The Night Shift(67)

“I’ll be fine.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking. You have a concussion and, no offense, but you look like shit.”

Chris makes no response.

“Let me take you home, you can relax, watch some TV, recover.”

“I appreciate you coming to the hospital, Julia,” he says, “and for the ride.” He considers asking her if he can borrow twenty bucks, but thinks better of it. He opens the car door.

“Chris, seriously, let me take you home.”

He hobbles out of the car and goes inside the bar.

It’s early evening and Clyde’s is nearly empty. The place picks up around midnight. An old man crouches over his beer at the over-glossed bar, looking like he’s in the mess hall of a prison guarding his meal. At a booth in the back, an older woman wearing heavy makeup and torn fishnet stockings taps on her phone. A hard-looking man in a leather jacket sits at a table on the other side of the place staring out at nothing. It’s a place for people who don’t want to talk about their problems. Don’t want to socialize. Don’t want a cocktail. They want to sit and drink bottom-shelf booze and mind their own damned business.

Chris tended bar at Clyde’s during his summers home from college. Clint happened to have gone to high school with Clyde, who at that moment is behind the bar, looking a thousand years old. He pours a drink into Chris’s glass.

“Been a long time, college boy.”

Chris smiles.

“Why you slummin’?” Clyde doesn’t ask about the scrapes on his face or the hospital bracelet. He sees worse on a nightly basis.

“Slummin’? You should see my office. Or worse, my apartment.”

Clyde lets out a laugh that sounds like the inside of a pack of Winston’s. Chris thinks back to his bartender training when he was twenty. Clyde saying, “These fools barely have a pot to piss in and the only time they tip is if you laugh at their jokes.”

“How’s the old man?” Clyde asks, meaning Clint.

“He’s hangin’ in there.”

“Toughest dude I ever met. I ever tell you about when we was in high school and some fool called me a—let’s just say, it wasn’t politically correct.”

Chris smiles again. Another memory from his training: “Tell them a story. That’ll keep ’em drinking.”

For the next hour, Chris half-listens to tales of Clint and Clyde back in the day. He has a hard time imagining Clint as the bellicose brawler Clyde remembers. But men change over the years. Some men, anyway. Rusty Whitaker never changed. And the one bit of good news this week, no, this year, is that Rusty would finally rot in a cell like he deserves.

Clyde looks over Chris’s shoulder, his face wrinkles. “Someone’s lost,” he says.

Chris glances in the reflection in the mirror behind the bar. An attractive woman, a professional, elegant, has come into the place. He twists around to confirm, and it’s her all right: Ella Monroe.

She must’ve talked to Julia.

Spotting him, Ella charges over. She doesn’t look happy.

“Hi,” Chris says, his voice thick with ironic cheerfulness or something close to it. The alcohol combined with the head injury have made him punchy.

She glowers at him, but says nothing.

Clyde senses the tension and disappears into the background. Another thing he’d taught Chris, “If the customers are fightin’, stay the hell out of it.”

“You’re here to commend my heroism?” Chris asks.

She’s having none of it. “You’re his brother. You knew what happened to me, and you still…” She stops, her breathing is ragged.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But what did you want me to say? ‘Hi, I’m the brother of the guy who allegedly tried to kill you’?”

“Allegedly.” She grabs onto the word.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I am. I know what you think. But I don’t believe Vince—”

“The evidence says otherwise,” she interrupts.

“It does for Jesse too. But do you think she did it?”

Ella doesn’t answer.

Chris takes a gulp, then stares ahead at the lines of bottles.

Ella takes the barstool next to him. There’s a long stretch of silence.

Eventually, Chris says, “Ever since I was in middle school, I’ve wanted only one thing: Vince to come home so I could help prove … Sorry, I get it, you don’t want to hear this.”

She turns to him. She doesn’t look angry anymore. It’s something else. Sadness? Curiosity? Pity?

“Try me,” she says.

Chris signals to Clyde to fill his glass. Clyde approaches, asks Ella if she wants anything.

“I’ll have what he’s having.”

Clyde fills two glasses, and Ella takes a big drink.

“That night, what time did you close the video store?” Chris asks her.

“Ten.”

“And you were—” He stops himself from saying it. “It happened shortly after closing?”

She nods.

“That’s the point. Vince was at home. Cooking my piece-of-garbage father dinner. I remember because Vince got there just before ten—I was watching the clock, worried he wouldn’t get home before Dad. It’s impossible that he was at the video store.”