Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

I watched Maggie fight her way through the crowd to the front. “Let me through,” she said impatiently, not wanting to pull rank. She wisely kept her badge in her pocket as she tossed aside bikers and women twice her size with a strength that impressed me. “Let me through. Coming through.” She finally reached the front and knelt down beside Daniels. His face was covered with blood. “What’s the story?” she asked Roger.

  “He’ll be fine,” the bartender said. “It missed his eye and all major arteries, but it sure looks like that was what they were going for. It’s a long gash and it’s on his face, so it’s going to bleed a lot. Might need a stitch or two.”

  “No,” Daniels croaked. “No hospitals. I don’t want a record of this.”

  Roger did not ask why. “Might get by with some butterfly bandages. I can give you a handful. We got plenty behind the bar.”

  “Thanks,” Maggie said, examining the slice that curved down the side of Bobby’s face. It had been made by a very sharp and very thin blade. There were no hesitation marks or stabbing wounds. Someone had known what they were doing, they just hadn’t gotten close enough to do it properly.

  “I need you to keep this one off the books,” Roger said. “One more call this month and I could lose my liquor license.”

  “Not a problem,” Maggie assured him. “This definitely stays off the books.”

  I don’t know who looked more relieved: Bobby Daniels or the bartender.

  “Can anyone tell me what happened?” Maggie asked Roger.

  The bartender rolled his eyes. “How many burnouts, goofballs, meth heads, and dusters do you have time for?”

  Maggie surveyed the crowd. “As many as actually saw it happen.”

  “I can give it a shot,” Roger promised as he rose to his feet. He raised his hands high and the crowd fell silent, as if waiting for a benediction. “Free drinks all night long for anyone who saw what happened and can help this officer out. But, if you’re contradicted by anyone else and I find out you lied just to get free drinks, then you’re eighty-sixed from here permanently. Got it?”

  Roger had the wisdom of Solomon. His pronouncement presented most of the patrons, none of them anxious to talk to a cop, with a deep moral dilemma. I had to admire the bartender’s ingenuity, though I figured most people would pass up the offer altogether. I was wrong.

  “Well?” Roger asked. “Let’s have it. If you want to stay outside and tell her what you heard, stay and talk. The rest of you, get the hell back inside so some do-gooder driving by doesn’t call in more cops. I’ve told the girls to take off their tops for the next half hour.”

  That got them going. Most of the crowd stampeded back inside, but some stayed behind to talk to Maggie. I joined the line, curious to find out what they knew. It was a cross section of lowlifes, ranging from a toothless old man in sawdust-covered Levi’s to a trio of bikers, two overweight women who’d been rode hard and put away wet, one bleary-eyed older woman with frizzy hair who looked like she’d been drinking the last thirty years away, a skinny kid who seemed terrified at being where he was, but was determined to tough it out, and one decent-looking woman on the right side of thirty wearing a pair of tight jeans and a bikini top. She should have been shivering, but she looked like she’d just stepped off the bar top and had plenty of body heat worked up.

  “Come on, Jeanna,” the bartender said when he saw the young woman in the bikini top. “Get back inside. You’re my moneymaker.”

  “No way,” she said, snapping her gum at him. “I want to talk to her. It’s important.”

  “You can send her back out after her next time up,” Maggie told the bartender. “I’ll talk to the others first and wait for her if I have to. And I’ll tip her. You’ll get your cut. I promise I’ll make up for any time she loses.”

  “Deal. You can use those tables over there.” He pointed to a pair of picnic tables in the side yard left over from way back when the Double Deuce had been a souvenir stand for tourists, before the new interstate had bled them all away. “The cold will sober people up and there’s no way you’ll hear a word inside. Unless you want to take these people into your car.”

  Maggie looked at the old man in filthy Levi’s. “The tables are fine,” she said.

  Roger tossed the blood-soaked rag to Maggie and headed back inside, his dancer close behind. Maggie caught the towel and knelt next to Daniels, murmuring in his ear. “Listen to me, Bobby. I need to talk to these people first so we can get the hell out of here. I don’t want you to listen because I need to hear your story straight from you. I can’t have their versions affecting yours. But when they’re done, I’m going to take you to where you’re staying and I want you to tell me every single thing you can remember. You’re going to be okay. I think we can get away with some butterfly bandages on that cut. Just sit tight, keep the rag pressed to your face, and start going over every minute of tonight. And don’t worry about anyone finding out. I’m not telling anyone about this; I’m not reporting it back. It stays between you and me.”

  Bobby nodded, too overwhelmed to do more than obey. I wondered what it was like to leave the narrow confines of prison life, where everything was prescribed, only to be tossed into the chaos of a place like the Double Deuce.

  “Over here,” Maggie told the witnesses. “I’ll take you one by one.”

  “Ah, man,” one of the bikers complained as he tugged on his ZZ Top beard. “This is gonna take all night.”

  “If you’re at the back of the line, you can go inside and get your free drinks while you wait. Just come back,” Maggie told everyone. “And you two”—she pointed out the biker and his friend—“when you get back, I want you to stand on either side of the guy who was cut and make sure no one gets within twenty feet of him. There’s twenty bucks in it for each of you if you do.”

  “Cool,” the friend said. “I can drink next to anyone for twenty bucks.”

  When I died, my price had been hovering around five.

  While most of the men in the group headed back in to start drinking on Roger’s dime, the old man with dusty Levi’s and the women stayed put. First up was the old guy and he got right to the point.

  “Satan did it,” he told Maggie, sitting down and leaning toward her like they were the best of friends, enjoying a cup of coffee and swapping secrets.

  “Satan?” asked Maggie calmly. She’d done this kind of thing before.

  “Yup. Looked real sharp, too. Dark hair, nice clothes. Mean face though. I don’t care how pretty he was. He walked in, I saw him and I knew there would be trouble. It was Satan. I tell you that now to save you time.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I appreciate the heads-up. I’ll watch my back. Now go tell Roger you’ve earned your free beer.”

  The old man smiled his toothless thanks and made room for the older woman with frizzy hair. Maggie took one look at her prematurely aged face, the swollen flesh and broken veins of her body, and sighed. She recognized the signs of a hard-core, cirrhosis-suffering alcoholic when she saw them.

  “And what did you see?” Maggie asked. “Because the guy before you claims he saw Satan.”

  “I didn’t see no Satan,” the woman said. “I saw a television guy.”

  I had taken a seat next to Maggie and was enjoying watching her work. Unfortunately, that meant I caught a blast of horrific halitosis from the frizzy-haired woman. It was an occupational hazard of being on the job.

  “A television guy?” Maggie asked. “You recognized him from TV?”

  “Hell no,” the woman said. “That shit kills your brain. But he looked like a television guy. You know what I mean? Plastic hair? Phony smile? Clothes that look like someone ironed them right onto him?”

  Hayes. She was describing Alan Hayes. I’d bet my tombstone on it.

  I couldn’t tell if Maggie realized it or not. I don’t think she did.

  “How tall was he?” she asked the woman.

  “Way taller than me.” She cackled. Not a good combination with that frizzy hair of he
rs. Throw in a cauldron and she’d be ready for business.

  Real police work again had made me giddy. I’d gotten a lot funnier in death, I decided. It was too bad there was no one around who could hear me.

  “And you saw him attack that man?” Maggie nodded toward Bobby Daniels, who was sitting patiently while Roger applied a series of small butterfly bandages down the length of his gash. The bikers had done as Maggie asked and were flanking Daniels like a pair of stone lions guarding a library entrance.

  “No,” the woman admitted. “I didn’t see him attack anyone. It’s just that he didn’t fit in. I mean, look at us.” She waved a hand boozily toward the others. “He didn’t fit and I think he had something to do with it. For one thing, do you see him here now?”

  I thought she had a point. So did Maggie.

  “Okay,” Maggie conceded. “I appreciate it. Tell Roger I said you earned your free drinks.”

  The woman staggered off and a scared-looking kid took her place.

  “You old enough to be here?” Maggie asked him bluntly.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said, whipping out a wallet and producing a military ID. “I’m twenty-four years old. I just look young for my age. Always have.”

  Maggie handed his ID back without even looking at it. “You on leave?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m shipping out tomorrow.”

  “Better get good and drunk tonight then,” Maggie said.

  The kid was surprised. It took him a moment to realize she was joking, and when he finally laughed, it made him look about twelve years old. I tried to get a feel of what his fate held in store for him, especially if he was headed for active duty. But all I could get from him was an image of two older people, dressed for church, arms outstretched to hug him. Not a bad memory to take with you to bad places.

  “What did you see?” Maggie asked him.

  The kid blushed spectacularly, turning a tomato red all the way from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears. What a thing to live with.

  “What is it?” Maggie asked him more kindly, seeing his distress.

  “I got tossed,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “I got tossed.” He looked up at Maggie, ashamed. “You know, like dwarf tossing?”

  “No, I don’t know,” Maggie said firmly.

  “I was standing there, minding my own business, watching a real pretty girl dance on the bar, when someone picked me up by my waistband and the back of my pants and kind of threw me through the crowd. I hit some fellows sitting at the end of the bar and went down. That’s when about fifty people landed on top of me and I got dragged outside, and I can’t tell you much else.”

  Maggie was staring at him. “You got tossed?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “And I don’t have to tell you how embarrassing that is.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “You don’t. You have no idea who did it?”

  He shook his head. “I reckon he was pretty big.”

  Maggie did not correct him, although I am sure she was thinking the same thing I was: so far, just about every customer we’d seen, with the exception of the old man in Levi’s, could have tossed this kid across the room. Especially the women. But Maggie did not pursue the point. She was like a perfectly calibrated interrogation machine, and what was more: I could tell she liked it. I was getting a glimpse into the real Maggie at last. She liked being among these people.

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “Thanks. Go on inside and have your drinks. And good luck tomorrow.” She hesitated, then took his hands and squeezed them. “Don’t be a hero. Just put your head down and get through it. It’ll pass.”

  He looked at her a little strangely as he walked away to his fate.

  I wondered if he’d ever come back.

  Two over-the-hill and overweight biker chicks took his place. “We want to testify together,” they announced in unison.

  “You’re not testifying,” Maggie explained patiently. “This is all off the record. I just need to know who started it and who came after that guy.”

  “We still want to do it together,” one of them said.

  “Okay by me.” Maggie waved at them to take a seat.

  They sat side by side, illuminated by the neon lights. They were definitely old before their time and it was likely alcohol and smoking were the reasons why. But for a pair of women who’d been hanging out at a bar all night, they seemed pretty damn sober to me. They took turns telling their story, like that children’s game Connie used to play with the boys: one person would make up a sentence, then the next person would add their own and so on, no matter how absurd it got.

  “That guy was sitting at the end of the bar,” the bottle blonde of the pair explained as she pointed out Bobby Daniels. “Minding his own business. Not saying anything.”

  “We figure he was laying low on account of he’s right out of the joint,” the second woman said. “Anyone can tell. A couple of the working girls approached him, knowing that and all, but he just waved them off.”

  “Might have gone gay inside,” the first woman confided to Maggie. “Happens to some of them.”

  “That’s true,” her friend agreed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Then this sweaty fat guy comes up,” the first woman said. “Sat next to him and you could tell they knew each other. But I can’t say they liked each other. It was like they had to talk to one another but neither one of them wanted to be there. Like what they really wanted to be was arguing, but there was too many people around.”

  “I understand,” Maggie said. “What did this fat guy look like?”

  “A loser,” the first woman offered.

  “Like a really bad car salesman,” her friend explained. “One who hasn’t sold a car in, like, twenty years. Fat. Sweating. Losing his hair. Bad suit.”

  “He had red hair,” the first woman offered.

  “No, he didn’t. I have red hair,” her friend said, running her hands through it to prove it. It was nice hair, too. She took good care of it. “That guy had brown hair. What was left of it.”

  “Okay, he had reddish brown hair,” the first one decided. “And he stunk of bad aftershave and way too much of it. Like we couldn’t smell the booze underneath it?”

  Danny. Danny had been there, too.

  “What happened next?”

  “They were arguing,” the second woman explained. “Me and Tammy tried to get closer. You know. We were bored. There’s this new girl,” she explained, then stopped to make a face. “She was in line earlier to talk to you. Every time she climbs up on the bar, you’d think Miss America had arrived and decided to tear off her clothes and do lap dances. The men go wild and we’re invisible.”

  “Yeah,” the first one agreed angrily. “And they throw all of our money at her. Because, let me tell you, we bring in steady paychecks, which is more than I can say for most of the men in this place.”

  “And then?” Maggie asked firmly, leading them back to the point.

  “They were sitting at the end of the bar, near the front door,” the first one explained. “I figured it was because the young guy had claustrophobia. You know, he didn’t like little spaces on account of just getting out of the joint.”

  “That’s probably true,” the second woman said in admiration. “I didn’t get that far in thinking about it.”

  “And?” Maggie asked less patiently.

  The first woman was ready: “All of a sudden, someone shoves Tony into the two of them. I mean, he just comes flying out of the crowd and slams into them, and they topple over on Charley, and some girl he’s trying to pick up, and drinks are spilling everywhere, and Charley and Tony come up swinging, and before you know it, everyone has pushed out the front door and they’re rolling around in the parking lot, and the whole place empties out and you can’t see a thing, but people are hitting the dirt right and left and fists are flying.”

  “Yeah,” the second woman added. “It was way better than the dancing.”
>
  “How did he get cut?” Maggie asked, gesturing toward Bobby Daniels.

  Both women shrugged. “That’s kind of the weird part,” the first woman said. “I mean, we were looking and we didn’t see nobody pull a knife. So whoever it was had to be quick. Now, I did see maybe a chain or two, but these guys got records. Most of ’em got two strikes against ’em. They’re not going to pull their weapons unless it’s serious.”

  “Are Charley and Tony waiting to talk to me?” Maggie asked, nodding toward the two men standing on either side of Bobby Daniels.

  “Tony is,” the second woman said. “Charley split with the girl he was hitting on as soon as Roger came out swinging a bat and broke up the fight.”

  “Yeah,” the first woman agreed. “Charley’s a lover, not a fighter.”

  Maggie suppressed a smile. “Okay.” she said. “Thanks, you guys. I appreciate how observant you are.”

  “Yeah?” the first woman said eagerly. She looked at her friend. “Maybe you and me ought to be cops?” They were still laughing as they stumbled back inside, anxious to start drinking on someone else’s tab for a change.

  None of these people had bothered Maggie. She was able to see beyond their rough exteriors and bad teeth and lack of money to the human beings beneath. She was able to find some sort of point in common with them, somehow, and they could feel it, and that was why they talked so easily to her. What a woman. I marveled at what I felt coming from her. She was calm and organized inside. She knew this was a distance game and that the starting pistol had just been fired. She was going to piece it all together before it came to an end, no matter how long it took and how many kooks she had to wade through to get to the truth.

  She waved over Tony the biker. He was so big that the picnic table tipped to his side when he sat down and Maggie had to put out her hands for balance.

  “Sorry, Officer,” he said in a low, rumbling voice as he settled in and slammed two big mugs of beer down on either side of him, like a modern-day Viking drinking his mead after a hard day’s worth of raping and pillaging. I took in his yellow-turning-to-white beard, the little pigtails he’d braided into the mass of it like a pirate, saw his big blue eyes, and recognized him: my friend from the other night, the one I’d hitched a ride into town with on his chopper.