by Nick Thacker
Joey cocked an eyebrow. “You think they’re on to you for Hannah’s dad’s assassination?”
“No, not necessarily for that. But they’re definitely curious about the same things this other group is curious about. I’ve been in all the wrong places at all the wrong times, and it really does look like I’m involved.”
“So Rayburn’s funeral service is out on Hunting Island on Sunday, and we need to clean this mess up by tomorrow night.”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
“And the government is crawling all over you.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t tell Joey it was the FBI, nor how I knew it was the FBI. I needed to keep a few cards close to my chest, and my relationship with Truman was one of them. If only for Joey’s protection. He’d done me a lot of favors over the years, and I didn’t need any of those ‘favors’ getting him in trouble with the feds.
“And we can’t just walk in and start shooting the place up.”
“Yeah, seems reckless.”
“Yeah,” Joey said, with a not-so-slight shade of sarcasm in his voice. “It does seem a bit reckless.”
“So the general idea, at this point, is to sneak in. Somehow. They did it with Hannah, so we can do it, too. My — “ I caught myself before I said ‘my contact at the Bureau told me — “my gut tells me that if they snuck into the mansion with Hannah kicking and screaming, there’s got to be some way to get through a cellar entrance, or a tunnel or something we could access.”
“Or just pretend we’re helping with the funeral.”
I shot Joey a glance. “That’s… that’s not a bad idea.”
“Beats digging around for a secret underground entrance that probably doesn’t exist.”
“True. Place is on the beach, I doubt there’s a whole lot of underground anything.”
I shifted in my old barstool, remembering how uncomfortable these chairs were. The leather had flattened down over the tops of the seats, the cushioning inside barely poofy enough to notice it was there. I made a mental note to shop for some better ones that hadn’t been used in thousands of bars before they’d made their way to mine.
“How about we bring in a bunch of drink stuff? Pretend we’re the bar?”
I shook my head. “No, place like that probably has a bar in every room already. There will be plenty of booze there.”
“But they won’t have a dedicated staff for pouring for large events like this.”
“They usually do drinks at funerals?”
Joey shrugged. “Sure, why not? I mean, wouldn’t you want a drink?”
“If I was dead, or if I was at a funeral for someone who was?”
He shrugged again.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Seems a bit… I don’t know, it seems a bit morbid, though.”
“It’ll work. If they have a drink service already, we’ll just fake our way in as employees. No one’s going to be guarding the door with a guest clipboard until Sunday. And if there’s not supposed to be beverage service at funerals, they won’t already have one. We’ll say we’re setting up for the wake. Those are really just afterparties, anyway. Everyone wants to be drunk at those.”
For a brief moment, my thoughts flashed back to the last funeral I’d been to.
Hers.
I clenched my jaw and forced another few sips of bourbon down. The memory came like a wave, crashing over me without a way to defend myself. The glass shook in my hand a bit, then steadied.
Joey looked at me, but I stared down the bar at the sign directing visitors to the restrooms, ignoring him.
This was another card I was playing close to my chest.
Finally, I looked up again.
“Yeah, Joey,” I said. “That’ll work. That’ll definitely work.”
40
I RUBBED MY EYES AND walked into the back office area. Go time. I remembered my father saying that when I was a kid whenever it was time to leave somewhere earlier than I wanted to get up. I’d always been a night owl, but as the years went on I found my body requiring less and less sleep.
Or, more likely, there was just nothing my body would gain from more sleep. It had been beaten into submission over years of hard service to me, and the aches and pains that had been cloying and sporadic at first had become permanent fixtures. Sleep did nothing to help them along, so I didn’t need as much of it.
Joey was already there, cooking up an unbelievably delightful-smelling concoction that included bacon, eggs, and what looked like hash browns.
“We had hash browns?” I had turned over the ordering to Joey a few months ago, as he was the master chef around here and knew when we were getting low better than I did. He also, somehow, had an uncanny way of knowing when there was going to be a run on something. The locals and oldies would come out and eat us clean out of catfish, or eggs, or something else, and Joey would surprise me by grabbing another stack of boxes full of the stuff from the tiny walk-in freezer, claiming he knew there would be a demand for it that week.
This time, too, he surpised me. “No,” he said. “I used breadcrumbs from the way I do catfish and added some butter and paprika, made sort of a pan-fried egg and bacon thing.”
I scrunched my nose. The delightful smell seemed to lessen when I thought of the smorgasbord he had whipped up.
“Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it,” he muttered.
I walked into the bar and flicked on the lights. The tables and chairs glistened, cleaned well from the early turndown service last night. I glanced around at the space with the same eyes I’d always looked through, seeing the same things as always and thinking the same things. The same upgrades, the same ideas, the same dreams.
After some time in the same space, there is a certain blindness that grows out of familiarity. It was no different here, and most days I came in I just stared, trying in vain to see the space through new, fresh eyes. I never wanted to see my bar as a paradigm, losing the ability to discern what my customers noticed. Did it smell? Was it outdated? Was there an obvious 800-pound gorilla in the room that turned people away?
Today was different. I had a brief flash of confusion, like my mind had finally pulled the blinders away and allowed me to see this space as if looking upon it for the first time. Only an instant, but it was enough. There was a smell to the place, but it wasn’t bad. It was grainy, almost like baked bread without the freshness. Like beer, but not the spilled-on-the-floor-and-forgotten kind.
There was a dampness to the place, or something like it. I didn’t really know how to describe it, but it wasn’t good. I didn’t like what I noticed with these new eyes in the moment I was allowed to use them, but I couldn’t really pinpoint what it was. It was a certain funkiness, like an interior designer had started in on this place and then stopped halfway through. But instead of a line, a specific delineation point in the center of the room where the ‘good’ stopped and the ‘bad’ began, it was all mixed together, impossible to separate.
I frowned, blinked, and looked again. The old bar, the familiar territory I’d built and had been building for years, returned. The ‘weirdness’ of the place was gone, replaced by a calming sense of security.
Crap. I wanted to bring back the weirdness so I could study it a moment, but my mind had shifted back again and the moment was over.
The smell of eggs and bacon increased, and I heard a sizzling plate floating toward me.
“Here you go, boss,” Joey’s voice said from behind me. I whirled around and found a gigantic plate piled high with food. “Eat up.”
“Go time,” I said.
He looked at me funny.
“My dad used to say it all the time. “‘Go time,’ like ‘ready or not,’ or something like that.”
“Got it,” he said. He handed me the plate and then a fork, then headed back to the kitchen for his own plate. He returned and saw me glancing around. “What you looking at?”
I shrugged, then shook my head. “I don’t know. I mean I don’t know what I’m trying to
look for. It’s… something about this place.”
I explained as best I could what I had been thinking about, and he started nodding. “The lights,” he said, through a mouthful of eggs and bacon.
“What do you mean?”
I stuck my fork deep into the center of my egg-and-bacon mountain and took a bite. My mouth immediately began to water and my senses overloaded with the absolute amazement of it all. It was phenomenal, whatever it was. For the thousandth time I made myself a note to give Joey a raise.
“I’m saying the lighting is off in here,” he said. “Always has been. Kind of a weird effect, actually. You’d think a place like this should be dimly lit, since it has a low ceiling and feels like a tiny speakeasy or something.”
I looked over at him, but didn’t stop eating.
“So you put up lights that aren’t quite dim enough, but even then they’re the wrong types.”
“How are you a lighting expert now, too?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he said. “Just been to a lot of places, and I was trying to figure out what was up with this place. I mean everything about it is great — best drinks in a 200-mile radius, good service, and — “ he winked at me “ — best damn catfish anywhere.”
I laughed. “Okay, fine, Martha Stewart. What kind of lighting do we need in here?”
“Something a little smaller, and a little dimmer, and more of them. On a dimmer switch too, so you can really dial in the effect you want. You ever been to a fancy restaurant?”
“Like Red Lobster?”
He almost choked on an egg. “No… like… never mind. Yeah, like Red Lobster, I guess. They turn down the lights at certain times, to make it darker during dinner.”
I thought about it as I ate my eggs. The idea had merit, and I had to admit I was the last person on Earth who should be deciding on things like interior design. Still, the lighting in here had cost a fortune. To think I’d have to redo it all. I grunted, a deep, angry thing that made Joey look up at me.
“You get any sleep last night?” he asked.
“Yeah, a bit. Doesn’t seem to help anything these days, that’s all.”
“You mean you’re still a pissed-off old dude?”
“A pissed-off old dude who can kick your ass,” I replied.
“Yeah, challenge accepted. Anyway, we’re here, we’ve eaten, what’s the plan?”
I looked back at him, knowing what he was asking. “Same thing as yesterday. We need to get in and pretend we’re working there. It’s the only way.”
“Yeah, I figured that. I’ll give my buddy a call — he handles catering at that place in South Charleston, but he usually has a finger on the pulse of it all.”
“The pulse of the catering market?” I asked, my voice betraying my attempt to not sound skeptical.
“Apparently there is a market, and apparently it’s cutthroat out here,” he said. “Whatever. He’ll know.”
“Okay,” I said. “Great. Find out if there is anyone already providing beverage service for this thing, and what we need to bring either way. After that, we’ll need to hustle. I want to get in there and get back out well before our deadline.”
Joey took a bite and nodded. He chewed a moment. “Sounds good. Even though we’re not going in ‘Rambo style,’ we’ll still —“
“Don’t worry about that,” I said, cutting him off. “I’ve got that covered.”
“Okay,” Joey said. “Great. What else?”
“Your car.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“It sucks.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“Mine’s going to still suck, even after Billy finishes with it, but next to yours it’s a Rolls Royce.”
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was stringing me along or if he thought it was a decent enough ride.
“Joey, the thing’s falling apart. You have three different tires —“
“They all went flat at different times. What, am I supposed to change all four at once?”
“— And the engine is starting to shake at 70.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Used to be 80.”
Now I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Still, it’s all we’ve got.”
“No,” I said. “This isn’t the time to rely on something built last millennium. Let me make a call.”
He nodded. “Okay, I’ve got that call to make myself. When are we shipping out?”
I looked at my watch, a cheap knockoff of a military issue. “Let’s give it three hours to get ready. Go time is noon?”
“Go time is noon,” he replied.
I reached out a hand. Joey looked at it for a moment, then grabbed it.
“I’m not trying to make this sentimental, but this is a big deal, Joey. I appreciate it.”
He squeezed my hand tighter, as if challenging me. His eyes shone with the enthusiasm of a new recruit. “Don’t mention it. Chances are I’ll be the one saving your old ass, anyway.”
41
IT TOOK ME THE BETTER part of half an hour to walk to Marley’s B&B, as I took a meandering route around the bend near the old corner of the beach, then back up along the coastline past the historic district. When I got there, the sun was shining fully and the sweat was starting to linger on the back of my neck.
There were tourists and a few locals out on the beach as I passed, the tourists standing out due to their brightly colored umbrellas and coolers strewn lazily around the park area. The locals always drove in, parking in one of the few spots that were open to the public yet hard to find, tucked away behind shops or houses yet still within walking distance to the water. They left their lunches and drinks in the vehicles instead.
I nodded to a few locals who recognized me as I passed, and hoped they didn’t think it odd I was traipsing up and down the streets wearing jeans and black boots and a long-sleeved shirt. I was a businessman in their eyes, so I figured they just assumed I was on my way to business of some sort.
Standing at the front stoop of Marley’s, it took me a moment to get my bearings. I had only been here once before, but it had been at night and I hadn’t been standing still. I looked around and retraced my route up the steps, onto the porch, and then looked up at the back driveway and pictured the van rolling away with Hannah inside, screaming.
I recalled the man who’d chased me down, the idiot who hadn’t known what he had signed up for trying to take me out. He was somewhere off the coast, strung up on paracord that had been tied around him and around a couple cinder blocks in some not-so-deep water. The next person he would be face-to-face with would be in for a disgusting, smelly shock.
The thought gave me little satisfaction, unfortunately. Hannah was still out there, still being terrorized by the assholes who thought I was involved in all of this. They wouldn’t listen to logic or reason, and there was no way I could prove to them I had no interest in their shitty company. Hell, it would seem to them further proof that I was involved. Anyone taking part in an organization like that would have all kinds of loopholes and legal trapdoors in place to make their involvement invisible.
I turned around and looked out to the street. The streetlight that had provided me just a little help before was dark during the daylight hours, but it stuck out between two trees in my field of vision like a sore thumb. There was no one around, and there was certainly not anyone watching the house in the near vicinity. The local police had not yet been alerted to the fact that there were two gruesome murder scenes right inside, decomposing and beginning their short trip back to dust.
But I wasn’t looking for a cop, or an innocent bystander. I was looking for something that would be a bit more subtle, not necessarily hidden but certainly not wanting to attract attention.
I saw it just past the streetlight, across the street from Marley’s and down just a bit, almost to the gas station.
A black sedan that sat low to the ground, impossible to see unless you weren’t blind. The gall of the gover
nment agencies to deploy their troops in the most obvious vehicles never ceased to amaze me. The tires had that oily look of having been changed out with brand new ones just a week ago, or even probably at the start of the mission, and the wheels themselves had that ‘I’m nothing to look at’ plainness to them that made me want to look at them. Cheap wheels on an expensive car only said one thing: government agent.
I started walking, hoping the guy or gal inside would see me coming and place a call to their boss. I imagined what the conversation would be like: ‘sir/ma’am, I see that guy coming. The one we were supposed to be watching the other day.’ ‘Yeah? Are you still supposed to be watching them?’ ‘uh, no.’ ‘Okay… then stop watching them. Any action on the house?’
Unable to prevent a smile from forming on my lips, I laughed a bit and crossed the street. I would approach them on their passenger side, for two reasons. They had been directed to watch Marley’s until the police investigation began, and I didn’t want to obstruct their view. In addition, I believed it was a little less intimidating to approach on the opposite side as the driver. Something psychological maybe, but it seemed like it gave them more confidence in their ability to pull up a gun or a badge or whatever it was they were defending themselves with that day.
I came all the way up to the window and brought up a knuckle to start knocking before it rolled down. Dark bulletproof glass slid away to reveal a dark, not-bulletproof interior covered in leather.
“Wow,” I said under my breath.
“Can I help you?” the agent — a guy who looked to be about half my age — said. His voice was more of an ‘air,’ the kind of voice reserved for kings who have been threatened by a field peasant.
“Uh, well, maybe,” I said. “Just admiring your ride. Shame you can’t ever let it up to speed, you know?”
The guy frowned. “Sir, I —“
I held up a hand. “I mean they got you watching Marley’s place, but I’m telling you, the action’s down south. Hunting Island.”
There was just a hint of recognition in his eyes, but he redirected and hid it well. He knew what I was talking about, but he realized just a little bit too late that he wasn’t supposed to tell me he knew what I was talking about.