John Connolly - The Lovers

That old proverb about people in glass houses had clearly never made an impact on Phil. He was the kind of guy who would throw a stone in a glass house, and then be surprised when it didn’t bounce.

“Understatement,” said Scotty. “Girl gave herself a jailhouse tattoo, couldn’t even spell her own name right. Three fucking letters. How hard could it be? Now she has ‘Lai’ tattooed on her arm, goes around telling people she’s half Hawaiian.”

“Wasn’t she in a cult?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t spell that right either, or else her hand slipped. Now she has to keep her left arm covered up, especially in church.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like Dan the Man is anybody’s idea of a catch,” said Jackie. “He lives with his mother and sleeps in a NASCAR bed.”

“Jackie,” I pointed out, “you live with your mother.”

“Yeah, but I don’t sleep in no NASCAR bed.”

I left them to it, wondering if those three should be the first guys I banned from the bar, and went to help Gary Maser stock the domestic bottles. I’d hired Gary shortly after I became bar manager, and he was working out well. When we’d finished, and I’d poured us both a cup of coffee, Jackie, Phil, and Scotty were still around, unfortunately. Jackie was reading aloud from the newspaper.

“It’s that guy again, the one from Ogunquit who got abducted by aliens,” he explained. “Says he can’t turn on his TV no more. Says the channels keep changing without him touching the clicker, and it makes his head buzz.” Jackie considered this for a time. “How come it’s always guys from Ogunquit that these things happen to?” he asked.

“Or Fort Kent,” said Scotty.

“Ayuh, Fort Kent,” said Phil. All three nodded in solemn understanding. It was a widely held belief down east that once you got a certain distance north in Maine, people became very strange indeed. Given that Fort Kent was about as far north as a person could go without taking out Canadian citizenship, it followed that its denizens had strangeness all wrapped up.

“I mean,” Jackie continued, “what do the aliens think they’re going to learn from snd ±learn froticking a probe up the ass of some fella from Ogunquit?”

“Apart from the obvious,” said Phil.

“Like not to do it again,” said Scotty.

“You’d think they’d abduct nuclear scientists, or generals,” said Jackie. “Instead, all they seem to do is take crackers and rubes.”

“Foot soldiers,” said Phil.

“First wave,” said Scotty. “They’re the ones the aliens will have to, y’know, subdue.”

“But why the probing?” asked Jackie. “What’s with that?”

“Could be someone was yanking their chain,” said Phil. “Some Venusian: ‘Yah, you stick a probe up their asses, and they light up.’”

“‘They play a tune,’” said Scotty.

“I just don’t understand it,” Jackie concluded.

At the end of the bar, there was a man scribbling in a notebook. His face looked familiar, and I thought he might have been in the previous week, although he wasn’t a regular. He was in his early fifties and wore a brown tweed jacket and an open-collared white shirt. His hair was short, and either he was aging well or he was spending a lot on Grecian. When I’d served him earlier, I’d caught a hint of expensive aftershave. Now he had a finger width of beer at the bottom of his glass. I wandered over to him.

“Get you another?”

As he saw me approach, he closed the notebook and glanced at his watch.

“Just the check, thanks,” he said.

I nodded and slipped him the tab.

“Nice place,” he said.

“Yeah, it is.”

“You been working here long?”

“Nope. Wouldn’t even be working today if one of the regular bartenders wasn’t sick.”

“So, what? You the manager?”

“Just the bar manager.”

“Huh.” He chewed his bottom lip, and seemed to consider me for a moment or two. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Next time.”

“Sure,” I said. I watched him leave. Jackie caught the look on my face.

“Something?” he asked.

“Probably nothing.”

But I didn’t have time to think about the stranger for the rest of the evening. Thursday was always microbrew night at the Bear, with beer specials, and that night we were hosting a small brewery named Andrew’s Brewing Company, a father-and-son operation out of Lincolnville. Minutes later, we were swamped, and it was all that I could do to keep us out of the weeds for the evening. Two large birthday groups, one almost entirely male, the other exclusively female, hit the restaurant simultaneously and, over the course of the night, began to meld into one indistinguishable whonks±uishable le of booze-fueled carnality. Meanwhile, there was rarely more than one seat free at the bar, and everyone seemed to want to eat as well as drink. Shorthanded as we were, it meant that Gary and I were working flat out for six hours solid. I didn’t even remember seeing Jackie leave; I must have been changing a keg when he wandered into the night.

“This is still February, right?” asked Gary as he made a batch of margaritas for Sarah, one of the regular waitresses who always kept her head covered with a scarf, which made her easy to spot on nights like this one.

“I think so.”

“Then where the hell did all these people come from? It’s February .”

At about ten thirty, things quieted down some, and there was time to restock and deal with our casualties. One of the line chefs had sliced himself badly across the palm of the hand with a paring knife, and the wound needed stitches. Now that the Bear was a little calmer, he was free to drive himself to the emergency room. Apart from that, there were the usual minor burns and heated tempers in the kitchen. I’d give the line chefs this much: they were always entertaining. The ones who worked at the Bear were better than most. I knew people in the business who spent a significant portion of their time bailing their chefs out from jail, finding places for them to sleep when their old ladies threw their asses out on the street, and, occasionally, beating them into submission just to keep them under control.

A group of Portland cops had taken up position near the door. Gary had been looking after them for most of the evening. The Bear was a popular hangout for local law enforcement: there was parking, the beer was good, it served food until closing, and it was far enough away from the Old Port and Portland PD headquarters to make them feel that they were off the radar. Perhaps its bunker-like aspect appealed to them as well. The Bear didn’t have many windows-and most of those were bricked up-and if all of the lights were switched off, it was pitch-black inside.

Now, as I watched, the crowd of cops parted slightly, and a familiar figure made his way to the bar. I had assumed that they were all Portland cops, but I was wrong. One of them, at least, was a statie: Hansen, the detective out of the barracks in Gray who, more than anyone else, I believed was relishing my current situation. He was fit looking, his eyes more green than blue, with very black hair and a permanent dark shadow on his face from years of shaving with an electric razor. As usual, he was better dressed than the average cop. He wore a well-cut dark blue suit and a blue paisley tie. A gold tiepin twinkled as it caught the lights above the bar.

He took a seat away from the main group and placed his near-empty glass on the bar, then put his hands together and waited for me to come to him. I let a couple of seconds go by, then resigned myself to having to deal with him.

“What can I get you, Detective?” I said.

He didn’t reply. His jaw moved as his bottom teeth worried against his incisors. I wondered how much he’d had to drink, and decided that it probably wasn’t much. He didn’t seem like a man who liked to cut loose.