You need stitches, but I'm afraid this is the best we can do for now.

Yen had carefully butterfly bandaged together which she could, and smothered the rest of my left hand and regalls mittens.

I'm gonna ask. Yeah, I was already missing that pinkie from before. No, no. I was gonna ask, what the hell happened in there?

I looked at Jerry, who was standing shirtless next to me and applying his own bandages. He gave me the look.

The one I'd come to understand is you're in charge here, buddy. If we were gonna tell them the truth, it would need to come from my mouth.

If we're going to attempt to cover up, I'd have to be the one to think up a good lie.

There was a ragcoon. Yen pulled down my shirt collar and shined her flashlight at my millipede leg track marks.

A ragcoon? You look like you've been put on a wrestling machine. Jerry ran with it. That's exactly what happened.

Raccoon had a sewing machine gun. It was, it was nuking f**ks in there. Hey, do you have any more of that rubbing alcohol?

Lucy was pretending not to watch, but even in the dim red glow of the emergency light, I noticed her steal a few passing glances at Jerry's tattoos.

And angry voice cut in the air. There's another wildcoon running around. You need to do something about it right now before we all get rabies.

Lucy snapped back. That's enough out of you. Owen was on the floor a few feet away. His hands zip tied to the drain pipe below the frozen drink machine.

Besides a slight wealth on his neck and some frizzled hair, he didn't look too much worse for wear.

He's not much worse than when we went into the cooler. On the other side of the room, Bart Lay motionless beneath the packing blanket.

There was no reason to rush for his sake anymore.

I didn't get the whole story. From what I had gathered, Owen had a change of heart about Jerry's plan shortly after the chair went into place, trapping us inside the cooler.

You just couldn't bring himself to surrender as weapon. All pretence of innocence went out the window after Lucy found the CB radio and Owen smashed it into pieces.

He needed more time to think, he said, to make sure that everyone was on the same page with their stories. He couldn't risk getting caught up in this.

It would have been too much of an inconvenience for a man his level of visibility.

Lucy took the gun from him. Owen put up a fight. It ended with him on the floor as zip tied to a drainage pipe.

I would have paid every penny that I had to see how it went down, but sadly, Lucy was conservative on the details.

So I'd have to let my imagination do the work. Bart held on for as long as he could, but it wasn't enough.

...