Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “I should punch you in the head,” Dale sneered.

  “You already did that.” I touched the stitches in my cheek. “Look. See? I should punch you in the head. It’s my bloody turn, isn’t it?”

  We watched each other. I put down my glass. He pushed the laptop closed.

  * * *

  The bar was hot and red, the throbbing internals of an enormous beast, groups of people standing around tall tables or lined in pairs along the bar, heads down, concentrating on intense conversations or stacks of playing cards at their fingers. In the corner, a jazz band squealing and writhing, shining brass cast pink in the overhead light. Sweeney had never been a big drinker, which had probably isolated her from her police colleagues over in Holloways Beach. The expectations of the pub scene filled her with dread. The few times she’d been out with groups of cops she’d cowered under the stares of men from the pool tables and the gaming room, tried to loosen up by hitting the spirits early and made a fool of herself shouting awkward responses to conversations that ran too quickly for her. She was always just slightly too loud or too quiet to fit in. No one turned to her for contributions. She never knew when it was polite to leave.

  This place was different. No one looked up as they walked in. The bartender seemed to recognize Amanda and nodded as he took up a glass for what must have been her usual.

  “And for your friend?”

  Amanda looked. Sweeney felt the air catch in her throat.

  “What are you having?” she asked Amanda.

  “Chivas.”

  “Chivas? Christ!”

  “I drank prison hooch for ten years,” Amanda said. “Whatever I drink, it can’t be fruity.”

  “I’ll have the same,” she told the bartender. They took stools at the bar, Sweeney wincing as someone’s elbow jutted into her ribs, an order shouted over her head. The bartender put two glasses of neat Scotch and a pack of cards before them. Amanda didn’t move to pay. Sweeney followed her lead.

  “What are we playing?”

  “Snap!” Amanda laughed. “What else?”

  Sweeney hadn’t played Snap since she was in primary school. Amanda shuffled the cards over-hand like an old-school hustler.

  Cheers erupting all around them. Groups watching the cards fall, eyes glued to dancing fingers. Sweeney took her deck and started flipping the cards onto the pile in turn, Amanda’s hand restless, hovering, the twitch in her neck ticking rhythmically.

  “So what’s the surveillance turning up on Michael Bell?” Amanda asked, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  “For a rough, plain sort of guy, he’s got a huge support network,” Sweeney said. “The tail is bored out of their minds. People are doing everything for him. Bringing him food, beer, mowing his lawn. He sits at home mostly, seeing visitors. We’ve identified every visitor and conducted background checks.”

  “Anyone interesting?”

  “Nope.” Sweeney peeled and flipped her cards slowly. “Nothing questionable in his bank account, either. He doesn’t own, and has never owned, a bike.”

  “You don’t have to own a bike to be a biker these days,” Amanda said. “It’s all about your weight. If you can prove yourself a good earner you don’t even have to know how to ride.”

  “How do you know this sort of stuff?”

  “Ted and I went out to see an old swamp monster named Llewellyn Bruce on our last case.”

  “Llewellyn Bruce!” Sweeney said. “Jesus. You’re brave.”

  “Anyway, I’ve been out there a couple of times since just to say hello on my rounds. It’s good to keep up these kinds of connections.”

  When the pair came Amanda slammed her hand down on the stack with a triumphant howl that made Sweeney’s ears ring.

  “SNAAAAAAP!” she roared.

  “Oh my god.” Sweeney looked around, blushing.

  “Come on, Sweens. You’re going to need to be faster than that.”

  “You ought to be careful going out to those swamps.” Sweeney’s face was taut as the cards started flipping again. “Don’t go by yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because something will happen to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’ll be raped and fed to a crocodile, Amanda, that’s what.”

  “I have dealt with both of those particular predicaments rather effectively before, I’ll remind you,” Amanda said. Sweeney felt her neck rush with heat. Amanda didn’t seem to notice her embarrassment and carried on. “So back to Bell. We’re not concerned about him. What about the girlfriend?”

  “She’s a wholly different creature,” Sweeney said. “She’s very alone.”

  “She lives alone?”

  “Yes, but I mean she’s alone in the rest of her life.” Sweeney had to yell over the music. “Her parents are interstate. And aside from Andrew I’m not sure she really has any social connections.”

  “That’s what happens when you let your first love consume you,” Amanda said. “You get lazy. You don’t need friends. You’ve got him. And then by the time he’s gone you’ve never developed the ability to make friends. That’s how old ladies end up dying in perfectly arranged houses and no one notices for three months.”

  “Huh.” Sweeney tried to shake off encroaching dark thoughts, but they rolled over her quickly. She was alone. She hadn’t been consumed by a first love, but by a first loss. She’d never developed the ability to make friends as an adult—hadn’t noticed the lack in her life until it was too late. Now she was wandering, as her surveillance officers were reporting Stephanie was wandering, walking with her head down to the shops, buying nothing, walking home.

  “My round,” she said, pointing to Amanda’s glass.

  By her third Scotch, Sweeney felt warm and happy. Sweat was rolling down her neck into her bra. Everyone in the bar was sweating. Red demons doing their pleasant time in hellfire.

  “Have you always had that twitch?” she asked suddenly. She regretted it instantly and squeezed her eyes shut as memories of awkward liaisons with her colleagues flashed before her. Amanda didn’t even look up. She was watching the cards fall with the intensity of a cat watching goldfish swimming inside a tank.

  “It started the morning after the murder,” Amanda said.

  “See, this is it. This is what I don’t get.” Sweeney kept flipping cards.

  “What don’t you get?”

  “You. I don’t get you. At all. You simultaneously will and won’t talk about the murder.” She heard the frustration in her own voice. “You say ‘the morning after the murder’ like you might say ‘the morning after the wedding.’ Like you’re talking about nothing. It was so damaging to you that you’re actually physically traumatized. And yet you go fluttering around your life like this invincible cartoon character, having a great time, solving Scooby-Doo mysteries.”

  “What exactly am I not telling you about the murder, Teeney-Weeney-Sweeney-Bikini?” Amanda asked. “What do you want to know so bad?”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “I regret getting the wrong person, that’s for sure.” Amanda laughed suddenly, absurdly. “I was going for Steven Hench. He’d been right there, outside the car door. But then when I opened my eyes it was Lauren Freeman. The old switcheroo.” She glanced up at Sweeney. “Who knew, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Sweeney said. “Who knew.”

  “And now Steven Hench is in prison. And that annoys me. Because I loved prison, and maybe he does, too. I don’t know.”

  “But going back to Lauren…” Sweeney said.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Yes.” Sweeney edged closer to Amanda. “Doesn’t that make you feel sad?”

  “People die all the time,” Amanda said. “An airplane engine could fall off a 747 and smash through the ceiling of this bar right now, crushing us both to death like juicy little cockroaches. You ever think about that? I do.” She glanced toward the ceiling.

  “We leap directly from the murder to airplane accidents,” Sweeney
said. “It’s like being on a treadmill, just trying to keep up.”

  “Faster, faster.” Amanda waved impatiently at the cards.

  “Your attitude doesn’t match with your behavior.” Sweeney slammed her hand down on the stack automatically as a pair of queens appeared. Amanda howled with laughter, rocked back on her stool.

  “That was a good one!”

  “Are you guilty?” Sweeney persisted.

  “Honey, is all this about my guilt?” Amanda asked. “Or yours?”

  Sweeney reeled. The Scotch had gone right to her head suddenly. She wondered what the hell she was doing here with this strange woman, pursuing underlying signs of murderous guilt, trying to find a whisper of what she felt. Because yes, she felt it, that cold, dark shadow slithering and sliding around the recesses of her brain, now and then appearing and staining the bright white thoughts she dared to have about happy times in a bar with a real friend, someone who would understand her. She had the sense suddenly that Amanda knew all of it. That knowledge of what Sweeney had done—or what she hadn’t done—had somehow escaped the locked box in her mind and Amanda had seen it all. Her father on the floor. His hand reaching. Eyes pleading.

  “Oh shit!” Amanda exclaimed suddenly, and hopped off her stool. She was gone in a flash of glitter and beads. Sweeney stumbled after her, took the edge of the bar too closely and bumped her arm painfully on the mahogany trim. There was a big, heavy-shouldered man at the end of the bar, a rocks glass looking tiny in the nest of his tattooed fingers. Gray stubble grew to an equal length over his rugged jaw and skull.

  “Oh shit,” he said when Amanda slapped his bicep.

  “It’s the Spruce Caboose—Llewellyn Bruce! I was just talking about you! I didn’t know you hung out here!”

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “This is LB!” Amanda explained to Sweeney, slapping the big man’s arm again in some kind of aggressive-affectionate greeting. “Ole mate! The big cheese of dogs with fleas!”

  “I see you haven’t grown any tits since I last saw you.” Bruce leaned over, peered skeptically into the tiny gap between Amanda’s small, hard breasts, pushed together by the dress. “You two on a date?”

  “No,” Sweeney said.

  “This is my partner, of sorts. Sweeney McSweenface. We’re on the Barking Frog case together. Not officially.” Amanda jerked her thumb and almost got Sweeney in the face. “Hey, it’s great to see you here, Bruce. Because you must know Claudia Flannery, the Leathery Queen. She’d be a hundred million years old, like you.”

  “I know Ms. Flannery.” Bruce’s eyes wandered over Amanda lazily. “I’ve known her a long time.”

  “People tell us the Frog is a biker hangout,” Amanda said. “Drug den.”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “I thought that wouldn’t be right,” Amanda said. “I told ’em you’re the Grand Poo-bah of drugs in the Far North.”

  Bruce raised an eyebrow in response, shrugged a shoulder. Amanda was about to press on, but stopped herself midsentence and announced she needed to pee, sprinting away into the crowd. Sweeney dropped her eyes from the ancient drug dealer’s glare and noticed in doing so a gathering of dogs lazing around the bottom of the man’s bar stool. They were not any particular kind of canine, but an assortment of ragged, misshapen things. One creature’s neck bulged with a lumpy pink growth that threatened to creep up the side of its face. Another was missing both eyes, the cavities grown over completely with caramel fur. On the counter beside her, Bruce’s big fingers took up his glass again, drawing her attention away from the beasts. The fingers of his hand were tattooed with the word “Skin” in mottled blue ink. She looked to his other hand. “Bone.”

  “I can see what you’re thinking,” Bruce said when she dared to meet his gaze. “You’re thinking—Amanda and me are connected. So maybe she can help you get to know me. You can squeeze in there between us as the new detective in town. We can be one big cooperative family.”

  “Well,” Sweeney struggled to say. “I wasn’t, uh … assuming anything.”

  “Let me set you straight.” Bruce leaned over. “We ain’t no family. Yes, I was glad to see those pricks go. Your predecessors. And I tolerate that little freak fluttering around my place.” He waved in the direction that Amanda had fled. “But I don’t do cops. Never have. Never will.”

  “That’s okay.” Sweeney tried to look nonchalant.

  “Oh, I know it is.” He appreciated the new detective. “And while I’m handing out advice, you want to watch that Pharrell girl. She’s a trouble magnet.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “Born under an unlucky star.”

  “What exactly does Amanda do out there at your place?” Sweeney asked.

  “Nothing much.” Bruce shrugged. “Shows up unannounced. Cracks terrible jokes. Plays with the dogs. I think she might be eyeing off a bike. Crappy old Harley. Doesn’t like cars, you see. She never stays long. Zips in. Blathers on for a bit. Zips out.”

  “So why do you tolerate her hanging around? You want to sell her the bike?”

  “I couldn’t give a shit about the bike,” he snorted. “You make room for your own kind.”

  Sweeney didn’t know what he meant, at first. But then she saw it, flickering in the downward turn of the big man’s mouth as the bartender, heading toward them to refill Bruce’s glass, got distracted and turned away. A sparkle of malice. Killer instinct. Though she was sure it wasn’t on a criminal database anywhere, or written in any court filings, Sweeney knew this man had killed. He made room for his own kind. Amanda, a fellow taker of life.

  Amanda was back among them before Sweeney could ask more questions, faking a slow-motion punch to the side of Bruce’s round gut.

  “All right, spill it, Brucey. The Barking Frog isn’t just a bar, is it?” Amanda pushed. “We’re trying to figure out why someone would rob the place. It doesn’t make any money. There’s something we don’t know, right?”

  “You mean you don’t know what goes on there?” Bruce sighed. “Jesus. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of supersleuth.”

  “I am!” Amanda looked appalled.

  “We don’t know what goes on,” Sweeney said, leaning in. “Can you help us out?”

  Bruce looked at his watch. Glanced at the clock above the bar, where a tiny slot in the cream-colored face showed the date.

  “Why don’t you go back there?” Bruce suggested, his voice light. He grinned, showing a collection of yellowed and gold-capped teeth.

  “It’s closed tonight,” Sweeney said.

  “Is it?” Bruce asked.

  It wasn’t a good fight by anyone’s standards. Some cops like to fight, and will deliberately get in scraps with drug dealers and mules in their houses just for the satisfaction of landing a couple of shots to vent the many frustrations of the job. Put a foot through the enormous TV bought with the profits of some young person’s life. When I was a drug squad cop, though, my size made me more of a battering ram. Drug dealers, invariably small, wiry people, ran from the sight of me. Kelly also tended to yell at me if I came home with too many bumps and scrapes, so I tried to be careful.

  I’d got into a few fights in prison and knew how to defend myself, but even then I liked things to be over quickly. You never knew who was going to jump into the fray with a shiv because they thought they might get away with a quick murder in the chaos.

  Dale and I were plenty drunk by the time we lunged at each other, although neither of us might have admitted it. I picked him up and threw him clean through the screen door to the porch. He rolled down the stairs onto the grass and I followed, picked him up and sucker punched him in the guts, copped his palm in my jaw for my efforts. We scrabbled on the lawn, swearing and growling, fighting the sloppiness and breathlessness that too many drinks bring. His nose was bleeding and my lip was split by the time we gave it up. That was about the worst of the damage.

  We’d upset the geese again. Dale sat panting on the lawn whi
le I went and hushed them, the light of the kitchen making the blood pouring down his lips and chin a rosy, beautiful shade of red. When I returned to the porch he was sitting with his back to the weatherboard wall, carefully inserting a tissue into each nostril. I sat down against the wall nearby and drew my legs up and hung my hands off them, felt strangely satisfied. At the end of the property the water was shimmering as distant sheet lightning flashed over the mountains. The humidity had already surrendered in anticipation of the coming storm. The tension between my enemy and me had also cracked.

  I must have drifted away into my thoughts, because when I came to myself Dale had stretched his legs out and the laptop was resting on them. He’d put a fresh glass of bourbon on the boards between us. I didn’t know if it was supposed to be his or mine. I drank from it anyway.

  He was scrolling through the pictures of cars again, the tissues hanging out of his swollen nostrils now red. I spat blood on the porch and watched the cars rising as he assessed and dismissed them, vehicles shifting up and disappearing off the top of the screen. I watched as he flicked over to the database Frankie had provided access to and started crosschecking the cars with vehicles registered in suburbs around Mount Annan.

  We said nothing to each other. We were even, for now.

  * * *

  They rode in silence, heads down, a light rain beginning to fall, pattering warm on Sweeney’s cheeks. She kept alongside Amanda, falling back as they penetrated rainforest blocks divided and separated by slick clay roads.

  She remembered expressing her theory to Ted that the Barking Frog made more money than it appeared to, that it was a rumored drug checkpoint for dealers distributing up and down the coast. If they were about to make a big drug bust, Sweeney didn’t know how Amanda would go bursting into the bar unarmed, wearing that impossible dress and those ridiculous heels. Then again, she had pranced up to Llewellyn Bruce like she’d known the man for decades, slapped the old criminal overlord on the arm, a cheeky niece trying to rev up her ancient, war-scarred uncle. Bruce, Sweeney knew, was not to be toyed with. His camp of runaways, bikers, and degenerates out in the marshes was known for disappearing local dogs who had lived past their prime, and she suspected they fed more than that to the local crocodiles. Amanda apparently wasn’t only guiltless, but fearless too. Fearless people were that way because they knew something most people didn’t. Or because they had nothing to lose.