The Sunoco station is the site of a fatal exchange of gunfire in which Eddie Warburton mistakes Ricky Bissonette for Sonny Jackett, shoots Ricky, and is then killed by Sonny. The station office turns a private grievance into a double killing, and its aftermath gives Henry Payton a concrete link to another violent crime in Castle Rock.

The mistaken shooting

Under the office fluorescents, Eddie pulls up in the second-hand Oldsmobile that replaced his Civic. He approaches with a gun in his jacket pocket, then pauses outside and watches Sonny sitting beside the cash register, rocking back in a plastic chair and reading a newspaper. Eddie reads the scene through his conviction that Sonny has cheated him and that white men can use lawyers to take advantage of Black men like him.

Eddie draws the automatic and enters. Though part of him recognizes that firing would be a mistake, he feels detached from his own actions as he shoots twice. The bullets strike the newspaper headline, and the man who falls from the tipped chair is not Sonny but Ricky Bissonette, whose name is stitched in gold on his coveralls. Eddie recognizes the error aloud: he has shot the wrong man.

Sonny's return fire

Sonny speaks from behind Eddie, explaining that he had been in the restroom. He, too, has bought an automatic pistol from Leland Gaunt. Before Eddie can turn around, Sonny fires three bullets into his lower back, destroying his spine. The scene's reversal is stark: Eddie enters believing he is confronting Sonny, but kills Ricky instead; Sonny emerges unharmed from the mistaken attack and kills Eddie.

The scene's aftermath

Henry Payton arrives at the office doorway and finds two men dead, one white and one Black. A third man, identified by his coveralls as the station owner, sits beside the open safe holding a dirty steel case. On the floor beside him lies an automatic pistol that Henry recognizes as the twin of the weapon Hugh Priest used to shoot Henry Beaufort. The station thus becomes more than the setting for a misdirected act of revenge: the weapon supplies Henry with a physical connection between this crime scene and the earlier shooting, while the two deaths deepen Castle Rock's wider breakdown into violence.