“Oh, yeah? No can do, dog.”
The two men stared across the table at each other.
“What?”
“Nah, man, see, I’m here in a strictly observating capacity. Think that’s what you said.” Swonger shrugged helplessly. “So, wish I could help you out, but . . .”
Gibson sighed. “Fine.”
“Fine what?”
“I need your help.”
“And you’ll tell me what’s going on and quit condescending at me?”
“That’s a lot to ask.”
“Then do it yourself.”
“Okay, okay, it’s a deal.”
Swonger’s attitude changed instantaneously as he sat forward. “So what you need?”
“Table across the way. At your four o’clock.”
Swonger dropped his head and looked low over his shoulder. “One with the angry hot bartender at it?”
“Right. You see the guard?”
“The big boy? Uh, yeah. He ain’t exactly stealth. What’s the play?”
“You’re so good at following me. Follow him instead. I need a name and an address. Where he lives.”
To Gibson’s surprise, Swonger didn’t ask why but stood and drained the last of his beer. “Then what?”
“Then what, what?”
“After I got an address. What you want me to do then?”
Gibson wasn’t sure. He hadn’t expected Swonger to actually follow his lead, so he hadn’t worked out the next part yet.
“Text me and sit on him until you hear from me.”
“On it.”
Swonger ambled out. A few minutes later, Chelsea Merrick left the guard’s table and went back to work. The guard rebuckled his belt before heading for the door himself. Gibson hadn’t seen him pass the bartender anything, so the message must have been simple enough to remember.
He’d have dearly loved to know what it was.
After Gibson finally pried the check from the waitress and settled the bill, he went to have a closer look at Chelsea Merrick. There was an empty seat at the bar where he could watch the Dodgers and Giants getting underway on the West Coast. An old man on the next stool contemplated a shot and a beer; he glanced in Gibson’s direction as if his being there were a sin.
“Someone sitting here?”
“Aren’t you sure?”
“No, I mean . . .” Gibson realized he was being messed with and sat down. The man introduced himself as Old Charlie, which Gibson thought an odd way to describe yourself.
“Robert Quine.” They shook hands.
“So, Bob . . . you with these other out-of-town sons of bitches? Sitting in folks’ seats, acting like you own the place?”
“Not with them. But I am an out-of-towner.”
“Y’all here to cause trouble?”
“Not for you.”
Old Charlie thought that over and pointed to his two drinks. “Which would you drink first?”
“The shot.”
“Yeah, me too. But lately, I’m wondering to myself why. The order. Hard stuff first, easy stuff last. What kind of way is that for a man to do things? What if you never make it to the easy stuff? But you say shot first?”
“Shot first.”
“From the mouths of babes,” Old Charlie said and threw the shot back.
Last call in West Virginia was three a.m., but the bar crowd began to taper off around one. Gibson nursed a beer and watched the bartender work. Up close, there was no doubt: she was Chelsea Merrick. Although here customers called her Lea. For the price of a shot and a beer, Old Charlie confided that her last name was Regan and that she’d lived above the bar the last two years.
Gibson nodded, thinking that Charles Merrick was a bastard to pull his daughter into his world this way. She was risking jail to help him hide and manage his stolen money, but family was hard to outrun sometimes. Gibson understood that. Or maybe that apple had fallen and rolled right up against the tree. He checked himself—he shouldn’t go and get sentimental about her just because she was tough and smart and took no shit from any of the men at the bar, all of whom stared openly at her ass whenever she walked by.
By one thirty, the empty seats at the bar outnumbered the occupied ones. The back room had cleared out except for one of the pool tables. SportsCenter played on all the televisions, and the muscular bartender—Margo—had disappeared into the office to do paperwork. Gibson guessed that Margo owned the place, the way everyone treated her. He didn’t think he’d given away that he knew Lea’s real name, but she definitely didn’t like him sitting there. She kept her distance and served him quickly. Of course, just being in a regulars-only bar like this was enough to raise suspicion. Each time he finished a beer, she asked the same unfriendly question.
“Anything else?”
“I’ll take another. Thanks.”
Now his friendly tone met with a blank stare. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
To his left, Old Charlie snored peacefully, face on the bar, beside an untouched shot and beer. Gibson gave him a long look before turning back to Lea.
“Yeah, be a shame if anyone got overserved.”
She slapped his bill down and left him to it. He chuckled to himself. There was no doubt about it—he liked her.
Swonger sat down beside him and ordered a beer. Lea served him, but grudgingly.
“I told you to text me,” Gibson whispered.
“Been trying. It’s like 1999 up here. Can’t get a signal nowhere.” Swonger gulped his beer before leaning into Gibson’s ear. “Anyway, I got him. Jerome Parker. Lives up at a shitty little development twenty minutes east.”
“Is he alone?”
“Only car his. But I didn’t knock and take his particulars.”
“Show me.”
“My beer . . .”
“Finish it and let’s go.”
Swonger looked pained. “Dog, I been up in my car for three hours watching some mook’s house while you been chillin’ here eyeballing the talent? And I got to pay for my own beer? That ain’t right.”
Man had a point. Gibson threw an extra five on top of his bill, and they headed for the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jerome Parker’s place did indeed belong to a shitty little development. An aspiring real-estate tycoon had cleared a few acres of land and thrown up rows of narrow vertical town houses that alternated in color starkly between a neon custard and mud. It was a new enough development that the trees along Parker’s street were only saplings, half of them brown and dying. Roughly one-third of the properties were unoccupied, and the wild, tangled lawns gave the neighborhood a desolate, uninhabited feel. Swonger pointed out a custard-colored townhome at the end of the block.
“Coupla vacant units back that way,” Swonger said. “If you maybe looking to upgrade.”
Gibson acknowledged the insult with his eyes and checked his phone. One bar. He tried making an outgoing call, but it wouldn’t go through. Satisfied, he created a new contact on his phone, leaving it blank.
“Is there an outgoing message on your voice mail?” he asked.
“Just the phone-company one.”