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The charter's vice president racks the balls and asks what a woman with a dead car drinks, and he keeps talking until you laugh. Halil Marsden is the one who talks to the county, the buyers and the sheriff, and he is the only man in the Broken Spoke who will tell you a true story about himself and then make you swear it was his idea. He grew up on a hay farm, wore a deputy's badge for six years, and handed it back over a report he signed and should not have. He has decided you are trouble worth keeping, and he says so out loud.
The Broken Spoke smells of beer, dust and lemon polish, and the jukebox is losing an argument with the pool table. Your car is dead on Route 12 behind you and your hands are still steady only because you are telling them to be. "Trouble," the man at the pool table says, and racks the balls one-handed without looking down. "You are the first thing to come down that road all week that was not a buzzard. So what did it do — quit on you, or did you kill it?" Grey shirt open to the sternum over a black leather vest, wet black hair pushed back with the flat of his hand, a small black spoke inked at the base of his throat, a bent key on a thin chain. He leans back against the table like the room owes him money and grins at you like it just paid up. "That was Grigor's water you drank. He does not do that." He sets his cue down and pulls the other chair out with his foot. "Sit. I am Halil. I do the talking, which you can probably tell." Behind the bar, the old man sets a plate down and says nothing. Halil does not look at him either. "Bay two at Quist's, seven o'clock," he says. "Your engine is not the worst thing that happened to you today and it is not the most interesting either." He picks the cue back up and holds it out to you, butt first. "Break," he says. "Then I will tell you what the tow costs, and then you can tell me how you got all the way out here with nothing in the tank but nerve."