It was December.
A cold, grinding midwinter night, the kind that gets under your skin and sends you searching for any place with heat, warmth, and something to forget it all. So they came, trickling into The Walking Stick, looking for a drink, a laugh, maybe a moment of peace. It wasn't bustling, not by any means, but that's just how Henry Savoy liked it—slow enough to watch, fast enough to ignore what needed ignoring.
Ruby, My Dear drifted from the speakers, John Coltrane's sax threading the air like smoke, winding its way through every glass, every pair of folded hands, every eyelid drooping heavy with the day's weight.
Thelonius Monk was back there, too, piano coming in soft like footsteps on a snow-covered street, just enough to hold up the melody without interrupting it. The tables held their conversations low and quiet, murmuring like rivers under ice, just loud enough to hear but not enough to shatter the spell of the jazz.
It was around ten when Henry poured himself a drink—a little earlier than usual, maybe, but tonight he felt that the hour called for it. You could almost hear it in the way Monk's keys twinkled their way toward midnight, the perfect invitation for a bartender to drink on the job.
There was always a moment, if you were listening, when the whole world seemed to line up, just for a second, and in that second, you'd feel like you could sip the whole night down to the last shade of dark.
But good things—those end fast, faster than you want, faster than you can hold onto.
And the bad things hang around, stretch out, filling spaces they shouldn't. Pain lingers, carves its name into you, leaves a mark you can't quite scrub away.
For Savoy, that's the ugly truth of it all.
His ugly truth.
And by 10:30, the peace was shattered.
Two men walked in, slick with trouble—long coats, black hats pulled low over hard, shadowed faces, the kind that told you not to get in their way. But maybe one of the patrons missed that look because they went straight for a table, started in on three of Henry's regulars, picking a fight that quickly spilled over.
Everyone scrambled.
Everyone but Henry. He couldn't let anyone wreck his bar. He asked for payment in kind, and they offered it—maybe too quick.
When they left, three men were slumped across the floor, bodies full of holes, blood crawling across the floorboards like thick, dark wine. For a moment, Henry stared, frozen, yanked from his small world of jazz and whiskey into something far uglier.
He'd seen violence, grown up with it as a given, a reality you learned to dodge, fight, or endure. But death this close—real, red, unmoving—hit him somewhere deep. And as he stood there, that cold December night settled over him, that sight burning itself in, numbing something inside.
The dark things stayed with him; they had a way of lingering.
Maybe that was why the bright days always turned blue so fast.