by R. B. Schow
“It’s eleven p.m.,” she said. “Be sure to pace yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking only at her eyes.
While he drank, he thought of Alabama Hargrove, the look on her face in the picture he managed to get, and he wondered what the hell happened to her. She was there one minute and then a ghost the next. The fact that he was still working the case piecemeal bothered him immensely. But that was the deal no matter how much it bothered him. Unfortunately, it bothered him plenty. He could never really get Alabama out of his mind.
Beer after beer after beer only seemed to take him further from the Hargrove case or any understanding of it. Fortunately, the dive bar was beginning to fill up. After learning the bad news about his wife, Scotty had developed a wandering eye. He found himself looking at the women in the bar, not judging any of them, but taking in all the little details. And then he wondered where he and his wife had gone so wrong. She tossed thirteen years of marriage right in the shitter.
Scotty was a good-looking guy with more money problems than resources to solve them. His wife had no problem reminding him of that. He was good to her, attentive when he was around her, supportive of the things she wanted to do. Unfortunately, she was just one of those types of women who couldn’t leave when things were over, so he never even saw the affair until it was too late. For a private detective, that was pretty pathetic.
“You’re just another asshole, Scotty the Hottie,” he said to himself regardless of whoever else heard him in the bar.
He finished the rest of his fifth beer, or was it his sixth? There was no way to be sure unless he asked the bartender with the dreamy rack where he was at on his bar tab. He waved her down to ask for another beer but she pointed to the clock and then held up five fingers. Did she really want him to wait five minutes?
“This is horse shit,” he called down to her. She then held up six fingers and served a younger man and his friends.
Two college girls sat at the stools next to him and though he wanted to talk because they were young, hot, and full of energy, he knew it would lead to nowhere good. Then, one of them turned and said, “Hey, I know you.”
“I’m sorry?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she replied, laughing. “You were the guy doing coke in the bathroom last time you were here. The guy I was with, he’s the guy who sold it to you.”
“When exactly was that?” he asked, not sure of his timeline because he’d been pretty bombed these last few months.
“About two weeks ago?” she said, almost like she was guessing, too. “Scotty, right?”
He closed his eyes and turned around.
To her friend, the attractive blonde said, “This guy Bart pissed all over the place and the dude next to me”—she tapped him on the shoulder getting his attention—“what’s your last name again?”
“It’s just Scotty,” he said.
Back to her friend, she said, “Yeah, so Scotty here was like a freaking Hoover vacuum the way he went after this huge line. He snorted it like it was fairy dust.” She turned to him again and said, “You were depressed, right?”
“What you’re doing right now is depressing.”
To her friend, a hot brunette who was looking at him with overdone eyes, she said, “He got screwed by a client or something.” She turned back to him again. “You’re like a private detective, right?”
“I’m not really sure how to react to you right now,” he said, resigned to feeling like a total schmuck.
“So his client totally screws him after he found out the guy’s wife was like, doing bathroom porn or something.”
“Bathroom porn?” her friend asked.
“You know, taking videos of your kitty and putting them on TikTok. Anyway, his client’s wife is a teacher and the kid filming, he’s one of her students, and then it all went wrong. His wife was fired and brought up on statutory rape charges and then the client goes and completely beats the piss out of the kid, landing himself in jail.”
“So did he get paid?” the ever-inquisitive brunette asked.
“No,” Scotty said, leaning her way. “Three months of work and nothing more than a two-thousand-dollar retainer. You can stand at a corner and ask for change and make more money than that.”
“Yeah,” the blonde said, “so this sob story wraps up with him wasted out of his mind and crying over some lady named Carly.”
“Carly is my wife.”
“Does she know that?” the brunette snickered.
“Does she know her name or does she know that we’re married?” Scotty asked, his voice sounding a bit too saucy to be conversing with regular people.
“Both?” the brunette asked with an annoying college giggle. On the Scotty Chase hotness scale, she just dropped a peg or two, not that she’d care.
Shaking his head, he went back to his beer and thought about Alabama. How the hell was he supposed to find her? He was out of leads, Wentworth was now second-guessing his dedication to the case, and he couldn’t even pay his lead investigator because he blew through his safety net a while back.
If Wentworth ever called again, should Scotty come clean? Should he ask for an up-front fee or exaggerate the expenses he expected to incur? That was not their arrangement in the past but that didn’t mean things had to stay the same. COVID was the big game-changer. It threw everything into a tailspin.
But the retainer…
Frowning, waving at the bartender again, he realized he was on his last few grand and he’d be waiting another week for his stimulus check, which he’d also blow through in no time.
“Hey, buddy, why don’t you move down so I can sit with my friends,” a college kid said as he tapped Scotty on the shoulder.
Scotty glanced back and saw this kid who looked like a jock with muscles and some snappy teenage snark. He didn’t like him already. Turning back to the bartender, who was still on the other side of the bar, he tried once again to get her attention.
“Yo, pal,” the kid said. “I’m talking to you.”
He turned around and looked the kid over with bleary eyes. Things were sort of spinning, but he didn’t let that stop him from conversing.
“You go to ASU?” Scotty asked him.
“You don’t need to know that in order to move, so seriously, go grab that barstool on the end and let me sit with my friends.”
The two girls looked at Scotty like he was being rude, and then Scotty looked at the guy who was being rude and thought about smashing his face on the edge of the bar just to watch his face break open and bleed.
Finally, he stood and said, “I’m a lover not a fighter; no need to hassle an old man.”
“Good, thanks, hurry up,” the kid said, not an ounce of gratitude to be found.
“You drive the yellow mustang, don’t you kid?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you around.”
“I don’t drive a yellow Mustang.”
“Look, man, nothing to be embarrassed about—”
“I drive a Blazer, thank you very much,” he said. “But seriously, bro, you’re salting my game here.”
Scotty held up his hands and moved on. He was headed to the open barstool when some other guy slid in and took it. “I give up,” he muttered. Leaning against the bar, he laid down his last four twenties and told the bartender to keep the change.
“You’re leaving already?” she asked as she collected the money.
“Yeah,” he said. “I might be getting diarrhea.”
“You need me to call you a cab?” she asked. He ignored her as he made his way through a small crowd of middle-aged men talking sports or women or whatever.
When he walked outside, he saw his car and stopped. He let out a pained sigh and said, “Well ain’t that just the biggest kick in the nuts.”
Every single window was broken out, the panels were dented, and there was some message spray-painted along the driver’s door.
TWO DAYS.
“What the hell does that mean?” he wondered.
He was
suddenly taken to the ground and hit with a flurry of punches, most of which were to his ribs and back. Through all of this, some guy was saying they wanted their money.
“What money?” he asked, still not sure who was throttling him.
The guy finally rolled him over but, unfortunately, he hit Scotty in the face several times to get his attention. It worked. These morons had his attention.
Laid out on the ground, gasping for breath, he watched as some big ugly dude walked into his field of vision. He towered over Scotty and he didn’t look nice.
“I know you are new to this sort of thing but this is not the way we do business,” the big guy said. “You screw us; we screw you twice as hard and twice as deep.”
“I’m not involved in any sex clubs, thank you very much, but there are gay bars everywhere I think. If you want to screw other guys twice as hard and twice as deep, you should try there.”
The three guys looked at each other and started laughing.
“I kind of like this dude,” the big guy said.
“Why’d you trash my car?”
“Because you owe us money and you haven’t paid,” he said. Scotty noticed the guy was strapped. Were all of them packing?
“I don’t know who you’re even talking about, but I’m Scotty Chase—”
“A down-and-out detective who was once the best in the business, I know. You fell hard, the bottom dropping out, but you’ll get on your feet. Did you get on your feet yet, Scotty?”
“Just about, yeah,” he said, trying hard to put the pieces of this puzzle together. “Maybe I have a job from a guy who’s loaded in the next few weeks or something. But…what do I owe you, and what did I buy from you?”
The guys broke into laugher again like they couldn’t get enough of him.
“That’s cute, Scotty,” he said. “See, you rolled on one of our friends, and that friend just got a bullet in the local pen.”
Scotty was trying to follow the guy, but then he realized that getting a bullet in the pen meant a one-year sentence in the penitentiary.
“That means you owe us for one year’s worth of his earnings. We had this conversation before.”
“You have the wrong guy,” Scotty said.
“Frederick Smith, a.k.a. Shitty Fred Smitty,” the big guy said. “That ring a bell?”
Yeah, it did. Oh, damn.
“He was a two-time scumbag who liked to peep into his neighbor’s window watching their fifteen-year-old daughter change, right?” Scotty asked.
“It doesn’t matter what he did, he didn’t need to do a year in the slammer for it. But now he is which means we have a gap in our income. You’re going to fill that gap.”
“Smitty was a helluva earner,” one of the other morons said.
Scotty turned and spit a little blood onto the asphalt. “So, how much do I owe you donkey dicks for Shitty Fred’s annual earnings?”
“Twenty large,” the big guy said.
“How about twenty small? Because that’s what’ll be left over after I put nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-dollars worth of work into my car.”
The big guy looked over at Scotty’s older 7-series BMW and said, “That bucket ain’t worth nine-hundred-and-eighty bucks much less the nineteen large you’re tacking onto it.”
“I have something you’ll like then,” Scotty said. “Will one of you dick eaters help me up?”
The three of them looked at each other like they couldn’t believe it. “This cat’s about to lose his ninth life,” one of the trio muttered.
When no one bothered to help him up, Scotty stood on his own, slowly, staggering a bit at first before straightening up and chin-checking the big guy in front of him.
The white guy’s head rocked back and that’s when Scotty followed the jab with a huge right hook that hit the mark dead-on. The guy went stiff and fell straight backward. When he landed on his back, the other guys let out a collective “Oooh!” The big guy’s hands went stiff, his wrists curling his hands at his sides.
Scotty looked down and saw the big guy’s eyes had rolled up into his sockets and his entire body looked strained with a little shake to it. To the layman, it might look like he was being electrocuted.
“Now, there’s another white guy who can’t dance,” Scotty said with a laugh.
“You killed him, bro,” one of the guys said.
The second the two of them rushed in, Scotty cracked one in the jaw but got tackled to the ground by the other. He took two big shots to the side of his face—which rattled his skull—but then he dodged a follow-up shot, causing the man’s fist to smash into the pavement.
The guy cried out for a second, then looked at his hand.
“Hurts, don’t it?” Scotty asked, his face throbbing.
Something in the man’s hand was broken which was why Scotty grabbed it and started digging his fingers into the injured area. He quickly found the fracture and made it infinitely worse. After pushing himself free and getting to his feet, he pounded the man three times in the side of the head until he fell down with the other two.
A couple of people standing just outside the bar’s front door clapped their hands in a sort of half-hearted applause. One of them had been filming the entire fight but then she put the phone away and went back inside. How many people would they tell before the video went live? He looked over at his car and frowned. Shaking his head, cursing quietly to himself, he walked over to the only thing he’d really ever bought for himself—the 750i BMW.
Inside, on the front passenger seat, he found a fist-sized river rock sitting among a bunch of broken glass. He tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start. He popped the hood only to find it was already open.
“You crooked donkey dicks,” he growled, still looking at them on the pavement. A couple of guys and three girls were trying to wake them up. One of them was coming around.
Scotty lifted the beamer’s hood then stood back. Inside, he found a bunch of pulled wires, a few cut wires, and a dead cat.
“Now that’s just uncalled for,” he said, taking it by the tail and flinging it at the two guys who were still unconscious.
“Should we call an ambulance?” one of the girls was asking.
Then the cat landed right next to the big guy and the girls screamed and ran into the bar, one of them falling and skinning her knee on the way. The two guys who came with the girls helped one of the semi-coherent thugs inside, leaving the two unconscious men behind.
With no witnesses left in the parking lot of the Rum Runner, the deli next door, or the bar & lounge on the other side of that, he figured he could just leave. He could explain it to the cops if they came for them, but that’s when he saw a lifted Blazer with an ASU sticker on the back window. This seventies beast was backed into a nearby parking spot right under a yellow sign advertising watch and jewelry repair.
Reaching inside the BMW, he grabbed the river rock, then ran about ten steps and hurled the rock at the Blazer’s back window. Before he even knew what happened, he was face-down on the dusty asphalt lot. Apparently, he was drunker than he thought.
When he tried to get up, he gasped as someone helped him up.
“You okay, sir?” an older man with a cowboy hat and a big belly in a western shirt had asked.
“I think so. I must have gotten hit harder than I thought.”
“Them the guys that attacked you?” he asked of the two unconscious men. “You was that feller who had to defend yourself?”
“Yeah,” he said, dusting himself off. “Thank you for the help.”
Scotty started back inside the blood-red bar heading right for the bathroom he had already frequented before. He hoped that in addition to having a coke stall, they had a sink and mirror. He wasn’t all the way to the bathroom when he saw the college douchebag chatting it up with his double–order of giggling twat waffles.
“I think someone smashed up your Blazer,” he told the kid.
“What?” he asked.
Wavering a bit,
he reached out and grabbed the first thing he could find to hold onto. It happened to be the kid’s shoulder. He quickly shoved Scotty’s hand away causing an involuntary reaction in him.
Scotty grabbed the kid’s arm, pulled it back, then slammed his face into the bar, still hanging on for balance. Getting right in the kid’s ear, he said, “I’m trying to do you a solid, bro. Just letting you know what’s up.”
“I said no fighting,” the bartender hurried over and said.
He shoved the kid’s face hard, then stood and smiled at the woman. “Oh, hey there. I missed you.”
“What the hell happened to your face?” she asked.
Scotty stared at her tits for a good ten seconds then he looked up and said, “My car was vandalized so badly it’s nearly unsalvageable. His Blazer was messed up, too. I was telling him this when he assaulted me, but he’s an asshole, so I think maybe it’s okay?”
“It’s not okay,” the blonde said.
“No one asked you, dingbat.” Before she could retort, he smiled and said, “Are those your real lips?”
“I just got them done,” she said, touching them.
“They look great,” he replied, tasting blood. He turned back to the bartender. “Two of the three guys who beat me up are still out in the parking lot.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Kissing pavement,” he said. “Where’d the third one go?”
“I think he’s in the bathroom,” the brunette said. “You know, your coke den, apparently?”
“If I was you,” he said to the brunette, “I’d get the number of your friend’s doctor and get your lips done. No offense, but they’re kind of thin and shapeless.”
“I’m calling the cops,” the bartender said.
“If they have any questions,” he replied, “have them call me.”
“I don’t have your number,” the bartender said.
“Funny you should say that. If you have a pen and paper, we can remedy that situation.”
She gave him a notepad and a pen, then she said, “Don’t bleed on my bar.”
“How many times do you get to say that in a month?” he asked sarcastically as he jotted down his number.
Before he was done, he wrote, Call me anytime, making the A in “Call” into a heart and putting XXOO at the bottom.
