Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

14

They met at the Rusty Scupper in the Swap. The Scupper — a shot and tallboy chaser joint — was as close as Paradise came to a dive bar. It wasn’t the kind of bar where you could order an appletini and not draw stares. The Scupper stank of past accidents, of spilled beers, of overturned ashtrays, and of emptied stomachs. It was also a place that kept its secrets. The two of them sat at a wooden booth covered in generations of carved graffiti: mostly the names of drunk men and the women they loved, longed for, or lamented. There were a lot of four-letter words, too. Even the first two lines of a limerick.

That was as far as the poet had gotten. One of the men at the booth read the lines as he had many times before and laughed as he always did.

“Why you think the guy stopped there?” he asked his booth mate. “I always think about that, whether he just couldn’t think of nothing else to write or if he got too drunk or his arm got tired or something. Maybe he got into a fight or the tip of his knife broke off. What do you think?”

But the other man was lost in his own dark recesses. He fidgeted, spinning his beer bottle like a prayer wheel. Peeling off pieces of the bottle’s wet label, then rolling the wet, sticky paper around on his fingertips and flicking the balls away.

“So what do you think?”

“Huh?” the fidgety man asked.

“About the girl from Japan.”

“I don’t know about no girl from Japan,” he said, scratching at the label with his dirty thumbnail.

“But what do you think?”

“I think we’re fucked.” He patted his jacket pockets. “I need a smoke.”

“Chill, man. We’re okay. There’s nothing to connect us to Zevon.”

“Nothing but that they found his body right next to the girls. Why did he do that, stick Zevon next to the girls?”

“How could he know the building was gonna go? Shit happens, man.”

“But why always to us? I didn’t even want to go to Stiles that night.”

“Yeah, you said that, like, a million times, but you’re full of it. You wanted a piece of her like we all did. It was her friend that screwed everything up. We shouldn’ta let her come.”

“Now who’s full of it? She wouldn’ta gone with us if—”

He stopped mid-sentence when the waitress stopped by the table to ask if they wanted another round.

“Sure,” they both said, just to get rid of her.

“Look, what’s done is done. We messed up. This will blow over, too.”

“It’s never done. And we just killed—”

“Keep it down. Keep it down, man. Take it easy.”

Their second round came, though neither of them had half finished their first beers. The fidgety man stood up, again patting his jacket for cigarettes. When he felt them, he let out a loud sigh. He pulled a bent cigarette out of the semi-crushed pack and rolled it around in his fingers.

“I got to have a smoke,” he said.

“Go ahead, man. Do it already.”

When he was certain his friend was out of the Scupper, he went to the men’s room. He slid the little metal bar into the crude hole in the doorjamb and dug his cell out of his pocket.

“Yeah, it’s me. I think we got a problem.”

When the conversation was over, he went back out to the table and reread the limerick’s first two lines, but this time he didn’t laugh.