Brian Freeman - Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7)

The Present

Serena spotted the Grand Am parked half a block from the Duluth bar. Someone was waiting inside the car.

Mosquitoes clouded in front of the headlights. The trumpets of a Russian symphony — something loud and mournful by Shostakovich — blared through its open windows. Serena smelled acrid, roll-your-own cigarette smoke drifting toward her with the spitting rain. Beyond the car, through the haze, she saw the milky lights of the Superior bridge arching across the harbor.

There were just the two of them in the late-night darkness of the summer street. Herself and the stranger behind the wheel of the Grand Am. She couldn’t see the driver, but it didn’t matter who was inside. Not yet.

She was here for someone else.

This was an industrial area, on the east end of Raleigh Street, not far from the coal docks and the paper mill. Power lines sizzled overhead. The ground under her feet shook with the passage of a southbound train. She made sure her Mustang was locked, with her Glock securely inside the glove compartment, and then she crossed the wet street to the Grizzly Bear Bar. It was a dive with no windows and an apartment overhead for the owner.

Cat was inside.

Serena felt guilty putting tracking software on the teenager’s phone, but she’d learned quickly that Cat’s sweet face didn’t mean she could be trusted.

When she pulled open the door of the bar, a sweaty, beery smell tumbled outside. She heard drunken voices shouting in languages she didn’t understand and the twang of a George Strait song on the jukebox. Big men lined up two-deep at the bar and played poker at wooden tables.

Inside, she scanned the faces, looking for Cat. She spied her near the wall, standing shoulder to shoulder with an older girl, both of them head-down over smartphones. The two made an unlikely pair. Cat was a classic beauty with tumbling chestnut hair and a sculpted Hispanic face. Her skinny companion had dyed orange spikes peeking out under a wool cap, and her ivory face was studded with piercings.

Serena keyed a text into her own phone and sent it. Look up.

Cat’s face shot upward as she got the message. Her eyes widened, and Serena read the girl’s lips. ‘ Oh, shit. ’

Cat whispered urgently in her friend’s ear. Serena saw the other girl study her like a scientist peering into the business end of a microscope. The skinny girl wore a low-cut mesh shirt over a black bra and a jean skirt that ended mid-thigh. She picked up a drinks tray — she was a waitress — and gave Serena a smirk as she strolled to the bar, leaving Cat by herself.

Serena joined Cat at the cocktail table where she was standing. The girl’s smile had vanished, and so had all of her adultness. Teenagers drifted so easily between maturity and innocence. She was a child again, but Cat was also a child who was five months pregnant.

‘I’m really sorry—’ Cat began, but Serena cut her off.

‘Save it. I’m not interested in apologies.’

She stopped herself before saying anything more that she’d regret. She was too angry even to look at Cat. Instead, by habit, she surveyed the people in the bar. It was a rough crowd, not a hangout for college kids and middle-class tourists like the bars in Canal Park. Hardened sailors came to the Grizzly Bear off the cargo boats, making up for dry days on the lake with plenty of booze. She heard raspy laughter and arguments that would spill over into fights. The bare, muscled forearms of the men were covered in cuts and scars, and they left greasy fingerprints on dozens of empty beer bottles.

In the opposite corner of the bar, Serena noticed a woman who didn’t fit in with the others. The woman sat by herself, a nervous smile on her round face. Her long blond hair, parted in the middle, hung down like limp spaghetti. She had an all-American look, with blue eyes and young skin, like a cheerleader plucked from a college yearbook. Maybe twenty-two. She kept checking a phone on the table in front of her, and her stare shot to the bar door every time it opened.

Something about the woman set off alarm bells in Serena’s head. This was a bad place for her. She wanted to go over and ask: Why are you here?

She didn’t, because that was the question she needed to ask Cat.

‘Why are you here, Cat?’

‘I wanted to go somewhere. I’m bored.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘Anna works here,’ Cat said. ‘She and I know the owner.’

Cat nodded at the waitress who’d been with her at the table. Anna was playing with her phone as she waited for the bartender at the taps. One of the sailors made a grab for the girl’s ass, and Anna intercepted his hand without so much as a glance at the man’s face.

‘She used to live on the streets, like me,’ Cat told Serena. ‘We’d hang out together. If she found a place to sleep, she let me crash there, too.’

‘I get it, but that’s not your world anymore.’

‘I’m entitled to have friends,’ Cat insisted, her lower lip bulging with defiance.

‘You are, but no one from your old life is a friend.’

Serena knew the struggle the girl faced. Not even three months ago, Cat Mateo had been a runaway. A teenage prostitute. When someone began stalking her in the city’s graffiti graveyard, she’d gone to Duluth police lieutenant Jonathan Stride for help. Serena and Stride had been lovers for four years, and she knew he had a weakness for a woman in trouble. They’d helped capture the man who’d been targeting Cat, and when the girl was safe, Stride made a decision that surprised Serena. He suggested that the teenager live with them, have her baby there, and grow up in a house with adults who cared about her.

Serena said yes, but she’d never believed that it would be easy for any of them. And it wasn’t.

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes in this place,’ a male voice announced.

A man in a rumpled blue dress shirt and loosely knotted tie stopped at their table. His eyes darted between Serena’s face and the full breasts swelling under her rain-damp T-shirt. He wiped his hands on a Budweiser bar towel.

‘This is Fred,’ Cat interjected. ‘He owns the bar.’

The man shot out a hand, which Serena shook. His fingers were sticky from sugar and limes. ‘Fred Sissel,’ he said cheerfully.

Sissel was around fifty years old, with slicked-back graying hair and a trimmed mustache. He wore the over-eager grin of a man who’d tried to smile his way out of everything bad in life. Fights. Debts. Drunk driving. His cuffs were frayed, and his shirt and tie were dotted with old food stains. His face had the mottled brown of too many visits to a tanning salon.

‘So what’s your name, and where have you been all my life?’ Sissel asked. The teeth behind his smile were unnaturally white.

Serena slid her badge out of her jeans pocket. ‘My name’s Serena Dial. I’m with the Itasca County Sheriff’s Office.’

Sissel’s mustache drooped like a worm on a fishing hook. The sailors at the other tables had a radar for the gold glint of a badge, and the tenor in the bar changed immediately.

‘Sorry, officer, is there a problem?’ Sissel asked, losing the fake grin.

‘Do you know this girl?’

‘Sure, she’s a friend of Anna’s.’

‘Do you know she’s seventeen years old?’

Sissel swore under his breath. ‘Hey, I don’t want any trouble,’ he said.

‘You’ve already got trouble, and if I find her in this place again, you’ll have even more.’