watch. “Take me home. And then I want you to get another car and take a little drive tonight. A car that’s not registered to you. Can you do that?”
“You mean steal one?”
“That’s up to you. Whatever you have to do, do it.”
“Drive where, Pop?”
“Bluefield.”
Chapter Fourteen
Bell had forgotten just how crummy the Tie Yard Tavern looked from the outside when it wasn’t nighttime, when the place was clearly, drearily visible: rotting roof, stained cinder block walls, slushy parking lot constantly garnished with glass from beer bottles smashed against those cinder blocks in fury or boredom or both. Like every bar, its charms were not aesthetic, but anesthetic.
It was still early—not yet 6 p.m.—but the roads were already at the edge of unmanageable. The thick snow made a wall as it fell, a wall that Bell’s Explorer had to cut through again and again. Finally she turned into the parking lot.
“You’d think this weather would keep a few folks home,” Rhonda murmured, surveying the rows of snow-covered, car-shaped lumps.
“For a lot of them,” Bell said, “this is home.”
They wanted to be discreet, thus Rhonda had called Kirk and asked to be let in the back door. Getting to that door was an ordeal; the owner of the Tie Yard Tavern was not, it was safe to say, a neat freak. Every item he had ever bought at a garage sale was stacked and wedged at the back of the building. Bell and Rhonda had to do as much climbing as they did walking.
“Any such thing as a fire code in this county?” Bell muttered as she scooted around an old wringer washing machine and moved a trash barrel to get to the door.
“Sure there is,” Rhonda said, engaged in her own clumsy waltz with a rusty bicycle and an upright piece of PVC pipe. “I bet the fire chief’s inside right now, having his fifth beer. You can ask him about it.”
Kirk the bartender met them at the back door. He turned out to be a middle-aged man with a nasty scar that ran diagonally from his right eyebrow all the way down to the left side of his chin. The slash must have been gruesome, Bell thought, and it was clear he’d had neither the time nor the cash to get it stitched up properly. His skin, as it aged and shrank back, had pulled and fussed at the long cut, so that now his whole face was implicated in the wound. His hair was a dirty mop of gray. He was skinny everywhere except in the gut, which meant his physique matched that of two out of every three adult males in these parts.
“When we get to where we can see the bar,” Kirk said, “he’s the second guy from the end.” He led them through a narrow, poorly lit tunnel that smelled like piss and beer. It occurred to Bell that those substances were really one and the same, because beer was, in effect, piss in the larval stage. “Hasn’t been here since the night he sat with that gal and kept her drinking,” Kirk added. “Noticed him right away. Seems keyed-up.”
“He’s here alone?” Bell asked.
“Yep, near as I can tell.”
They paused before a pair of waist-high white louvered doors that swung inward and provided access to the bar. The place was drowning in loud music and louder laughter. Here, nobody fretted over an approaching storm or plunging temperatures or the need to stock up on bread and milk. There was only noise and booze and the comfort of a willed oblivion.
Kirk put a hand on one side of the door, ready to pull it toward him. “You gals okay on your own? I gotta get back to work.”
“Thanks, Kirk,” Rhonda said. They watched him over the top of the doors as he returned to his dominion, fending off the shouts of those who had had to wait—shockingly—a good three minutes for a refill.
Bell quickly spotted the man at the bar. “It’s him,” she said.
“Like you thought.”
“Yes.”
“So what do we do now?” Rhonda said.
“When in Rome.”
“Huh?”
Bell pressed the edge of the louvered door. “We buy him a beer.”
* * *
Lenny’s face when he first saw Bell was like a balloon being filled by a faulty pump. It got big with shock, then went back to its normal size as he realized the necessity for playing it cool; it puffed up a little more after that as he took some deep breaths, holding them too long before exhaling.
He sat