by Wendy Byrne
"This is it, ladies. After this, I've got nothing."
The place was dark and gloomy. Young people hung around the periphery or chatted on bar stools. Nobody looked overly drunk, and nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the group of senior citizens that had just filtered in. Or maybe they hoped we'd go away if they ignored us. I didn't mean to break their bubble, but that was pretty much impossible.
Honestly, I didn't know how they couldn't notice. Besides the fact the Qs were about quadruple the age of most everyone inside, when they arrived, they brought out their A game. I couldn't be sure if it was because it was the last stop before we left for Hell's Tavern, or they'd decided to break the rules.
But Ramona was high-fiving people as she walked in like she'd just won the Super Bowl. And Alice was doing the same thing right behind her. Dolly was doing the Raise the Roof motion with her hands. Viola brought up the rear keeping a low profile, as usual. Jefferson and I slunk inside, pretending we had no idea who the ladies were.
Needless to say, patrons vacated their seats around the bar like they knew something I didn't. The ladies gravitated toward the new vacancies.
"Over here, Izzy. There are enough seats for all of us," Alice said in a whisper that was more like a shout, causing everyone to glance her way.
Given Dolly was the only one over five foot two, I wasn't sure they'd be able to negotiate their way onto a bar stool without toppling over. Before I could enlist Jefferson's assistance or encourage them to sit at a table, he'd already seen the potential disaster and rushed in that direction.
"I'll have a gin and tonic," Alice said.
The ladies weren't drinkers except for the occasional shot of brandy in their tea when the situation called for it. A gin and tonic sounded like trouble. I did a not-so-subtle shake of my head, mouthed "no" and hoped the bartender had the sense to go light on the gin—as in a teaspoonful. Alice didn't have a filter most times when she was sober, let alone a little tipsy. I could only imagine.
The bartender served the ladies everything from bottled water to high balls to gin while I calculated how long we should hang around. Since there weren't any sweets handy, it might not be too long. The Qs didn't go long without needing a sugar fix, so I figured there'd be an opportunity for a quick getaway. And besides, I expected they wanted to head towards our next destination to get to the exciting part with this stop as their warm up.
The door opened, and a group of five shuffled in. They all looked like college-aged kids, wearing hoodies and sweats, with phones in hand as they secured a table. The ladies talked about trying their hand at pool before we left. I might need to warn anyone within a twenty-foot radius of the potential for flying objects if they made good on their decision.
On the other hand, at least they'd be occupied for a while. And they probably couldn't drink and play pool simultaneously. Another plus.
My phone buzzed at my hip. I pulled it out, spying another random number. "Hello." I covered an ear as the place wasn't conducive to phone conversations despite the fact everyone had their phones out. Most were texting rather than talking.
"It's Joseph. I really need your help."
My heartbeat sped up while adrenaline made my fingers shake as relief poured through me. He's alive.
"Are you alright?" A million questions floated through my brain, but I forced myself to focus.
"Of course I'm not alright. And it's all your fault."
Seriously? The man knew how to destroy the miniscule of sympathy I had for him in an instant. "I don't know what happened with your car and that dead guy, but you need to talk to Sheriff Crowder and leave me out of this. I have more than enough going on in my life and don't need your drama right now." Especially when he pointed the finger at me instead of taking responsibility.
"But I didn't do it. Somebody took my car, and I have no idea about the dead body."
"Do I need to repeat myself? A dead guy. Your car with a dent the same size as the guy's body. Whatever trouble you're in, you need to figure this out. If somebody stole your car and you had nothing to do with this, turn yourself in. I've got more trouble than I can handle right now."
"You'll be sorry. I—" I clicked off before he said something that would only make me more angry. Yeah, the guy was a tool of epic proportions. And I felt okay leaving him by the wayside to fend for himself. Not a hint of guilt entered my thoughts as I suspected there was a whole lot he wasn't sharing with me.
To think I was worried he might be dead. Right now I might have shot him myself—probably with a rubber band—because I wasn't the gun type. But still… As usual, the world revolved around him.
During my conversation, the ladies had left the bar and wandered over to the pool table in back. Jefferson had stuck by my side. "That joker thought he'd get you to help get him out of trouble? What did that idiot want?"
"Help. As if…" I got distracted by a loud sound coming from the pool table area. "Oh no. Did that pool ball just hit that kid in the head?" We rushed off to save the day before there was some kind of lawsuit or potential police intervention.
Just another day in paradise. For all those people that thought seniors were boring individuals who only talked about their illnesses and sat around complaining, I begged to differ.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
To say my head was spinning would be like underestimating the force of a tsunami headed my way. As I followed the map thing on my car that brought us deeper and deeper into the middle of nowhere, it took everything in me to not turn back.
"We should turn this whole thing over to Nate. If this Buddy guy knows something to exonerate Gus, Nate should know about it. He's a good guy, and there's no history between Buddy and Nate, so he could circumvent Chaz for the time being."
I was trying to play by the rules, but I'd never been very good at coloring inside the lines, so to speak. I vividly remembered Nate's face when he asked me to swear I wouldn't interfere. He followed that up with a warning that Chaz was somebody I didn't want to mess with to illustrate the importance of what he'd been saying.
"Didn't you say that Gus said Buddy wouldn't talk to the police, period? That we'd have to follow his lead to the real killer," Ramona added.
Apparently, those tales of senior moments were fabrications. These ladies had minds like steel traps. Just my luck.
"But I couldn't find any listing for Hell's Tavern. Are we sure it exists? My navigation device seems confused by that address he gave me."
"I texted a friend who asked her son. I've got the directions on my phone. It's about twenty miles on this road, closer to West Des Moines. Winterset is a little too small for a biker bar," Dolly said.
I hit the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. "Did you say 'biker bar'?" Not for the first time tonight I thought these ladies had taken a giant step over that line into the land of got-to-be-out-of-their minds. It was a place where they were invincible like superheroes.
"Why are you surprised it's a biker bar with a name like Hell's Tavern?" Dolly rightly asked. Why hadn't I thought of that? Was I so blinded by finding Gus innocent, the obviousness escaped my notice?
Alice clapped. "I've never been to a biker bar before. This should be a lot of fun."
"Of course we'll be careful," Dolly said as if she already knew I'd bring that part up.
"How about we see what it looks like on the outside. We don't have to go inside if it looks rough," Viola assured me.
Viola always brought me back from the brink. Never having been a risk-taker, I'd changed since confronting my first murderer. But still…yeah…I tended to be a chicken on the inside. I felt an inexplicable need to get to the bottom of this murder case. I owed it to Gus and every other person who'd been wrongly accused of murder.
That's me on my soapbox.
"Our first biker bar adventure." Getting into the spirit of things, I followed their directions and, about forty minutes later, pulled onto a small dirt road.
This didn't look right. There were no signs or
lights or anything to mark the business. Was it some kind of bootleg place that catered to the moonshine crowd?
What have I gotten us into?
"I don't feel good about this." Second-guessing reared its ugly head, making my temples pound. Driving on a road that wasn't really a road in search of some out of the way biker bar—that may or may not be for real—seemed like a recipe for disaster.
"Oooh, that was quite a bump." Ramona remarked and grasped the handle along the interior of the car.
"Oh wait, I think I see something." Dolly pointed straight ahead.
"Wow, that's a whole lot of hogs," Alice commented as she tsk-ed.
I pulled to the side of the makeshift road, shut off the car, and looked at the double-wide trailer that had been turned into a bar—and I used that term very loosely.
"Hogs, but not of the farm animal variety." I soaked in the scene, including the twenty or more motorcycles lined up outside the door, and tried not to shudder. This had all the makings of an epic disaster, and somehow I'd become a willing participant. This madness had to stop now.
I didn't want to scare them, but maybe I should have earlier. This whole idea was six-ways-to-Sunday crazy. But I knew better than to try to dissuade them. They were in investigative mode, and nothing would stop the Qs from solving a mystery or apparently getting me killed or, at the very least, ending up in jail if I dared to call the police and ask for assistance when the inhabitants of said bar found out we were sitting outside.
Details of every gory scene from Sons of Anarchy popped into my brain. Most of the time I'd watched that show, I had my eyes tightly closed and my hands over them for good measure. Still, I could visualize the carnage without seeing it based only on the sounds emanating from the TV. And I had one word to describe it—ewwwwww. I struggled to make sense of my current predicament. I didn't see how the Qs could innocent-little-old-lady their way out of this if we dared to venture inside. While I contemplated how we could make a fast getaway before we were discovered, the ladies were excitedly chatting in the back seat.
They were adrenaline junkies on steroids, despite their outward appearance of civility. Although they talked a good game about their reverence for Jessica Fletcher, these ladies were hardcore Bruce Willis wannabes. They hadn't met an accident-waiting-to-happen they hadn't wanted to dive into.
As I contemplated how to back out of my now precarious position, Ramona squealed and pointed toward the door. When I glanced in that direction, a guy somersaulted through the door, crashing into the wobbly wooden railing surrounding the equally wobbly steps. He eventually landed onto the hood of a car—if I used the term car for a rusted out piece of metal sitting on top of an engine.
"That had to hurt," Alice muttered.
Before I had a chance to get out of Dodge, a burly guy that looked about six feet four tossed out another guy. Since the shaky railing already laid in broken pieces scattered among the close-by cars, he fell off the edge and got wedged between the trailer and a car. After considerable twisting and maneuvering, he managed to squeeze his chubby body out of the predicament he'd found himself in and crawled across the hood of a car to land onto the open grass. He stumbled, fighting for purchase on unsteady legs, until he finally gave in to the uneven terrain, or the drunkenness, and flopped onto the ground. If the whole thing weren't so scary, it would have been downright comical.
"Just for the record, I think this is a really bad idea." I'd tried to be the voice of reason, but their fascination with the drama going on outside made any argument I might make pointless. Given the dilapidated cars littering the grass outside, combined with the motorcycles on the makeshift stone driveway, if Buddy frequented here, I didn't want to talk to him. I'd figure out another way to clear Gus.
"Izzy, you worry too much," Alice said. "We need to come up with a plan on how to get inside in between all the bodies being tossed out."
"I've seen Jessica get out of worse situations than this," Ramona added.
I turned in my seat. "I've never seen an episode with Jessica going to a biker bar called Hell's Tavern. If she did, I'm sure it would have been the last episode because she would have died, either from fright or something worse." I gulped back that lump in my throat and started up the car. Once again, I needed to be the adult in the room and call a halt to this nonsense.
"We can't give up now. We're so close," Dolly said. "Our only lead to clearing Gus could be inside there."
"This is crazy. We cannot stay another second. If you ladies don't see that, I do. Besides, if Chaz or Nate finds out what we've been up to, we're toast." They were quiet. Deathly quiet as remorse slinked over me. I didn't intend to be so harsh. But dang it, this was a foolhardy mission.
"If they do find out, we do what Jessica would advise us to do—we develop amnesia," Alice said as the others started to cackle. Extrapolating the popular quote from one of the episodes didn't help calm my nerves. I suspected a pint of vodka followed by some sleeping pills wouldn't do the trick either.
Instead, I drummed my fingers along the steering wheel as I focused on regaining my sanity. Before I could think of a way to pacify them that satisfied us both, a shotgun blast broke through the ominous quiet and took off the tip of my antenna. A crowd of men stormed through the door to the outside. Everyone in the car ducked, including me.
Before I could get my car turned around and headed in the right direction, a parade of motorcycles rumbled past en masse, taking up the small dirt driveway. Another shotgun blast tore through the night. This time it didn't come near my car.
Phew.
"Chickens," Alice mumbled as she kept her head on her knees.
I inched up from my cowering position enough so that I could see over the dashboard. The place had quieted down, and the door to the trailer had shut either of its own accord, or someone had slammed it closed. Either way, I figured it was the perfect time to make my move and leave now that the motorcycles had cleared out.
Viola grabbed my biceps. "Maybe all the really bad guys were scared off."
Good point. Or she could also be one hundred percent wrong as well. Which way that fell remained to be seen. But I figured now was not the time to take any chances.
When I shifted my car into gear, the wheels spun in the soft ground, keeping the car from moving. I tried not to panic.
"Perfect. We have an excuse to go in and ask them for help," Alice said as she opened the back door of the car.
"Alice, wait," I called. No use. I threw open my car door. Before I could caution the others to stay inside, they'd already piled out. This couldn't possibly end well. The mantra of please don't let them get hurt reverberated inside my head.
The bouncer must have seen our approach, as he came out to stand on the crumbling railing-less porch and folded his massive arms across his chest before glaring in our direction. "What do you old ladies think you're doing?"
First off, I didn't like that he called the Qs old ladies. Although the words accurately described them, the way he said them was meant to insult and demean. And secondly, I really didn't like that he included me in that label as well. Besides the fact he was clearly older than me, his remark smacked of ageism.
At another place and time, I'd have a war of words with this bulging-biceped scary dude—preferably in front of witnesses and an officer of the law—but not now.
I managed to catch up with Alice and grabbed her arm. "Let's rethink this, shall we?" I whispered into her ear.
"Nonsense. I'm sure it will be fine." She waved toward the bouncer. "We need help getting our car unstuck."
He placed his likewise massive hands on his hips. "I've got better things to do than help you. Now…"
Before he could finish, a pair of women charged through the door wearing short leather skirts and matching vests, cussing and swearing about some guy named Sam. Their attire took poor fashion sense to a whole other level. But it was their hair that riveted my attention. I hadn't seen so much hairspray-soaked hair and overdone makeup since we visi
ted the bowling alley a few months back during our last investigation. And don't get me started on their makeup that looked like something in a remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Right now, I was more afraid of the women than the men as their arguing escalated, and the brassy blonde woman pushed the raven-haired woman, and they tumbled down the stairs onto the ground. A group of men followed them outside, taking side bets and cheering as the women wrestled in dirt and what could loosely be described as grass.
Does the madness never end in Iowa? Clearly not, based on my short stint in this state.
"Let's wait in the car until the dust clears," I cautioned and hoped they'd all take the hint.
Before I could gather the troops and launch into full retreat mode, the bouncer charged down the stairs. I naively thought he'd break up the all-out war going on between the two women, but instead he came towards us and started screaming.
"Get out of here now," he growled.
"What are you going to do? Call the police?" Alice retorted. I knew she hated to be told what to do, but sometimes you had to know when to flee. Clearly, she hadn't learned that lesson.
"Sorry. We took a wrong turn and got stuck, and then the shots broke out," I grabbed Alice's arm and did a soft yank.
"This is my place, and I keep order however I want," he grumbled.
I nodded while Dolly surged to the forefront. "Henry Cahill, is that you?" She rapped him on the arm. "I swear you had better manners in fifth grade when I taught you. First, break up that fight between those two women, and then get somebody over here to push us out." She shook her head to further prove her point before she folded her arms under her breasts.
"Yes, ma'am," he stuttered out.
"Snake?" Alice called as the men continued to pour out of the small trailer like clowns from a VW Beetle in a circus.
"Yes, ma'am. What are you ladies doing here?" Snake blushed. The incongruence of a three-hundred-pound man wearing a leather biker vest and dirty white T-shirt stammering and turning red made me want to give Alice a high five.