“You’re sure I can do it?”
Amy came over to Holly’s rocker and knelt in front of it.
“Do you remember what I told you when you first came to me for help? After we met at that meeting?”
Holly nodded. Her spoken answer was almost a recited catechism. “That I’d have to trust you, but that the only way to learn to trust others was to trust myself.”
“Think how far you’ve come since then, Holly. Think how much you’ve accomplished. Child molesters are basically cowards, and you’ve called his bluff. That’s why he’s here. That’s why he’s come to offer you a settlement. You don’t have to be scared of him anymore. The tables are turned. Now he’s scared of you.”
“That doesn’t seem possible.”
“But it is. Go get in the shower. I’ll tell him to come back in an hour.”
“Not an hour,” Holly said flatly. “That’s too soon. It makes me sound too eager. Tell him to come back at four.”
“Alright,” Amy said. “Four it is.”
Long after the door closed, Holly lingered in the chair without moving. If this was what she wanted; then this was what was supposed to happen; how come she felt so awful? If this was victory, why was she shivering and sweating at the same time? Why was the prospect of seeing her father again after all these years so terrifying?
Finally, though, after an hour or so, she managed to pull herself together enough to rise up out of the chair and head for the shower. If Amy still believed in her, maybe Holly Patterson could somehow find a way to believe in herself.
She had to. Amy had said it was the only way she was going to win. And winning was supposed to be worth it.
IN THE relative pre-lunch quiet of Bisbee’s Blue Moon Saloon, Angie Kellogg was studying her Arizona state driver’s license manual as though her very life depended on it. Studying was something she had done so seldom in her short life that it came as a surprise. Even to her.
On the run from her drug-cartel, hit-man boy friend, Angie was an ex-L.A. hooker who had landed in Bisbee two months earlier. Under circumstances that still amazed her, she had been taken under the protective wing of an unlikely trio of rescuers made up of Joanna Brady, Reverend Marianne Macula, and Bobo Jenkins, one of Bisbee’s few African Americans. As the enterprising owner/operator of the Blue Moon, he had offered Angie Kellogg her first legitimate employment.
Determined to be out of “the life,” Angie was walking the straight and narrow for the first time in her short existence. She had purposefully changed her lifestyle, but not necessarily her clothing. Her trademark skintight jeans, platform heels, and voluptuous figure continually provoked comment and notice in the post office and Safeway.
They also made her by far the best-looking relief bartender in town. Bobo, a sharp businessman with one eye on Angie’s figure and the other on the daily receipts, was quick to notice a distinct upswing in business whenever Angie Kellogg pulled a shift.
He joked that she was his most valuable employee. Since she was also his only employee, Angie didn’t take that compliment very seriously.
But in a place as small as Bisbee, where a severely limited population also limited the number of drinkers, anything that improved the bottom line of a marginally profitable business was an addition to be welcomed with open arms.
At first Angie Kellogg didn’t pay that much attention to the well-dressed man who crashed through the swinging door of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge and slouched over to the farthest booth. It was a little before eleven-thirty when he ducked into the bench seat with his back to the entrance.
Annoyed to have her quiet study time interrupted prior to the normal lunch-hour rush, Angie put down her driver’s license manual and hurried over to take his order. “What’ll you have?” she asked.
“A Bloody Mary,” he answered. “A double.”
Angie guessed the stranger might be an attorney right away, although of a far better caliber than the ones her various L.A. pimps used to bail their girls out of the slammer.
“Hot or not?” she asked.
Bobo had directed Angie to ask the question in just that way, carefully explaining that some customers liked mild Bloody Marys while others wanted the drink so fired with Tabasco sauce that they required a water chaser. When Bobo, an athletically built black man, asked that particular question, no one gave him any crap. When Angie did things usually went from bad to worse in a hurry.
The dweeb lawyer answered her with a disturbingly blank stare, and Angie braced herself for the inevitably rude comment that was bound to follow. If it was bad enough, she was fully pre pared to tell him what he could do with the piece of celery she was supposed to put in the drink to stir it.
“I beg your pardon?” he said finally. “What was it you asked me?”
“The drink,” she prodded. “How spicy? Hot or not?”
“Not very,” he said.
Angie flounced away from him, tossing her blond hair. Maybe he didn’t go to bars much. He acted like he didn’t even speak the language, like he was from a foreign country or something. But at least he hadn’t propositioned her. Bobo had made it clear that if Angie wanted to keep her part-time job as relief daytime bartender, “fraternizing with the customers,” which Angie translated to mean screwing around, was absolutely forbidden. To be honest, there weren’t that many men who looked remotely interesting to her these days, and certainly not for free. As far as that job was concerned, Angie Kellogg was permanently on vacation.
By the time she delivered the lawyer’s drink and collected his money, the first of her noontime regulars had wandered in from outside. Archie McBride and Willy Haskins were already arguing when they sauntered into the bar
