her brutal rape in the parking lot of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office in Cleveland, Ohio, Dana swiveled back and forth on her stool at the Smokin’ Oyster Bar on Fort Myers Beach in Southwest Florida and ordered up her fourth beer of the morning.
The bartender twisted off the cap from an ice-cold Bud Light and slid it over with a smile. He needed to shout to be heard clearly above the group of drunken tourists who were noisily punctuating the sounds of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline on the jukebox over in the corner with the requisite ‘bah-bah-bum!’
Wiping up a puddle of spilled beer on the section of bar directly in front of Dana, the bartender yelled, ‘How’s your vacation going?’
Dana looked up at the man and gave him the once-over. Different guy than the one who’d served her the first three longnecks of the morning. About forty-five years old. Longish salt-and-pepper hair. Solid build. A throwback hippie quality about him.
‘How’d you know I was on vacation?’ she shouted back.
The bartender waited for a pause in the music and winked. ‘Tan lines,’ he said, then immediately moved farther down the crowded bar to attend to the group of rowdy bikers hollering for more shots. Having picked their poison for the day, this particularly motley crew had settled in to do mortal combat with Jack Daniel’s – no beer chasers required.
Dana leaned back her head and took a long swallow of her beer as the bartender moved away, savouring the way the icy alcohol cut into the back of her throat. A warm breeze blew gently through the tiki bar that featured no walls and a thatched roof, fluttering her short blonde hair around her head and keeping her from sweating like a pig.
Even in March, the mercury had already reached eighty-five degrees in Southwest Florida, and thank God for that. If nothing else, it was certainly a far cry from Cleveland, where the wintry weather hadn’t loosened its icy grip on the city one little bit since Dana had left. Then again, Cleveland had always been a place where summertime never started until somewhere around mid-June. A gloomy place where the skies that hung over Lake Erie remained gray and cloudy and pregnant with either rain or snow long after spring had officially sprung.
A place where Dana had lost her will to fight the good fight and had instead simply given up.
With her checkered past with the bottle, Dana knew there was no way in hell that she should have been drinking anything stronger than ice-water with a lemon twist, but they didn’t call alcoholism a disease for the simple fun of it. The siren song of the booze had finally won her over again after all that useless fighting, dragging her down to the same sorry place she knew all too well. The same sorry place she’d found herself following the deaths of Crawford Bell and Eric Carlton. The same sorry place she’d promised herself she’d never visit again.
Dana closed her eyes and sighed. Then she opened them up again and shrugged her shoulders. Fuck it. Lifting her beer bottle, she took another long drink and swished around the beer in her mouth.
With everything Dana had gone through in her life she deserved a drink whenever she felt like it. There was nothing for her to feel guilty about here. Nothing over which she should feel remorse. Those kinds of bullshit feelings were better left to the circle-jerk AA meetings she had zero intention of ever attending again.
Dana swiveled her barstool in a complete circle and idly peeled the label from her sweating beer bottle as the jukebox kicked over to Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. Another orgasmic cheer rose up from the tables full of tourists.
Tapping her foot in perfect time to the infectious island music, Dana swayed her butt in her seat, feeling at home here. Fort Myers Beach was famous for having one of the safest beaches in the world, and if there was one thing she needed to feel right now, it was safe. Down here in sunny Florida, the sugary-soft white sand reflected the sun’s heat so that you didn’t burn your feet on the way down to the warm water. The bathwater surf had absolutely no riptide to speak of. And the depth only dropped off a foot or two for every twenty yards you waded out.
Down here, she didn’t need to worry about insane women wearing black dresses calling her out by name on