* * *
Maris angrily marched up to the man who’d rented her the golf cart. “Why did you send me all the way out to Mr. Evans’s house?”
He smirked. “Knew you’s lying ’bout him expecting you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”
“Don’t recollect you askin’.”
She was seething, but he was too coarse and stupid to waste her anger on. She would save it for Mr. Parker Evans. She had a lot to say to him. He had probably known about the wild goose chase she’d been sent on. Terry, the cook, surely had. His charcoal grill had gone cold, but he was tending bar when she pulled open the squeaky screen door to his establishment and went inside.
She crossed a bare concrete floor, splashed through a puddle of what she hoped was beer, and strode past the pool tables straight to the bar at the back of the room. The man who had rented her the cart followed her inside.
Billiard balls stopped clacking. Conversations died. Someone turned off the boom box. The floor show was about to begin, and the angry New Yorker was the featured act.
Terry was grinning at her sardonically.
“Give me a beer.”
His grin slipped a notch. He hadn’t expected that. But he reached into an ice chest and pulled out a longneck bottle of beer. He uncapped it and passed it to her. Foam oozed from the neck. Maris shook it off her hand, took a long drink, then set the bottle on the bar with a hard thump.
“I’m here to see Parker Evans,” she announced.
Terry planted his hairy forearms on the bar and leaned across it toward her. “Who should I say is calling?”
His customers guffawed. Terry basked in the success of his clever comeback. He laughed louder than anyone. Maris spun around and confronted the room at large. The interior was thick with tobacco smoke despite the screened walls and the overhead fans. Their desultory rotations didn’t eliminate the smog but only stirred it into the warm, humid air.
A dozen pairs of eyes were focused on her. There was only one other woman in the place. She was wearing crotch-hugging shorts and a clinging tank top that barely contained her pendulous breasts and the tattooed cobra whose flared head and wicked tongue rose out of her cleavage. One hand was insolently propped on her hip, the other held a smoldering black cigarette.
The tavern smelled of beer and grilled meat, tobacco smoke and male sweat. Maris drew a deep breath and tasted those essences in the back of her throat.
“Isn’t this rather juvenile, Mr. Evans?”
No one said a word. There was little movement beyond one man glancing at another, jabbing him in the ribs and winking. Another gave her a mocking salute with his beer bottle. One sitting near a pool table idly chalked the tip of his cue.
“To say nothing of rude,” she continued.
Forcing herself to move away from the false security of the bar, she approached a group of three men sitting around a table. She looked at each of them carefully. Judging from their moronic leers, she doubted any of them could read without moving his lips, much less write fiction.
“I’ve come an awfully long way to see you.”
“You can go back the same way.” The voice issued from a shadowed corner and elicited more chuckles.
She gazed into the face of a man sitting alone. He was about Mike Strother’s age, with a neglected white beard and the weather-beaten face of a seaman. He seemed not to be aware of her or anyone else. His rheumy eyes were fixed on the glass of dark liquor cradled between his callused hands.
“Mr. Evans, the least you could do is give me ten minutes of your time.”
“Come on over here and bend over, honey,” a nasally voice invited. “I’ll give you the best ten minutes you’ve ever had.”
“In your dreams, Dwayne,” the tattooed woman drawled. “You can’t keep it up more’n two.”
Laughter erupted, louder than before. The woman was high-fived by the man standing nearest her, but he said, “Ol’ Dwayne’s got the right idea, though.”
“Yeah, Yankee lady. You don’t know what you’re missin’ till you’ve been rid hard by a horny southern boy.”
Maris had experienced catcalls from construction workers made anonymous by distance and hard hats. She had received obscene propositions by crank callers and men lurking in recessed doorways on the sidewalks of the city. When she was seventeen, she had been groped in the subway, and to this day the memory of it made her skin crawl.
But having been the victim of crude behavior hadn’t made her immune to it. Their vulgarity got to her, but not in the way they expected. It didn’t frighten her; it made her angry. In fact, it made her mad as hell.
Not even attempting to disguise her contempt, she said, “Whoever you are, Mr. Evans, you’re a damn coward.”
The snickering ceased abruptly. Silence fell like a lead curtain. Any other insult was pardonable, but apparently cowardice wasn’t. Name-calling couldn’t get more serious than that.
Using it as her exit line, she made a beeline for the door. As she passed a billiards table, a pool cue arced down in front of her like the arm of a toll gate. She ran into it, connecting with her pelvic bones hard enough to make a smacking sound.
She pitched forward, but broke her fall against the stick. She took hold of it in a tight grip and tried to shove it out of her way, but it was unyielding. Turning her head toward the man holding it, she realized he was the one she’d noticed earlier chalking the pool cue.
“I’m Parker Evans.”
Maris was astonished. Not by his audacity or the hostile eyes that reflected the red glow of a neon sign as they glared up at her.
What astonished her was the wheelchair in which he sat.