Big grinned under the mask. “I trash the place. God, I love this job.”
OUTSIDE, across the back lawn, down the bluff, over the top of the United Hospital buildings and Seventh Street and the houses below, down three-quarters of a mile away, a towboat pushed a line of barges toward the moorings at Pig’s Eye. Not hurrying. Tows never hurried. All around, the lights of St. Paul sparkled like diamonds, on the first line of bluffs, on the second line below the cathedral, on the bridges fore and aft, on the High Bridge coming up.
The pilot in the wheelhouse was looking up the hill at the lights of Oak Walk, Dove Hill, and the Hill House, happened to be looking when the lights dimmed, all at once.
The rain-front had topped the bluff and was coming down on the river.
Hard rain coming, the pilot thought. Hard rain.
2
SLOAN CARRIED a couple of Diet Cokes over to the booth where Lucas Davenport waited, sitting sideways, his feet up on the booth seat. The bar was modern, but with an old-timey decor: creaking wooden floors, high-topped booths, a small dance floor at one end.
Sloan was the proprietor, and he dressed like it. He was wearing a brown summer suit, a tan shirt with a long pointed collar, a white tie with woven gold diamonds, and a genuine straw Panama hat. He was a slat-built man, narrow through the face, shoulders, and hips. Not gaunt, but narrow; might have been a clarinet player in a fading jazz band, Lucas thought, or the cover character on a piece of 1930s pulp fiction.
“Damn Diet Coke, it fizzes like crazy. I thought there was something wrong with the pump, but it’s just the Coke. Don’t know why,” Sloan said, as he dropped the glasses on the table.
At the far end of the bar, the bartender was reading a Wall Street Journal by the light from a peanut-sized reading lamp clamped to the cash register. Norah Jones burbled in the background; the place smelled pleasantly of fresh beer and peanuts.
Lucas said, “Two guys in the bar and they’re both drinking Cokes. You’re gonna go broke.”
Sloan smiled comfortably, leaned across the table, his voice pitched down so the bartender couldn’t hear him, “I put ten grand in my pocket last month. I never had so much money in my life.”
“Probably because you don’t spend any money on lights,” Lucas said. “It’s so dark in here, I can’t see my hands.”
“Cops like the dark. You can fool around with strange women,” Sloan said. He hit on the Diet Coke.
“Got the cops, huh?” The cops had been crucial to Sloan’s business plan.
“Cops and schoolteachers,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.”
The bartender laughed at something in the Journal, a nasty laugh, and he said, to no one in particular, “Gold’s going to a thousand, you betcha. Now we’ll see what’s what.”
They looked at him for a moment, then Sloan shrugged, said, “He’s got a B.S. in economics. And I do mean a B.S.”
“Not bad for a bartender…So what’s the old lady think about the place?”
“She’s gotten into it,” Sloan said. He was happy that an old pal could see him doing well. “She took a course in bookkeeping, she handles all the cash, running these QuickBook things on the computer. She’s talking about taking a couple weeks in Cancun or Palm Springs next winter. Hawaii.”
“That’s terrific,” Lucas said. And he was pleased by all of it.
SO THEY TALKED about wives and kids for a while, Sloan’s retirement check, and the price of a new sign for the place, which formerly had been named after a tree, and which Sloan had changed to Shooters.
Even from a distance, it was clear that the two men were good friends: they listened to each other with a certain narrow-eyed intensity, and with a cop-quick skepticism. They were close, but physically they were a study in contrasts.
Sloan was slight, beige and brown, tentative.
Lucas was none of those. Tall, dark haired, with the thin white line of a scar draped across his tanned forehead, down into an eyebrow, he might have been a thug of the leading-man sort. He had intense blue eyes, a hawk nose, and large hands and square shoulders; an athlete, a onetime University of Minnesota hockey player.
Sloan knew nothing about fashion, and never cared; Lucas went for Italian suits, French ties, and English