Tangled Up in You

T he glowing white neon above Morts Bar pulsed and vibrated and attracted the thirsty masses of Truly, Idaho, like a bug light. But Morts was more than a beer magnet. More than just a place to drink cold Coors and get into a fight on Friday nights. Morts had historical significancekind of like the Alamo. While other establishments came and went in the small town, Morts had always stayed the same.

Until about a year ago when the new owner had spruced the place up with gallons of Lysol and paint and had instituted a strict no-panty-tossing policy. Before that, throwing undies like a ring-toss up onto the row of antlers above the bar had been encouraged as a sort of indoor sporting event. Now, if a woman felt the urge to toss, she got tossed out on her bare ass.

Ah, the good old days.

Maddie Jones stood on the sidewalk in front of Morts and stared up at the sign, completely immune to the subliminal lure that the light sent out through the impending darkness. An indistinguishable hum of voices and music leached through the cracks in the old building sandwiched between Ace Hardware and the Panda Restaurant.

A couple in jeans and tank tops brushed past Maddie. The door opened and the sound of voices and the unmistakable twang of country music spilled out onto Main Street. The door closed and Maddie remained standing outside. She adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder, then pulled up the zipper on her bulky blue sweater. She hadnt lived in Truly for twenty-nine years, and shed forgotten how cool it got at night. Even in July.

Her hand lifted toward the old door, then dropped to her side. A surprising rush of apprehension raised the hair on the back of her neck and tilted her stomach. Shed done this dozens of times. So why the apprehension? Why now? she asked herself, even though she knew the answer. Because it was personal this time, and once she opened that door, once she took the first step, there was no going back.

If her friends could see her, standing there as if her feet were set in the concrete, theyd be shocked. Shed interviewed serial killers and cold-blooded murderers, but chatting up nut jobs with antisocial personality disorders was a piece of cake compared to what waited for her inside Morts. Beyond the no one under 21 sign, her past waited for her, and as shed learned recently, digging into other peoples pasts was a hell of a lot easier than digging into her own.

For Gods sake, she muttered and reached for the door. She was a little disgusted with herself for being such a wimp and a weenie, and she squelched her apprehension under the heavy fist of her strong will. Nothing was going to happen that she did not want to happen. She was in control. As always.

The heavy thump of the jukebox and the smell of hops and tobacco assaulted her as she stepped inside. The door shut behind her and she paused to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Morts was just a bar. Like a thousand others shed been in across the country. Nothing special, not even the array of antlers hanging above the long mahogany bar was anything out of the ordinary.

Maddie didnt like bars. Especially cowboy bars. The smoke, the music, the steady stream of beer. She didnt particularly care for cowboys either. As far as she was concerned, a pair of snug Wranglers on a tight cowboy butt couldnt quite make up for the boots, the buckles, the wads of chew. She liked her men in suits and Italian leather shoes. Not that shed had a man, or even a date, in about four years.

She studied the crowd as she wove her way to the middle of the long oak bar and the only empty stool. Her gaze took in cowboy hats and trucker caps, a few crew cuts, and a mullet or two. She noticed ponytails, shoulder-length bobs, and some of the worst perms and flipped bangs to ever come out of the eighties. What she didnt see was the one person shed come searching for, although she didnt really expect to see him sitting at one of the tables.

She wedged herself onto the stool between a man in a blue T-shirt and a woman with overprocessed hair. Behind the cash register and bottles of alcohol, a mirror ran the length of the bar while two bartenders pulled beers and blended drinks. Neither was the owner of this fine establishment.

That little gal was into AC/DC, if you know what I mean, said the man on her left, and Mad die figured he wasnt talking about Back in Black or Highway to Hell . The guy in question was about sixty, sported a battered truckers hat and a beer belly the size of a pony keg. Through the mirror Maddie watched several men down the row nod, paying rapt attention to beer-belly guy.

One of the bartenders set a napkin in front of her and asked what shed like to drink. He looked to be about nineteen, although she supposed he had to be at least twenty-one. Old enough to pour liquor within the layers of tobacco smoke and knee-deep bullshit.

Sapphire martini. Extra dry, three olives, she said, calculating the carbs in the olives. She pulled her purse into her lap and watched the bartender turn and reach for the good gin and vermouth.

I told that little gal she could keep her girlfriend, so long as she brought her over once in a while, the guy on her left added.

Damn right!

Thats what Im talking about!

Then again, this was small-town Idaho, where things like liquor laws were sometimes overlooked and some people considered a good bullshit story a form of literature.

Maddie rolled her eyes and bit her lip to keep her comments to herself. She had a habit of saying what she thought. She didnt necessarily consider it a bad habit, but not everyone appreciated it.

Through the mirror, her gaze moved up, then down the bar, searching for the owner, not that she thought shed see him plopped down on a stool any more than sitting at a table. When shed called the other bar he owned in town, shed been told that he would be here tonight, and she figured he was probably in his office examining his books or, if he was like his father, the inner thigh of a barmaid.

I pay for everything, the woman on Maddies opposite side wailed to her friend. I even bought my own birthday card and had J.W. sign it, thinking hed feel bad and get the hint.

Oh, geez, Maddie couldnt help but mutter and looked at the woman through the mirror. Between bottles of Absolut and Skyy vodka, she could make out big blond hair falling to chubby shoulders and breasts spilling out of a red tank top with rhinestones on it.

He didnt feel bad at all! Just complained that he didnt like mushy cards like the one I bought. She took a drink of something with an umbrella in it. He wants me to come over when his mother goes out of town next weekend and make him dinner. She brushed moisture from beneath her eyes and sniffed. Im thinking of telling him no.

Maddies brows drew together and a stunned, Are you shitting me? escaped her mouth before she knew shed uttered a word.

Excuse me? the bartender asked as he set the drink in front of her.

She shook her head. Nothing. She reached into her purse and paid for her drink as a song about a Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, whatever the hell that meant, thumped from the glowing neon jukebox and coalesced with the steady hum of conversation.

She pulled back the sleeve of her sweater and reached for her martini. She read the glowing hands of her watch as she raised the glass to her lips. Nine oclock. The owner was bound to show his face sooner or later. If not tonight, there was always tomorrow. She took a sip and the gin and vermouth warmed a path all the way to her stomach.

She really hoped hed showed up sooner rather than later. Before she had too many martinis and forgot why she was sitting on a barstool eavesdropping on needy passive-aggressive women and delusional men. Not that listening in on people with lives more pathetic than hers couldnt be highly entertaining at times.

She set the glass back on the bar. Eavesdropping wasnt her first choice. She much preferred the straightforward approach: digging into peoples lives and plumbing their dirty little secrets without distraction. Some people gave up their secrets without protest, eager to tell all. Others forced her to reach deep, rattle them loose or rip them out by the roots. Her work was sometimes messy, always gritty, but she loved writing about serial killers, mass murderers, and your everyday run-of-the-mill psychopaths.

Really, a girl had to excel at something, and Maddie, writing as Madeline Dupree, was one of the best true crime writers in the genre. She wrote blood and gore. About the sick and disturbed, and there were those who thought, her friends among them, that what she wrote warped her personality. She liked to think it added to her charm.

The truth was somewhere in the middle. The things shed seen and written about did affect her. No matter the barrier she placed between her sanity and the people she interviewed and researched, their sickness sometimes seeped through the cracks, leaving behind a black tacky film that was hard as hell to scrub clean.

Her job made her see the world a little differently than those whod never sat across from a serial killer while he got off on the retelling of his work. But those same things also made her a strong woman who didnt take crap from anyone. Very little intimidated her, and she didnt have any illusions about mankind. In her head, she knew that most people were decent. That given the choice, they would do the right thing, but she also knew about the others. The fifteen percent who were only interested in their own selfish and warped pleasure. Out of that fifteen percent, only about two percent were actual serial killers. The other social deviants were just your everyday rapists, murderers, thugs, and corporate executives secretly plundering their employees 401(k) accounts.

And if there was one thing she knew as certainly as she knew the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, it was that everyone had secrets. She had a few of her own. She just held hers closer to the vest than most people.

She raised the glass to her lips and her gaze was drawn to the end of the bar. A door in the back opened and a man stepped from the lit alley and into the dark hall.

Maddie knew him. Knew him before he walked from the shadows. Before the shadows slid up the wide chest and shoulders of his black T-shirt. Knew him before the light slipped across his chin and nose and shone in his hair as black as the night from which hed come.

He moved behind the bar, wrapping a red bar apron around his hips and tying the strings above his fly. Shed never met him. Never been in the same room, but she knew he was thirty-five, a year older than herself. She knew he was six-two, one hundred and ninety pounds. For twelve years hed served in the army, flying helicopters and raining Hellfire missiles. Hed been named after his father, Lochlyn Michael Hennessy, but he went by Mick. Like his father, he was an obscenely good-looking man. The kind of good-looking that turned heads, stopped hearts, and gave women bad thoughts. Thoughts of hot mouths and hands and tangled clothes. The whisper of warm breath against the arch of a womans throat and the touch of flesh in the backseat of a car.

Not that Maddie was susceptible to those thoughts.

He had an older sister, Meg, and he owned two bars in town, Morts and Hennessys. The latter had been in his family longer than hed been alive. Hennessys, the bar where Maddies mother had worked. Where shed met Loch Hennessy and where shed died.

As if he felt her gaze, he glanced up from the strings of the apron. He stopped a few feet from Maddie and his eyes met hers. She choked on the gin that refused to go down her throat. From his drivers license, she knew his eyes were blue, but they were more a deep turquoise. Like the Caribbean Sea, and seeing them looking back at her was a shock. She lowered her glass and raised a hand to her mouth.

The last strains of the honky-tonk song died out as he finished tying the strings, and he stepped closer until only a few feet of mahogany separated his gaze from hers. You going to live? His deep voice cut through the noise around them.

She swallowed and coughed one last time. I believe so.

Hey, Mick, the blonde on the next stool called out.

Hey, Darla. Howre things?

Could be better.

Isnt that always the case? he said as he gazed at the woman. Are you planning on behaving yourself?

You know me. Darla laughed. I always plan on it. Course, I can always be persuaded to misbehave.

Youre going to keep your underwear on tonight, though. Right? he asked with a lift of one dark brow.

You never can tell about me. She leaned for ward. You never know what I might do. Sometimes Im crazy.

Just sometimes? Buying her own birthday card for her boyfriend to sign suggested a passive/ aggressive disorder that bordered on crazy as hell.

Just keep your panties on so I dont have to toss you out on your bare butt again.

Again? Meaning it had happened before? Maddie took a drink and slid her gaze to Darlas considerable behind squeezed into a pair of Wranglers.

I just bet you all would love to see that! Darla said with a toss of her hair.

For the second time that night, Maddie choked on her drink.

Micks deep chuckle drew Maddies attention to the amusement shining through his startling blue eyes. Honey, do you need some water? he asked.

She shook her head and cleared her throat.

That drink too strong for you?

No. Its fine. She coughed one last time and set her glass on the bar. I just got a horrifying visual.

The corners of his lips turned up into a knowing smile that made two dents in his tan cheeks. I havent seen you in here before. You just passing through?

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