good day!”
Dixie laughed. “Okay, apron’s in the drawer. Let’s get to work.”
****
Ed Saxton, Cracker to his teammates, sat in a black SUV. His shades purged the brilliant noon sun. Last night, he’d grabbed some chow with the other men at Lt. Bach’s place, then headed to his bachelor suite for a few z’s. He’d tossed and turned, disturbing images keeping him awake. Mostly replaying that piece of human shit raping his sister.
Before the sun mounted the horizon, he’d woken up and went for a five-mile run. He’d dropped into the Erotic Bean and spoke with CDR Hunter before heading to Ramona.
A few minutes past eleven, Melodie Kallis backed out of the garage and headed south. Cracker kept his distance and followed.
Parked along the street behind a dented white pickup with rusted-out wheel wells, he watched Melodie walk down the sidewalk in the worst part of El Cajon. Litter choked the curbs and garbage cans overflowed with refuse. Men in soiled clothes, strung out on opiates, sat propped against store fronts to ride out their highs. Two women in miniskirts, heavy makeup, and skimpy blouses that revealed their best attributes, stood on either side of a lamp post, looking for a John to earn a few bucks.
Ed sighed. He sure as hell didn’t make it a practice to hang out in shitholes like this, since it reminded him too damn much of his own roots in Detroit.
He watched Melodie enter a seedy lookin’ bar. The paint had peeled off the face of the two-story building. A real dive, where the front window was so smeared, he could barely make out the name Copperhead Lounge. Why’s a rich girl going into a place like that? He noticed she wore sunglasses, washed-out jeans and a blue tank. Nothing about her stood out as wealthy. Even the turquoise purse she carried screamed Walmart rollback.
Cracker sauntered across the street, eyeing the occupants decaying from self-inflicted abuse before he gripped the brass door handle and entered the bar.
Without much interior lighting, he removed his shades and slid them on top of his head. The lounge smelled like smoke and stale beer. Couldn’t smoke inside anymore, even in places that served a liquid lunch. Yet, the stench had seeped into the dark wall paneling. The place was narrow. Rectangular in shape. A dingy joint with a couple low-hanging lights over the bar.
Customers, mostly men, filled the place to half capacity. Melodie had taken a seat in the far left corner near a hallway, the sign above her head pointing to the bathrooms. She’d removed her shades as well and Cracker got his first good look at Kallis’s sister when he sat down a couple tables away. A beautiful young woman. Smooth, perfect skin and deep brunette hair.
A chick sauntered over from the bar wearing a low-cut t-shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Whatever’s on tap,” he said before she could ask.
The server sized him up, then smiled. “Sure thing.”
Instead of heading to Melodie’s table, the waitress carried on to the bar. Did that mean she knew Melodie wouldn’t be staying long?
His answer strode in with a hip-hop-baggy-jeans-hanging-off-his-ass stride. The kid, no more than eighteen, wearing his baseball cap backwards, slid into the chair across from Chandler’s sister.
Cracker might have left the hood years ago, but he recognized the exchange of goods for money about to unravel. The punk slid his hand across the table, and shoved the drugs under her napkin. Melodie stretched her slender arm across the scarred tabletop and placed a wad of cash in his palm.
The deed completed in a few seconds and the dealer was gone. Ed wasn’t exactly shocked that Melodie self-medicated her trauma with drugs. He’d done the same damn thing as a teenager. Thanks to Ditz, they knew Melodie was thirty-one. Same age as Ed.
He expected her to quickly disappear into the ladies’ room to consume, smoke or shoot whatever narcotic was under her napkin. Instead, she just stared at the concealed substance. He recognized the silent battle. The same one he’d experienced.
If it wasn’t for an old man who’d lived two doors down from his childhood residence on a street that looked more like a war zone than a neighborhood, Ed wouldn’t be a SEAL today.
He probably wouldn’t even be alive.
The old boy was in his seventies. A veteran. Spent thirty years in the Marines. His wife had died from cancer long ago. Said he couldn’t sell the home they’d bought together as newlyweds, and remembered when the neighborhood wasn’t