Whiskey Sour Noir (The Hard Stuff) (5 page)

Poison
? Now, there was a new “P” word.

I got defensive on her. Not the first time either, but this was about the man I loved. “I didn’t think we were ready to condemn everyone accused of sexual offenses. I thought we were willing to give everybody a chance, men and women both.” I sounded huffier than I felt. It just came out of me all puffed up.

“This isn’t about Cat Avery per se. It’s about how you see yourself and, ultimately, what you convey to your clients. Acceptance is one thing, a blind eye is another.”

She managed a smile and a slug of her coffee at the same time. Lulu had it down, the whole social work thing. Be on their planet, but not of their planet. That kind of personal philosophy. Which they don’t teach in college, by the way.

“I’m not one to tell anybody what to do with their personal life,” she added. That was a laugh. She’d been doing exactly that with me, the other DIC employees, and our clients, for years. “But if you want to be more effective here, honey, you may want to work on your own weaknesses.”

She patted me on the shoulder and headed down the dingy hall toward the cafeteria. The wafting aroma of hot grease filled my head.

If only he wasn’t so gorgeous. If only he wasn’t so sweet. If only I didn’t love making love with him
, was what I thought to myself. But was that all it was? I tossed my still-full cup into an overflowing garbage can and followed Lulu, lost in thought and not at all ready to help supervise the breakfast line.

After work that day, I drove my crappy car to east Dusky Beach and parked in the public lot for the beach. When I turned off the engine, blue smoke puffed out the tail pipe. My ride sure needed work, but I didn’t have the money for it. If I really wanted to change the channel and escape to New Hampshire, I’d have to save up some money first. I’d never been very skilled at planning ahead like that. I tended to drift along with the currents and see where they took me. This was obviously the kind of thing Lulu was talking about, the kind of short-sighted behavior that got my clients into the messes they were in.

I kicked off my work pumps and climbed out of the car. The asphalt was steaming hot so I hopped fast to the coolness of the shoreline sand. The beach was crowded with tanned people in skimpy bathing suits. I don’t tan and I don’t even own a bikini. If I want to swim, I wait until dark and strip off my clothes. Call me low class, but that’s just how I am.

East Dusky Beach is another world. The residents are mostly snowbirds down from up north for part of the year, or the kind of rich Floridians who can afford to lounge around in the sun all day. I saw more leathered skin on that beach than you’d see at a gator farm. Everyone was way oiled up. The sea breeze was brisk and smelled like macaroons. I walked right into the water to soak my burning feet.

The sea churned a little, foaming all down the shoreline. A little rough for August, but otherwise it looked to me like the same old ocean. I, for one, couldn’t tell the Gulf Stream had died. The blue green waves gave no sign the warming currents had disappeared without a trace.
How do you do that
? I wondered
. Just go like that, and leave nothing in your wake?
I waded out until the bathwatery sea was up to my knees. Then I hiked my jean skirt up far as it goes and tucked it between my thighs so it wouldn’t get too soaked. The horizon looked real far away, but I reached out for it anyway.

And that’s when the plan came to me. Fully formed, like a blueprint handed to me by an architect in a dream.
Here you go,
something inside me told me right out.
This here’s for Avery. This is all he has to do.

Suddenly, I knew how Cat Avery might free himself from his shackles. If my plan worked, then our life together would offer me more than hot sex in a cat box. If Cat Avery was no longer a prisoner of his past, well, I’d be free, too. Without having to run off to New Hampshire, I’d maybe upgrade my own life as well.

Chapter Four

When I got back to Love House, Avery was stretched out on the sofa with a bottle of hard stuff. He held up a red plastic cup and said in a newscaster voice, “This here’s the oldest whisky made in Ireland. Distilled since 1608. Used for medicinal purposes and to settle down the faithful so they wouldn’t uprise or fuck around.”

He was in a mood. I shucked off my skirt and padded toward the bathroom sink to wash the salt and sand from my hands and feet.

“Irish whisky was only produced in monasteries back in the 1300s,” he rattled on. “By the Scottish monks, too. Finally, production passed into the sinners’ hands sometime in the 1500s. But the government taxes were such a killer, folks ducked them and distilled at night. That’s where the word moonshine comes from. All the brogue drunks, making their hooch by moonlight.”

I didn’t know that. But then again, so fucking what?

“That bourbon you drink, the mash is largely corn. This here’s malt. Been distilled three times, and aged maybe two, three years.” I moved closer. His eyes were glassy, the lids heavy and pink. “No added flavorings, no goddam colorings. The read deal.”

I sat down next to him on the sag of the couch. I could smell his boozy sweat, the peaty odor of whiskey through pores. “How much of that have you had so far?” I asked him in a low voice.

“Not nearly enough,” he yelled right into my face. His breath held no trace of the tropical sweetness I loved. The man who didn’t drink was completely soused. And why exactly was the volume up so high?

I edged into the far corner of the sofa and covered my panties with a ragged afghan my momma had made for me. How long ago was that? Seemed like forever since I’d had a mother to care for me. Maybe that was why I didn’t know how to get cared for properly.

I
folded my arms around my knees and huddled up. Not knowing what to expect, I knew enough to take it slow with Cat Avery. I wanted to tell him my plan, the idea that had come to me on the beach, but he wasn’t going to listen to me, not in his state of mind. Now was not the time for planning ahead. I needed to see what he was on about in the present moment.

The way he sucked at his drink made me nervous. My gut roiled a little so I shook my head when he tipped the whiskey bottle my way. I was on shaky ground, not sure where I stood. No use pouring alcohol on that.

“Your favorite, the whiskey sour, was invented by a bartender with a sex offender rap. You know that?” He was babbling. “Back in the 1940s, when it was okay to diddle teenagers, but not lawful to fondle persons of your own sex. This talented but socially rejected barman made up a concoction to cure somebody’s whiskey hangover. A bit of the hair of the dog, right? Used egg white to add nutrients. A drink not too sweet for the stomach, not too flat for the digestion. The sour caught on, all right. The drink recipe must have gone viral, like a silly pet video does these days.”

He cradled his plastic cup and stared into the middle distance. I hate it when men do that. It almost always means they have another woman or a sexually transmitted disease. I crossed my legs and gripped my ankles.
Hit me with your best shot
, was what I thought.
Go ahead.

“Beer is halfway to whiskey, you know. They make whiskey from beer wash, distill the stuff in a pot still.”

Like I said, so fucking what? I tried to sigh silently, but it came out like I meant it. Avery snapped his head around and gave me a heated look.

“You have any idea what happened today, Tami Lee?”

I shrugged.
Let’s see,my client died in the pauper wing, nobody will pay for her funeral. Oh, and Fannie turned up in the canal out on Northwest Miller Road, her head bashed in, maybe with a tire iron. And who will bury her?
But Avery wasn’t talking about those things, I knew that for a painful fact.
I know what happened today. Despite all the tragedy I saw at my crummy job at the DIC, I was thinking about you. I even figured a way to save your fine ass, but now you’re gonna abuse me. Like all the lousy men do with the women who love them.

He shook his head at me, his eyes clouding over real quick, like the summer sky over Dusky Beach. “No. Of course you don’t, Tami Lee,” he said, and he looked away like he hated me. My shoulders pulled up under my ears and I waited for the final blow.

“Two things happened today while you were off doing some sad-ass loser cop from the Elbow,” he said.

When I opened my mouth to protest, his hand shot out and pressed itself firmly against my lips. He kept it there to make sure I didn’t say a word. His skin smelled like rye bread and brine. All I could picture was that rotten rag he slung over his shoulder every day at the Kettle. I breathed once in a while and only through my nose. If I could’ve sucked in some air with my ears, that would’ve been a better deal. The bile floated up into the back of my throat. Not the first time I’d been manhandled by a guy I’d spread myself open for. Still, it always came as such a nasty surprise.

“On a global note, the thermohaline collapse has spurred a tsunami. It’s headed for eastern Europe and hundreds of millions of unprepared people. Marine scientists announced today that the Loop Current in the Gulf is no more. No wonder that the stock market fell a thousand points in fifteen minutes.”

He took his hand back and used it to light up a cigarette. What could I say? No smoking at Love Hotel? That was a joke, so I concentrated on breathing instead. I held my breath while I watched him pour a good amount of whiskey into his dented cup, then I gulped fresh air while he gulped his alcohol. I was waiting for him to pull out a blunt or a pipe. After all, he smoked cigarettes, got stupid drunk. What else had he been lying to me about?

Part of me said in a quiet but firm voice,
everything.
The other part of me said,
just give him a minute to explain.
As per usual, I listened to the wrong me. I only half-listened to his monologue. In my head, I had begun packing my bags for New Hampshire.

He stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray he’d created from a chunk of tinfoil. He’d barely smoked it, but there were two other longish butts in his handmade tray. “Cold water currents have been known to stop and reverse direction within a half hour. Even currents that go down thousands of feet and extend north to south hundreds of miles.” When he turned those stormy eyes on me, I saw nothing in there that could save me, so I looked down at my chipped nails, at my pale hands grasping at maroon and white crochet. “But you don’t give a shit about that, do you, Tami Lee? Long as you have a stiff drink and a stiff Joe in your greedy little mouth, you’re just fine. Right?”

He was displacing his anger, I knew that. Two years at the DIC, I’d been accused of worse things by angry folks hurt by somebody not convenient at the time. I shrugged, uninterested in provoking him with any kind of answer, and said, “What’s the second thing happened today?”

Avery couldn’t bear to look at me, he was so full of his mad suffering. So he stood up and walked toward the door, half-empty bottle in one hand, sloshing cup in the other. I glanced around the room. His stuff wasn’t where he’d kept it the past couple months. No neon running shoes by the door, no battered guitar hanging on the wall over the bed, no shiny black CD player on the night stand.

He leaned his broad back against the thin door with its peeling coat of dirty white paint. When Avery stared at the ceiling, I looked up, too. At the water stains from old roof leaks, and spatters of black and green mold. The place was a dump, but long-term rates were about the best in the area. Still, I knew Cat Avery’s brief sentence in the shoebox was up.

He didn’t look at me when he said, “Chet’s son Chaz turned twenty-one today. Guess who instantly took my place at the Kettle? Once again, a young guy I took under my wing has fucked me over. I’m out of a job again, like that.” He snapped his fingers, spilling whiskey on the already sticky tile floor. “You know how freaking hard it is for a sex offender to get hired anywhere? I am preternaturally and globally fucked.” He flashed his empty stare my way then lifted his cup. “Cheers,” he said, his eyes distant as the horizon.

While he slugged the whiskey he obviously didn’t need, I watched his prominent Adam’s apple slide up and down, remembering how nice it felt under the soft heat of my tongue. The pain in my heart was bad. We’d had our issues, but did he have to leave me
now
? Couldn’t that wait until I hated him? Yes, I know, but why couldn’t I have gone first, split town and left him flat before he went ahead and tossed me in the trash?

I made a last ditch pitch for something. What, I wasn’t sure. “Avery, baby, please think on this. Chet owes you now. This is a good thing. I was thinking today how Chet, his partner, his ‘friends,’ they could maybe help you find out what Rindle Champion’s hiding. These guys, they are very good at getting information from people who don’t want to give it.”

I thought about Chet’s wife, her broken nose—two or three times, I couldn’t recall—the spiraling tattoo of bruises she’d sported when her husband found out she’d been stealing money from the till for drugs. The stories about her husband’s violent lifestyle she’d shared in group.

“Ask Chet to look into it,” I said to Avery. “He likes you, maybe he’ll give payback for having to drop you from the payroll. And what about Peter’s daughter, Joyce, the criminal attorney? I mean, you have options if you still want to clear your name. You could get your old teaching job back at Coconut Palms High or we could move somewhere better, make a better life—”