CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was late when we finished our meal, but I wasn’t sleepy. Jock and J.D. were ready to call it a day and headed home. I stopped by Tiny’s for a beer and a little conversation with friends. The place was nearly empty. Susie, the proprietor, was leaning over the bar talking to Cracker Dix. Two men sat at the end of the bar deep in conversation. The TV above the bar was muted, a baseball game in progress. Somehow the games always seem a little better without the incessant chatter of the announcers.
Susie looked up as I came in. “Hey, Matt.”
“Hey, Susie. Cracker.”
I took the stool next to Cracker. Susie moved to the cooler to retrieve a Miller Lite for me, brought it back, and set it on a cardboard coaster on the bar. “I heard that Jock was in town.”
“Yeah, but the weenie wanted to go home to bed.”
“Where’s Logan?”
“With Marie. They’re having dinner on the mainland. How’re you doing, Cracker?”
“No complaints. I heard you’ve been looking into the murders on Dulcimer.”
I chuckled. Everybody knows everything on a small island. Cracker was an expatriate Englishman who’d lived on Longboat Key for thirty years. He’d come with his bride to visit his new in-laws when he was in his mid-twenties and stayed. The marriage didn’t last, but his love for our key was as deeply ingrained in his persona as the accent he’d never lost. He stood about five feet eight and his wardrobe seemed to be limited to Hawaiian shirts, beige cargo shorts, and flip-flops, and on cooler days, boat shoes. He wore a thin strand of gold around his neck and a small gold stud in his right ear. He was as bald as an onion and much loved by the islanders.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m trying to help an old friend find out who killed his son on the beach the same day as the Dulcimer murders. I don’t think there’s any connection, but I’m checking it out.”
“Did you know that Dora was aboard Dulcimer that night?”
“No. What was she doing on a tourist dinner boat in June? She’s usually in the mountains by then.”
“She was late leaving this year and the Observer asked her to do a piece on the boat.”
“I’d like to talk to her. Do you know how to reach her in Blue Ridge?”
“Don’t have to. She’s here.”
“What’s she doing on the key in August?”
“She had to come back for a doctor’s appointment or something. She’s only here for a couple of days.”
“Thanks, Cracker.”
The evening wore on. The two men at the end of the bar left, and a few minutes later Tracy Tharp and three other servers from Pattigeorge’s came in. Tracy gave me a hug and chatted a few minutes before joining her friends at one of the high-top tables near the bar. A group of workers from Mar Vista arrived for what Susie called the second shift, a time when the restaurants on the north end of the key closed and the workers stopped at Tiny’s for a nightcap before heading home.
Cracker was in a storytelling mood, and I enjoyed hearing about his hilarious escapades in Wales, India, Pakistan, and other places that his hippie culture had taken him before he settled down on Longboat. I’d heard some of the stories before, but when Cracker was on a roll, new tales appeared, each one funnier that the last. I often wondered which were true and which were the result of the hyper imagination that rolled around in Cracker’s enormous brain. I left Tiny’s in a better mood than when I’d arrived, and headed home.
The house was quiet except for the snoring coming from Jock’s room. I locked up and went to bed and dreamed of soldiers who had died in a strange land. My soldiers.