Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(46)
After two years in Niobe, planning and biding her time, she ought to know the answer.
So what does she want?
Across the street, Margo stood in the Toproll parking lot signing for a delivery. A full keg of beer weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, but her boss hefted one easily and walked it into the bar. Lea trotted across Tarte Street, picked up a case of longnecks, and followed her inside.
Margo looked back at her. “What did I tell you about hanging out at the bar in your free time?”
“I came to talk to you.”
“Oh? Well, make it quick. Your boyfriend is stopping by in a few,” Margo said. “Trying to get himself unbanned.”
“Tommy Hillwicky? Are you serious?”
“He’ll be sober so he’ll probably say the right things, and then later when he’s drunk again he’ll say the wrong ones again.”
“So why?”
“He drinks a piece more beer than you, flyweight.”
Lea shrugged. “You own the place.”
“Yeah, like the Indians owned Manhattan.” Margo set down the keg and shook her arms out. “So what do you want to talk about? ’Cause you’re not getting a raise.”
“Remember what you said about fighting battles?”
“Vaguely.”
“I might need your help with that after all.”
Margo regarded her with curiosity. “What kind of help?”
“What do you owe on the bar?”
Margo’s eyes narrowed. “Enough.”
“What if there was a way to square yourself with the bank? Would that be something that interested you?”
“I’m listening.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was turning into an ugly night at the Toproll. A festering, hostile energy swirled through the smoky rafters. Lea had seen two fights already, and it wasn’t quite nine yet. Reggie Weir and Cece James, the town lovebirds, had thrown down over nothing at all; Reggie had stormed out, leaving Cece in tears. Not much of a drinker, Cece was in the corner, aggressively nursing her third Long Island iced tea.
Everyone was drinking hard tonight, and that was saying something. Lea scrambled to keep up. She pushed four pints across the bar, took the twenty, and made change while scanning the bar for the next customer. The customer pocketed the bills and dropped the coins heavily, scattering them across the bar. Punishment for Tommy Hillwicky. The regulars had thought it over and found Tommy hard done by. They’d taken turns buying him drinks to welcome him back from his one-week suspension as if he were a returning war hero. Tommy hadn’t seen this much love when he’d gotten out of prison and was three sheets in search of a stiff breeze. He stood at the end of the bar, talking loudly about missing high-school football and the license it gave to hurt people.
“People knew better than to come across the middle, boy,” he said, eyes drifting to Lea. He clapped his hands together to suggest the violence of his collisions and called for another round of shots.
Lea had spent enough time in joints like this to know that bars had personalities, especially ones that depended on their regulars. Moods could take hold and spread from barstool to barstool like a bump in the back with no apology. No one was immune. The regulars were still a little on edge about Tommy, but the mood would have passed by on any other night. Tommy was a symptom rather than the cause.
The cause sat in the back room at Al Reynolds’s regular table. Al Reynolds had hosted a poker game at the same table for eight years. It wasn’t official, but everyone in town knew that come nine p.m., the table belonged to Al Reynolds. The same couldn’t be said for the four strangers from the fifth floor of the Wolstenholme. They’d come in around seven thirty for dinner and sat at Al’s table. The four ordered politely and weren’t bothering anyone, except they bothered everyone. Maybe it was their healthy, square-cut features. Maybe it was that none drank anything stronger than Diet Coke. Maybe it was that now, well past nine p.m., they still hadn’t reached for the check.
Lea could feel the room pressurizing, and normally, she would worry for four strangers in a bar full of hostile regulars, but something about the four men’s bearing made her think that it was the regulars who would regret starting anything. The regulars felt it too and milled about, unsure what to do about the situation. The accustomed ebb and flow of the Toproll had been disrupted. The established hierarchy, so critical to the peaceful coexistence of a bar full of alcoholics, was under threat. Nothing was in its assigned place.
Earlier, Old Charlie had stuck his head in the door just far enough to see his stool was occupied, turned tail, and fled into the night. Might be the only wise thing that she’d ever seen him do. The men in Old Charlie’s space were actually wearing suits. The first two suits she’d ever seen in the Toproll. One of them had ordered, and was actually drinking, a glass of white wine. His companion kept playing songs on the jukebox that Lea had never heard in here before, which was amazing because Margo hadn’t put in a new CD the entire time Lea had worked there. He’d played about twenty dollars of music so far, and no one else’s stuff was getting played. A small thing, but in the delicate, alcohol-fueled hothouse of a bar, way over the line.
The two waitresses stood at the service bar and traded war stories while Lea made drinks for their tables. One had served a group of three men who’d ordered in faint Russian accents, then waited in eerie silence. The waitress was spooked. “They don’t say nothing. They just stare at each other like telepathy, you know? Weird.”