Lake Country (11 page)

“Guy points to the next jar and says, ‘Now, this one
here? Belonged to a heart surgeon. Run you fifty thousand.’ Well, sure, the customer thinks to himself. Heart surgeon, schoolteacher, that makes sense. Then the customer sees a third jar and says, ‘Who’d that one belong to?’ Guy tells him, ‘United States Marine Corps, friend. That jar right there goes a million-two.’ ”

Bryce dropped his jaw and sat back on his stool, miming amazement. A regular performer, this one.

“The customer, he can’t believe it. Says to the guy, ‘You must be kidding. Why does a Marine cost so much more than a heart surgeon?’ The guy looks at him and says, ‘Pal, do you have any idea how many Marines it takes to come up with an ounce of brains?’ ”

At his own punch line, Bryce rapped the bar top with his knuckles, grinning like a crocodile. A crocodile, Hal thought, that had tried to eat a lawn mower. And just might have succeeded.

Hal put the beer down in front of him. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s a good one.”

“Makes me laugh every time I hear it.” Bryce raised his beer. “Cheers.”

Hal waited for him to finish off his victory chug, then said, “You got any more?”

Bryce sucked foam off his top lip. “More what?”

“Jokes.”

“Can’t think of any off the top.”

“Then I guess you can answer my question now.”

“What was the question again?”

Hal didn’t repeat it.

“Wait, I remember,” Bryce said. “You asked me what I wanted.”

“Starting to think you didn’t hear me,” Hal said.
He made a show of stacking clean mugs in the rack below the bar, keeping his hands below bar level.

“Oh, I heard you. I just figured it was rhetorical.” Bryce drained what was left of his beer in one long pull, then set the dregs on the bar. He slid the mug across. “I figured, we’re both smart guys. We know why I’m here.”

“For a smart guy, you don’t listen so good,” Hal said. “I told you once already. When you came around here the first time.”

“Yeah, but see, I’m thinking you weren’t being honest. I can tell that about people.”

“Can you, now?”

“Hang on a sec,” Bryce said. He held up a finger, fishing a cell phone out of his jacket pocket with his other hand. He slid the phone open, thumbed a few keys, put the phone to his ear, listened a minute. Pretty soon he nodded and said, “Sorry, I think I have the wrong number.”

He snapped the phone closed, put it back in his pocket. Looked at Hal. Shrugged. “See what I mean?”

Hal couldn’t wait to wipe the smile off this guy’s fucked-up face. “I guess I ain’t smart like a heart surgeon,” he said.

Bryce arranged himself on the stool like he was willing to go nice and slow.

“Try and look at it from my perspective,” he said. “I come in here before, ask you politely about this guy I’m trying to find. For business reasons. You tell me he hasn’t been in all day—okay, maybe I can buy that. Except then you run me and my partner out of here like you’re John Wayne and we’re the Indians.” He shrugged again. “I mean, fair enough, I’ve got a
little Chippewa blood on my mother’s side, but still. At that point I have to pause and ask myself: Being my bar, is this the way I handle a couple of clean, mostly white paying customers who aren’t causing me any trouble? If I’m telling them the truth?”

Hal didn’t respond. He only moved a little to his left.

“Then when I come back to try again,” Bryce said, “I find the whole bar closed. At ten on a Wednesday, no less. And
then
,” he said, nodding toward the counter, “when I call the number I see you have written down there?”

Hal followed his glance to the notepad he’d carried out with him from the office. He hadn’t even realized he still had it in his hand.

“A gal from the sheriff’s hotline answers,” Bryce said. “Something about that missing girl they’ve been talking about on the news. Imagine my surprise.”

Within view, Hal arranged bottles along the rail. Below view, he felt the smooth walnut stock of the 12-gauge coachman’s gun he kept on hooks beneath the liquor well.

“So, couple things,” Bryce said. “First, and this is important, you want to think twice about bringing up whatever kind of peacemaker you’ve got hiding back there.” He reached inside his jacket, brought a nickel-and-black autoloader out from the shoulder holster Hal had glimpsed earlier. Gunmetal clunked heavily on wood as Bryce placed his hardware on the bar in front of him. “Mine’s a lot closer.”

Hal gritted his teeth. Thought,
Hell
.

He exhaled slowly. From his angle, the way the son of a bitch had positioned the gun on the bar, Hal
could see straight up the pipe. Like a dark, empty round eye looking at him. The eye didn’t blink.

He thought it over and changed his angle. Straightened his back. Crossed his arms.

“Better,” Bryce said. He took his hand off the gun. Left the gun on the bar where it was. “Now, I can sense you’re a man with some principles. I respect that. Problem is, me, not so much.”

“Huh,” Hal said. “Hard to believe.”

“Could be genetic,” Bryce said. “Or maybe just bad parenting. But you see the conflict we’re left with. You being you and me being me.”

While Bryce talked, Hal studied the guy’s eyes. Not because he particularly wanted to, but because he couldn’t make himself look away. Once, in ’67, in Quang Tri, he’d run across a Force Recon sniper who carried half a dozen blood-crusted Vietcong teeth around with him in a cigar tin. He used to dream about that after the war. That guy then had the same kind of flat, cold light in his eyes as this guy now.

“Thing is, I already know I’m walking out of here with what I came in here to get,” Bryce said. “You don’t want to give it to me, but we can’t both win. And I don’t lose.”

“First time for everything,” Hal said. His voice came out sounding weaker than he liked.

Bryce nodded. “True. And I can see you’ve got a stubborn streak. Question is, how stubborn are you? Because if you’re stubborn enough, we both lose. At that point, I won’t feel like I have much choice but to give my partner a call. You remember him from before?”

“I remember him.”

“Well. If we get to that point—and I hope we don’t—I’ll probably feel like I’ll have to have him bring back that nice-looking lady in the Honda he followed away from here a bit ago. See if she can help us sort all this out.”

Hal felt his pulse jump. He thought:
Goddamn son of a bitch
. “She can’t help you,” he said.

“Yeah, but you’re stubborn, remember? How could I be sure?” Bryce shook his head. “I don’t know. It looked awfully sweet to me, the way you two parted company. I’ll bet if push came to shove, she wouldn’t be as stubborn as you are.”

In twenty-five years owning this place, Hal couldn’t remember ever feeling the way he felt just then: trapped behind his own bar.

He couldn’t stand the way his mouth had gone dry. Couldn’t stand the way his blood hummed inside his ears. He couldn’t stand
standing
there. Letting this guy talk to him.

“I think she needs a new muffler, by the way,” Bryce said. He leaned back on his stool, put his hands on his knees. He patted an easy rhythm with his fingers, then held his hands very still.

This was an invitation, Hal understood. The way the guy was sitting: hands on his lap, gun sitting alone on the bar between them, unattended. A regular Old West routine. The barkeep and the gunslinger. Goddamned ridiculous.

“So, you tell me,” Bryce said. “What’s next?”

Hal looked at the gun. Looked at its owner. He wondered: Who was closer?

“Three bucks,” he finally said.

Bryce tilted his head. “Pardon?”

“For the beer.” Hal nodded to the empty mug still sitting on the bar near the gun. “You owe me three dollars.”

“Oh,” Bryce said. His crocodile eyes seemed to twinkle in the back-bar neon. “Right.”

He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. Without looking down at his hands, he opened the wallet, pulled a bill, and handed it over.

“Sorry I don’t have anything smaller,” he said.

Hal looked at the bill. A twenty. “I’ll get your change.”

“Much obliged,” Bryce said.

At the register, Hal traded the twenty for a ten, a five, and eight quarters. Something caught his eye as he counted the money into his hand, and an idea came to him. His pulse jumped again.

He forced himself steady. Thought,
Easy, now
.

Nice and easy does it
.

Hal finished counting coins, then made the same move he’d made a few hundred times a night for the past twenty-five years: He turned and slid the register drawer closed with his hip.

Only this time, in the half second his back was turned, using the clackity-shuck of the closing drawer for cover, he used his free hand to scoop a handful of margarita salt from the glass rimmer on the ledge.

“Funny,” he said on his way back. “I’m out of singles myself.”

“Perfect,” Bryce said, watching him all the way. “I can use the change for parking meters.”

Fast
, Hal thought.
Just be fast, is all
.

“But I like how you’re thinking business,” Bryce added. He held out his hand deliberately. A symbolic
gesture, Hal interpreted. “We’re making a transaction, you and me. Simple as that. Business doesn’t have to be complicated.”

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, you hatchet-faced prick
, Hal thought.

He placed the bills in the guy’s open palm. Weighted them down with the quarters.

In the next motion, he flung the salt hard with his other hand, aiming straight for those open eyes.

Damned if he didn’t hit where he was aiming too. Bryce gave a garbled shout and rocked back on his stool, blinking and pawing at the stinging grit in his face, as Hal went for the gun on the bar.

He grabbed it clean. Felt the weight of it come up in his hand even as he heard two bucks’ worth of quarters clattering down though the legs of the bar stool, hitting the floor. His thumb found the safety switch like it was the cash button on his register. Right there where it belonged. The pebbled grip found its place in Hal’s palm. The smooth curve of the trigger found the crease of his finger. All just as fast as that.

And still, even with salt in his eyes, the son of a bitch was faster.

Later on, when it was too late to matter, Toby Lunden would wonder why he sat there in the Navigator, in the lot behind that bar, waiting like he’d been told, when his head and his gut told him to do differently.

Everything had swerved off in some new direction he hadn’t seen coming. Somehow Toby had gone from calling the shots to feeling like he was in over his head; he didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on anymore and didn’t think he really wanted to know.

This would have been the perfect chance for him to cut loose of the whole situation. It would have been so easy: While Bryce was inside, doing whatever he was doing, Toby could have dropped the Navigator into gear and said sayonara. He could have left Bryce there.

So why hadn’t he?

Was he really that pissed off at Darryl Potter? Or was he really just that scared of Bryce?

Or was he kidding himself?

Maybe somewhere deep down, he and Bryce weren’t so different after all. Toby wasn’t a gambler himself, but in running a book the way he ran it, he
knew how to judge an opportunity. Maybe it really was about the dough.

Why else had he followed instructions when Bryce told him to pull into the alley, around back of the building, out of view of the street?

What else could have kept him sitting there even after he heard the muffled bang inside the building? Because it sure sounded a hell of a lot like a gunshot to Toby, and Toby didn’t do gunshots. He was a numbers guy.

Yet he was still sitting there when Bryce let himself out the back door ten minutes later. He was still sitting there when Bryce climbed into the passenger seat and hauled the door shut behind him. He was still sitting there when Bryce looked over and said, “Now would be the part where you start driving.”

Toby didn’t need to be told that part twice. He cranked the engine and backed up too quickly, nearly clipping the garbage Dumpster with the rear bumper. He skidded the brakes, threw the truck into go, and mashed on the gas. He cornered out of the alley hard enough to make the tires whine.

“Chill, kid,” Bryce said calmly. He leaned forward and checked himself in his visor mirror, probing the skin under his eyes with his fingers. “We’ll look dumb on television if we get pulled over here.”

“Oh, man, what the hell,” Toby said. It took every bit of will he had to keep the needle on the speedometer under the limit. It felt like they were crawling. He felt like he was losing it. “Hell. What the hell, what the hell.”

“What the hell what?”

“What the hell happened back there?” Toby said.

Bryce opened his eyes wide, angling his head back and forth like he was checking his mascara. “I miscalculated,” he said. “I can admit it.”

Toby took a left and kicked up his speed as much as he dared. Every oncoming car made him cringe and want to hide. “What does that mean, you miscalculated?”

“Old bastard had some gristle, I’ll give him that.” Bryce pushed up the visor and turned in his seat. “Can you believe he almost got the drop on me?”

Toby looked over as they passed under a streetlamp. Bryce’s eyes looked raw, and his hairline was damp, as if he’d just washed his face. Toby felt like his throat was closing. With a catch in his voice, he said, “What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t
do
anything
to
him,” Bryce said, making imaginary quotation marks in the air. “He made choices that caused events to occur. Hang another left up here.”

Toby did as he was told. He felt his mind shutting down, numbing over. How had he gotten himself into this?

Bryce rode along for a moment, studying the floor mats, then finally shook his head. “Guess it goes to show you,” he said. “You never know what people might do.” He reached out, grabbed Toby’s phone from its cradle, and turned it over in his hand like a piece of alien technology.

Toby didn’t like him holding his property for some reason. It seemed like a stupid thing, but he didn’t like it. He said, “What are you doing?”