Broward.”
“You’re working missing persons?”
I hadn’t meant the question to sound like she’d been demoted.
“Not just missing,” she said. “Gone. Like off the face of the earth missing. Not runaways, or gone on a lark, or start over somewhere else missing.”
“OK,” I said. Her tone made me think she’d already heard one too many skeptics on this.
“Similar circumstances? Hours? Physical appearances?” I asked, turning my former cop process on, giving her the professional courtesy she deserved.
“Yes. Thank you,” she said. “Enough of a pattern for somebody to take them seriously.”
OK, I thought. There’s enough sarcasm there to know she’s been butting heads with command.
“So, how can I help, Sherry?”
“You know a guy named Colin O’Shea? Former Philadelphia cop. Might have worked patrol during your time?”
It didn’t take long for me to come up with the face. Colin O’Shea. Kid from the neighborhood. St. Marie’s High School. Touch of the Irish. Good-looking guy. I’d run into him on the corners and after some football games when we were coming up. I got to know him a little better when we both became cops. He was a third- generation cop, like me. After a few at McLaughlin’s, when the others were half bagged and horseplaying, we’d talked. He gave off the hint that he wasn’t convinced that the blue tradition was his true calling, either.
But he was also a manipulative son of a bitch. Angry. The two traits had come together one night in the streets and O’Shea had, in a way, saved my ass.
“Yeah,” I said. “I knew him from back then. Haven’t seen him for years. He helping you somehow on this?”
“Not exactly,” she answered. “He’s my suspect.”
CHAPTER 2
The manager at Hammermills let her close down the bar early. It had been slow since the Monday Night Football game had ended in a blowout of the home team. The regulars had lasted through the hopeful first quarter and the suspicious second. At halftime the place was still upbeat and she’d been busting her ass. It was mostly a beer crowd with an occasional round of party shots. On this particular night one of the distributors had put a premium on bottled beer, two for one, so she’d been juggling them all night and carried a big chrome opener which she stuck in the back pocket of her tight jeans, and she knew the guys kept an eye on it when she walked from one end of the twenty-foot mahogany bar top to the other. The opener was like a thing with her. A girlfriend back home had given it to her for her very first bartending gig and confused her when she said it would make a difference. Now the girlfriend was long gone but she’d been working bars long enough to know there was always a bit of performance going on and always a subtle scent of sex. God knows why else she would wear these tight hip-huggers and the cotton shirt that rose above her navel and dipped low enough up top to show what cleavage she could manage to bunch together. Her boyfriend didn’t like it, except for when it was just for him, but to her it was a harmless part of the bartending business.
She’d gathered some good tips from the halftime crowd, and then when her regulars started cashing out their tabs in the third quarter she looked up and saw the home team was down by seventeen and registered why the place had gone from festive to grumbling sarcasm. By one o’clock she was restocking the coolers and draining the wash sinks. By two she’d totaled out the register. She’d made four hundred dollars in tips for the shift.
“I’m heading out, Mitch,” she called to the manager, who was still in his tiny office next to the kitchen. She heard his swivel chair creak and waited until he stuck his balding head around the corner.
“You got a ride, right?”
“Yeah, I do. A safe one,” she said and nothing more. She wasn’t the kind to share her personal life with coworkers, and for some reason she especially liked leaving Mitch out of the loop.
She stepped outside and listened for the door to snick shut and the lock to engage behind her. It was a warm night and the air was humid and thick with the smell of stale beer and discarded Styrofoam meals in the alley. There was a half moon high in the western sky, turned on its side like a white china cup. She