Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(39)

She counts two other women in the place.

One’s passed out at one end of the bar; the other’s sandwiched in a corner booth in between two hulking guys who look like bikers. Her glazed eyes focus on nothing in particular while the men talk across her. Occasionally they slam the table with the sides of their fists to make a point. The impacts are strong enough to jostle their beer bottles, but the woman, who wears an outfit slightly more revealing than Charlotte’s, doesn’t even flinch. She’s somewhere far away from this place. Maybe someplace with blue sky and birds and men who acknowledge her presence.

Charlotte takes a seat at the bar.

The pill’s been in her system for an hour. That’s about the same amount of time it took her to get from Dylan’s office to her house.

To distract herself from the looks she’s getting, she makes a mental checklist of the symptoms she’s on the lookout for. The shaking hands, the throbbing in her bones—the phenomenon she’s nicknamed bone music. The former, she thinks, is a sign the drug’s about to kick in, the second that it’s in full bloom throughout her body. But these are just guesses. There’s a lot she’s still not sure of. Not yet. That’s what tonight’s about.

The nearest bartender glares at her, but he doesn’t come over. His glare seems both a warning and a dismissal.

When she hears the bar’s door open, she fights the urge to look over her shoulder. But she’s sure it’s Marty. He’s changed into a baseball cap and some paint-splattered clothes from his truck that conceal the gun he’s now carrying on his hip. The plan is he’ll keep her within sight at all times while he tries to hang back.

Marty only told her one story about this place. It was general, but it was enough.

One of his AA sponsees had to make a serious amends for something he’d done here. An amends that involved him turning himself in to the police and pleading guilty to a charge that got him ten years in Folsom. And the reason he’d had to turn himself in is because no one in this place reported what he and two of his buddies did to a woman in the corner while everyone else drank beer and played pool. Not even the woman, even though she’d lost most of her teeth during it.

Outside, Kayla has parked her car a short walk from the bar’s entrance, next to the tall, spiked steel fence designed to keep drunks from driving into the water supply for the nearby farms. If all goes as planned, she’ll have a front-row seat to Dylan Thorpe’s magic show. And so will Marty. And so will whoever makes the mistake of following Charlotte out of this place.

“Can I get a drink?” she asks.

It’s not that she’s rude; it’s that she doesn’t keep her eyes averted or soften her tone. She doesn’t ask the question the way these men believe a visitor, especially a female one, should. She doesn’t address them in a way that says, You’re in charge, big boy, and I remain here at the pleasure of your bad attitude. The wording alone calls attention to how brazenly the bartender’s been ignoring her and sends a ripple of tension through the two men seated at the bar next to her. They rouse like coiling snakes. One of them runs fingers over his sweating beer bottle; the other taps out a frenetic rhythm on his. Both study her, their jaws working, as if the five words she just spoke have awakened a predatory energy inside them.

The bartender comes over, stands in front of her. This isn’t the type of place where a napkin precedes a drink order.

“Diet Coke,” she says, staring him in the eye.

“You want a lemon in that?” the bartender asks.

“Sure.”

“There’s a Save Mart about ten minutes from here. I hear they got ’em on sale.”

The bartender departs. The guy closest to her at the bar cackles, punches his friend lightly in the elbow.

Charlotte locks eyes with him.

For a second she worries that her gaze is too steady, too intimidating. That her knowledge of what she might be able to do to him if he tries to harm her has given her a confidence that might frighten the guy into submission.

She’s wrong.

His mouth curls into a sneer. It’s a similar reaction to the one Thor the biker gave her when she refused to pull over on his command; only now she’s seeing it up close.

His baseball cap is on backward, giving her a full view of his bloodshot, rheumy eyes, his bulbous drinker’s nose. He’s stocky and about her age, but years of hard living make him look ten years older, and she’s not sure how much of his bulk is muscle or just beer fat.

His buddy is watching her, too, only his baseball cap is turned forward, hiding his face in shadow. He’s slouched forward on the bar, staring at her. Either he’s the more focused of the two or the more drunk.

She tries to imagine both men crying out in pain the way Jason did the night before when she broke his shoulder. It feels like a version of that old mental trick people recommend when you have to speak in front of a large group. Just imagine everyone in their underwear. But the trick backfires. It doesn’t make the men glowering at her now seem more human or less threatening. It doesn’t, in her mind’s eye, at least, dim the flames of their evident hostility toward her.

“You a cop?” Backward Cap asks.

“You a criminal?” she asks.

“Cops wear bras,” Forward Cap says, his voice just above a growl.

“The lady ones do at least,” his friend adds.