Ezra pulled the door open and let fifty conversations, three ball games, two shouting bartenders, a flock of chirping waitresses, and some awful pop music out into the evening. He felt he could feel the energy of the place, like one of those people who claim to be empaths affected by the vibrations around them, and he almost turned back around. He thought again of how this wasn’t the place for him, this glitzy bit of costume jewelry; he preferred the kind of bar that was half empty even on a busy night, where the bar keep and the half a dirty dozen on their stools all turned when the door opened to see who was coming in. He wasn’t on a case after all, he was on his own time, and could come and go as he pleased. He told the kid he’d meet him though, so he went in. Nobody turned to mark him when he did.
The inside of Wallace’s Inn at Jacob’s Court (such a lofty name for a bar!) was indistinguishable from any number of anonymous sports bar and grill franchises across the country. Ezra could picture a place just like this at one of Leon Jensen’s mountaintop resorts, clinging to the peaks people could attain just by hauling their freight into an elevator. The waitresses wore black pants so tight they seemed painted on, with white shirts and black suspenders that were covered in flashy buttons with glib slogans on them: It’s five o’clock somewhere; TGIF; Feelin hot hot hot! The main room had a polished wood floor and exposed rafters that were probably supposed to invoke a sense of rustic olde world charm (spoiled by the ad banners hanging from them showing classic “everyone having a good time at the bar” images of attractive young people smiling ferociously with glittering eyes, and beer company logos) and was filled with round tables. Most of the tables were full of people stuffing themselves with cheesy pepper poppers, hot wings, and potato skins, chasing every bite with drinks from big schooners of bright yellow beer; not many of them looked like the young models shown on all those hanging banners. There were a lot of kids, yelling and being spastic while their parents tried to ignore them. The room was too hot, the music was too loud. Everyone in the room seemed to be engaged in a contest to see who could coat themselves in the densest layer of the most obnoxious body spray, and they were all winning.
“Welcome to Wallace’s Inn!” a young hostess said. She’d approached Ezra as he stood there at the top of the short flight of steps running down into the main seating area, looking the place over and leaning on the side of an arcade cabinet for a game where the goal seemed to be stealing as many cars and killing as many Guards as a player could before getting taken down. The hostess tossed her thick waves of turquoise hair aside with a practiced flip, getting it out of her violet eyes so she could see what she was doing while she pulled a huge plastic menu from the box of them on the side of her work station. “Table for one?”
“My party’s waiting for me at the bar,” Ezra said. He hoped it was true.
“Okay then!” the hostess said. Her voice was piercing; not powerful, just loud- everything she said was a shout. She dropped the menu back into its slot. “You can see our specials at the bar- just tap the palmscreen to order up some apps! If ya need anything else, just grab any waitress nearby. And remember- at Wallace’s, you’re always in good company!” And then she was gone, in a whirl of shimmery blue hair and a lingering mist of perfume that smelled like hard candy. Ezra shook his head and made his way to the bar.
The bar was a polished wooden horseshoe taking up the back half of the room, the green and brass barstools full of young guys in drunken party casual and girls in mostly nothing (well, technically they were dressed- but the stuff girls wore now wouldn’t have been called appropriate sleepwear when Ezra was a kid). The pair of bartenders looked like bartenders: slick and disinterested, with a lot of expensive tattoo work on their thick forearms, their white dress shirts gleaming in the dim lighting. Ezra looked around, starting to feel sweaty, and finally spotted Leonard Forest down aways on the other side of the bar. He’d been wrong, as it turned out; the kid was sipping on a seven and seven, and there wasn’t a fruity umbrella or a glass made from a cut pineapple anywhere in evidence. What a relief.
The stool next to Leonard was empty and Ezra slid onto it. “You come here often?” he said.
The kid looked over and smiled wanly. “That line was old when your dad was trying to pick up your future mother,” he said. “You better get some new material, if you’re lookin to pick up any action round here.”
Ezra chuckled. “There’s no action here,” he said. “Just a bunch of uptown kids playing at drinking. Their parents are probably in the dining room, ordering food and grabbing the tab.”
“What’ll you have, pal?” One of the bartenders, black hair slicked back from his forehead and an animatoo of two writhing constrictor snakes on his neck, snapping their fangs and going round a golden bar in a constant loop, had noticed Ezra take a seat and ambled over. His eyes, augmented and glowing silver, reflected Ezra’s face as he looked at the man.
Ezra jerked his head at Leonard’s drink. “Gimme what my friend’s got,” he said. “Go on ahead and make two.”
The young mixologist nodded and wandered back down the bar to get to work.
“So what’s the word?” Ezra said.
Leonard blinked at him. The good doctor had put away a couple three drinks already, from the look of him. “Why, the bird is the word,” he said. “I thought that, by now, everyone had heard that the bird is the word. Shame on you.”
“That’s older than my line,” Ezra said. “Hell, that’s from my grampa’s day.”
“Grew up with a lot of old stuff,” Leonard said. “I was the only kid in my class who knew who the hell Buddy Holly was. On the flip side, I didn’t understand pop culture references from the day because I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. I didn’t know what any of the other kids were talking about in home room, and they didn’t know what I was talking about because everything I knew was from before we were even born. We spoke two different languages.”
“Must’ve been rough.”
“Fucking nightmare. But I found a loophole,” Leonard went on, raising his forefinger off the glass he held in that hand. “Books. My parents didn’t pay any attention to what I read- all that mattered to them was I was reading books. So I wasn’t allowed the TV or the movies…but I could get all the violence, sleaze, and sex I could handle at the bookshop. Showed them.”
“There ya go,” Ezra said. The bartender came back with his two seven and sevens, set them down on a couple napkins, and held up a black and red paydock. Ezra bumped his credstik on it and the red light flashed green. The bartender nodded and sauntered back down to the other end of the bar, to con some tips from a gaggle of giggling sorority girls. Ezra tucked his credstik away, thinking of the bar back home and the piles of wet bills and change guys would leave on the counter when they went to the john…and how the cash would still be right there when they came back. It was a different world.
“They had the last laugh, my parents,” Leonard said. He found nothing but ice in his glass when he went to take a drink, looked at it with contempt, and slid it away down the bar. He saw a fresh drink waiting for him and reeled it in, saluting Ezra with it. “I never had a job. All my money came from them- the old trust fund stranglehold. Course, it wasn’t really their money, either. My great-grandfather was one of the big land barons who finished the job of logging Hadwood Forest to death. All that’s left now is a few thousand acres of protected park land, but they say that Hadwood used to cover the continent from sea to shining sea, ya know it?”
“I’ve heard that,” Ezra said. He had himself a sip of his drink and found it quite tasty. The bartender mixed strong. He reminded himself to add on a good tip when he was finished here, and the man came round with his paydock for Ezra’s final approval.
“Wanted to be a Guard like you,” Leonard said. Ezra was having trouble picking up the threads of the kid’s story and making a tapestry out of them, but figured hey, just let him talk it out. “Or maybe go private, do the gun for hire thing like in all those old books my parents never bothered
to flip through to see what I was up to. Dad wanted me to be a doctor. Said ‘You want to be a Guard, you can just go out and get yourself a job and work your way through the academy. If you want to go to school on my dime, you’ll do it my way.’ And so I did.”
“But you found another loophole,” Ezra said.
Leonard grinned and tipped Ezra a wink. “Yeah, I did,” he said. “Forensic medicine. Not a Guard, but close. Work with them. Be a part of solving crimes, putting the bad guys away. Too bad my career’s already over when it was just begun.”
“Aw, c’mon,” Ezra said. “No need for melodrama.”
“No, it’s true,” Leonard said. “Calling in this expert to do my job, it might as well be a petition of no confidence. Do you know what that means? It basically means that my credibility is shit. Any time I ever get called to the stand to testify in a matter of homicide, any time from this day on, Ezra, the defense attorney is going to be jumping up my back and down my throat. ‘Isn’t it true, doctor, that you’ve had two different cases in your tenure with the Hatis City Guard Department where you couldn’t even determine the cause of death?’ And when I have to answer in the affirmative, there goes your ball game. ‘How can we in this courtroom today be certain that any of your testimony is accurate? Perhaps the victim wasn’t shot by my client the defendant at all but suffered a brain aneurysm, and you simply couldn’t tell the difference.’”
“Shit,” Ezra said.
“The Jensen family’s expert was in my shop for about forty-five minutes,” Leonard said. “You heard what he came up with, right?”
Ezra shook his head and swallowed a long sip of his drink. “I’ve been dodging the commissioner’s phone calls all day,” he said. “Haven’t been back to the office since I got dismissed from the Jensen estate for trying to sully the poor dead woman’s name by Mister Pembroke.”
“What a piece of shit,” Leonard said. His latest seven and seven had magically evaporated and he thumped the empty glass on the bar until he got someone’s attention. The bartender raised his eyebrows. Leonard raised his own with a great deal of sarcasm and pointed at the glass.
“So what was it?” Ezra said.
“Huh?”
“What’d he come up with?”
Leonard laughed- a short, bitter bark. “Heart attack, High Guard Beckitt,” he said. “The walls of the poor old bird’s heart were paper thin, and it just gave out on her while she sat there in her car preparing to ride back to her castle after an arduous day of being the strength of the weak and the wealth of the poor. The man from Northeshire says that there was a slight tearing of the fibrous muscle of the aortic wall, and I simply missed it. He was very nice about it. Hardly condescending at all. A gentleman and a scholar.” He laughed again, and then drank half of his fresh drink off in three huge gulps when it arrived in front of him.
Ezra gave the young doctor a long, hard look. Leonard was pretty far gone, but his eyes were still there. He looked furious, and hurt- and sharp. Ezra didn’t want to wound the man any more than he already was, but he had to ask what he was going to ask. It was important. “Tell me true, Leonard,” he said. He spoke softly (softly as he could in the din of this glorified sports bar and grill, anyway), and held the young doctor’s eyes with his. “Do you think that’s right? Did you miss it?”
Leonard looked over at the Guard, surprise replacing the furious look in his face before everything got washed away by a sad disappointment. Ezra was sorry for that, but it had to be done. “No,” he said. “I think it’s utter bullshit. I don’t know what killed that woman, Ezra, but I’ll tell ya this- whatever it was, without it she could have lived another twenty years. She was in great shape. Her little old heart didn’t just give out on her. It’s shit.”
“Okay.”
Leonard gave Ezra a hard look of his own; hard as a young doctor who maybe shaved three times a week could give. “Kinda didn’t think you’d ask me that,” he said. He found his drink after a couple of tries and finished it. “Kinda thought we were like, friends or something. You stopped calling me kid when I asked you to, and I appreciate that…but you still think it, don’t you? Just a kid, probably never even been laid proper yet, what’s he know about anything? All it takes to earn a university degree is the credits and he’s got those, right?”
“Hey-”
“I think it’s time for me to call it a night,” Leonard said stiffly. He was done talking. Ezra had gone and done what he always managed to do with people and pissed the kid off, and maybe tomorrow he’d see things better and maybe he wouldn’t and the two of them would be quits. The good doctor stood up from his barstool, looked surprised that the floor of Wallace’s Inn had turned into the deck of a ship in stormy waters while he wasn’t paying attention, and sat back down. Hard.
“Here now,” Ezra said, putting his hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “Take it easy there, kid.”
The doctor jerked his shoulder away from Ezra so hard that he almost spilled himself off the stool again, righting himself only after a brief, wide-eyed struggle and then standing up. Other patrons nearby were watching with open speculation: a lover’s spat, a brewing fight; they didn’t know, but folks loved their drama…and real life action was a million times better than the vidscreen.
“Kid me no kids, Beckitt,” Leonard said. “Outta here.”
Ezra wasn’t sure if the kid meant to say “get the fuck outta here” or “I’m outta here.” Either way, he turned himself around and started making his way to the front door in long, looping strides that kept taking him fairly far off the beam; it was only by some slim miracle that he didn’t ram right into someone and start a brawl as people watched him do the drunk bum boogie across the floor with dirty smirks on their faces. Ezra was going to go after him, try to talk it over with him some more; at least make sure the kid was going to get behind the wheel and wrap his car around a power pole, Carpenter forbid- but then he saw another face he recognized and stopped in his tracks as the good doctor made his slow, rambling escape from the scene.
-
“Strider Connor?” Ezra said. A main part of what made him good at his job was his ability to remember names and faces and put them together and he was sure he was right about this one, but the words still came out as a question because he couldn’t quite credit what he was seeing. For one thing, the young Guard was still in his uniform- and that could get him written up or even suspended or booted from the force, depending on the results of his actions while intoxicated in his blue and greens. For another, the top three buttons of the long brass row of them going down the front of his tunic were undone, and the man didn’t have on an undershirt. Lastly, he was even more drunk than the good doctor had been.
Jesus the Carpenter, Ezra thought. Don’t they ever cut anybody off in this joint?
Thomas Connor craned his neck, slowly centering on Ezra and looking up at him with the big eyes of an owl up past the dawn. Connor had been connected to the Eat-the-dead Fred case; he was the first responding Guard to a potentially ugly situation in a residential area- the John and Jane Qs out there on Leeweigh Street had thought one of their neighbors was the killer, and they weren’t going to wait on the Law to come and get him. Strider Connor got sent to the scene ahead of the riot team because he’d grown up in that neighborhood and his captain thought maybe he could diffuse the situation. What the young Guard got for his trouble was a nasty swipe across the face with the tines of a garden rake, and the handle of that same implement to the nuts. Connor still bore the marks of that rake across the face, a set of scraggly white lines that started on his brow above the left eye and ended at the corner of his mouth.
“Ezra Beckitt,” Connor said when he finally got his brain out of first gear. “I be damn.”
Ezra had spoken to Connor while he was writing up his final reports on the Fred case. He liked the kid. They had spoken a few times since, gone out for a beer or two at the Ace, bowling once over at the Spare Time Lanes. Ezra wouldn’t have thought that the kid was any
kind of a boozer, not based on those couple of times when they sat at Dozer’s place and had a beer over a game of Risk.
“The hell are ya doin, son?” Ezra said. He pulled out the other chair from the table where Connor sat and put himself in it. “Drunk in your uniform? You’re going to be in for one hell of an asskicking from your captain if he finds out.” And, he didn’t add, any one of the assholes in this bar could have already flicked a pic of him, and tomorrow he’d be all over the interwebs with some smartass caption like “your tax creds at work” or “ever vigilant”- “the High AF Guard.”
“Don’t care,” Connor said. He took another long drink from the vile concoction in his hand, something red as the apple that got man thrown from paradise that reeked like it came out of some backwoods still, and then swiped the sleeve of his uniform tunic across his mouth. “Don’t matter, not no more.”
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Ezra said. He was concerned. More than that he was shocked, and that was no small feat; after the shit he’d seen in the last year, he would have said that shock was a thing of the past for him. Not so. “Talk to me, son.”
“Just can’t stop thinkin about what she told me,” Connor said. “Can’t get it outta my head.”
“Who?”
“Darlene Stapleton,” Connor said. His lip curled when he said it, like the name was something nasty in his mouth. “That thing, the thing with your case? Captain Bentley sent me over there cause it was my old neighborhood, I knew people there. Well, I knew someone in that mob, all right. Darlene. I went out with her little sister when we was in school. I loved her- Becca that is, not Darlene. I mean I liked Darlene well enough, she was okay. She gave me this,” the young Guard went on, gesturing at the scars on his face before letting his hand drop back onto the table, limp as a fish. “But that’s not what really hurts. She hurt me worse with what she said.”
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