Winter at the Door (5 page)

The drunk man spotted him. “You call the cops and I’m gonna shoot,” he threatened. “Now gimme another drink.”

“Aw, jeez,” the bartender complained. “Dammit, Henry, why d’you always have to—”

The trapped woman was turning blue. Lizzie got right up in the guy’s face, hoping her guess about him was right.

“Henry, listen to me, he doesn’t have to call the cops. I am one, okay?”

A cop with a gun, too; Chevrier had not yet issued her a duty weapon, but she had her personal piece, the Glock semiauto she always carried, tucked into her leather satchel.

There were already too many guns in this situation, though; adding a second one might just make it worse.

“Go ahead, pour him another drink,” she told the bartender, not taking her eyes from the intoxicated man’s face.

“A double. On me,” she added when the bartender hesitated.

Because the guy had the woman locked in one arm, his weapon clutched in his other hand, and he’d have to use one of them to pick up his fresh beverage, wouldn’t he?

But when the bartender put the glass down hurriedly, the man ignored it, a wild look of injured righteousness coming into his eyes. “Ain’t gonna diss me no more, are ya?”

He gazed around belligerently, as a strange
gak-gak
sound clacked from the throat of the blond woman. Her hand fell from her captor’s thick forearm.

“Henry,” said Lizzie. “You’re hurting her. Let her go.”

But Henry’s mind—or “mind,” Lizzie thought impatiently, since if ever a word deserved air quotes it was that one, used in connection with Henry—was now occupied by the tricky puzzle of grabbing his drink without giving up either the gun or the girl.

Meanwhile the bartender babbled on the phone to someone who
was seemingly not too interested in Area 51’s patron-pacification problem. “How the hell do I know if it’s loaded?” he was yelling.

Yeah
, Lizzie thought, staring at it. And why, precisely, had she thought coming out tonight was a good idea?

“No, it ain’t a domestic dispute,” the bartender yelled into the phone. “It’s Henry, he ain’t had a girlfriend since Noah built the Ark, for Pete’s sake. He just grabbed Missy ’cause she was handy, that’s all. Now, are you going to—”

Behind the bar, a police-band scanner sputtered. In case
Hollywood Squares
got boring, Lizzie supposed. Beside it a huge jar of pickled eggs stood next to a Paul Bunyan bobblehead doll.

Oh, yeah, this is my kind of place
, she thought, recalling her usual haunt back in Boston, a place with a weekend jazz trio, dark leather booths that were dimly candle-lit, and a chalkboard bar menu listing a dozen brands of single-malt Scotch.

Leaning over, the drunk man broke into her nostalgia trip by attempting to slurp fresh booze from the glass using only his lips. The maneuver loosened his grip on the blond woman’s throat enough for her to drag in a gagging breath.

But only one. “Dammit, Henry,” said Lizzie.

She didn’t want to hurt him. Not permanently, anyway.

Still, he wasn’t cooperating, so when he leaned over for his next sip, she stepped past him and pivoted on her left foot while kicking him very hard in the back of his knee with her right.

“Blearrgh!” he exploded, his arms flying up reflexively as the anguish of a mashed peroneal nerve suddenly took precedence over any and all other concerns.

The woman took two short, staggering steps and collapsed to her knees, dragging in great whooping breaths. The drunk’s gun, a mean-looking little Raven .25, clattered to the sticky floor.

Lizzie grabbed the weapon, popped the magazine. Empty. She pulled the slide back as the bartender watched, wide-eyed.

There was a round in the chamber.
Jesus
.

“Aw, Henry,” moaned the bartender, “why’d you want to go around with it loaded, for Pete’s sake? Now you’re in trouble.”

By now the blond woman had recovered somewhat and made her way to the back of the room through a door marked
LADIES
.

“Call the cops back,” Lizzie told the bartender sharply. “Say there’s an officer in here with a suspect in custody, who would appreciate the freaking honor of their presence like right the freak now.”

Her heart was still hammering.
Jesus, it was loaded
.

“They’re already on the way. But he’s not a bad guy,” the bartender told her. “Just once in a while he gets a little—”

“What, murderous?”
Oh, Christ on a freaking cracker
.

But … she came to a quick decision.
This is going to come back and bite me in the ass, maybe
.

But the guy behind the bar knew Henry better than she did, and when she came out of the ladies’ room even the recently assaulted blond woman looked pityingly at the man lying on the floor clutching his knee.

“Gimme …’nother drink,” muttered Henry, his eyes filling with tears, just as the local cops burst in with guns drawn.

Quickly Lizzie slipped the ejected round from the .25 into her pants pocket. Noticing this, the bartender nodded minutely, tightlipped.

“Henry, you’re an idiot,” said the blond woman, then turned to the local officers in their dark gray uniforms, regulation black shoes, and tinny-looking badges.

“Forget it, Ralphie,” she said to the younger of the pair, a red-haired, strutting rooster of a man whose lip thrust out in a thwarted pout as she spoke, and whose gaze went to her chest and lingered there a moment before it reached her face.

“Aw, Missy, you can’t keep letting him get away with—” The other cop scowled disgustedly at the bartender. “You’re not going to press charges, either, I suppose,” he said. “Get us both here, now you’re going to say it was a false alarm.”

The big man on the floor had clipped his nose on the edge of the bar on his way down. The blond woman grabbed a bar towel, dumped some ice into it, and thrust it at Henry.

“I’m sorry, Missy.” He yelped when the cold towel touched his face
but kept it there. Then from behind it came a muffled question so dumb, it made Lizzie wish she’d kicked him harder:

“Can I have my gun back?”

The cops turned sharply to him again, the redheaded one’s hand going to the baton on his belt. The Raven .25 was already in Lizzie’s own belt, hidden by her leather jacket.

“He never had any gun,” she said firmly.

The bartender looked away, but he didn’t contradict her, and the sight of all the blood in the icy towel had startled Henry so much that for the moment he couldn’t speak, either.

Fortunately. “He’s just drunk,” said Lizzie. She didn’t know why she said it, only that this was her scene to handle.

That something was going on here and she was too new to know quite what, but in some strange way everyone in here was testing her, watching to find out how she dealt with a situation that she didn’t yet understand.

A different kind of fitness test, and if she flubbed it, any hope she’d had of doing anything useful in Bearkill—for herself or anyone else—would be over before it began.

“Drunk and rowdy, that’s all,” she continued. “Unless you disagree?” she asked Missy. The blond woman had been the one with an arm wrapped around her throat, after all.

But Missy just nodded. “No harm done.” She took a gulp of her beer, gone flat in its glass. “Go on, you guys, it’s fine.”

At this, the older cop made a face of disgust and left, but the younger, carrot-topped one approached the man on the floor.

“Hey, Henry. C’mon, get up. Let’s get you home, huh?”

A wet snore was the only reply. The young cop bent to shout “Henry!” in the sleeping man’s ear; still no response.

So maybe the rooster act was just that, Lizzie thought as she watched the cop shake Henry’s shoulder, not unkindly; maybe it was an act he put on with the uniform, and this cop was okay.

Time would tell. Sighing, the cop straightened. “Can’t budge him.”

“Forget it,” said the bartender. “He’ll wake up by the time I’m ready to close. I’ll run him up to his place then.”

Another surprise; back in Boston, if you passed out in a bar, you could wake up in an alley missing your wallet—or in a hotel bathtub, packed in ice and minus a kidney.

Though that latter possibility was likely just urban legend; the only “organ theft” she’d ever seen herself had turned out to be a revenge murder, not quite cleverly enough disguised.

“Okay, I’m going now,” said Missy, grabbing a purse and jacket from the back of a barstool.

The clock behind the bar was shaped like a flying saucer; glancing at it, she added, “Cripes, Ma’s up watching the baby. She’ll be—”

The bartender made a snorting noise. “Hey, you’re just lucky your dad’s not home,” he said, and the girl rolled her eyes in agreement.

“Wait,” said Lizzie, swallowing the last of her own beer. “I’ll walk out with you.”

Because maybe this was just a quiet little town out in the middle of nowhere, with—by several orders of magnitude—more wild animals than criminals. Maybe Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier was spooked for no good reason over the deaths of four ex-cops.

And maybe Lizzie’s search for her long-missing niece, Nicki, her dead sister’s child and her own only living relative, would hit a dead end here.

But maybe not. And if not, she’d need contacts of her own. The barkeep shot her a nod and a thumbs-up; he wouldn’t let her pay for the beer, either.

So she’d passed his test, apparently, and possibly now she could strike up an acquaintance with Missy, too.

Gotta start somewhere
, Lizzie thought as she followed the blond woman out the door.

“Don’t say it, okay?” Missy dropped the new yellow Jeep Wrangler into gear and shot away from the curb.

Lizzie had left her own car at home, opting instead for the walk, which was only about ten minutes, and now she was glad.

“Say what?” she asked. “You mean, ‘What’s a nice girl like you—’ ”

Missy joined in sarcastically. “ ‘—doing in a place like that?’ ”

She went on: “ ‘And so pretty, too! You don’t belong here, you should move to the big city!’ ”

But her scathing tone told Lizzie that being pretty hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses for Missy Brantwell.

“Yeah, well. I did wonder,” Lizzie admitted. “You’re—”

In general it made no difference if people were good-looking or not, she’d found; looks were the frosting on a cake that could be moldy or stale.

Or even poisoned. But Missy wasn’t just pretty. In the truck’s dashboard glow, she was flat-out gorgeous, from her pale curly head to the toes of the perfectly white sneakers she wore.

“You didn’t exactly get beat with the ugly stick, either, and you’re here,” Missy pointed out.

Yeah, but I’m not stuck here. And I’m not getting throttled by a drunk in a saloon
, Lizzie thought, ignoring the compliment.

But it was too soon to say this kind of thing to Missy, who made the turn onto Lizzie’s street without asking if it was the right place. She pulled up in front of the right house, too.

“Anyway, not that it’s your business,” she said, “but I was there picking up my paycheck. It’s my cousin’s place—I tend bar when it’s busy on the weekends sometimes, or starting next week it’ll be more work, because the season’s here.”

“Season?” It was only nine-thirty, but some of the houses on the street were already dark, including her own.

She’d forgotten to leave the porch light on. “How’d you know this was my place?”

Missy rolled her eyes in response. “Please. You’re a new county deputy, you’re from Boston, no husband, no kids. And you rented the Walsh house on Buckthorn Road, sight unseen.”

She went on, making a face of approval: “Which was lucky for you, by the way. At this time of the year there’s not many rental vacancies.”

So much for how the kid knew I’m a cop
, thought Lizzie.

“Gossip’s a sport in Bearkill,” Missy added. “If the whole town doesn’t know your shoe size, it’s only because word on that hasn’t quite gotten around yet, so get used to it.”

She pushed blond curls off her forehead. “As for the season, this right here is the heart of potato country and the harvest got an awfully late start, so right now there’s still about fifty zillion bushels of ’em out there, still waiting to be dug.”

Turning to Lizzie, she continued. “Local kids even get let out of school to do it, but there are grown-ups in the fields, too, and they’re hungry afterwards. And thirsty.”

“Huh.” So the houses filled up and the bar got busy. Crime went up, too, maybe. She put a hand on the Jeep’s door lever.

“Interesting. Well, thanks for—”

“Quite the little power trip you were on back there,” said Missy.

Lizzie stopped, peering back into the dim-lit truck. “Huh?”

Missy gestured at Lizzie’s leather satchel, which now held the gun that Lizzie had told the Bearkill cops didn’t exist, and the single round that had been in it.

“Back there in the bar, you wanted things to go a certain way, so you made them go that way. Just took it upon yourself to decide, no aye-yes-or-no from anybody who might know more than you did,” said Missy.

“Oh, come on,” Lizzie began defensively. “You can’t tell me any of you wanted me to—”

Missy smiled. “Uh-huh. Fair enough. You had your mind made up about it already, is all I’m saying. To make things go whatever way they might work out best for you.”

To which Lizzie had no reply, as Missy went on:

“Hey, I may be a country girl, but I didn’t just fall off the potato truck, myself, okay? You’re a big-city cop? Think you’ve seen everything, know what’s best way better’n any of the hicks around here?”

She dropped the Jeep into reverse. “Fine, and thanks for your help, but listen up: Henry’s dumb when he’s loaded, but when he’s sober he’s mean. And tomorrow morning when he wakes up to a sore leg, he’ll remember who’s got his pistol.”

“Oh.” Lizzie swung the Jeep door closed. It slammed harder than she intended. The Jeep backed out and pulled away down the street, leaving her in the dark out in front of her empty house.

O-kay
, she thought, picking her way across the damp, leaf-strewn
front yard to the door. Fortunately, the penlight on her key ring worked.