Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Four

As much as Jackson loved every brick of the restaurant, his prize renovation was the bar, a genuine teakwood reclamation from a bungalow teardown in Morningside. Presently the old antique was three-deep in thirsty patrons, all of them waving money, whistling, elbowing.

I squeezed to the edge and caught Cricket’s eye. “Hey, have you seen Rico?”

Cricket blew a strand of fawn-brown hair from her forehead. Whipped cream smeared her red glasses, and a rabid desperation lurked in her eyes. She wore totally inappropriate clothes for bartending—a white satin shirt and a black suede vest with fringes that kept dangling into the beer—but then, she hadn’t been expecting to be schlepping drinks. She was Rico’s teammate, competing for the third time this year, and she was supposed to be drinking champagne and practicing her lines, not mixing cocktails. That had been the plan anyway, before the bartender and two servers had called in sick.

She shoved a black apron at me. “You know anything about bartending?”

“I used to. But it’s been—”

“I don’t care. Get back here!”

Great, I thought, now I’d have to pretend I hadn’t seen her husband threatening Lex in the hallway. I also had to hope that Trey wouldn’t come back and start a recitation of whatever weirdness he’d discovered. There was a reason he didn’t do covert—he had no sense about what to say and when to say it.

I moved into place and tied on the apron, kicking my heels under the bar. Before I knew it, money was being shoved at me left and right.

Cricket moved deftly. “Don’t worry about the mixed drinks—throw me the orders, and I’ll handle those. Just move beers and take money.”

I did as she said. The hubbub of the room had spread to the merchandise table, where Adam worked feverishly. Individual faces melded into an amorphous impressionistic blend. No Rico, however. Our table remained empty.

I passed out beer and took money. “Cricket, what’s a Screaming Viking, I don’t see anything labeled Screaming Viking here.”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she stared at her phone, annoyance twisting her mouth.

I snapped my fingers. “Cricket?”

She looked up. “I have to go.”

“You what?”

Somebody pounded the bar. I shooed him back, but two more bodies surged into his place.

“I’ll be right back.”

“But—”

She pulled off her apron and shoved it under the bar. Then she bounded around the corner and tacked her way through the crowd, headed for the swinging door that led to the back hallway.

That was when I spotted Trey, in the corner nearest the kitchen’s service entrance. I spread my hands in a “well?” gesture. He shook his head emphatically, tapped his watch, then disappeared into the kitchen.

Ah jeez. Sometimes that man…

At that moment, Adam came up, a worried crease in his forehead. “Where’s Rico?”

I blew hair out of my eyes. “That’s what I’d like to know. Did you see him leave?”

“No, but he starts in twenty minutes. He’s real nervous, and I don’t know why. Do you?”

Great. Another thing I was supposed to keep under my hat.

Adam crossed his arms. “I asked, but you know how he gets. And now he’s vanished, not a word to anybody, not even me. Can you watch the merch table while I go find him?”

“Adam! You can’t leave it unattended like that!” I sloshed a foamy wave of beer across the counter, and two guys jumped back. “And I’m up to my eyeballs right now.”

“What about Trey?”

I imagined Trey guarding the sherbet stack of tee-shirts, nine-millimeter at the ready.

“Not a good idea.”

“I need some help here. Rico’s gone, we’re out of CDs—”

“Babysit it for five more minutes, and I’ll come over as soon as I can.”

Adam sighed in exasperation and disappeared into the crowd, back to the table, I hoped. I understood his frustration—serving the public without berserking on some innocent customer was a challenge. But the last thing the team needed was a thousand bucks’ worth of merchandise disappearing into the night along with Jackson’s missing funds.

I had my own worries—too many customers, too little beer, and absolutely no Rico. Some frantic moments later, Trey reappeared right at my elbow, materializing like an apparition.

I tried not to sound impatient. “Well?”

“Lex was in the back parking lot. Smoking.”

“No gun?”

“Cigarettes and matches, only no gun. And then I found Jackson in the kitchen, also unarmed. He says everything is fine.”

“What about Rico?”

“What about him?”

I was in no mood to play Twenty Questions. “Look, Adam’s a mess, Cricket’s vanished, Rico’s on in five minutes, and now I’m stuck here. You have to find Rico!”

“But he’s right there.”

I looked at the stage. Sure enough, there he was, checking the microphone, cool and professional. He saw me looking and patted his heart, once, twice, a little thump thump of reassurance. Relief coursed through my veins.

He took the microphone, cleared his throat, and the hushed refrain moved from table to table. “Respect the word,” people whispered. “Respect the word.” In less than thirty seconds, the conversations blurred into backnoise, a curtain of sound. Someone dimmed the overheads, and Rico stood alive and electric under the amber spotlight.

He smiled his slow molasses smile. “You begin in the softest of ways, by opening your hand, the hardest part of all.”

And the crowd sent up a roar of whistles and claps.

He moved quickly into his first poem—a warm-up piece that always stoked the energy of the room. At the other end of the bar, I saw Cricket return and take her place. Her hands trembled as she tied her apron and wiped her palms on it, but she kept her eyes on the stage.

Jackson appeared at the kitchen entrance. He stared at Cricket, his hands shoved in his pockets, but she didn’t look his way.

Adam elbowed to the edge of the stage, riveted on Rico, as if each word were a private gift only for him. He’d packed away the merchandise table, every capitalistic impulse cut short by the desire to be fully focused on Rico. Behind him I saw Frankie, her expression calculating. I imagined she was torn to have such talent on her team this year. Rico, Cricket , even Lex—they made Atlanta the team to beat, these people who would eventually be her toughest competition in the individuals.

I turned to Trey and dropped my voice to a whisper. “So what happened with Lex?”

“I asked him if he was okay. He said yes. I came back inside. He remained in the parking lot.”

“He’d better be getting in here. He’s on next.”

A person in front turned and shushed us, so I pulled Trey into a huddle in the corner. All I could see was Rico in the spotlight, surrounded and solitary.

“How did he seem to you?”

“Nervous, agitated. No threat indicators, however.”

I scanned the edge of the audience for Lex’s pale sharp face. Crowded places provided an invisibility of sorts, if you knew how to work it. I wasn’t sure Lex did—he seemed the kind to naturally draw attention, not hide from it—but I wasn’t dismissing the possibility that he was somewhere in that shifting warm darkness.

Rico moved into his second piece, the shorter competition poem. Three minutes and nineteen seconds, one second under the time limit when performed perfectly. But despite the auspicious start, it was not one of his better performances. It lacked the dynamic push and pull he usually created, the dizzying spin of the lyrics, the rat-a-tat rhymes. Now, he was working by rote. He knew it by heart, but his heart wasn’t in it.

He pulled the mike from the stand. “And now I’d like to—”

A screaming alarm drowned him out, followed by the panicked murmur of the crowd. The sprinklers came on with a hiss and whoosh, and the murmuring ratcheted into gasps and shouts. Water soaked my hair and dribbled down the front of my dress.

I shoved a sopping hank of hair from my eyes. “Great, now what?”