“Tiffany—what the hell is going on?”
Tiffany swallowed. “It’s Barry. I don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
Angela put a comforting hand on Tiffany’s back. “What happened? Did he have a heart attack or something?”
She didn’t want to ask if he’d been shot in a robbery for fear of making it be true.
Tiffany took a tissue when Angela offered it. She pressed it under her eyes.
“No. Someone beat the shit out of him.”
“Is that what the police said?”
“No. I’m the one who found him when I came in to work just a little while ago.”
“Do the police know who did it?”
Tiffany shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Angela gave Tiffany a suspicious look. “Do you?”
Tiffany stared off at the gaggle of police and onlookers. “Yeah. When I found Barry on the floor, I rushed to help him. His face looked like raw hamburger. That white T-shirt he always wears was soaked red with blood. It had holes burned in it and he had burns, like from a cigarette. He had a rag stuffed in his mouth. They’d been torturing him. I pulled the rag out so he could breathe.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Barely.” Tiffany sniffed back a sob. “I asked him what happened. All he was able to say was ‘Those Mexicans,’ then he lost consciousness.”
Angela felt goose bumps race across the bare flesh of her legs and arms. She knew without a doubt what Mexicans he was talking about.
“Did you tell the police?”
Tiffany huffed her contempt. “Fuck the police.”
“Well … who called them?”
“I did.”
“Didn’t they ask your name?”
Tiffany gestured toward the simple block building. The beer sign in the window glowed its perpetual invitation.
“I didn’t use my cell phone. I called from the phone behind the bar. That’s where Barry was laying. They asked what was the emergency. I told them that someone robbed Barry’s Place Bar, and that Barry was hurt real bad. Before they could ask anything else, I hung up. A stayed with Barry until I heard the sirens and then I got out before they saw me.”
Angela frowned. “Why didn’t you want to tell the police what you knew?”
With a finger, Tiffany carefully wiped the lipstick from each corner of her mouth. It was a long moment before she answered.
“I never told you about it before, but I was arrested not long ago.”
“You? For what?”
“Prostitution.”
Tiffany dressed like a slut, but Angela had always thought that was just to get better tips.
“I didn’t know.”
Tiffany’s expression drew down into a scowl. “I don’t hook. All right? This off-duty cop—Officer Palinski, a real mean motherfucker—was in here one night. He wanted me to come out to the parking lot and give him a blow job. I didn’t know he was a cop. I told him to fuck off. He came back in his blues later that night and arrested me for solicitation. Took me to jail and had me booked—said I had solicited him. My mother had to come down and bail me out.” Tiffany shook her head in anger at the memory.
Guys asked Angela to suck their cocks often enough, but so far none of them had been a cop, so she’d never feared getting arrested when she said no.
“But that ain’t the worst of it,” Tiffany said. “The prosecutor called me in. He gave me that smug smile like he knows I’m a whore, know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know the look.”
“And then he says to me, he says, if I want, he could help me out of the jam I was in and maybe drop the charges. I said I’d appreciate that because they weren’t true.” She looked over at Angela. “It’s not good for your health to go accusing cops of shit, know what I mean? So I said it was just an honest misunderstanding.”
Angela nodded.
“So this prosecutor—he’s still got this shit-eating grin on his fat face—says to me that his officer has pretty good taste in cocksuckers. He told me then that he could add on some drug-dealing charges so that I’d spend at least six months, maybe even a year, in jail.”
Tiffany glared off at the police. Silent tears started rolling down her cheeks again. “I got a kid, you know. A daughter. This fucker says that he could make sure that when I was convicted the county would take away my kid.” She wiped the tears from under her eyes with the tissue. “She’s only three.”
“Jeez, Tiffany, I had no idea.”
Angela had been taken by the county once when they sent her mother to rehab. It had been a fresh kind of hell—one invented by the legal system. They had Angela in their clutches for six months before she was tossed back into the frying pan.
“He asked what I’d be willing to do to get the charges dismissed so I could keep my kid. I thought he meant community service or something. So I told him I’d do anything, ya know? He says to me, then, that all I had to do was to come around to his place a few times a week for a month or so and give him a blow job, and if I did it good enough he’d drop all the charges. He said I’d need to give Palinski his blow job so that he’d be willing to go along with the charges being dropped.”
Angela didn’t have to ask if Tiffany agreed to the deal.
“What was the prosecutor’s name?”
Tiffany made a face. “Assistant District Attorney John Babington. Why? You know him?”
“I know the prick,” Angela said under her breath.
“Yeah? Sorry to hear that you had a run-in with that motherfucker.”
After a time, Angela asked, “Did Barry say anything else?”
“No.” Tiffany shook her head. “Alls he mumbled when I asked him what happened was ‘Those Mexicans,’ before he passed out. I hope to God he makes it. Barry’s a good guy, ya know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
As Angela listened to Tiffany’s story, she was trying to figure out why in the world the four men who had attacked her would have done this to Barry.
Tiffany trembled as she hugged herself. “I gotta pay my rent. I got a kid. What am I going to do?”
“Well,” Angela said, thinking out loud, “some of us girls have keys to the place. Why don’t we keep the bar open? Barry has bills to pay, too. We don’t want him to lose his bar. Most of the girls are like you—they can’t afford to be out of work. It would help all of us out and it would help Barry out until he got better if we all pitched in and kept the place up and running.”
Tiffany started smiling for the first time. “Yeah, we could do that.” Her eyes widened when she had the spark of an idea. “We could start a ladies’ night, offer them a free drink. That would bring in women, and women bring in lots of men.”
“Barry never wanted to have a ladies’ night,” Angela said.
“Well Barry ain’t here to say no.” She snapped her fingers. “I could bring in a string of Christmas lights and we could hang ’em up behind the bar or something. It would class up the place, make it look fancy. We could even paint the ladies’ room, ya know? Make it look better so women would want to stay around.
“Until Barry gets better we could do some things to make the place more money than it brings in now. I’m sure of it. And if we do it right—bring in the ladies—we’d all make a lot more tips from the men who would come in.”
Angela thought about it for a minute. It sounded like it was worth a try. It certainly would help Barry out if the bar pulled in some money for him while he was in the hospital and until he could recover. If he recovered.
“I think that sounds like a great idea. You’d be able to make more money to help out with your little girl.”
Tiffany considered a moment. “With just us girls, I think we’d need a man around to watch over things. Like a bouncer or something, so there wouldn’t be trouble we couldn’t handle.”
“I think you’re right. Barry always watched over everything. Him and that baseball bat he keeps behind the bar. But I guess it didn’t help him tonight.”
“Any idea who we can we get?”
Angela shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ll have to give it some thought.”
Tiffany looked over. “Hey, wasn’t it some Mexicans that almost killed you, too?”