by Mark Stone
"Booze surely ain't one of those things," Boomer said, chuckling. "Did you know the poor bastard is sober except for beer?"
"He's not supposed to mix any alcohol with his medications," I responded, narrowing my eyes. "Can a person even be sober, except for beer?"
"They can in Florida." Boomer shrugged. "You didn't answer me though. What about the others?"
"I talked to Charlotte," I said, shaking my head. "She's staying here. Says Isaac is out of school for the rest of week anyhow, and she might as well make the best of it."
"And Rebecca?" He asked, his eyebrows raising. "I doubt she'd be okay with you staying here alone with Charlotte, especially given what happened between you too."
My jaw tightened. "Nothing-nothing happened between us, Boom," I said, remembering what he was talking about.
"You said she kissed you, dude," he answered, beaming at me like some gossip addicted teenager.
"It wasn't like that," I answered. "We were in a stressful situation. Neither of us thought we would make it out of that church alive."
The last time Charlotte and I spent any real time together, it was at the behest of a madman. Her devious uncle had pulled her into a church and a drug kingpin tried to blackmail me into killing her, threatening the safety of her son and my nephew to do it.
We fought our way out of it, but not before things got to looking as dire as they ever had. She told me a lot of things before we got out of there, including the fact that she believed she made a mistake when she didn't come with me to Chicago. She said it should have been me. She said we should have been together.
I told Boomer about that, trying to make sense of it. Though, right about now, I was wishing I hadn't.
"Drunk and despondent," he answered. "That's when you say the real truth."
"That's ridiculous," I answered. "She just wanted to thank me, that's all. She wanted to say something nice."
"And what did you want?" Boomer asked. "You never told me what you said when she told you that the two of you should have been together."
"I just wanted to get out of there," I answered. "I have a girlfriend, Boomer."
"Just the one though, right?" Boomer asked.
"You didn't even like Charlotte when we were dating, if I remember correctly. You said she was like the tide. She kept—”
"Pulling you in just to pull you away. I remember," he answered, cutting me off. "What I want didn't matter then though, Dil. And it doesn't matter now. The only thing that matters is what you want."
Looking down at the grass underfoot, I said, "I have what I want, Boomer. I have whom I want."
"Fair enough," Boomer said. "I assume that means she's staying though."
"She's staying," I admitted. "At least for the next couple of days. Grandpa too."
"Good," Boomer said. "Though that doesn't give you any help. If you're about to do what I think you are, you'd be safer not to do it alone."
"Who said I was alone?" I asked. "I made a call earlier."
"A call?" He asked. "To whom?"
"A girl is missing, Boom, and I have to go around the law to find her," I answered.
"Lord in Heaven," Boomer said, his eyes widening as he realized what I meant. "You called Jack Lacey?"
"I did," I said, grinning. "I called the Finder."
Chapter 10
The text on my phone said to come back to the Thirsty Seagull. It had been seven hours since Jack Lacey told me he would head over to Vero Beach, which was more than enough time to make the drive. Still, given the fact that I just got the message saying the former Coast Guard member and current emotional wreck had made it to town, maybe he got stuck in traffic or something.
He wanted to jump right into things which, according to him, meant revisiting the site where I ran into Mikey last night.
I thought he wanted to get a head start on investigating this. I should have known better.
The instant I walked into the Thirsty Seagull, I heard the yelling. I didn't have to hear Jack's voice to know he was involved. The second I realized there was some sort of trouble, all the pieces fell right into place.
The fact that it seemingly took him a lot longer than it should have to get here, the fact that he wanted to start at a bar, the fact that it was damned Jack Lacey….
"Look guy." I heard Jake Lacey's voice cut through the rest of the arguing, booming like unaided bullhorn. "Nobody told you to bet it all. If you don't have money for groceries or whatever, that's hardly my fault."
"Goddammit," I muttered, rushing toward the back of the bar, where the noise seemed to be sourced, wondering what sort of trouble this guy had started.
I pushed through the crowd that had formed past the bar, right at the edge of the same pool room where Mikey had been playing the night before.
"This ain't right!" A man shouted, half slurring and obviously drunk. "You played me!"
"Of course, I played you," Jack said as I made my way through the crowd. "That's the point of the game, isn't it?"
Settling at the front of the crowd, I saw what was going down. Jack Lacey, looking as scruffy and unkempt as I remembered him, stood with a pool cue in his hand, a cocky look on his face, and an “I live for this kind of trouble” grin on his face.
The guy he was arguing with didn't seem nearly as happy with the way things were going though, and neither did his five friends.
"Not like that!" The man, a tall dude with a bandana and a handlebar mustache said, his voice a roar. "There was no way you could have made that shot, not with the way you've been playing for the last hour and a half."
"Hour and a half?" I muttered. This loser had been hustling people at the bar for an hour and a half when we could have been getting to the bottom of what was going on. It was almost like he didn't care there was a woman missing or a man whose freedom might be taken away unjustly.
"Now, I want my money back right this instant, or me and my friends are going to turn your lanky ass inside out."
"Lanky?" he asked. "I've been beefing up." He shook his head. "And no, my man. You're not getting your money back. I don’t care how many friends you've got here, 'cause I've got friends of my own."
"Oh no," I muttered. "Oh God no."
"Storm!" Jack Lacey said, his head snapping toward me in the crowd, though he hadn't given any indication that he'd even seen me walk in at all. "Come on. Let's show these guys who the bosses are in this joint."
"No," I answered, my eyes narrowing. "Let's absolutely not do that, Lacey."
It wasn't that I was afraid of these guys, though they did outnumber us almost two to one and had twenty pounds apiece on us. I had been in enough fights to know I could hold my own. There was no time for this foolishness now though. Besides, Cross and Anchor had insisted I go home. There was little advantage to me making waves and letting them know I hadn't.
As people from the group I was standing in front of pushed me hard out into the center of the room, where the fray was, I realized that it might not have been my decision.
"You coming at me, boy?" the man with the bandana asked, holding a cue stick at me like it was a baseball bat and he was getting ready to clock me with it.
"What the hell did you get me into?" I asked, my teeth ground together, and my eyes shooting toward Jack Lacey.
"Nothing you can't handle, I'm sure," he answered, moving toward me and handing me a cue stick of my own.
"Get that away from me," I said, pushing it away. "I don't need that."
"Don't be so sure, boy," the man in the bandana said, swinging his stick at my head.
I ducked quickly, hearing the thing whistle through the air as it flew overhead.
"I don't want to fight you," I said, popping back up. "Though, maybe you should stop calling me boy."
"I wouldn't want to fight me either if I was you," he said, tightening his grip on the cue stick again. "Boy."
"Oh, hell no," Jack muttered from beside me. "Kick his ass, Storm."
"I will not," I said, but the ma
n swung that damned stick at me again, and I was forced to add, "Not unless he makes me," as I ducked to dodge it again.
Standing upright, I grabbed the cue stick as it made another attempt at my skull. The wood stung as it slapped against my palm, but I pulled it hard, jerking the man's body toward me.
I gave him a slap in the face, but just a light one, just enough to let him know I meant business. Maybe, if he saw I wasn't some pushover he could kick around and toss out of here, he and his friends would simmer down and let me take care of this thing rationally.
One look at the enraged look on his face as he registered the slap told me just how wrong I was.
"Look," I said, trying to tamp all of this down. "I don't want to start anything here."
"You got a bad way of showing it," the man answered. With a huff and a roar, he brought the cue stick down on his knee, snapping it in half.
"Uh-oh," Jake said from beside me.
"Scorpions!" The man with the bandana and two shards of wood in his hands barked. "Time to break some bones!"
"Maybe we should have met at the park or something," Jack muttered beside me.
"Maybe," I answered.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Chapter 11
The Scorpions, whoever the hell they were, jumped into action against Jack and I. In the short time he had been in town, the Finder- as he liked to call himself (or, at the very least, his boat)- had gotten himself into enough trouble to screw up our newborn investigation. What was worse, he’d dragged me right along into it with him.
“There’s five of them,” Jack said as I threw a punch at the ban in the bandana, who was coming at me with a shard of broken cue stick in each hand.
Thankfully, I connected, sending the man stumbling backward.
“I can see that,” I answered him, without bothering to look in his direction. From the sound of things though, he had his hands full as well. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I wanted to know how Christian you were going to be about this,” he answered.
Before I could ask him what he meant by that exactly, the man in the bandana recovered. My punch had jarred one of the shards from his hand but, luckily for him, the other had stayed put.
He jutted it toward me, and I flinched backward. Spinning, I rounded the pool table, wishing I hadn’t thrown away the stick Jack had handed me. I hadn’t wanted to use it at the time, but there’s a hell of a lot of difference between what you’ll do when you’re staring down the barrel of a fight and what you’ll do once that fight had thrown itself on top of you; liquored up breath and all.
Still, there were more weapons to consider than just the cue stick. Like say, the pool balls for instance. I grabbed ahold of the 4 ball, tossing it hard at the man’s covered head. His hands moved upward to save his face, which was what I expected.
While he did that though, I lunged toward him, slamming into him with my shoulder.
I felt the air pull from his lungs and heard him grunt as he hit hard against the wall. The second shard of cue stick fell to the ground and I had to admit that, while I was thinking about what Jack had just said, I wasn’t feeling very Christian at the moment.
I pulled back just in time to catch a fist right to the jaw. It knocked me against the side wall, and I saw stars. Still, I knew I had to act quickly. I didn’t know this gang, but common sense told me that anybody willing to call himself a “Scorpion” and get drunk in the middle of the day while wearing glorified dish rags on his head probably wasn’t someone you trifled with.
Gathering myself, I turned, tossing an elbow into the nose of a man headed right for me. I hadn’t started this fight, and Lord knows I didn’t want to be in it. Still, there was something oddly satisfying about the crunch I heard as my elbow met his nose.
He fell backward, squealing like a pig in mud.
At this point, bandana dude was trying to stand back up. He was the person who gave the orders for the Scorpions to attack. So that probably meant he was the leader. As the leader, he probably didn’t want to be down for too long. Bad for morale, not to mention his personal reputation. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t give a warmed over damn about either of those things. It was better for me if he stayed on the ground. So that was where I was going to make sure he stayed.
I reared back, my boot meeting his gut with an oomph even more satisfying than the crunch.
I turned to Jack, who had his hands full with three men going at him. Two of them were behind, grabbing either of his shoulders with the third pummeling him with hits to the face, chest, and stomach.
I winced, not hesitating at all as I drove toward the group. He might have been the cause of all of this, but I was the reason he was here in the first place. I would be damned if Jack Lacey ended up in the hospital because he decided to help me out.
I grabbed another pool ball, this time the 6, and launched it into the back of the man who was hitting Jack. It crashed into the small of his back, and he arched forward, an arm moving to brace him.
Seeing my chance, I went for it. Jumping on the man, I put him in a sleeper hold. Suddenly, I felt like how Mikey must have felt, either in the MMA or with whatever ridiculous televised wrestling company he’d worked for. I had no desire of knocking this guy out. Hell, I probably couldn’t have if I wanted to. I didn’t have that sort of technique or really know what I was doing when it came to moves like that. Still in all, I figured I must have been doing right, seeing as how the man grabbed at me, falling to his knees.
In response, Jack head-butted one of the men holding him and- when he released him instinctively- popped the other one across the face with his free hand.
“So?” Jack asked, looking at me again.
“So what?” I asked, my arms circling the head and neck of the guy I’d jumped on. He was writing hard, like a mechanical bull trying his damnedest to buck me off.
“So, you feeling Christian or not?” Jack repeated.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, my body being thrown hard as the man moved.
“There’re five of them. How many are you comfortable with taking on?” he asked.
“Well,” I muttered, getting irritated with Jack and his nonsense. “Seeing as how I already took out three of them—”
“Then two more won’t be a problem,” Jack finished, smiling at me like a banshee. “Thanks, bud. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”
And, just like that, Jack bolted. He rushed off, darting into the crowd and disappearing in the sea of bodies who had come to watch us knock skulls with the Scorpions.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Where the hell are you go—”
My words fell off as the man I was holding bucked hard again, finally succeeding in throwing me off of him.
I flew through the air, gliding like some idiot who had just jumped out of a plane and realized- midway down- how big a mistake he’d just made.
That wasn’t exactly accurate though, was it? I hadn’t jumped out of this particular plane. I had very literally been pushed…and now I had been thrown.
I hit the wall again, tasting blood and metal in my mouth. My head was spinning. My eyes were clouded. My heart was racing like a marathon runner an instant after hearing the commencement signal.
Sliding to the filthy floor of this bar, I looked up at the Scorpions. They were bruised and battered, definitely worse for the wear. Like any good group, they had rallied though. They came back together and were focused on their shared enemy. As it turned out, now that Jack had run off, leaving a yellow streak across the floor, their shared enemy was me.
I tried to stand, but I was dizzy. I had hit my head so hard.
“Word of advice,” the man in the bandana said as he and others neared me. “You’re better off to stay down. You see, my boys like to beat until they get bored. And nobody likes to fight someone who isn’t fighting back. So, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll lay there and take your medicine. It’ll be over a l
ot quicker that way, and much less of a chance of broken bones.” He grinned at me. “Well, of as many broken bones anyway.”
My jaw set as a tidal wave of anger and indignation ran through me. I did not deserve this. I was just trying to make things right, just trying to make sure justice was done in a way that made sense and ensured the best for everyone involved. And now these bastards wanted to break my bones? They wanted to tell me to do as I was told?
I grunted and stood up, holding the wall for support. I had never been very good at taking orders anyway.
“Fine,” the man in the bandana said, his smile widening. “Your funeral.”
I took a deep and ragged breath. I might have been outnumbered. Hell, I might not even have a chance of winning this, but I wouldn’t go down without fighting. I would swing until they peeled me off the floor of this bar.
“Stop!”
…or not.
A loud voice boomed through the bar and, like the Red Sea for Moses, the crowds parted, making room for whomever the voice belonged.
Though my eyes were still a little hazy and my head was still spinning, I recognized the man as he neared me. I recognized the scruff on his face and his floppy sand colored hair. Most of all, I recognized that irritatingly cocky grin.
Anchor settled beside me.
“You’re not going to touch him anymore. You got that, guys?” he said.
“Mr. Anchorage,” the man in the bandan@ said, looking from me to Anchor and back again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.”
“He’s not,” Anchor admitted. “Though, to be fair, he certainly does seem to have the kind of poor decision making skills I’m usually drawn to in a drinking buddy.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulder to steady me. “No. This guy should be gone already but, since he’s not, he’s going to answer some questions for me.”
Chapter 12
“That’s going to leave a mark,” Anchor said, sympathetically wincing as he looked at the knot on my head. I had taken a hit or two I hadn’t registered or something during the bustle with the Scorpions, and I was starting to feel each and every one of them.