Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (32 page)

“Just doesn’t look like their work,” Roddy said.

I thought it over as I put my feet on the floor. I remembered the faraway look in Billy’s eyes as he gazed out over the Strait of Georgia from behind his desk and wondered how bad things had to get before you had your own son killed. Kind of made me wonder about my old man. About how far I would have had to push him before he decided I was just too much of a liability to keep around.

“You don’t suppose Billy Bud finally had enough, do you?” I asked.

“We’ll never know, will we?”

The Zoo was quiet, mainly because half of the usual suspects were missing. Norman had taken the bus to Harborview to get his arm dressing changed. Big Jack, Heavy Duty Judy, Large Marge, and Little Felix had gone along for the ride, leaving a skeleton crew to man the bastions of bacchanalia.

Red Lopez played eightball with Billy Bob Fung and a couple of locals. Yelling and screaming every time he made a shot. The jukebox was hammering out “Whip It” by Devo when Rachel Thoms walked in the front door. All of a
sudden, I could hear my pulse. She stood for a moment, as everyone does, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then strode confidently along the bar, moving toward the commotion in the back of the room.

I had no idea how she knew to look for me here, and, unless I was mistaken, the Zoo wasn’t her kind of place at all. She spotted me sitting in the mezzanine and walked in my direction. As she passed the pool table, somebody said something. She hesitated and turned toward whoever had spoken to her.

I read her lips. “Excuse me?” she said.

That’s when I heard the magic words.

“Ain’t it a beauty?” Red inquired.

The bar went freeze-tag silent. No chuckles or clicks or bangs or bells or whistles. The assembled multitude remained frozen in place, waiting for the moment to play itself out. They’d seen this movie before. This was the end of Act Three. The part where whoever found herself gazing down at Red’s appendage ran screaming into the street. A shiver of morbid anticipation ran through the room like a funny-bone current.

Only, inexplicably, that’s not what happened. Instead of staging the oft-witnessed elbows-and-assholes retreat, the gorgeous Rachel Thoms looked vaguely amused and steadfastly held her ground. As she leaned forward and peered myopically into Red’s palm, the crowd leaned forward with her. After a nearly unbearable interval, during which she gazed at the organ from several angles, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her reading specs. Settling the red half-glasses onto the end of her nose, she once again peered down at Red’s now puckering package. After
yet another uncomfortable moment, she raised an eyebrow, nodded knowingly, and waved a stiff finger at the rapidly retreating rod. “You know…,” she said, looking Red in the eye, “…that looks just like a penis…but much, much smaller.”

For the briefest of seconds, it was as if the air had been vacuum-pumped from the room, leaving the throng bugeyed, collectively gasping for oxygen that wasn’t there.

Then the place came unglued. People slid out of chairs and rolled among the gum wrappers and peanut shells littering the floor. Billy Bob Fung threw himself onto the pool table, where he rolled from rail to rail like a beached whale, scattering the brightly colored balls hither and yon as he thrashed about, spouting his laughter to the ceiling. Back by the front door, somebody pounded on the bar and brayed like a donkey. A glass shattered on the floor as the wave of laughter and derision rose to the rafters like a tsunami.

Just as things began to settle down, somebody repeated the punch line at top volume. “…but much, much smaller,” he bellowed, and the place erupted again.

By that time, Red had packed himself back into his jeans and beaten a muttering, head-shaking retreat to the men’s room. When I looked over at the narrow stairway, Rachel Thoms was standing there. “Nice crowd here,” she commented.

“Never a dull moment,” I assured her.

I offered her a seat. She nodded past my right shoulder, where Ralph leaned against the wall. Together, we watched him nod off with his mouth so wide open you could have dropped a pool ball inside. His brown and broken teeth reminded me of those old pilings sticking up from the Hylebos Waterway.

“How about someplace we don’t have to shout?”

I swept my arm across the room and grinned. “But you’ve achieved full icon status here today,” I said. “They’ll talk about this for years.”

She grinned back. “I’ll have to remember to include it in my bio,” she said.

I wobbled as I got to my feet. She noticed.

“I shouldn’t be driving,” I admitted.

“I’ve got a cab outside,” she said, and let her smile loose on me.

I kept my feet, but just barely. “Pretty sure of yourself,” I managed as she turned away.

She smiled and started down the stairs. “You coming?” she asked, without looking back.

I said I was.

Photograph by Skye Moody, 2004

G.M. Ford escaped teaching English at a community college to write full time. He never (well, rarely) suffers fools, and he enjoys music, cooking, eating other people’s cooking, boating, golfing, and arguing about everything under the sun. He is the author of more than a dozen novels, including
Cast in Stone
,
The Deader the Better
,
Red Tide
, and
Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca?