Fifty hours since they'd last been there Mal and Zoë entered the bar at New Lafayette once again. This time Mal didn't scan the room. He just went up to the counter, leaned over, grabbed the bartender and slammed him face down on the table, then cocked his gun and pressed the barrel against the man's temple. "Where's my man?" he hissed through his clenched teeth.

"I told you," the bartender protested.

A few of the patrons in the room shouted and Mal heard the scraping of chairs against the floor as some of them got to their feet, but Zoë was covering him with her shotgun and nobody intervened.

"The truth this time!" he yelled at the bartender.

"It was the truth, gorram it!"

"Okay then, the whole truth!"

The man was panting heavily now. "He was here like I said. He was talkin' to some guy and left with 'im. Went to find some hidden goods in the hills or sumthin'."

Mal, pleased with the answer, let the man go, but kept his gun at him. He glanced over his shoulder at Zoë and nodded and they left the bar.

"Goods weren't in the hills," Zoë said as soon as they were out the door.

"No," Mal replied. "And Jayne knew. Gorram fool!"

He was furious, by now with everyone and everything in this crap-heel 'verse. The anger had been steadily building up inside him during the eight-hour trip back to this god-forsaken moon. Wash had been able to shave three hours of the estimated travel time, but that hadn't been enough to stop him from descending into the pit of self-loathing he found himself in from time to time and always seemed to put him in a lashing mood.

Jayne would never have left his guns! Why had he been the only one not able to see that?

Everybody had been anxious. Kaylee had been constantly pacing all over the ship, driving Wash nuts with her are-we-there-yet?-questions and even tried to squeeze River for more information. But River ha