Child of Fire

The place was a bar, but that was fine with me. I went inside and sat on a stool.

After a few moments, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The bar ran the length of one wall, with a wait station near the door. The rest of the room was divided into booths. There were no dartboards or pool tables. There was no jukebox. The place was pretty empty. An elderly man sat at the bar, head bowed over his tumbler. Three men sat at the other end of the room, arguing in the relative privacy of a booth.

The bartender approached me. She was tall and lean, with glossy black hair that hung long past her shoulders and dark eyes that suggested she was at least partly Hispanic. Her long face had a no-nonsense friendliness that I liked immediately. “I didn’t see you come in,” she said. “What can I get you?”

I glanced down at her left hand. She wore two rings. Oh, well. “Let’s start with a beer and a glass of water.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “What kind of beer?”

“What do you recommend?”

“We have a terrific Elephant Stout on tap.”

That sounded like an up-sell if I’d ever heard one, but what the hell, Annalise was buying. “Sounds great,” I told her. She went back to the taps, and I looked around.

The older man looked over blearily and then turned back to his drink. He wore a modest suit that bulged at the middle, and he had carefully combed his hair over his bald spot.

Victim, I immediately thought. I could have rolled him for his wallet if I was desperate for chump change. A couple years back I’d have rolled him for his car keys, then driven his car straight to the chop shop.

That chapter was closed now. I didn’t steal cars anymore.

I killed people. People like Carol the receptionist.

I wondered what was going to happen to the bodies of those women. Was it a crime scene now, with police tape, coroners, and witnesses who couldn’t remember a thing? Or had those dead women been erased from the memories of everyone around them? I imagined the surviving office workers moving like automatons as they carried the corpses away. Or worse, walking past them like they weren’t there, the same way people ignored the black streaks.

A gray-haired woman walked into the bar. She had a sensible work-and-church vibe that made her seem instantly out of place. She went over to the old man with the comb-over and set some papers on the bar beside him. They exchanged terms of endearment in a tone that suggested it was a habit for them and little more. The man tapped the papers. “What’s this?”

“Financial papers and a birthday card for Paul,” she said.

For a moment he looked as if he was going to ask for details, but instead he shrugged and picked up the pen. When he got to the card, he said: “Ten years old already? Is he coming home this summer?”

The woman sighed. “His scholarship covers a summer program in Atlanta, and he’s going.”

The man sighed, too, and signed the card.

As the woman walked out of the bar, the three men in the booth burst out laughing. They sounded loud, raw, and somewhat drunk. One called another a “fucking moron.”

The bartender was just about to place my beer in front of me. She turned toward them, bared her teeth, and said: “Keep it down or take it somewhere else!” She didn’t have to raise her voice.

They quieted down. The bartender set the beer in front of me, then served up a big glass of ice with a splash of water. “Sorry about that. Sometimes it’s like a chimp house in here.”

“I like noisy chimps. You know where they are. It’s the quiet chimps you have to watch out for.”

She smiled at me. “I’m Sara,” she said.

“Ray.”

“New in town?”

“Absolutely.”

“I guess you came to apply at the toy plant?”

I shrugged. “Everyone keeps suggesting that.”

“Well, don’t,” a man behind me said.

One of the three men from the back booth had come to the bar with an empty pitcher. Sara took it from him without comment and began filling it from the cheap end of the tap.

He was tall and rangy with a small scarecrow’s head, and he stood closer to me than he needed to. I guess he wanted to look down on me while we talked.

“You’re the first one to suggest I stay away,” I said. “Something wrong with the company?”

“Not a thing,” the scarecrow said. “I just don’t want to see some stranger blow into town and take something that belongs to a local.” Sara set the pitcher in front of him. “Thanks, little lollipop. If you get tired of these two, I have some prime lap space reserved for you back at the booth.”

“Boy, you are one word away from being tossed out like trash. Don’t make me call the Dubois brothers.”

Brothers? Thinking back to the cops I’d seen at Harlan’s shooting, they certainly could have been brothers, with Emmett the oldest. I filed that information away.

The scarecrow winked and sauntered back to the booth.