North and Shaw Out of Office - Gregory Ashe Page 0,1
smell inside the old minivan was worse today, reminding him of mold under a bath mat—and the wind came off the Anheuser Busch brewery heavy with hops.
“What?” North was studying the street signs.
“Never mind.”
Pari and Chuck—the girls who had hired them to find a way to get the bros out of the bar—were waiting outside Radio Girls when they pulled up. They were still holding hands. Chuck looked about five feet taller than Pari with those combat boots, but from the way Pari tugged and Chuck trotted, Shaw guessed the combat boots weren’t really giving Chuck much of an advantage.
“Mom’s inside,” Pari said. “She’s really the one you need to talk to.”
“And you can stay,” Chuck said, her voice pleasantly husky. “Those fuckers will show up tonight, I’d bet on it.”
On the outside, Radio Girls didn’t look much different from the welding shop on one side or the bike repair shop on the other. Its gravel lot had only a pair of cars in the late afternoon—a Subaru, of course, and a Prius. The only real giveaway was the neon sign that showed a woman’s figure, back arched, breasts up, one leg stuttering an on-off kick, and the name of the bar. On a side street off Gravois, nobody was going to wander here.
“They picked this place on purpose,” Shaw whispered as he followed North through the door.
North nodded.
Inside, the dark wood and patched vinyl and splintered parquet dance floor could have come and gone in a million other bars and never been noticed. The touch here, the one that told Shaw this wasn’t his scene, was old movie memorabilia. Hollywood starlets mostly, pictures of famous, beautiful women in cinema going back to silent films. There were three bars, and Shaw found himself wondering if this place did enough business to keep the doors open. Aside from the couple in the corner—a pretty woman just shy of middle age, linen pencil skirt, powder blue cardigan; her companion was much, much younger with a buzz cut and a Volcom shirt and a chain wallet (Shaw wanted to sigh)—the only other occupants were two women behind the bar on the other side of the room.
“Not really what I was expecting,” North muttered, dropping back to walk at Shaw’s side.
“More leather? Pictures of busty blondes on Harley Davidsons?”
“Ha ha.”
“I think you’d be comfortable here. You’re just so tough and manly.” Shaw tugged on North’s work shirt, the kind a mechanic or gas station attendant might wear, with the patch on the chest that said Bud in a looping script. “You could probably help them change the oil or something.”
“Christ, you’re funny.”
“I think Chuck might be willing to lend you her boots. You guys could swap. Think about it: you could double your wardrobe!”
The boots touched a real nerve, and North huffed and pulled ahead, muttering, “You don’t have to be an asshole.”
At the bar, two women were waiting for them. One was obviously Pari’s mother: the same light brown skin, the same dark eyes, although her glistening hair was cut into a neat bob. The other woman was a blonde, the sides of her head shaved, the top long and spilling pink tips into her eyes. Shaw was starting to have an idea of what Pari looked for in a woman.
“I’m Daksha,” Pari’s mother said, shaking hands with them. “This is Bud.”
“Like your shirt,” Shaw whispered.
North elbowed him so hard that Shaw thought he might have cracked a rib, and Bud must have overheard—or noticed the nametag—because she crushed Shaw’s hand when she pumped it.
“They started coming in here about ten days ago,” Daksha said, wiping her hands on a towel; she smelled like fresh-cut limes when she put a Coke in front of Shaw. “They just showed up. Twelve of them. Fifteen.”
“Fifteen the last time they came in,” Bud said. “Twelve the first time.”
“The bros are multiplying,” North said, his thumb gliding up and down the neck of his Schlafly. “Do they cause trouble?”
“They’re a bunch of douchey white guys in a lesbian bar,” Bud said. “That is the trouble.”
Daksha sighed. “They take up a few booths right near the east bar. They’re loud. They laugh. They’re obviously laughing at us. But they never do anything that would be a legitimate reason to kick them out. They don’t say anything offensive, not to our faces. But they’ll go out on the dance floor and try to get women to dance with them, and then they go back and explode laughing.”
“It’s fucking up