Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(17)

“Cool, cool. That’s really interesting. Listen, I’m Tommy. People call me Smokestack.” He extended a heavily tattooed hand. “What’s yours?”

So here she was, poised on a familiar precipice. Go on ignoring him and get called a bitch. Tell him she just wanted to be left alone. And get called a bitch. Or be her mother’s version of a good girl, stop what she was doing, and invite the inevitable small talk with some guy who assumed the right to interrupt her because he was a man and she was a woman. And call herself a coward. None appealed.

She shut the magazine again, removed the earbud closest to her unwanted companion, and stared at him. “What?”

“I said, my name’s Tommy—”

“I’m meeting someone,” she said. It was technically true, just not today.

“Cool, so I’ll just keep you company until they get here.”

“Christ, Tommy,” Margo snapped. “Girl couldn’t be saying ‘leave me alone’ any louder if she had a megaphone.”

“I’m just trying to talk to her.”

“She’s reading a magazine.”

“It’s a bar, Margo.”

“What? Everyone comes to bars to talk to you?”

“Yeah, why not? Why else she here?”

“Maybe eat her food and read her magazine like she’s doing?”

“What the hell?” he asked rhetorically.

“Come down the other end of the bar, and I’ll buy you a shot.”

Old Charlie perked up at the prospect of free shots, Tommy less so.

“Why you defending this stuck-up skank? I didn’t do nothing.”

There it was. She’d gone from girl he wanted to meet to skank in less than sixty seconds. All for the sin of reading in a public place. The bar went perversely, expectantly still. Lea could feel her temper wake and uncoil with reptilian malice. There was a good chance she was going to regret this, but she had no more give for the Tommys of the world.

“Hey, Tommy, tell me something,” Lea said.

“Yeah? What?”

“What do guys with big dicks say in the morning?”

“Huh?” The question confused him. “What?”

Lea nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t think you’d know.”

She said it loud so everyone could hear, then swiveled slowly back to the bar and reopened the magazine. For its part, the bar let out a collective “oh” as it registered what she’d said. The ones that missed it asked their friends like they’d missed a line in a movie. There were a couple of ways this could go. Lea didn’t see anyone leaping to her defense. One time in four, a friend would intercede and cool the situation down, but Lea knew better than to count on those odds. She’d been working here for almost two years, but she wasn’t from here; these weren’t her people.

Someone laughed. Could have been laughing about anything, but there was only one way Tommy would interpret it, and that would narrow his options considerably. Lea heard him curse and felt his fist close in her hair, wrenching her head back and up. She let out a yelp and stood up on her tiptoes, following his hand like a marionette. Anything to keep her scalp from coming off. The pain forced tears into her eyes, but it was the yelp that really bothered her. Don’t do that again, she admonished herself.

A baseball bat came down hard on the bar and then pointed at Tommy.

“Don’t make me come out from behind the bar.”

“You hear what she said to me?”

“Do I look like The People’s Court?” Margo asked. “I don’t care what she said, or if it gave you diaper rash. I don’t want to deal with the sheriff today. Do you? How long you been out anyway? Two days? You really miss a cell that much?”

“This is some bullshit,” Tommy said.

Lea felt his fist tighten. She was right; she definitely somewhat regretted it, but this is what came of leaving her gun upstairs.

“Let loose of her,” and when that didn’t work, Margo yelled, “Thomas Edward Hillwicky, let my bartender go, or I will knock your one good memory out of that dumbass head of yours.”

Tough spot, Tommy. Back down from a woman, even one who would crush him like a beer can, and they’d still be joking about it in his eulogy. That was how it went among men.

Tommy did the only thing he could that wouldn’t land him in the ER and would also save face. He pitched Lea forward. Not hard enough to hurt her, but enough to let her know it was only by his good graces that she had all her teeth. For good measure, he picked up her beer and shattered it across the floor, then set to cursing Margo at the top of his lungs. Margo, for her part, just stood with the baseball bat lying across the bar and stared him down. Finally, one of Tommy’s friends stepped up and tried to talk sense to him. Tommy used that as his excuse to be done with the lot of them.

“The hell with this dump,” he said, then told his friend where he could go and told Margo the same for good measure. On his way out, he pointed a predatory finger at Lea. “Bitch, I’ll be seeing you.”

When he was gone, show over, the bar returned quickly to life. Lea pressed her hands to her head and pivoted on her stool so she could see the door in case Tommy got any ideas about round two. His threat left her feeling queasy. He’d said something, she’d said something back, but this would end up her fault. She knew that. She was the outsider. Two years in Niobe didn’t mean you belonged. It was how these things went, and she could feel the heat of angry eyes on her back. Good old Tommy, fresh out of jail and kicked out of his own bar. She could hear the narrative forming even before Margo finished mopping up the spilt beer.