THREE LOCALSwere sitting on the wide wooden porch, on a green park bench, to the right of the bar’s front door. An overhead fluorescent light buzzed like a dentist’s drill but didn’t seem to bother them much. All three of them wore trucker hats and were drinking beer from plastic cups.
They stopped to watch when Lucas Davenport rolled his black Mercedes SUV across the gravel parking lot and into a vacant slot between a new Ford F-150 and a battered yellow Cadillac sedan old enough to have fins.
Lucas got out of the truck, clicked “Lock” on the Benz’s key fob, and took in the bar.
In any other place, Cooter’s would have been a dive. Out here itwasn’t, because it was theonlybar in Aux Vases, the place where everybody went, from the janitors to the bankers. Built like an old Mississippi River Delta–style house, it featured a wide front porch with an overhanging roof, warped, unpainted plank walls, and neon beer signs in the windows. A million white thumbnail-sized moths were beating themselves to death around the light over the heads of the three men, but they didn’t seem to notice.
In a movie, you’d expect an outbreak of rednecks. Crackers. Peckerwoods, with ropes and ax handles.
Located two hundred yards from one of the rare exits off I-55, with a twenty-foot-wide red-and-white sign that blinked “Cooter’s,” then “Drink,” the bar also attracted anyone who might be running along the interstate between St. Louis and Memphis who might get shaky after two hours without alcohol.
Lucas crunched across the gravel parking lot, climbed the porch steps, and nodded at the three men. He didn’t have to get close to smell the spilt beer. One of the three checked out Lucas’s suit, tie, and black Lucchese lizard-skin cowboy boots, and said, “Evenin’, sir,” slurring his words enough that Lucas thought the men might not be out on the bench voluntarily.
Lucas said, “Evenin’, boys.”
“Nice ride you got there,” the middle one said.
“Thank you. Want to buy it?”
The three all chuckled. They couldn’t afford one of the fuckin’ tires, much less the rest of the truck, but the offer gave them the warm glow of economic equality. Lucas nodded again, said, “Take ’er easy,” went inside, chose the least sticky-looking stool toward the end of the bar, and sat down.
The bartender, a thin man with a gold eyetooth and a black string tie, came over and asked, “What do you need?”
“Make me a decent margarita?” Lucas loosened his necktie.
“I can do that, though some folks think the indecent ones are even better,” the bartender said. When Lucas didn’t crack back, he said, “One decent margarita coming up.”
The bartender had started to step away when Lucas asked, “How do you pronounce the name of this place?”
The bartender’s face took on the look that people get when they’re asked a really,reallystupid question. “Cooter’s?”
Lucas laughed. “No, no—the town. Aux Vases.” He pronounced itOx Vasies.
“Oh. Jeez, you had me goin’ there for a minute,” the bartender said. “It’s, uh, French, and it’s Oh-Va.”
“Oh-Va. Always wondered, whenever I saw the sign,” Lucas said.
“Yup. Oh-Va.” He looked at Lucas a little more closely and saw a big, blue-eyed guy, whose dark hair was threaded with gray at the temples.
The bartender guessed that he might be in his late forties or early fifties. His nose had been broken at one time or another and a thin white scar ran down his forehead across his eyebrow; another scar, a round one, sat just above the loosened knot of his necktie. And the suit—the suit he was wearing was undoubtedly the most expensive suit to come through the door in the last ten years.
He went off to find some tequila.
Lucas looked around the place. Fifteen booths, twelve bar stools, a couple of game machines in the back, plank floors that creakedwhen somebody walked across them, and the vagrant smell of Rum Crooks and deep-fried fish sticks. He was the only man in the placewitha necktie andwithouta hat.
—
LUCAS SAT ALONE,buying four margaritas over the span of forty-five minutes, and making two trips to the men’s room, or what he hoped was the men’s room. The only identifying signs were a picture of a cat on one restroom door, and a rooster on the other.
He was halfway through the fourth margarita when Shirley McDonald eased up on a stool two down. Lucas looked her over, smiled, and nodded. She was a skinny young blonde.Veryyoung. Black eyebrows, too much eye shadow, crystalline green eyes, Crayola-red lipstick not quite inside the lines. She looked fragile, easily broken; might already have been busted a couple of times. She wore a white blouse that verged on transparent, no obvious bra straps, jeans torn at the thigh and knee, and sandals. Not a debutante. She asked, “How y’all doin’?”
“I’m doing fine,” Lucas said. “For a man this far from the comforts of home.”
“You got a cigarette?” she asked.
“I don’t smoke,” Lucas said.
“Damnit, I’ll have to smoke one of my own.” She grinned at him and fished a turquoise pack of American Spirits out of her purse. One of her big front teeth wasn’t quite straight, but the irregularity made her even more attractive, which she certainly knew. “The goddamn things are so expensive now, I can only afford about a pack a week.”
