Behind me I heard Brie breathe something and Jessie hiss back and I didn't turn around. Paid. Took the bag. Walked out into the heat.
Danny Arceneaux. Billy's cousin.
Cody said he and Judah had some kind of—
And Thibodaux Senior, who had not looked up from his newspaper for the entire twenty minutes I'd been in that store, had cut it off.
That was something worth a ponder.
I walked back toward the church with the bag on my arm and the heat pressing down and that half-sentence sitting in my chest like a swallowed thing.
The sensible thing,I told myself,is to leave it alone.
I was very sensible.
I was going to besosensible about this.
The bar, Randy’s Saloon, Darlene had mentioned in passing.
“There's a bar on Decatur if you ever need to decompress,” she said, without looking up from the volunteer schedule. “Nothing fancy. Dice runs it. Good girl. Doesn’t bite if you don’t cause trouble.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it. Darlene, who had a Bible verse on her desk and organized the church's food bank like a military operation, casually recommending the local bar. I filed it away and didn't ask questions.
By Friday I was desperate enough to go.
Randy’s Saloon was exactly what the name promised. Narrow front, dark inside, a neon Budweiser sign in the window doing its best. A dead honest thing if you asked anyone. I was a sucker for honest things.
I pushed open the door.
The smell hit first — stale beer, something fried, some cigarette smoke from years past — and a dozen different colognes and perfumes mingling. Three men were sitting at the far end of the bar, none of them looked up. A jukebox in the corner played something old and rock.
Ceiling fan. Sticky floor.
Behind the bar was the most aggressively red hair I'd ever seen on a human being. She was maybe five-two, probably less, with sleeve tattoos that went all the way down to her knuckles and a crop top that saidOnly Fansin block letters across the chest andhad a picture of — you guessed it — fans. She was making a drink in a beat-up shaker so effortlessly she might’ve been born into the job, I thought.
She looked up when I came in.
“You're the church girl,” she said, voice husky. Either a bad cold or alongcigarette habit.
“News travels fast, I see.”
“Babe, this town's got a population of fuck-all and no Netflix.” She set a glass down and leaned on the bar. Sharp green eyes, eyeliner smudged, a small hoop through her septum. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. “What're you drinking?”
“What've you got?”
“Everything… that doesn’t require a blender.”
“How about…” I scanned the blackboard menu with the smudged names written in colorful chalk. “Whiskey. Whatever doesn’t come in a green bottle.”
She reached for a bottle without looking, poured two fingers, slid it across. “What do you have against green?”
“Don’t like the color.”
“Green?” Dice cocked an eyebrow.
“Yeah.”
“Huh. Okay. I’m Dice,” she said.
