Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Mickey J. Corrigan
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Other Books You Might Like
Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Whiskey Sour Noir
by
Mickey J. Corrigan
The Hard Stuff, Book One
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Whiskey Sour Noir
COPYRIGHT © 2014 by Mickey J. Corrigan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: [email protected]
Cover Art by Angela Anderson
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Mainstream Fiction Edition, 2014
Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-170-0
The Hard Stuff, Book One
Published in the United States of America
Praise for Mickey J. Corrigan
“I've only read three of her books and she is HILARIOUS! I know I will be highly entertained by her shenanigans.”
~Smardy Pants Book Blog
~*~
“One of the best things about being a reviewer for Romance Junkies is the vast number of new-to-me authors that I get to read. There is nothing more thrilling to me than finding a writer whose work I can instantly fall in love with. Mickey J. Corrigan is one of those authors for me.”
~Romance Junkies
~*~
“I'll read anything by Ms. Corrigan. All her short pieces I have read were vastly different, but no less entertaining.”
~Hearts on Fire Reviews
Dedication
“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
~Charles Bukowski
Chapter One
I’d never tasted a whiskey sour before I met up with Cat Avery. If I was having me some whiskey, I wanted it neat. In a shot glass. With a beer chaser. That’s the kind of girl I am. You may call me trailer trash or low class or whatever. I don’t care. I know what I like and that’s what I care for. I have my own tastes, my own reasons for that such. But sometimes I choose wrong. It happens. Shit happens all over this world.
I liked Cat Avery right off. Even though I knew he was a sexual offender, SO for short. You get arrested or convicted of any kind of sex offense, even playing with yourself too near to an open window or sharing raw dog photos on your smart phone, well, your name goes up on the register. Your meanest face mugs out of the daily line-up on our local public TV station, your home address zips out by email to every resident within five miles of what used to be your private life. The good people of Dusky Beach, Florida, take their predator protection rights seriously. You do the time for a S.O., everybody in town knows more than you do about it.
But in west Dusky Beach, where I lived these last two years, and where I worked and played and had a cold one nearly every night with my fake diamond-studded, concave, white as an iceberg belly up to the bar, nobody much cared. So nobody held the damn so-so label, as we called it, against Cat Avery. Mainly because everybody has a past if they’re hanging around west Dusky Beach. I know I did. Still do.
The first time I met Cat Avery, he’d just started at the Kettle of Fish. The sudden halt of the Gulf Stream flow was all over the news and everybody sat glued to the yakker box, watching the talking heads discuss the oncoming doom. When I walked in I was tired and cranky. Not in the mood for world disaster. Not in the mood for love, either. I’d dropped by the Kettle for relaxation, not excitement. I’d had enough of that at work.
The Kettle is two doors down from the Drop In Center where I counsel survivors of intimate partner abuse. People around here call it the DIC. A lot of my clients—we call them clients, not victims, so as to be empowering—are drug addicts and drinkers. Being near to the Kettle isn’t such a good thing for the addicted, but real estate is expensive in a beach town like Dusky Beach. Bars on the buggy west side of town are moneymakers because the rent here is low. And because, after all, not everybody who likes a drink can afford to indulge in the snobby pubs over on the beach.
So when I went into the Kettle after work that day, I wasn’t looking for trouble of any kind. I was just in need of something cold on tap. As per usual, I’d had a bitch of a day and all I was considering was my choice of chaser. I won’t get hauled in for drunk driving because I live right up Pearl Street and I can roll myself home nice and easy from the Kettle. Have done such that many a time. So there I was, already not liking things due to the blare of the two flat-screen TVs stuck on loud on the hyper-chatter news shows. Oh yes, we are headed for death and destruction, so let’s all sit and watch it come for us. I was in no mind for the end of the world.
I almost turned right around and headed for the take-out coolers at the liquor mart down the way. But once I’d set my squinting eyes on Cat Avery, I stood my ground. In west Dusky Beach, you’re lucky if you see anyone with all their own teeth, never mind good-looking guys in their thirties. Well-built men with hair on their heads are a rare breed in my neighborhood. I’d become accustomed to sleeping down. Avery was on another ranking entirely. He was up so many rungs he was out of my league, and I knew it soon as I laid eyes on the man.
That was my first row of thoughts, at least. I should’ve turned tail, saved my tattooed ass. But it was already too late. I was hooked line and sinker, and he was smiling at me. He’d seen me come in. The double-thick oak door eased shut behind me, and I stood there, letting the bar gloom seep around me. The Kettle’s windows are covered up with sailcloth drapes in funereal black, specially designed for alcoholic privacy and to keep out the mean old Florida sun. I held my breath for a moment and tried not to look at the vision of hunkiness standing behind the bar with a dirty towel over one broad shoulder. But there wasn’t really any choice. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. What was a guy like that doing in a place like this?
It was doubtful he was thinking that such about me. I’m a Kettle of Fish kind of girl. Cheap date clothes, red chipped nails, sawed off hair bleached whiter than Miami coke. Tats down my low-cut backside that show when I sit down. In west Dusky Beach, I fit in perfectly.
Peter broke the ice for me and Cat Avery by saying, “Here come trouble, boys.” He waved me over to the stained captain’s chair next to his own. “Avery, you better bring me a pitcher and a couple shot glasses of WT. And hold onto your wallet. And your pecker.”
What could I do? I laughed and sat down at the bar in the high wooden chair next to Peter’s. When he gave me a peck on the cheek I could smell the musty peanut odor of a day spent in darkness drinking cheap drafts and watching the bad news unfurl in an endless depressing stream. I hadn’t slept with Peter, not even close, so he could tease me all he wanted. I didn’t care, long as Avery kept smiling at me like he was. Kind of nice, not creepy and looking to benefit from my personal history of cheap scandal. Like some want to do.
“How’s tricks, Tami Lee?” Peter sat back against the knobby rungs of the chair. His be
ery gut pressed against the sticky bar. He petted it like a pregnant women does, rubbing little circles and soothing what’s deep inside. “You talk to Lulu today?”
Lulu’s his ex and my boss at the DIC.
“Yup. What you want to hear, Peter? She was crying all day long, crying so bad she couldn’t get any work done, all because she’s missing your sorry butt?”
He snickered. Lulu was tough as they come. When she tossed Peter to the curb, he’d fractured his tailbone and, according to him, it still hurt to sit on the crapper some ten years later. They were kind of friends, but Lulu blamed Peter’s drinking for every financial problem she and the two boys had suffered over the years. Being a single mother hardened Lulu and made her into one of those real strict teetotalers. She disapproved of my habits, and this held me back from all sorts of career advancements. I had more education than Lulu, but she’d put in way more time at the job. There’d be no winning with her.
“A pitcher of the house beer and two shots of bourbon. Here you go, kids. Now introduce us, will you, Peter?”
Avery’s soft-lull voice rumbled straight through my bones into my sponge-tender marrow, like we were sitting in a boxcar taking a long slow train ride together. I looked up at him and thought—I remember this distinctly, that’s how hard hit I was by this man—he’s going to love me and hurt me, but I don’t know in what order.
“Tami Lee Conkers, meet Mr. Cat Avery, the new day bartender. He’s your new best friend. If you don’t break any mugs or shot glasses, he’ll give you your tenth round on the house.” Peter looked like he might have gotten a free drink or two already. “Avery’s on TV. He’s famous,” Peter added with a wet laugh.
“So is global warming, so shut it, Peter,” I said.
I offered the new guy my hand like the fine southern lady I was not raised to be. If this man was on TV but working here, I figured he was either a criminal or a porn star. Turns out I was just about dead on.
His hand was rough, pale, worn in the pads of his long white fingertips. I imagined those callouses worming their way into the deepest folds of my dampest parts. Just like that, I was in lust with Cat Avery. So lusted up I had to drop his hand like a hot tamale and down my drink in a concentrated whoosh. He kept looking at me in this way he has. Indecent, but distant. Like a sex god or a pimp.
“Nice to meet you, Tami Lee,” he said.
No trace of a hick accent. Polite, but dangerous. My heart rappelled off my chest and my nipples hardened. I have a thing for bad boys. Not sure why. I’m in the counseling business by default, not because I can figure out what makes the human tick or lie back with a smile.
After Avery left to tend to a rowdy redhead at the far end of the bar, Peter gave me a look. “He’s got one of them so-so labels, Tami Lee. Bum rap. He’ll tell you soon enough.” Peter clinked his beer glass against mine.
Clinking back, I nodded. Nothing new in these parts. Half the guys in my motel had a sex offender rap. There wasn’t a daycare center, park, or school within six blocks of Pearl Street. Registered sex offenders could legally live and work in west Dusky Beach. Many of them did. Not a one had ever bothered me.
I sipped my beer and looked around. We weren’t the only ones having drinks at the Kettle at three-fifteen on a Monday afternoon, so Avery was up and down the bar, fetching and making quick comments about the Gulf Stream disaster. The cash register dinged, he ring-a-linged the tip bell. He seemed awful damn comfortable for a new guy on the back end of a federal stretch and the front end of a climate collision.
I asked him about himself when he returned to our end of the bar. He acted like he wasn’t a bit busy and gave us his full attention. He sipped on a sweet-smelling glass of pineapple juice. He liked to talk, didn’t listen too much. He was into his own story. Most attractive men are like that. And I’m not one for personal revelations anyway. I’d rather take in a tall tale than tell my own. In a bar. To a stranger. Especially in west Dusky Beach, where I worked, lived, and ran around a little too much.
Now, don’t get the wrong idea. Dusky Beach proper is real nice. White sand beaches with lots of pretty little shells. Cutesy strips of pink and teal T-shirt shops, ice cream parlors, and pizza places with early-bird specials for the old folks. Five churches, real ones with steeples and asphalt parking lots. Nice clean schools with windows for the kids to stare out, not like some I’ve seen in the big cities, where the local prison has a more accommodating look. Over in east Dusky Beach, there’s a little downtown off Beach Street with the city hall and the library, both historic buildings from 1960-something. In this part of the world, anything older than a couple decades is automatically historic. Maybe because nothing lasts very long here in the dirty Sunshine State.
West Dusky Beach, now that’s a whole different pad of paper. I’m talking about the part of town where the churches are located in somebody’s house for tax purposes, and the stores have one thing for sale in the window and something else entirely in the back room. That’s where I live, in a run-down day motel called Love House. Yup, I know, but you can’t beat the long-term rates. Plus, I can walk to work. The DIC facility is huge, includes a homeless shelter for overnights, a soup kitchen serving three meals a day, plus day rooms for community use, group counseling, and support. Mostly we get drunks, addicts, abused women and kids, and crazies without the wits to stay on their meds. We get a lot of sex offenders because the state laws for so-so parolees and those on probation are mighty strict. Those people can’t live anywhere decent. They lose their jobs and run out of dough. That’s how Cat Avery ended up in the neighborhood. Like a lot of other folks I know down this way. In west Dusky Beach, you learn to live with them.
Avery suckled his juice and said like it was nothing, “Just got out of prison. Five years on a child porn charge. Didn’t do it. I was set up.” He looked right at me. His eyes were clear blue-gray, like the sea on a stormy day. “I’m not into the kiddies. I like grown-up women.” My stomach lurched. I held my breath. “I was a geography teacher at Coconut Palms High School,” he said, as if that documented his purity.
I was on my second shot, my last one. I wouldn’t have had that one, but when Avery brought it over it felt too rude to turn down. Peter chugged his and kind of dozed off with his eyes open. Like he’d heard it all before.
“Lost my job, of course. They came and got me at home. Six in the morning on a Monday, perfectly timed so that my neighbors could watch me get hauled out of the house in my altogether and tossed ass-end up into the back of a black-and-white.”
He shook his head and his bangs landed all fluffy like on his high forehead. His hair looked softer than an egret’s feathers and shiny clean.
“My wife gave me all of five minutes to try to explain myself, then she wrote me off like a dirty check. Moved back to western Mass. Now she’s in love with an old friend of ours. A woman.”
He shook his head again. Life had kicked the cat around all right. My right hand was itching to reach over and smooth his fur.
“Any kids?” I asked. My voice shook a little, like it does whenever I want somebody so bad I’m reverting to a teenager. I’m twenty-three and this kind of crap still happens to me. It’s embarrassing. I blush, too, when I’m hot for a guy. They think it’s cute, thank God, because I can’t control it. Like a lot of things my body does without my permission.
I slurped my beer, trying to cool off my hurtling blood.
“No kids. We were in the trying stages. While I was inside, she adopted a baby girl from China. With her girlfriend. Hurtful shit, man.”
He had one of those jutting jaws you see on mannequins and matinee idols, super hot male models. He lifted his bristly, perfectly shadowed chin and said, “I’m living up the street now. My first week in town. I walked in here on Friday, hoping like hell for a break. And they gave me one.”
I nodded. Chet Riley, the bar owner, had a problem with beating up women. Violently abusing his intimate partners, as we say in the business. But other than that, he was a mushy-
hearted old pig who gave a lot of down-and-outers the chance to earn a paycheck.
“You got the job and now you just have to prove you deserve to keep it,” I said.
Peter woke up and giggled. “Chet goes through bartenders like this little lady here goes through fuck-buddies.”
I punched his arm and he laughed until he coughed. He was right on both counts.
I said to Cat Avery, “You got to be real reliable. Chet doesn’t kid around with his business. This is one of three bars he owns with his partner. From what I hear, Chet’s partner is the kind of guy you don’t want to ever have to meet.”
For some drunken reason, Peter giggled again. Ignoring him, I said, “If you steal from Chet, you’re out. If you drink his inventory, you’re fired. If you show up late, that’s it for you. Most of the bartenders willing to work here are not the type to adhere to those rules.”
“I know rules and those are nothing compared to what I’ve got on me now. My P.O. is a goddam stickler.” Avery gave the high sign to somebody behind us then went on. “For the next fifteen years, I’m on probation. That means I report in to my parole officer on a goddam regular basis. I’m restricted where I go, who I see, what I do. I’m monitored and drug tested, even though I don’t drink, don’t smoke or do any kind of mind-altering substances. I love consensual sex with my fellow adults, but I haven’t been with a woman in more than five years. And the registry rules don’t make it easy for me to rectify that. No nights out, home with the tracker on between ten and six. What woman wants to go home with a sex offender, anyway?”
Plenty of women, is what I thought to myself. Because I work with these women every day. They sleep with their abusers, they make a life with the very men who threaten them with a loaded pistol, a serrated bread knife, two thick hands around the throat. What’s a little peek at a photo of a naked kid compared to that?
I myself, knowing better but not prone to doing it, was dying to go home with Cat Avery. Even if he was bitter, beaten down, and right out of the federal prison on the southwest tip of the Everglades.
Whiskey Sour Noir (The Hard Stuff) Page 1