Lea brought Hillwicky his beer as the door opened and more new faces entered. It was the two men who’d arrived at the hotel this morning. They were an odd pair, and given a hundred guesses, she’d never have put them together. The little one—with the trash bag for a suitcase—looked like he’d been drinking in the Toproll since birth. He studied the crowd as if he were sizing up tonight’s first fight. Tattoos sprawled from his collar and sleeves, and she’d give odds that everything he wore came from Walmart. His partner, on the other hand, didn’t belong, but she couldn’t say why. He just didn’t fit in, and she would have been hard-pressed to say where he would. He was a decent-looking guy with a neatly trimmed beard, melancholy eyes, and the blueprint of a cocky, just-read-your-diary smile. He met her gaze and held it. A flicker of something passed across his face that made her stomach flutter unpleasantly. Knock that shit off, she warned herself. Next thing she knew, she’d be clutching her pearls and fanning herself. She put her head down and got back to work. When she glanced up, the two had disappeared into the back room, looking for a table.
Over the next couple of hours, the bar picked up yet another notch. Lea and Margo poured beers steadily, and neither had time to worry about Tommy Hillwicky or any of the unfamiliar faces in the bar.
“What’ll you have?” Lea asked, moving blindly to the next customer.
“Whatever. Beer.”
Lea looked up, recognizing the voice. Parker stood there in his uniform. She poured him a fast beer, and he hooked his head toward the back. It wasn’t their scheduled day, and Parker wasn’t in the habit of going the extra mile, so whatever had dragged him away from his movies must be important.
Lea waited ten minutes before telling Margo she was taking her break. She dropped a fresh bowl of bar mix in front of Parker and slid into the booth opposite him. The poker game was finally under way, and tension had eased a little. Across the room, the mismatched men were locked in animated conversation. Lea would have loved to know about what. Instead, she turned her attention to Parker.
“Your cable out?”
“Slaski.”
Lea felt her breath catch. “You’re sure?”
Parker nodded. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
He told her about Slaski clearing the library for Merrick so Merrick could use Slaski’s phone. The only reason an inmate would need the library, he explained, was that it offered the best cell signal in the prison. Lea felt jubilation but hid it with a subdued fist pump under the table. Her mind raced ahead. How to get her hands on that phone, see who he’d been calling. Might be enough to give her back the edge. She would need to move quickly, but she felt optimistic for the first time since reading the interview.
“What?” Parker asked.
“Nothing. Surprised he was so careless.”
“Had something to do with the visit he had yesterday.”
“Not his lawyer again? Henry Susman?”
Parker shook his head. “Some fella named Lee Wulff. Didn’t see him, but he rattled your boy good.”
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about Slaski.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
A pall of animosity more toxic than the haze of cigarette smoke hung over the bar. It took more than an hour to get food. The bar was busy but not so busy that it should take fifteen minutes before someone even dropped menus at the table. In the same time, Gibson watched the middle-aged waitress make three trips to the poker table and the group of Niobe Prison guards shooting pool. When she finally dropped off their menus, Gibson ordered a pitcher of beer in case she took her time coming back to take their order—Swonger was thirsty work.
“This is discrimination,” Swonger groused.
“Don’t start.” But Swonger had a point; it was not the friendliest bar.
Gibson looked over each of the prison guards, all still in uniform. Scrutinized how they carried themselves and interacted with each other. He would need a set of eyes inside the prison, and guards’ salaries should make them susceptible to a well-aimed bribe. Still, none of them felt right to him. Fortunately, the place was thick with off-duty prison guards, and there were a few more options in the front room. He’d take a closer look after he ate. Where was that waitress?
When the food finally came, they ate in hungry silence. Swonger drowned his burger in ketchup and mayo and ate it with an ex-con’s wariness, head down and fast, like someone bigger and stronger might try to take it from him. Ignoring the French fries until he’d devoured the protein. When his plate was clean, Swonger pushed it away and fished around in a pocket for paper and a pencil. It was a list, and beside each item was a number. Swonger went over his columns, lips moving as he added the sums, making adjustments and additions as he went. An unfamiliar smile crept over his face as he worked.
“What are you working on?”
“Nothing,” Swonger said, then, “You know. Just what I’m going to do with my share. Of the money.”
Gibson was all too familiar with the fantasies of money to come. When the Spectrum job had seemed assured, he’d daydreamed about everything he would buy. All the ways that life would be better for his daughter. So he understood the impulse, dangerous as it might be, but that didn’t mean that he wanted to listen to Swonger’s plans to trick out his Scion. Instead, Swonger surprised him.
“Already got the plot picked out.”
“Plot?”
“Only a hundred fifty acres, but good land. Me and Pops. Set things up right. Cattle. Sheep. Soybeans and corn. Sell to those locally sourced hipster restaurants. It’ll be pretty sweet.”
“A farm?” Gibson said. “Really?”
“Dog, that’s all I ever wanted. Been working with Pops since I don’t know when. Never had much use for school, but I can farm. Believe that. After Merrick, I’m gonna get my mom and pops away from the Birks. Do things right.”
Gibson studied him and tried to reconcile this with what he already knew about Swonger. Peer through the swirl of anger and see the pain that anger protected.
Swonger felt it. “You scheming on kissing me?”
Gibson shook his head to show that he didn’t mean any offense. He wanted to warn Swonger somehow but didn’t know what words could penetrate the ex-con’s hopefulness. Swonger had so much riding on Merrick, on his desire to avenge and simultaneously save his family. Gibson knew all about that fantasy as well. He realized something else that he should have seen sooner.
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“Until the Birks lose the farm.”
“Oh, that ‘how long.’ Couple months. Pops hasn’t even started looking for somewhere to live. Just keeps killing himself for the Birks. Like mending fences will make a difference. Man works so damn hard. Always has. But he doesn’t want to know nothing about the world. Just wants to farm. I remember when the judge talked Pops into investing. Pops had never invested in anything more than a savings account. What’s he know about hedge funds? Nothing. But here comes Judge Birk talking about me. About my future. How this was Pops’s chance to jump our family ahead. Pops trusted the judge. Even after Merrick got busted. Hell, he still does. I don’t. So here I am.”
“Listen, Swonger. Go easy, okay?”
“I’m easy, dog.”
“No, I just mean don’t get ahead of things. Maybe there’s money. Maybe there isn’t. But even if there is, it’s not going to be as much as you think.”
“How you figure that?”
“Like I told you, the Justice Department is really, really good at finding money. So whatever money Merrick managed to hide away, it was small enough to fall through the cracks. So go easy.”
Swonger considered this and shrugged. “Still more than I got now, dog. Know what I’m saying?”
Gibson knew that math all too well.
After dinner, Gibson tried and failed to catch the waitress’s eye, his hand poised optimistically above his head to signal for the check. A new guard came into the back room and squeezed himself into an e
mpty booth. It was ungainly ballet, and Gibson’s hand dropped gently to the table as he watched the guard struggle vainly with the belt that pinned his paunch half in and half out of his pants. Failing to broker a truce, the guard glanced around surreptitiously before loosening his buckle several notches. That seemed to do it. Freed from the belt’s constraints, the guard nursed his beer and picked at a bowl of bar mix. Every few minutes, he looked over his shoulder as if expecting someone.
A smile crept over Gibson’s face. God, it was beautiful: middle aged, no wedding ring, a stain on his uniform that was at least a few days old. Impatient, lazy eyes. When he’d come in, none of the guards at the pool table had waved him over, and he hadn’t so much as glanced in their direction. Yeah, he’d do, all right. Gibson just needed an approach. While he mulled that over, the young female bartender who had twice now given him the stink eye—once in the hotel when he’d first arrived and again when he’d come into the bar—entered the back room, made a haphazard lap around the other tables, and sat down with his guard.
Well, isn’t that interesting?
Gibson couldn’t make out what they were discussing, but it wasn’t the casual chat between friends they wanted it to appear. Whatever their arrangement, she was in charge, even if the guard didn’t want to acknowledge it. Her graceful, intelligent hands conducted the conversation at her tempo. She thought with her mouth, chewing pensively on a corner of her lip; he imagined that she would smile beautifully—nimble and expressive, although something in her eyes told Gibson that smiles were few and far between. He thought he’d enjoy listening to her talk even if the same couldn’t be said for the guard. She had seen what Gibson had seen—the guard was weak, and she had exploited that weakness. But to what end?
He had the strangest feeling that he knew her from somewhere. Not just from the hotel this morning. From further back. But why would he know a West Virginia bartender? Maybe she’d been a Marine? He willed her to sweep her long brunette hair away from the side of her face so he could get a better look. Where did he know her from? Her features were hard to place too, and he could only guess at her ethnicity. Some Caucasian to be sure, but something else as well. East Asian perhaps?
A crazy thought occurred to him.
He took out his laptop and opened his research on Charles Merrick. He scrolled until he found a picture of Merrick with his family: ex-wife, Veronica, and daughter, Chelsea. It was an older picture, posed for an issue of Hamptons magazine—Chelsea Merrick’s sixteenth birthday looked like it had been quite an extravaganza, and the family smiled brilliantly. Just two years before the roof fell in on her father’s house of cards. His research into her whereabouts hadn’t gotten past Portland, where she’d more or less disappeared off the grid.
Couldn’t get much more off the grid than Niobe, West Virginia.
Chelsea Merrick would be what? Twenty-six now? Gibson glanced back and forth from the picture to the bartender across the room, trying to imagine the sixteen-year-old as a grown woman. In the picture, Chelsea Merrick was blonde like her father, hair piled in a chic swirl atop her head. Gibson didn’t know enough about women’s fashion to say for certain, but her flowing summer dress must’ve cost a small fortune and was a world away from the black sleeveless Joan Jett T-shirt and blue jeans that the bartender wore. Gibson shook it off—there was a passing similarity, but that was it. He’d started to close his laptop when the bartender leaned out of her seat to gaze through the doorway, checking on the bar up front. She gathered her hair up in one motion and tied it up in a ponytail. And like that, he saw her. Same jawline, same ears, and a small mole on her temple above her right eye.
Chelsea Merrick, in the flesh.
Bartending in a dive bar in Niobe, West Virginia.
He let that sink in. Bartender was a good cover, but what was she really doing here? Obviously, it had to do with her father. Was she Merrick’s liaison with the outside world? Who else could it be? Whom else would Merrick trust with his money? And they were using this guard as their courier? It made sense.
“What?” Swonger asked.
“What?”
“You’re smiling again. It’s weird.”
“I need you to do something in a minute.”
“Oh, yeah? No can do, dog.”
The two men stared across the table at each other.
“What?”
“Nah, man, see, I’m here in a strictly observating capacity. Think that’s what you said.” Swonger shrugged helplessly. “So, wish I could help you out, but . . .”
Gibson sighed. “Fine.”
“Fine what?”
“I need your help.”
“And you’ll tell me what’s going on and quit condescending at me?”
“That’s a lot to ask.”
“Then do it yourself.”
“Okay, okay, it’s a deal.”
Swonger’s attitude changed instantaneously as he sat forward. “So what you need?”
“Table across the way. At your four o’clock.”
Swonger dropped his head and looked low over his shoulder. “One with the angry hot bartender at it?”
“Right. You see the guard?”
“The big boy? Uh, yeah. He ain’t exactly stealth. What’s the play?”
“You’re so good at following me. Follow him instead. I need a name and an address. Where he lives.”
To Gibson’s surprise, Swonger didn’t ask why but stood and drained the last of his beer. “Then what?”
“Then what, what?”
“After I got an address. What you want me to do then?”
Gibson wasn’t sure. He hadn’t expected Swonger to actually follow his lead, so he hadn’t worked out the next part yet.
“Text me and sit on him until you hear from me.”
“On it.”
Swonger ambled out. A few minutes later, Chelsea Merrick left the guard’s table and went back to work. The guard rebuckled his belt before heading for the door himself. Gibson hadn’t seen him pass the bartender anything, so the message must have been simple enough to remember.
He’d have dearly loved to know what it was.
After Gibson finally pried the check from the waitress and settled the bill, he went to have a closer look at Chelsea Merrick. There was an empty seat at the bar where he could watch the Dodgers and Giants getting underway on the West Coast. An old man on the next stool contemplated a shot and a beer; he glanced in Gibson’s direction as if his being there were a sin.
“Someone sitting here?”
“Aren’t you sure?”
“No, I mean . . .” Gibson realized he was being messed with and sat down. The man introduced himself as Old Charlie, which Gibson thought an odd way to describe yourself.
“Robert Quine.” They shook hands.
“So, Bob . . . you with these other out-of-town sons of bitches? Sitting in folks’ seats, acting like you own the place?”
“Not with them. But I am an out-of-towner.”
“Y’all here to cause trouble?”
“Not for you.”
Old Charlie thought that over and pointed to his two drinks. “Which would you drink first?”
“The shot.”
“Yeah, me too. But lately, I’m wondering to myself why. The order. Hard stuff first, easy stuff last. What kind of way is that for a man to do things? What if you never make it to the easy stuff? But you say shot first?”
“Shot first.”
“From the mouths of babes,” Old Charlie said and threw the shot back.
Last call in West Virginia was three a.m., but the bar crowd began to taper off around one. Gibson nursed a beer and watched the bartender work. Up close, there was no doubt: she was Chelsea Merrick. Although here customers called her Lea. For the price of a shot and a beer, Old Charlie confided that her last name was Regan and that she’d lived above the bar the last two years.
Gibson nodded, thinking that Charles Merrick was a bastard to pull his daughter into his world this way. She was riski
ng jail to help him hide and manage his stolen money, but family was hard to outrun sometimes. Gibson understood that. Or maybe that apple had fallen and rolled right up against the tree. He checked himself—he shouldn’t go and get sentimental about her just because she was tough and smart and took no shit from any of the men at the bar, all of whom stared openly at her ass whenever she walked by.
By one thirty, the empty seats at the bar outnumbered the occupied ones. The back room had cleared out except for one of the pool tables. SportsCenter played on all the televisions, and the muscular bartender—Margo—had disappeared into the office to do paperwork. Gibson guessed that Margo owned the place, the way everyone treated her. He didn’t think he’d given away that he knew Lea’s real name, but she definitely didn’t like him sitting there. She kept her distance and served him quickly. Of course, just being in a regulars-only bar like this was enough to raise suspicion. Each time he finished a beer, she asked the same unfriendly question.
“Anything else?”
“I’ll take another. Thanks.”
Now his friendly tone met with a blank stare. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
To his left, Old Charlie snored peacefully, face on the bar, beside an untouched shot and beer. Gibson gave him a long look before turning back to Lea.
“Yeah, be a shame if anyone got overserved.”
She slapped his bill down and left him to it. He chuckled to himself. There was no doubt about it—he liked her.
Swonger sat down beside him and ordered a beer. Lea served him, but grudgingly.
“I told you to text me,” Gibson whispered.
“Been trying. It’s like 1999 up here. Can’t get a signal nowhere.” Swonger gulped his beer before leaning into Gibson’s ear. “Anyway, I got him. Jerome Parker. Lives up at a shitty little development twenty minutes east.”
“Is he alone?”
“Only car his. But I didn’t knock and take his particulars.”
“Show me.”
“My beer . . .”
“Finish it and let’s go.”
Swonger looked pained. “Dog, I been up in my car for three hours watching some mook’s house while you been chillin’ here eyeballing the talent? And I got to pay for my own beer? That ain’t right.”
Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2) Page 15