Authors: Lauren Gilley
Four
Matt touched the end of the match to the candle wick, and a soft glow welled and pooled across the top of the bar. Three seconds into burning, the candle began to give off the scent of vanilla. It was a tall, white pillar candle, stately in its makeshift candelabra of an overturned ash tray. They all stood around it, hands clasped, silent. A moment of respect and remembrance for Carly. Several of the girls were crying into tissues, cheeks streaked with mascara.
Holly’s eyes were dry, but she shivered on the inside, chilled down to her bones. She’d had relentless nightmares, dreaming of the ropes again, and she’d awakened with fear in her veins, a fear that refused to abate. She grieved for her friend, but the grief couldn’t quite touch her heart, because the fear was so great. She knew,
knew
, that this couldn’t have anything to do with her. Just a random act of violence. A stroke of evil against their bar; a chance killing, the life taken Carly’s, instead of hers, just because of timing.
She didn’t want to think that Carly had been killed
because
of her. That she’d finally been found, and that from behind, small and dark-haired Carly had been mistaken for her. That was too awful to contemplate. She wanted to believe Michael; wanted to feel sure that this wasn’t her fault. How could she live with herself if it was?
Vanessa broke the silence. Sniffling, she said, “Weren’t you supposed to close last night?” And lifted her tear-brightened eyes to Holly with an accusatory twist to her trembling mouth.
“I was,” Holly said. “I wasn’t feeling well and Carly offered to cover for me.”
Every pair of eyes came to her. Matt seemed sympathetic, but all the girls had something dark and angry lingering in their gazes. Holly was the newest waitress at Bell Bar, the one without local connections, without friends. She was the outsider anyway, and now she felt the chasm opening up between herself and the others. She could feel their blame, their anger and resentment.
“It could have happened to any of us,” Matt said, consolingly.
“But it happened to Carly,” Meg said.
Holly bowed her head, staring down at the toes of the little wedge-heeled sneakers she wore with her work uniform. “I wish I’d stayed,” she said. “I wish it had been me instead.”
There were no comments, but someone gasped softly, like she couldn’t believe Holly would say such a thing.
A hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed: Matt. “It was an awful thing that happened, but it was nobody’s fault. We’ll have to be more careful, from now on.”
Yes, they would.
“And you do this all the time?” Mercy asked, with a considerable amount of doubt, as he scanned the familiar environs of Bell Bar. The place was evening-dark, even in the middle of the day, and that made him feel fractionally better, but not a lot. “Just…in the bar like this?”
Ratchet gave him a blank look, like he didn’t see what the problem was. “Yeah.” He’d ordered a damn Jaeger bomb and took a sip of it like it wasn’t the nastiest shit anyone had ever tasted. “So?”
Mercy lowered his voice a fraction, reaching for his water. Water. Ugh. Ava was pestering him about drinking during the day. He was relenting…when she wasn’t around to see him. “So you meet drug dealers in public. In bars.”
Ratchet nodded.
Mercy shrugged. Whatever. This wasn’t his usual sort of gig. If Ratchet did this routinely, who was he to judge? He was just the muscle.
Their waitress today was Holly, the little brunette with the old Hollywood curves and the big green eyes. She breezed around their table and settled with a swishing of her silk uniform shorts – blue, today, with a white shirt – and whipped out her order pad with a certain uncharacteristic quickness. She wasn’t a flirt – unless you counted her talking at Michael as flirting – but she was usually more solicitous than this. Today, she’d been fast and distracted, her smiles slender and false.
Probably had something to do with one of her coworkers getting murdered last night. When he’d heard, he’d felt the blood drain out of his face. How many times had he and Ava met for dinner here? Granted, never at three-thirty in the morning, but still; they didn’t live far from this place. The idea of a killer running loose made him want to put knives in people.
Clearly, it made Holly the waitress twitchy.
“What can I get you?” she asked, voice a ghost of its usual chirp.
Ratchet ordered the grilled chicken sandwich, veggies instead of fries, because he was a health nut. Mercy thought about the sore places in his bad left leg, the one that had been trapped beneath the bike and been operated on twice, and thought about his weight loss, his need for protein. “Burger,” he told her, “and the soup.” That would give him two servings of beef, and he expected a comment, a laugh, even a twitch of eyebrows from Holly, but she didn’t react at all.
“Right up,” she told them, and whisked away as quickly as she’d come. She’d always been a frightened-seeming girl, Mercy reflected, and now it was amplified.
He didn’t get to dwell on it anymore. Ratchet said, “I think that’s them.”
Mercy glanced up to see two men entering the bar, their mouths set in firm lines, their eyes sweeping back and forth like they were searching for someone.
Had to be them.
Mercy leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Have at it,” he told Ratchet, and resolved to look terrifying.
Holly saw them as she was leaving the kitchen, Mercy and Ratchet’s food balanced on the tray perched on her shoulder. Her eyes went to the table where the two Dogs sat, searching for a clear path through the crowd to get to them, and she spotted the two men who’d joined them.
Her heart came to a full stop, slamming up against her ribs. Nerveless, her hand opened, and the tray began to tilt.
Abraham looked older than when last she’d seen him: more flecks of gray in his hair, deeper lines pressed into the sunburned skin around his eyes and mouth. He looked like a military man, the way he was built and the way he carried himself, but he wasn’t. He was just a man who put on airs, and who had one of those raging metabolisms, that kept all the alcohol from turning into a beer gut.
At his side, Dewey looked the same: his colorless hair clipped short in a crew cut, his Adam’s apple sticking too far out of his throat, like his neck was bent at a wrong angle. Too skinny and awkward in his own skin. The top button of his red plaid shirt buttoned tight at the throat. His mouth damp and pink enough to make it look like he wore lipstick.
Holly felt the tray tipping off her shoulder, but was powerless to catch it. It fell, crashing down onto the hardwood, the china breaking with an awful sound, soup bursting across the boards like spattering blood, hitting the baseboards, the walls, her sneakers and bare legs. She felt every eye in the place dart toward her, and the explosion of noise. She dropped to her knees with a gasp, ducking down low over the mess, where the bar would conceal her from the men at the table.
“Shit!” Vanessa said behind her.
“You okay?” Matt asked, hurrying from his place beside the taps to stand beside her.
“I’m fine. Sorry. I’m so sorry,” Holly said, but she was anything but fine. She was close to cardiac arrest.
She reached for the broken dishes with trembling hands, picked up a shard of the soup bowl, and was burned by the heat it retained. She fumbled it, and the sharp edge sliced across her palm, bright blood welling up in its path.
“Oh no,” Matt said, crouching down. “Here, did you cut yourself? Damn, it’s bleeding. Doesn’t look deep, though.”
On her knees, poised above the terrible mess she’d made, Holly stared transfixed at the blood. Her hand burned. Matt was right; the cut was deep. And all she could think about was the time she’d been threatened with a knife, the cool tip of it scratching lightly across her stomach, while the ropes cut into her wrists, and her ankles. That cut, if it had been made, would have been deeper than this one. It might have killed her, and then she wouldn’t have been here now, to spill food and make a big commotion that no one needed.
Some of the other girls were rushing from the kitchen, asking what the noise was about, already jumpy because of Carly and wondering if it had been a gunshot.
Matt was scooping up fragments of plate and handfuls of spilled lettuce, assuring them that everything was okay, as he glanced worriedly at Holly.
She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t sure she could, because when she stood, there would be people looking over this way, out of normal curiosity. And two of those people might be Abraham and Dewey, and then what would she do?
She would run. If they laid eyes on her, she would run as fast and as far as she could, and hope it was fast and far enough.
Mercy instantly disliked the look of these two. But then, when did he ever like drug dealers?
The older one had introduced himself as Abraham, a wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped, medium-sized man with a solid handshake. He wore a white t-shirt tucked into old Wranglers, no belt, a thick Carhartt jacket to fight off the winter chill, and boots that had seen better days. Typical working class guy, by all standards, but there was something in his face that set off the alarms in Mercy’s head. A strange, unnatural light in his colorless eyes, an insincerity to his smile.
The younger one, Abraham’s son-in-law Dewey, was just weird as hell. He’d shed his jacket and folded it carefully before laying it over the back of his chair. He was very thin, plaid shirt sinking into the concave cavity of his chest, his throat looking like a bent knee between his narrow shoulders and his awkward bobble head. His movements were slow and deliberate, like he was thinking hard about how to make each one of them just right.
Crazy redneck drug dealing hill people, both of them. They were in good company with the rest of their dealers.
Both had given Mercy measuring glances, their eyes getting big as they traveled up from the table to the top of his head. Mercy was glad he’d been there, for Ratchet’s sake. If the secretary was getting bad vibes off these two, he wasn’t showing it.
“We want to get outside our area,” Abraham said. “Where there’s more buyers.”
“And we heard we needed to ask you first,” Dewey said. He spoke slowly, carefully. Stupidly.
“That’s right,” Ratchet said. “The Dogs control the trade around Knoxville.” Not an ounce of threat or spin behind his words, just a friendly relaying of facts. “Where are you located now?”
“Pinewood.”
“Wow. Why’d you wanna come this far?”
“I heard good things. Thought it’d be nice to get outta the country for a little while.”
“You wouldn’t exactly be peddling shit downtown,” Mercy broke in, unable to keep quiet. He just didn’t like these guys. “You’d be outside the city.” He offered a wide, insincere grin. “Just saying. This ain’t exactly Vegas, boys. If you country mice are looking to hit the big time, Knoxville’s not the place to do it.”
Dewey made a face that was both confused and offended, brows plucking together over too-wide eyes.
Abraham snorted and said, “Trust us. Knoxville’s plenty big compared to where we come from. We ain’t tryin’ to get to the top of the ladder, just go up a rung or two.” His voice was friendly enough, but his gaze drilled into Mercy, an obvious challenge.
Cute
, Mercy thought.
Not impressed, asshole
.
“I think Merc is just concerned is all,” Ratchet said in a soothing tone, proving that he had at least some sense of when things were going badly. “It’s in the best interest of our…er,
associates
if they know what they’re getting themselves into.”
Abraham gave a low laugh. “Hey, boys, I’ve got the product; just tell me what to do with it. S’all I’m saying.”
Dewey’s eyes followed the path of a waitress – the blonde, Vanessa – with rapt fascination. Poor shithead had probably never laid hands on a woman.
Abraham glanced between the two of them. “Are we gonna be able to make a deal, or what?”
Ratchet nodded. “Most like, yeah. My president will want to see your product personally, and test it.” Which was code for Ratchet would take some of it, and they’d all see if he keeled over dead. “And then he’ll want to meet you personally.”
“The boss man’s pretty particular,” Mercy chimed in again, with an unhelpful smile.
“Yeah?” Abraham lifted his brows. There was that strange glittering in his eyes again, that gave Mercy the impression that something was very wrong here. “Mine too.”