by Nick Thacker
Death Mark
Mason Dixon Thrillers - Book 2
Nick Thacker
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
1
I HAVE THIS IDEA THAT maybe morality is like death: we can buck and fight against it as long as we want, but eventually it’s going to get us. And we’re all given a specific amount of morality; a certain flavor of it we can’t change or cash in, or alter in any way.
We can mask it, like our faces, but it won’t do any good. At the end of the line, wherever that line is, we’re as moral as we’re ever going to be. We’re as good or bad as we’re ever going to be, or as ‘us’ as we ever were.
Okay, enough with the philosophical bullshit. What I’m saying here is that I have no idea how the world works.
I don’t really care, either, because I know, generally, how people work. I get how they tick, what they want, how they intend to get it. I’m good at that part of it. I’m not so good at the part of it where I have to decide what to do about it.
You see, I’m good at my gig — I tend bar at a little place I own, and I like it. I love it, actually. The oldies take care of me, and I get to silently judge the younger idiots that come in and ask for things that no bar menu should even suggest to offer.
Like light beer.
And I don’t mean ‘beer that is light,’ like a proper Belgian or some of the summer Germans or the pilsners and IPAs that are vying for hipsters’ attention out west.
I mean beers that were designed to be tasteless, so men, women, grandparents, and children alike could hate them all the same, pretend they like them, and drink them by the bucketful just for the sheer hell of saying they could drink a bucketful of them.
Those beers are the types I don’t anywhere my bar. I’ve got a few taps, and I keep those taps full of whatever I can get for a reasonable price that comes out of Charleston, or when I’m feeling fancy or festive I might spring for a shipment of kegs of something a little more exotic. But I don’t have your typical Applebee’s-on-a-Sunday-night fare of brew selections.
So when these youngsters — anyone younger than me, I should say — come in and try to order something like that, I just shrug and serve them whatever I’ve got on tap in that’s in a real beer format.
Want a Coors? I’ll give you whatever I’ve got from Revelry. Have a hankering for a Bud Light? I’ll toss you the latest from Tradesman.
The guy that walked in five minutes ago was one of these guys — I could tell by his swagger. There’s always a swagger. They come in like they’re the coolest cat in town and that I should be honored to serve him a ‘cold one,’ which is ‘this guy’-speak for ‘crappy beer.’
Sure enough, he sidled up and tucked his legs under the bar top and gave me a nod. No smile, no greeting, no nothing. Just that nod.
I nodded back.
“What can I get you?” I asked.
“Eh, just a cold one,” he said.
Of course. Bartender one, this guy zero.
I poured him a legacy IPA from Revelry, waited for the head to peak up above the top of the pint glass, and slid it over to him on a brand-new coaster.
Joey made those coasters — they have a cute little logo of a bearded, mustached man holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pint glass of beer in his other hand. It’s green, mostly, but the guy’s lumberjack shirt is checkered red and black, and his mustache and beard are a dark brown.
It’s sort of a weird logo, but I wasn’t on the design committee that made them. The oldies and regulars seem to like the coasters, at least, but I wasn’t too thrilled that it was just another expense and not something we could make money from. You can’t sell coasters, after all.
Joey, anyway, had printed up a few million or so of these stupid things and placed them in all sorts of strategic locations around the tiny estate of mine. I even saw a handful of them in the bathroom, on top of one of the toilets. I mean really, I guess it’s a helpful thing, but I’d just as soon finish my drink before I expose it to the nasty shit floating around in the men’s room.
“What’s this?” the guy asked.
“Cold one,” I said, without missing a beat.
“Tastes like shit,” he said.
I pulled it back and dumped it out in the sink. “That one’s on me, then,” I said. “What are you looking for, specifically?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, Miller, Coors, Bud, any of those ring a bell?”
I frowned. “Yeah, I’ve heard of them. Don’t have them here.”
He looked like he was about to pop a gasket, but to his credit he held it together long enough to ask the famous question. “What is this, some sort of gay bar?”
I honestly don’t know what it is with these guys. Look, if your drink really is a Coors Light, fair enough. I won’t get in your way. But if you claim to not really care about what type of beer you’re drinking, but then you bitch about it when I pour you a craft beer from a small local business that needs your support, I have no patience for you.
And if you top it off by adding some sort of ‘color’ to your opinion, you’re about as good as the coaster that’s been stuck to the floor near the drain in the bathroom to me.
“Nope,” I said. “Just a bar. But we don’t have that sort of stuff here because it’s actually cheaper to work with the local places. I get a better deal, and they make more money. Win-win.”
“Yeah? Well not for me.”
“Well I’m not sure there’s anything in this world that will make you a winner at anything, pal.”
He looked at me then with those eyes that would have told me I was in trouble, if I thought this was even remotely the sort of guy who could make me feel like there was trouble coming.
Then, as if on cue, he got up and stormed out. The little bell above the door clinked violently as the door slammed shut, but only two or three regulars in the corner took notice.
“Who was that?” Joey asked. He’d snuck up on me, delivering dinner and placing it in front of me at the bar. Fish and chips.
“Just a guy looking for a cold one.”
“Huh,” Joey said. “Nothing here cold enough?”
“Nothing but the banter, I guess. Fish and chips?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Thought we’d keep rolling with that English pub theme for a while longer.”
Joey, since I’d made him manager, had done me quite a few favors. On
e of them was to ‘theme’ different seasons. We were currently running with an English pub theme, complete with a few English-style ales on tap. I was never a huge fan of English beer, but Joey had done a great job with the theming and menu design.
We’re a small operation — just Joey and me — but we’re sort of the talk of the town, if you consider that the town is about 800 people. Edisto Beach, in South Carolina. It’s the town you run into when you’re trying to run into the ocean.
Joey took the helm as planner of all things that needed planning, besides the liquor selection and the mixology. I’d started the place because I’d wanted to bring back the classiness to drink-making. The ‘-ology’ part of mixology. So many younger bartenders were throwing together fruit juices and liqueurs, mixing them in with forty crushed berries and calling it a drink. Sure, it was liquid, and sure, it may count as a drink on a beach somewhere south of the border on spring break, but in my world it was trash.
I wanted the beauty restored to the mixology world. Just like the chefs that were breaking down barriers and expectations, I wanted drink-making to be as masterfully practiced an art form.
Joey got it, and he loved it. But we didn’t need two of me — we needed me and Joey. Joey was master of the kitchen, the private chef of the patrons we served six nights a week. He was also in charge of decor, aesthetics, and generally everything else besides the liquor. He did a bang-up job, and I paid him better than anyone else in this town or Charleston.
“So it’s working pretty well, then? The pub style?”
“Sure, yeah. Everyone seems to enjoy the beers, and the drinks you’ve mashed up are a huge hit.”
I’d made about five custom drinks to match the English theme, using English gins and genevers, as well as a few specials, like the Cornish Pastis, to round out the palate. I had to admit, they were tasty. I liked creating the drinks, and I certainly liked drinking them.
I drank a lot, but never too much. Joey and I were the tasters, purchasers, mixologists, and bartenders, and I always harped on him that we needed to know our stuff. I wouldn’t anything without my palate.
“So what’s next, then?” I asked him.
“Like for themes?”
“Sure, yeah.” I gave him that look he’d come to understand well. Yeah, but not really. What’s really next?
He smiled. “I don’t know, boss. You’re kind of in charge of that, don’t you think?”
He was referring, of course, to our other endeavor: moonshining.
2
I HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO get into moonshining, but never had the guts. Really. I’d always heard it was a ‘good way to get yourself killed,’ or ‘great if you want to go to prison,’ so I’d never really attempted it.
But the truth of the matter was that it’s a misdemeanor in most places, and seen as one in all the places. Most cops — trust me, I’ve asked them — don’t really care one way or another. It’s when you sell the stuff they tend to get all bent out of shape.
I had the stuff all set up in the back area, near the tiny kitchen and against one of the walls. It wasn’t much — a couple carboys, a couple large fermentation buckets, and lots of plastic tubing. Joey had figured out how to finagle the whole distillery apparatus onto the kitchen’s water spigot using about a hundred adaptors, and a large electric burner served as the heating element.
I’m not interested in breaking the law, necessarily. I’m not really interested in not breaking the law, either, but the point isn’t about the law. I wanted to start distilling my own stuff, and eventually try to get it sold in the bar, but in order to make sure I knew that I could do it, I had to practice. No point in paying the massive fees and working toward a license if I didn’t even like the process.
Hence the tiny distilling operation taking place illegally in the back of my kitchen. Nothing fancy, but enough that Joey and I could get used to the process and try to produce something worth selling.
Joey was excited about our new little experiment, and I often found him in the back trying out a new mash or cooking up something strange. It took time — usually between three and six months — aging the distillate in the tiny oak barrels I’d bought for the purpose, so neither of us knew if our stuff was any good, but it was fun nonetheless.
“What do you have in mind?” Joey asked.
“I don’t know, maybe something similar to Scotch?”
Scotch was tricky because, well, we weren’t in Scotland. But the premise of Scotch was pretty simple: make whiskey from grain, but smoke the grain over peat before you distill it.
“Sounds hard,” Joey said.
“It adds an extra step, but —“
I looked up from the bar just then, interrupting our small talk, and noticed the guy who’d just walked in. He was tall, not as tall as me but tall enough to be noticeable, but he carried himself the same way I did.
Confident.
I gave him a nod, but he kept on staring me down as he walked straight toward the bar. I wasn’t entirely sure he’d slow down and stop, and I wasn’t entirely sure the bar would be able to stop him if he wasn’t.
Finally he stopped. He didn’t sit down, and he didn’t look down either.
Joey turned to look at me, then he shrugged. He knew the drill — guys like this came in every now and then. Thinking they were worth someone’s attention. Maybe they were, but they weren’t worth mine.
I waited for him to make the first move. Confidence like that meant he was here for a reason, and that reason probably wasn’t drinking.
He reached into his pocket. I moved my hand to the left, feeling the rounded edge of the shotgun’s barrel poking out from where I’d mounted it just underneath the bar. I doubted I’d need it, but better to doubt and be ready than to be sure and be caught off guard.
His hand came out, weaponless. He smacked his palm on the bar top and then removed his hand. I looked down at the hard object he’d laid there.
A small, metallic circle. Embossed with some sort of design on the topside of it.
I looked back up at him. “What’s that supposed to be?”
The man didn’t respond at first. He was waiting, testing. Trying to figure out if I knew more than I let on.
“You don’t know what this is?” the man asked.
“If it’s money, it ain’t going to work in here. Not sure I’ve ever seen that currency —“
“It’s not money.”
“Okay, well your round metal circle isn’t going to get you any beer.”
“I don’t want beer.”
I saw a few oldies shifting around in their chairs, but Joey was off helping a couple patrons near the door.
“Listen, pal, I’m not sure what you’re trying to play, here, but I’ve got paying customers — using real money — to take care of.”
The man nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll wait.”
I sighed. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to go down. If you’re waiting for me to suddenly remember where I’ve seen that little thing, you’re going to be waiting a long time. If you’re waiting for me to have some time to chat, maybe play ‘Antique Road Show’ with you, bar closes at 2. That’s in…” I stopped to check my watch, “about five hours.”
She shook his head. “I want to know what you think of this.”
“I don’t think anything about it. It’s a coin, probably from some other country. Why should it mean something to me?”
I shuffled away, grabbing the two beers I’d just poured and an Old Fashioned ‘My Way’ I’d mixed and placed them onto a serving tray. I swung around the end of the bar and walked them to the customers who’d ordered them.
I took another couple’s order and began walking back to the bar.
“Look like your other little coin?”
I stopped in the middle of the bar, examining the man. I was positive I’d never seen him before, yet he looked familiar. Maybe in that ‘looks-like-a-lot-of-other-people’ sort of way.
“I know you?” I asked.
H
e shook his head. “No, but you’re going to.”
“Why’s that?”
“This coin was found in a dead man’s pocket three days ago.
3
I HAD POURED MYSELF A glass of bourbon — Michter’s — and sat down at the bar stool next to the guy. He didn’t want anything but a glass of water, and that was how I knew: he was a government guy. Paid detective sort.
“You FBI?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“DEA.”
“I see. Well, DEA, I’m sorry I can’t help with your investigation.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, because I don’t know what that little thing is.”
“You don’t?”
Joey’s eyes met mine — he was still behind the bar, pouring for a few customers who’d just walked in. They were apparently here on vacation, from what I overheard. Nice folks, older than me with a son who was about half my age. They ordered some mixed drinks, and the son ordered a beer.
“I don’t. Like I said.”
“Got it.” DEA-man pulled out a little notebook and started writing in it.
“You actually use those things? What are you, some 1950’s detective?”
“No,” he said. “DEA.”
“Right. So, DEA, how many questions of yours am I going to have to answer before you let me and my patrons be?”
He swiveled around and looked at me after he’d finished scratching in the words ‘doesn’t know — coin.’ “Well, I want to know what you know about this coin, or —“