Crude Sunlight 1 by Phil Tucker Page A

three years now."
    "Huh. Three years." Julia nodded slowly as if absorbing this fact, and then began to push her bottle from one hand to the other, sliding it slowly across the table. "You guys weren't too close to Henry, were you?" It didn't sound so much like a question, but more of an opening gambit.
    "No," said Thomas, "I guess we weren't." The silence hung in the air between them, palpable despite the noise in the bar. Thomas waited for her to speak, and when she didn't, he continued. "Henry was a lot younger. Is a lot younger." He frowned and stared at his bottle, focusing on the way the light refracted through it onto the table surface. "He's a lot younger, and I guess we didn't spend too much time together growing up. I was out and in college by the time he was hitting middle school, and then I moved to New York to start work when he hit high school. Not much overlap."
    "Yeah," said Julia. She glanced up at him. "That's too bad."
    "Yes," said Thomas. He continued to frown at the bottle. "It is."
    "We'll find him," said Buck with what sounded like trembling bravado. "If anybody can find that brother of yours, it's us. We'll just buy some cowboy hats and six shooters, and go down there and give 'em hell. Talking about giving them hell, who's up for another round?"
    "I don't know. I'm thinking I should start taking it easy."
    "I'm game," said Julia, nodding to Buck. "Hit me up."
    Buck edged his way awkwardly around the table to stand up, and then looked down at the two of them. "Beer for me, beer for Julia, and as promised, warm milk for Tommy boy. Got it." Grinning, he turned and waded into the crowd.
    "Great. He's going to get me a shot of tequila." Thomas upended his beer and drained it, setting it down hard enough that it spun out from his hand in erratic circles before settling down and coming to a stop. "What are we doing, Julia? What are you doing? I thought you weren't interested in finding Henry. I thought that's why you didn't go after Eric."
    "Yeah, well." She looked at Thomas, and then past him at the crowd. "I don't know. I wasn't going to. Well, more like I wasn't going to think about it, you know? Like, just let it slide. But then you showed up, and... well." She broke off, and frowned. "I don't know. It made me think. About... well, friends. And family. About... stuff. And I decided that maybe..."
    "Maybe what?" asked Thomas.
    "Maybe I shouldn't have let it slide. Like maybe I owed Henry better than that. Maybe we all did." She looked at him then, and her eyes were hard and suddenly fierce, like when he had first met her in the campus cafeteria. "Maybe somebody out there should have gone after him. I don't know. He was... really nice, your brother. Funny, strange, but nice. Maybe I should have done more." She began to peel the label off the beer, tearing it away in ragged strips. "No, I should have done more. Not maybe. So this is a chance to do right by him, you know? To try and go back and... yeah."
    Thomas watched her fingers, long and delicate, slowly turning the bottle and tearing glittering streaks from the glass. She was utterly focused on her task. As if he wasn't even sitting there.
    "Yeah," he finally breathed. "I know what you mean." He glanced past her fingers at the brown table top, through it. "I know exactly what you mean." He felt lightheaded, not quite euphoric like he had felt in his apartment the night before, but slightly melancholy, mature beyond words, suddenly on the verge of tears. "How do things get this way? How does life just change on you just when you think you've got it all figured out?"
    From the corner of his eye he saw Julia stop staring at the bottle and look up at him. He kept staring at the table. "Each step should be a logical progression from the last, but somewhere along the line it all stops making sense." He smiled, though it hurt to smile. He felt careless, his words seeming at once brilliant and pathetic. "You get a job, you get an apartment, you fall in love, you