and into preadolescence, a high-pitched and mocking voice, convulsive little hand motions up around his face, picking the air apart to show how petty he thinks it all is, and perhaps how he'd just like to tear it apart, " – no longer credible and certain cases no longer hold up and blah-blah-blah! Technicality? Technically stupid you think there was any technicalities involved, all very simple, you ask me."
Merritt trails off muttering. Dylan edges around the booth to put his elbow hard in Danny's ribs. "Help."
"No."
"Help me, or I will let Lula saw you in half. And you saw that special she did with the second rabb-"
"Why are you letting this get to you?" says Danny, sitting forward with a sudden surge of compassion. "You're thousands of miles away, you're part of something bigger. You've got purpose." A flicker of recognition, far away behind the tearful fug in Merritt's eyes; the slightest suggestion that this might work. They might be getting through. The right word now and this excruciating early part of the night might be over.
The wrong one, "And besides, everybody knows what he did, right? So he's not in prison, so what?", and the flicker dies like a snuffed candle. It is subsumed by more powerful fire, bright and raging. The gaze is turned inward, directed at some awful memory. Merritt had been sinking closer and closer to the table, and might have sunk entirely into his own mire. That at least would have meant he'd shut up. But now he rises monstrous, something from the deep wakened by sacrifice or the smell of blood.
"So what?" This new beginning is soft. Dylan's first instinct is gratitude, relief. But instinct dies when it hears the danger inherent in the near whisper. "So what? Because he's getting away with it, is what!"
Whatever you do, Dylan tells himself, definitely don't grab the hat clean off his head and stuff his mouth with it.
And Danny pleads, "Please don't tell me about the school talent show again." To Dylan, "He's done it twice already, I don't know if he forgets or he just doesn't care, but-"
"Getting away with it. Like he always does. Ever since we were seven years old, that was the first time. Before that we were friends. It was at the age of seven it all started to go wrong. I never even wanted to enter that damn show but… well, it was compulsory so-"
Danny stands. He doesn't wait for Dylan to move but presses out right past him. The table is so violently rattled drinks splatter out of glasses. "Where are you going?"
"Tell Lula I'll bring my own chainsaw."
Dylan almost grabs for the back of his shirt. But he catches himself. That would be a brutal, cruel sort of desperation. It's okay. Let Merritt rant. Something like this would bother anybody. Let him get it out of his system. By the time the alcohol has done the same, he'll be back to himself again. Yes, Dylan decides, that's the key to this; just let him talk. Nod, grimace, maybe pat an arm until, like a toddler throwing a tantrum, Merritt wears himself out and needs a nap. Inebriation plus aggravation plus the emotional exhaustion, Dylan gives it an hour tops.
He'll be fine for an hour, right? With the wellbeing of one of his own at stake?
Ten minutes go by. Fifteen, and Merritt goes into another telling of the talent show story. Twenty and the odd stray, unwanted thought of possibly strangling J Daniel Atlas to death somewhere over by the stairwell, maybe using the edge of the jukebox, getting that right in his windpipe, something along those lines, starts to creep in. Where did Danny go, anyway? He didn't leave. Dylan's got enough of the back-bar mirror in his periphery to have seen anyone go up or down the stairs. So the next time Merritt gets lost staring into the bottom of his glass – which Dylan does not intend to see filled again – he risks a glance away around the room.
And there he is, looking riper and more ready for strangling than he ever has, feigning ever-so-genuine interest in some blonde at the far end of the bar.
But he stares too long. Merritt notices. Similar failures of attention have been punished, so far, with repeats of the talent show story. Dylan winces, braces himself… and nothing happens.
He slides his eyes sideways to find Merritt staring the same way. Something more interesting than his personal darkness, it seems, has arisen. Peering and squinting, probably trying to align the two images of his double vision into one, he picks up his empty glass and looks through it like a telescope. "Couldn't be…" Dropping the glass into his palm he studies it carefully, "I must have had too many of these."
"I won't argue with that, but what is it about this sickening display that clued you in?"
"Isn't that Rebecca?"
For the longest time, Dylan flounders. The name is familiar, but only in a distant way. Rebecca is a friend of a friend or an overheard story. And to ask Merritt could be to invite the floodgates to open right back up. The mood and the state he's in, Rebecca could have been Merritt's third grade girlfriend. Given the theme of tonight's other stories, she probably went on to become Chase's third grade girlfriend. But Merritt keeps squinting, keeps staring. It doesn't take long for curiosity to overpower fear.
"Who's Rebecca?"