Read Just After Sunset for Free Online Page B

question is what do we do now? Because the honky-tonk is closed.”
    “We go in anyway, of course,” she said.
    “It’ll be locked up.”
    “Not if we don’t want it to be. Perception, remember? Perception and expectation.”
    He remembered, and when he tried the door, it opened. The barroom smells were still there, now mixed with the pleasant odor of some pine-scented cleaner. The stage was empty and the stools were on the bar with their legs sticking up, but the neon replica of the Wind River Range was still on, either because the management left it that way after closing or because that was the way he and Willa wanted it. That seemed more likely. The dance floor seemed very big now that it was empty, especially with the mirror wall to double it. The neon mountains shimmered upside down in its polished depths.
    Willa breathed deep. “I smell beer and perfume,” she said. “A hot rod smell. It’s lovely.”
    “You’re lovely,” he said.
    She turned to him. “Then kiss me, cowboy.”
    He kissed her there on the edge of the dance floor, and judging by what he was feeling, lovemaking wasn’t out of the question. Not at all.
    She kissed both corners of his mouth, then stepped back. “Put a quarter in the jukebox, would you? I want to dance.”
    David went over to the juke at the end of the bar, dropped a quarter, and played D19—“Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” the Freddy Fender version. Out in the parking lot, Chester Dawson, who had decided to lay over here a few hours before resuming his journey to Seattle with a load of electronics, raised his head, thinking he heard music, decided it was part of a dream he’d been having, and went back to sleep.
    David and Willa moved slowly around the empty floor, sometimes reflected in the mirror wall and sometimes not.
    “Willa—”
    “Hush a little, David. Baby wants to dance.”
    David hushed. He put his face in her hair and let the music take him. He thought they would stay here now, and that from time to time people would see them. 26 might even get a reputation for being haunted, but probably not; people didn’t think of ghosts much while they were drinking, unless they were drinking alone. Sometimes when they were closing up, the bartender and the last waitress (the one with the most seniority, the one responsible for splitting the tips) might have an uneasy sense of being watched. Sometimes they’d hear music even after the music had stopped, or catch movement in the mirror next to the dance floor or the one in the lounge. Usually just from the tail of the eye. David thought they could have finished up in better places, but on the whole, 26 wasn’t bad. Until closing there were people. And there would always be music.
    He did wonder what would become of the others when the wrecking ball tore apart their illusion—and it would. Soon. He thought of Phil Palmer trying to shield his terrified, howling wife from falling debris that couldn’t hurt her because she was not, properly speaking, even there. He thought of Pammy Andreeson cowering in her shrieking mother’s arms. Rattner, the soft-spoken conductor, saying, Just be calm, folks, in a voice that couldn’t be heard over the roar of the big yellow machines. He thought of the book salesman, Biggers, trying to run away on his bad leg, lurching and finally falling while the wrecking ball swung and the dozers snarled and bit and the world came down.
    He liked to think their train would come before then—that their combined expectation would make it come—but he didn’t really believe it. He even considered the idea that the shock might extinguish them and they’d simply whiff out like candle flames in a strong gust of wind, but he didn’t believe that, either. He could see them too clearly after the bulldozers and dump trucks and back-end loaders were gone, standing by the rusty disused railway tracks in the moonlight while a wind blew down from the foothills, whining around the mesa and beating at