Клер Донелли - The Big Kitty

The barmaid scooped up a stemmed wineglass from a shelf behind her—Sunny noticed it was dusty—and the wine itself came from a box.

Not a big seller, apparently, she thought. I just hope it hasn’t turned to vinegar.

She left a tip, strolled over to Gordie’s table, and sat across from him.

He looked up from the half-empty beer he’d been contemplating and stared as if she were Dracula’s daughter, inflamed zits showing up even more clearly on his pale face. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the mood to go out for a quick drink. Been a while since I was in here, though.”

But as Sunny put down her drink, she found some things never changed. Ever since she could remember, the tables at O’Dowd’s had been cheap rounds of plywood on top of heavy steel pillars. The bases never sat straight, and the tops could give you splinters at a moment’s notice. They still could. The table wobbled, causing her wine to slop around in its glass.

“Heard you wrote a piece about Mom in the paper.” Gordie looked down at his beer. “Sorry, I haven’t read it yet.”

“It was more about the unfinished business she left behind,” Sunny told him.

“If you mean the ticket, I haven’t found it yet.” She had to strain to hear Gordie over the rowdy background noise. “Maybe she never actually bought the damned thing. Mom was getting a little older. She’d started losing track of stuff sometimes.”

“I know you’re depending on that money to fix up the house and get things on an even keel,” Sunny said. “Not getting it would be a real killer.”

She’d decided to approach this talk the same way she did search engine optimization for her website—throwing out keywords and checking the response.

The word “killer” didn’t seem to have any effect on Gordie. She decided to try another.

“Poor Ada changed a lot from the way I remember her as a kid. But I guess we all have.” She smiled, gesturing to Gordie. “Look at you, how you’ve slimmed down. I hope you didn’t do it the dangerous way—with amphetamines or something.”

Gordie flinched and took a quick look around the nearby tables. A bit of an overreaction, since they were all empty. Okay. She could mark down a definite hit at the mention of amphetamines.

“I hope you don’t mind that I wrote that article,” she went on. “Maybe I should have mentioned it the last time we talked.”

“Why?” Gordie asked. “Did you say something bad about me—or Mom?”

“No, but ever since I visited with you, somebody’s been playing tricks on me.”

Except for a little interest, Gordie wasn’t really showing a reaction.

“Yeah, somebody got into my car, somebody was making trouble outside my house—”

Again, nothing appeared to register with Gordie. He blinked at her, a little puzzled, and said, “That’s messed up.”

All right, Sunny thought, looks as if I’ll have to up the ante.

“It made me wonder if someone was afraid of that story I was doing.” She gave him a hard look. “Afraid that something might turn up to suggest that what happened to your mother wasn’t an accident.”

She had all of his attention now. “What do you mean?”

“When’s the last time your mom used those cellar stairs?” Sunny asked.

For a long moment, Gordie’s eyes refused to meet hers. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “But then, I haven’t lived there in a while.” He looked as if he were trying to push something away.

“But you were there when your father was still alive. I hear that’s when she stopped using those stairs.”

This turn in the conversation had him definitely uneasy. He tried to take a sip of his beer, but stopped when he saw how his hand was shaking.

“Ada at least tried to clean up the places where she usually went,” Sunny told him. “But there was thick dust on those stairs. Years of it.”

“Just what are you saying?” Gordie demanded, his fists clenched on the table.

Impulse control issues, Sunny thought, remembering Will’s list of tweaker tip-offs. Let’s see if I get a reaction if I start circling around Ron Shays.

“I’m saying it could be dangerous for an old woman to have something worth a lot of money, when there’s criminal stuff going on around her. What do you think?” Sunny stared Gordie right in the eye. He looked as if she’d morphed from Dracula’s daughter to the Prince of Darkness himself.

But before he said anything, angry voices rose over the crowd noise and the music. Sunny turned to see a big, beefy guy in a hooded sweatshirt with a mullet and a healthy beer gut shove a skinny guy whose beard didn’t hide the acne scars on his face. Screaming like a banshee, Skinny launched a roundhouse right. Fatso ducked the wild swing, then slammed the other guy into the bar. Skinny came back with a bottle in his hand, smashing it against a bar stool.

Somebody ran past their table as people started to intervene.

Sunny turned back to Gordie to find a changed man.

Staring pale faced at the fighters, he muttered, “I know those guys, and they’re bad news.” Still staring, he bolted up from his seat. His hip jostled the unsteady table, and Sunny’s wineglass fell over.

Before she could grab it—or him—Gordie was out the door. Sunny had never seen him move so fast.

A second later, Will Price entered, his expression hard, his right hand hovering beside the pistol at his hip. He came right over to where Sunny was still sitting. “I saw Gordie run out and heard sounds of a fight when the door opened. Everything okay?”

Behind him, except for the thumping country music, the place had gone dead silent. When Sunny looked over at the bar, the crowd had gotten a bit smaller, as if several people had preferred not to be seen by a representative of the local law.

So much for my undercover career, Sunny thought.

“I’m fine,” she said, wiping at her lap as red wine began to dribble onto her jeans. “Nothing a wash won’t fix.”

She tilted the rickety table so the wine went the other way. Of course, that sent the glass rolling, too. Sunny grabbed it, then stared. “What the—?”

A lumpy mass sat in the bottom of the glass, stained the same color as the wine. At first she thought it might be past-due sediment, or maybe a drowned creature. Yuck. But as she brought it closer, she saw that the lump was made up of a bunch of smaller globs, some kind of melting capsules …

Capsules that were supposed to have dissolved in her drink.

13

Will’s eyes wentwide as he took in the gooey mass of pills in the glass. He whipped out a handkerchief, wrapped the glass up, then pulled Sunny to her feet. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. Who knows what this stuff is.”

Sunny resisted. “I didn’t drink any of it. There are two guys you’ll want to talk to. They were fighting—”

She stopped, looking around at the crowd. Somehow, Fatso and Skinny had disappeared.

“Gordie got spooked when he saw them, but they’re all gone now.”

Will turned to the crowd. “Anybody know the guys who were fighting?”

“What guys?” Jasmine the barmaid tried to give Will a sexy smile, but the effect was a bit ruined by her missing front tooth. None of the other patrons said a word.

Will’s face got stony as he scanned the boozy wall of silence lined up in front of the bar. “And I suppose you have no idea how that broken glass happened to wind up on the floor over there?”

Jasmine peered over the cheap plywood bar, her cleavage dangerously straining her little tank top. “Somebody musta got careless and dropped a bottle.” She bustled out with a broom and pan. “Thanks for pointing that out, Constable.”