What you need, Officer Coughlin, she thought, picking up her drink, is to be home getting a good night’s sleep for once, instead of sitting in this bar, waiting for trouble. Waiting for the chance to make things worse right when your life is about to get better.
She looked down into her drink, an underpoured, watered-down, double-in-name-only Jameson rocks in a plastic cup. She wasn’t going to change her mind about tonight. She needed to quit worrying, quit thinking, and focus on the task at hand. Focus was key. Somebody in this bar who didn’t even know she was there needed her.
She poked at the ice in her cup, the cubes melted through in the middle, with the hard plastic cocktail straw. She slipped the straw through a cube, fished it from the whiskey, raised it to her mouth, and let the ice slide onto her tongue. She savored the cool, the ice whiskey-slick, before crushing the cube into shards between her back teeth.
She picked up her burning cigarette from the cracked plastic ashtray, took a deep drag, pulling the smoke over the whiskey and the ice chips, blending the temperatures and flavors.
Rattling the ice in her cup, she again looked over the men in the room. Stop lying to yourself, she thought. She wasn’t only there for the sake of someone else’s needs. It wasn’t like she didn’t have needs of her own, didn’t enjoy the anticipation of meeting them.
She crushed more ice in her mouth and watched the room through the smoke of her cigarette.
*
This wasn’t her first time in the Garden; she’d lived in a tiny studio across the street from the place for her first six months in town, during her time in the academy, during her field training—in a big old mansion that had been carved up into apartments decades ago.
She’d dated a cook from the bar’s kitchen. Briefly. Things with Patrick hadn’t worked out. Or, Maureen thought, they had worked out perfectly, considering what each had been looking for going in. She wasn’t sure why she used that term—not working out. Not marrying the guy didn’t mean the relationship, if she would even give it that name, had failed.
Either way, whatever they’d started had ended amicably, and she and Patrick hooked up once in a while, creating a situation only slightly different from the original incarnation, she thought. What made things different now, and possibly better, was the mutually acknowledged fact that they were now in the aftermath of something and were no longer at the beginning. The fact that there was no future in it took a lot of the pressure off. The really important part was that he was good in bed, patient and mature enough that she could take her time and get what she wanted, but not some kind of sexual martyr who acted like waiting for the woman to come first was an act of enormous personal sacrifice.
They’d ended their regular thing when Patrick had landed a new gig at an upscale restaurant farther uptown. He’d made the kind of all-consuming career move that Maureen understood very well. Well, if she was gonna be honest about it, they hadn’t ended it. He had called it quits, while the smell of sex lingered on them, as a matter of fact. But she hadn’t fought him on it, which kind of, pretty much made it mutual. That was what she told herself.
*
Christ, she hated this fucking bar. She wouldn’t have set foot in the place except for the task at hand, searching out one special man, the one in whom she saw herself reflected back to her, the one hiding in plain sight. She took a tiny sip of her drink, nursing. Don’t get up for another whiskey, she thought. Limit your motion, your interaction with the staff and the other patrons. Don’t do anything that might make you memorable.
Truth be told, she didn’t much want to see her face in the mirror behind the bar.
She wasn’t there to drink whiskey, anyway, good as it tasted.
Look at these men, she thought. So similar, like they rolled off an assembly line. Thick unbrushed hair. Khaki pants. Checkered shirts. Hours after the sun had gone down, their wraparound Oakleys hung around their necks on leather straps. Leather boat shoes in hideous colors. Hairy forearms. Thin and bony ankles and wrists. So breakable. And those perfect white teeth. So expensive and so fragile.
Her eyes flitted from face to face. The same, the same, the same.
So loud, their ever-running mouths. Loud voices, loud laughter. Everything they said was shouted. Every insult, every joke, every reaction to whatever game played on one of the twenty televisions or whatever played-out song came on the jukebox.
How would she ever find that one special man she was looking for? Her last mystery man. Because, she told herself, you’ve spent enough time as prey to know a predator when you see one. And a predator is hunting out of this bar. This was her third night in the past week camped out in the Garden, waiting for him to appear.
*