Bloodthirst in Babylon Read online

  “You’re not avoiding the subject,” Todd said, scooting closer. He accidentally knocked his beer bottle against hers as if sealing a pact he knew nothing about. “What’s he holding over you? The cop, I mean.”

  Kathy Lee stared at Dukey’s empty stool on her other side as if willing someone interesting to take it. “He let me keep my kids,” she said, still facing away.

  Todd barely heard her. When he asked her to repeat it, she swiveled in her seat and said it again, right to him this time. While burning him with a look that dared him to find fault with her words.

  She twirled a bottle that had been half full the last time he’d looked, but was empty now. “My kids, they’re loud, obnoxious and semi-evil,” she said. “I can’t spend too much time around them or they’d drive me nuts. But I do love them in my way.” She sucked on the bottle, her eyes so lost in thought she didn’t even seem to mind that it was empty.

  “Skip, he was my husband.” She laughed. “Good name, now that I think of it. As in, ‘he skipped.’ So he’s gone, and I get into a tiff with the landlord, right?”

  Todd wasn’t sure he was keeping up, but he nodded anyway. “Right.”

  “This bastard’s all gung-ho about raising my rent, but he won’t fix the locks on the windows—and three of the neighbors have had break-ins. So he comes over one night after work with his hand out for last month’s rent which is late ‘cuz I’m not getting any child support and Skip’s skipped without a forwarding address. I tell him—the landlord—he’s not gonna see another rent check until I get some locks on those windows. That’s fair, right? He screams at me and I scream at him and the next thing I know there’s cops pounding on the door. I’m busted for disturbing the peace and for assaulting my pig of a landlord. By that he means that I shoved him away when he got his face into mine. Now I’ve got the cops on my ass and my landlord’s lawyer, too. And now Skip’s back in town long enough to tell me he wants the kids ‘cuz I’m obviously a violent, unfit mother.”

  “Here ya go, Kathy Lee,” young Duke said, plopping another bottle in front of her. He wordlessly slid Todd his, but not a dime of change.

  “So what happened?” Todd asked, nudging her back into the story. He squinted to narrow his field of vision and miss Duke leaning into the picture.

  She shrugged. “Skip didn’t want the kids. He was just pissed at me for chasing him down for child support. He’d found a job of some kind in Knoxville—miracle of miracles—and his employer was about to start garnering his wages. So…” She shrugged again and sucked down a throatful of suds. “…I packed up the demon seeds and took off for somewhere Skip wouldn’t look. Knowing, of course, that he wouldn’t look too hard when he learned his wages weren’t going to be attached.”

  Kathy Lee turned the other way and let Duke ramble on about a new pair of speakers he was thinking of installing in his ride, but Todd didn’t let her off that easy.

  He tapped her. “I don’t see why you didn’t stay put. Okay, you were late with the rent and you tussled with your landlord, but compared to the way your asshole husband took off, that don’t seem too bad.”

  She sighed. “Right. The lesser of two evils. Mommy’s violent and Daddy’s a deadbeat. Let’s flip a coin and see who wins. Skip had what passed, for the moment anyway, as a steady job, while I was tending bar. Leaving the kids alone, I might add, ‘cuz I wasn’t making near enough to pay a babysitter on top of everything else. Whoever’s got the best lawyer wins, and I couldn’t even afford a bad one.”

  Todd tugged her thin forearm again when she turned her attention to glassy-eyed Duke, sitting there slamming down beers like he thought the faster he drank the smarter he got. “So where does Marty McConlon come in?” he asked when he had her attention back.

  She stared into space. “I had an aunt in Flint. I think she still had a job with one of the automakers—forget which one—and I needed to convince her that I just had to see her for the first time in like twenty years. Actually, I was hoping she’d let me and the kids crash at her place for awhile. Buying time, you know?” She took a healthy swallow from the new bottle. “I was keeping off the main freeways just in case anyone was actively looking for us, though, as I said, I didn’t think Skip was trying too hard.”

  Todd felt her attention wavering again, and quickly pressed her to get to the McConlon part.

  “You know, I can’t even remember why he pulled me over,” she said. “Probably don’t matter. But while I’m waiting, he’s running my plate and finding there’s a bench warrant out for me.” She snorted. “I’m wanted in Tennessee for snatching my own kids. Hell, if the law knew what those two were like, they’d give me a medal for taking ‘em out of the state.”

  That was the last of it. She poured herself off of her stool too quickly for Todd to catch her this time, apparently to visit the little girl’s room. Never mind. He had the rest figured out for himself. He could picture the smarmy cop telling her that she’s probably unaware there’s a warrant out for her arrest, that it must be a big mistake but she’ll have to come with him to get it sorted out in town. Later, he’d tell her that her legal problem could stay a big mistake as long as she stayed in Babylon and took the easy job and generous tips they threw at her.

  But why? Todd took a long pull. Maybe beer really did make you smarter. He was bound to find out.

  “D.B.,” he shouted when the man passed his line of vision.

  Don Brandon plopped onto the stool that still held the shape of Kathy Lee’s fine, though scrawny, ass. His little pink eyes danced with Friday night fever. “Gimme ten bucks, boss. Judd and me can take Carl and Denver,” he shouted, jerking a thumb toward the Sundowners waiting at the dartboard.

  Todd knew or at least recognized everyone at their section of the bar. Tonya Whittock waited listlessly for the rail-thin guy with the ponytail and messed-up teeth to quit simultaneously talking and spitting at her. Carl Haggerty and Denver Dugan stood waiting for a money match while Jamey Weeks was chalking up a stick and chatting with Jermaine and the chrome-dome young dude.

  “They any good?” Todd asked, peeling away a ten from his thin stash. “If they are, and I lose my money, my wife’s gonna hate me even more than she already does.”

  “They’re good, we’re good…” D.B. said, brushing aside the issue with an expansive shrug.

  “Tell Carl I want to talk to him when he gets a chance,” Todd said, reluctantly letting go of the bill.

  D.B. winked. “Oh, he’ll get a chance real soon.”

  Carl Haggerty was a ten-spot richer by the time he plopped into a barstool next to Todd. “The problem with those two,” Carl said, jabbing a thumb at D.B. and Judd, “is that they drink when they play. You can gamble or you can drink, and do a halfway decent job of either, but you can’t combine vices like that.” His own gambling vice apparently put to bed for the night, Carl waved the bearded bartender for a beer. “So what you wanna see me about?”

  Todd made himself ignore the ten-dollar bill on the bar in front of Carl. His ten. “Doyle Armstrong,” he said and waited for a reaction.

  “What about him?” Carl Haggerty’s black skin looked combat boot tough, his half-mast lids weighing down his eyes. The deep grooves etched into his forehead heightened the image of a man with a lot of past.

  “Jermaine tells me you and this Doyle were friends. You traveled into town together, but one day a month or two ago he just disappears.”

  “So?”

  So, indeed. Not even Todd knew where he was going with this. He tried working it out by talking, not thinking. “Way Jermaine tells it, sounds like your friend Doyle just up and left.”

  “My friend Doyle. That’s all I hear from people: ‘Why’d your friend Doyle…?’ How the hell do I know? He didn’t tell me nothing. Just left, is all.”

  “Just left,” said Todd. “Couldn’t find work, or what?”

  “All these goddamn questions.”

  Todd stayed stubbornly silent while Carl mulled over whether to answer him or
not.

  Finally, voice heavy with resignation, Carl said, “No, of course he had work. That was the easy part. Didn’t like the town, though. Suspicious of everything. My way of thinking, you don’t question good luck.” Pointedly spoken, and not lost on Todd.

  “What kind of work did he find?”

  “Security guarding. Plainclothes security at that department store in town.”

  Something didn’t sound right. “Small town like this, everyone knowing everyone, why they need a security guard? An outsider.”

  And a black guy at that, he almost added.

  Carl whistled between his teeth, a low, haunted sound. “Man, you and Doyle. Twins separated at birth. Just like you, he’d come in with those eighteen-dollar-an-hour paychecks, pissing and moaning all the way to the bank.”

  “Sounds like a lot of money for keeping an eye on shoplifters.”

  Carl shook his head. “I heard my fill of that talk, Dunbar. But know what? I make that kind of money lugging ladders and brushes for a company that sends me out with paint crews.” Carl squirmed deeper into his barstool, a cold beer in front of him. “Rains three straight days last week and we can’t go out, so they tell me to stay home, stay dry. Today, after I drag out the equipment and help set up scaffolding in front of this big old house that’s now an insurance agency, my job’s done till cleanup. I grab me a newspaper and a coffee and go sit in the shade ‘cuz that’s what they tell me to do. But I get a pay envelope end of day just like everyone else. Just like every week.”

  Todd stared at him while formulating his next question. “Yeah, but do they like you?” he finally asked. “Do they respect you?”

  “What, am I on Oprah? Here.” Carl ripped a ragged cloth wallet from his hip pocket and slapped it onto the bar. He pulled bills out of it and held them up for inspection. “Here’s the respect. You see this paper money here? Not a fortune, but it’s more’n I was getting cashing unemployment checks about to run out. Does it all make sense to me? No. Does it have to? No again.”

  Todd sat back and waited for the other man’s nostrils to stop flaring. For his forehead furrows to smooth out at least a little. Then he said, “You don’t know shit about economics, Carl. Neither do I, but I know jobs like ours don’t last forever.”

  “My point exactly. So let’s enjoy life while it’s got a little sweetness to it. Tomorrow…” Carl shrugged. He stood like he was about to leave, but then heaved his boot-leather face into Todd’s. “You think you’re the smart guy, don’t you? Think you the only one bright enough to figure something’s wrong, but lemme tell you. D.B. knows it, but he also knows he’s looking at jail time for stealing from his last boss, a construction contractor who kept promising him raises that never came. Kathy Lee knows it, but the poor woman wants to keep her kids. Jermaine and Tonya know, but they already had to leave theirs behind and they want them back. So how ‘bout this? How ‘bout you keep your brilliant deductions to yourself, huh?”

  With that, Carl moved away. Todd tipped his bottle to his lips in a futile effort to get his mind off of his full bladder. When that didn’t work, he lurched to his feet and tried avoiding sight of the pay phone just begging for his quarter.

  Two young locals in jeans and T-shirts quit talking when he stumbled into the men’s room. And when he finished, zipped and came back out, a middle-aged man in a suit stopped trying to pick up a girl who could have been his daughter as Todd leaned across the bar to give his beer order to a new bartender. This one had long hair, wide shoulders and a tiny red stone set into an earlobe.

  Kathy Lee was pretending she didn’t know how to shoot pool so that Buzzcut Duke could demonstrate the proper technique by shoving his groin against her ass and wrapping his big strong arms around her.

  Beer in hand, Todd wandered over to the basketball-shooting game and set his bottle down.

  “Dontcha see the quarter?” The kid had a denim jacket with the sleeves removed and motorcycle club patches sewn here and there. The rugged look clashed with his frail build and coke bottle eyeglasses. His friends looked like they’d back him up in a fight, though, which accounted for the sneer.

  Todd moved away.

  The makeup of the Winking Dog had subtly changed over the timeless period in which he’d been there. With no windows, no structure to the routine of chatting and drinking—mostly drinking—there’d been no way to measure the passage of time. Well sure, he could have looked at someone’s watch, but that would have just depressed him.

  Now that he thought about it, he remembered a smattering of businessmen when he first got there. Now the place was overrun with the jeans and work-shirt crowd. The women were his age and younger, flaunting hips and asses and boobs, but at other locals. Not at the few remaining Sundowners.

  The mood of the bar had changed, too. Voices were lower, the music more somber. It had been Seger’s Night Moves before, but now it was a Vietnam ballad from Billy Joel that made Todd inexplicably uncomfortable. Something about holding the day in the palm of your hand and letting them rule the night.

  The locals stood closer together now, men whispering to women, limbs intertwined. Others sat in small clusters with expression that seemed to harden by the minute as they passed quick glances at the Sundowners in their corner.

  Carl and the Whittocks were gone now. Denver Dugan flapped a hand toward them as he and Jamey Weeks dragged ass out the door.

  “What’s going on?” Todd asked D.B. and Judd, both standing motionless behind a tight crowd of dart players. Todd tried flagging down a waitress, but she pretended not to see him. He felt in desperate need of putting something in his friends’ hands—beer, darts, something—to keep them there.

  “We won, dammit,” Judd growled, his fists as tightly clenched as his hairy jaw. “They gotta play us or give us the dartboard back.”

  D.B. patted the kid’s shoulder. “Relax, Judd. If they don’t want to, fuck ‘em.”

  “That’s right,” Todd said, not knowing or caring exactly what the hassle was about. He tried steering both of them to the table the Sundowners had staked since happy hour. “Let’s just get another round and wait them out. When they leave, we’ll shoot darts ourselves, okay? Kathy Lee’ll be my partner.” He scanned the room and waved her over to them.

  She surprised him by laying a cool hand on the back of his neck and pecking his cheek. She was braless, as usual, her nipples stiff against her coarse cotton top. The sight didn’t irritate Todd as it had before. Didn’t irritate him at all.

  She put her lips to his ear. “Call your wife,” she said.

  He grabbed her hand when it was apparent she was about to get away. “What are you…?”

  Duke Gates came swinging out of the bathroom, zipping up as he pranced toward them, the gesture and the smile deliberate.

  Kathy Lee brushed Todd’s ear again with her lips. “Dukey said he’d take me—”

  “I bet he will,” Todd said, laughing wildly, yet inexplicably pissed. Funniest goddamn thing he’d ever heard. He signaled again for a drink, and this time the waitress acknowledged him.

  He cocked an eyebrow at D.B. as the girl sauntered their way, and D.B. said, “I don’t know, man. I shouldn’t spend any more.”

  “I got money,” Todd said, pulling from his pocket not much remaining evidence of that claim.

  The waitress was blond and young and uninterested as she waited for them to decide.

  “I’m staying,” Judd said sharply. “These town fucks ain’t forcing me out.”

  Heads turned from the dartboard, faces hard.

  “Easy, man, easy,” D.B. soothed. He took one of Judd ‘s balled fists and held it like a lover, pulling him into the next chair. “Two more of the same,” he told the waitress, eyes twinkling with counterfeit ease.

  “Where’s Denver?” Judd looked around, his eyes not tracking well. “Shit. If he’s gone, I rode in with him and Jamey.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Todd said. Then echoed Judd with “Shit,” as he remembered the status of
the Olds.

  “Never mind. I drove,” said D.B.

  The front door pealed open at that moment. It was almost flung off its hinges to admit a clutch of night shadows and four loud, strutting men.

  “Yes!” the first of the four shouted.

  Todd’s eyes moved first to the darkness they’d tracked in with them. It had been close to broad daylight, the September sun sitting high and eternal in the sky, when he’d let D.B. take him here. Where’d it gone?

  The front door hushed shut behind the last of the four. Todd’s hand on the table rattled a graveyard of empty green bottles and sent up grainy clouds of cigarette soot from overflowing ashtrays. His head swam, his throat burned and eyelids felt braced up by everything he could put into the effort.

  “Beer, Lattimer. Lots of beer.”

  “Outta the way, assholes. We got drinking and fucking to get to.”

  “Yeah!”

  The four roared, grunted and barked laughter as they cleared a path to the bar by the strength of their strut, the swing of eight arms, the glint of eight glittery eyes.

  “Purcell,” said one of the dart players in a greeting that sounded carefully neutral. Just: “Purcell.”

  Todd squinted for a view that eliminated blurry multiple exposures of the four. Their eyes seemed to emit a slight white glow until they got to a place in the room where the light was strongest and Todd saw that he’d been mistaken. They were just eyes, one pair dark, one green, the others just eyes.

  The one who’d burst first through the door was compact and unshaven, somewhat shorter than average stature. He wore a denim work shirt that looked too hot for the weather. It seemed to be the cause of the sheen of oily sweat across his pale face under a billed ball cap that advertised an agricultural chemical.

  This one, the muscular guy with the stone eyes, just had to be the Purcell pointed out by the darts player.

  The second one through the door was the noisiest. A slight man in his mid-thirties, he whooped “ha, ha!” with brazen joy. He pawed the air in quick, meaningless gestures. “Bud. Yes! Four Buds,” he yowled to the bartender. His tongue played with a cigarette, whipping it from one side of his mouth to the other as he impatiently awaited his order.