The Paradise Key (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 5)

by Nick Thacker

  I raised my chin just a bit. “12 year is eight a glass. 18 year, thirteen. And the 25… not sure you can afford it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t think I have the money for it, champ?” he asked.

  Champ? Okay, now I really was going to kill him.

  “No, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who does.”

  “How much it gonna set me back?”

  “Well it’s been sitting on sherry-infused oak for twenty-five years, so, let’s make it an even $700.”

  “A bottle?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Holy sh—“

  “Yo, Dawson, this the place that dude was telling us about? Seems a little run down.”

  2

  ONE OF ‘DAWSON’S’ — THE MARK’S — lovely friends had decided that shouting from across the room was an ideal way to have a conversation. And ‘the room,’ in this case, was my bar. A single, small, one-facility building set back from the street a ways but still lit enough to see the front door. I had renovated it myself with the help of a contractor friend, splitting the empty building in half so I’d have a nice front chamber for the drinking and sitting, and a back half split in two again — one half for the office and kitchen and the other for the restrooms.

  I fell in love with the place from the minute I saw the listing. A buddy dabbling in real estate set up the meeting, and I was his one and only client before he moved on to his true passion — marrying a rich lady from the bay area and moving in with her and her kids. Anyway, the contractor friend and I spent a few weeks gutting the old restaurant and cleaning out the fried food smell, then framing out and drywalling the separating wall, then I hired a team for the grunt work. Restroom, electrical, plumbing — no one wants to do those jobs.

  It was a hit with the locals right from the start. Part of the appeal, I heard later, was that when it opened I had refused to talk to the town’s paper and the three idiot ‘food bloggers’ who’d come down from Charleston repeatedly that week. I didn’t like press, what they thought they stood for, and I certainly didn’t like the tight-jeaned hipsters who came in with their phone cameras clicking away, expecting me to give a shit about some-odd ‘thousands of followers.’

  The older locals thought I was a hero, and the younger ones thought I was a legend. It was weird — I was certainly neither — but I accepted the attention in the form of greenbacks. They liked drinking in a place that was relaxed. A bit old-fashioned, but relaxed about it. I didn’t smack the youngsters upside the head when they would ask for an old fashioned and then frown at me when I wouldn’t squish a bright-red maraschino cherry into a red Solo cup before I poured the drink.

  Likewise, I didn’t argue with any of the older ones. Twenty-five years ago I was twenty-five years younger, and there were plenty of folks twenty-five years my senior coming in. They all have their ways about them, like I do now. Some of them thought the only way to make a daiquiri was with daiquiri mix, and some of them thought ‘Scotch’ meant anything distilled last century.

  Whatever. As long as they paid their tab and left a decent tip, I was happy. Doing what you love is only surpassed by doing two things you love at the same time.

  And tonight I was going to do two things I loved.

  I poured the kid’s Scotch, the cheapest of the options I’d given him, and thought about how I’d do it. Guns and knives were always traceable, and even though I wasn’t worried about local authorities much I had a business to run. Any questions I got meant downtime, and not-working time.

  Poison, chemicals, and other exotic treatments were just that — exotic. That meant they were more difficult to exhume from the corpse, but once they were it was almost a sure thing that the higher-ups would get involved. Ditto about the downtime in that case.

  Thankfully it’s left up to me to decide how it’s done. That was the deal, and that will always be the deal or I’m out.

  I repeat methods, but not often. Usually there’s some story-building involved, as it makes for a more natural climax and a much smoother transition to normal life… and I like stories.

  Dawson’s unenthused buddy walked over, hovering over the bar like I owed him something.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “What you make my friend here?” he asked.

  “Scotch. On the rocks.”

  “I’ll take one too.”

  I poured it and then listened. They always start talking, when there are two guys at the bar next to each other. Even if they don’t know each other, they always talk. Always. If it’s just one, they’re either silent or they try to bring me into whatever it is they’re dealing with. Women, it’s the opposite. They want you to draw it out of them, or if there’s more than one they’ll sit there and wait for the other one to talk. If they’re drunk — man or woman — all bets are off.

  This time I couldn’t tell if they were drunk or not. They started yapping about ‘some chick’ one of them had seen and/or done some stuff with, but I wasn’t interested enough to know the details. I hadn’t thought they were drunk when they’d come in, but listening to their conversation really made me wonder.

  Kids these days.

  Wait. Did I really just think to myself the words, ‘kids these days?’

  I felt immediately disgusted and simultaneously amused. I felt like I was turning into my old man, the curmudgeon of curmudgeons. Here I was pouring drinks for kids half my age, silently judging them behind a half-wall I’d built with my bare hands.

  Probably while I had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get home at night.

  I decided to take a bit more interest in their conversation.

  “…Because they smoke the whiskey when it’s done,” Kid B — not the mark — said.

  “How do you smoke liquid?” Kid A — the mark, or Dawson — asked.

  “I, uh, I think it’s… they just add like that liquid smoke stuff I guess.”

  I shook my head. Enough to give them a clue but not enough to give me a headache.

  “What’s that?” the mark asked, turning his coiffure my direction.

  I smiled. “Sorry — no, it’s — hate to interrupt, but it’s before the distillation process. They smoke peat and then add that to the fermentation. Then it’s distilled out, but that smokiness is still in there.”

  Kid B had the look of ‘who the hell asked you?’ on his face, but the mark, to his credit, seemed enthused. So I kept going.

  “They age it in charred oak barrels after that. That’s the number you see on these bottles — how many years it’s been resting on oak.”

  “And the oak gets in there, and, like, flavors it?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” I explained. “It enhances the flavors by —“ I stopped.

  What am I doing? Am I really this bored?

  One of the oldies came to the bar and asked for a couple margaritas. I recognized her, but didn’t know her name. I held up an index finger at the boys and busied myself with the lady’s drinks while I looked over to her table to make sure that she was actually sitting with someone. She’d entered with a younger gal, perhaps my age, maybe a little younger, and they’d started talking deeply about some issue or another before they’d even started drinking.

  I always like to make sure someone’s not drinking alone, and especially not ordering more than one drink at a time. I don’t really have a rule against it, necessarily, it just seems like anyone so excited to get going that they need to have two drinks for themselves on the table at once is a little too excited for me to not pay attention.

  The lady who’d ordered asked if we kept tabs open. I made the universal sign of ‘yeah, sure,’ by tucking my open palm out to her and shaking side to side and she seemed to get it, leaving her credit card there on the counter for me.

  I finished making the margaritas — old, traditional style with no mix — and came back to the boys.

  “What brings you in here tonight?” I asked.

  The first guy — th
e mark with the amazing hair — thought for a moment. Maybe hesitating just a bit. “Uh, yeah, we wanted to go out, you know? Hadn’t tried this place yet, but I got a tip from someone that it’s worth checking out.”

  I nodded. “Seems like your buddy knows where the hot spots are.”

  I waited to analyze his reaction. Both of them seemed to think I was joking, that drinking here was a bit of a step down from their typical haunts. I went with it, smiling.

  “I know, kind of a dump, huh?”

  “It’s — it’s not the worst I’ve —“

  “Tell the owner it smells like catfish in here,” the mark said.

  I sniffed, good and long and hard, just to show him I cared, then responded. “Yeah, we have a tiny grill back there. Catfish is our main dish, believe it or not, and Joey cooks the hell out of it.”

  “Really? Way out here?” Kid B said.

  “Really.” ‘Way out here’ in this case referred to the fact that we were nowhere near the big city as long as you didn’t zoom out too far in Google Maps. The town was on the coast, the main road actually backing up against the beach in most places. My bar was only a few blocks from the beach, but since there wasn’t a direct road to the coastline and the town sort of wound around a bit before meandering its way to the sand, it seemed like this was the last stop on the way to the inland areas, rather than the way I liked to think about it: a first stop on the way to the beach, if you were from out of town.

  “Makes sense,” the mark said. “Hey, this isn’t half bad,” he said, rotating his drink around in the glass like a pro. His eyes flicked up at me, taking me in, calculating something, and it was the first moment I thought of him as anything more than an idiot frat boy between summer flings. There was depth there, something unspoken. Something he hadn’t even told his buddy.

  It also irked me in that I didn’t know how to respond. “Yeah,” I said quickly. “Took me awhile, but I think I mixed it pretty well.”

  We stared each other down for a few seconds until he burst out laughing. “Nice — good one, champ. Just pure Scotch and pure ice, can’t go wrong with that, right? Unless you’re mixing something else in there?”

  He said it with just a bit of a lilt, just the slightest of questions. I of course didn’t think he was really asking me, since there was no way he could know I was the one who’d do it, but it took me a split-second to recover. “Not this time, champ. Just Scotch and frozen water.”

  3

  I DID THE KARATE KID thing with my towel all the way to the opposite end of the bar where a new couple had come to sit. I noticed them walk in a few minutes before the mark and take up a place at a table to my right, but I hadn’t gone over yet to check on them. Since they’d moved up to the bar instead of waiting for me to walk over, I decided to make sure they weren’t upset with me.

  “Howdy,” I said. I neither like cowboys nor am I from Texas, but it seemed like a good fit in the moment.

  Clearly I was wrong about the moment and I needed to step it down a notch, judging by the man’s wide-eyed expression. He had a ring on his left hand, so I assumed this was a husband-wife pair, in for an evening of drinking.

  “Sorry,” I said, “just getting a little bored. Thought I’d try to have a little fun.”

  He looked at me like I’d just insulted his mother in a language he didn’t understand, so I turned to the woman. I was about to ask what they wanted when I realized this was not just a typical Wednesday night visitor.

  The girl in front of me was absolutely stunning. Her hair was light brown, woven around itself and gently perched on top of her head, streaks of lighter blond interspersed through it all. Small diamond earrings brightened her face but took nothing away from it. She had a petite, youthful look in her eyes, yet she couldn’t have been more than ten years younger than me.

  He, however, seemed just a bit older. Maybe there was something offset about him, or I was just imagining it, but he had a distant expression and stoic stance, even as he leaned — curled forward like an aging librarian — with both elbows on the bar top.

  Finally I found the words. “What are you drinking?”

  I directed the question at the space just between both of them, as I couldn’t look at him without asking what was wrong, and I couldn’t look at her because… well she just reminded me…

  Stop it.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down that train of thought, at least not yet. She had something about her that seemed familiar, and I didn’t think I liked that. Her beauty wasn’t the same as a supermodel’s or that of a Photoshopped actress on a magazine cover. It was simple, unassuming yet confident.

  The man spoke first, while she just smiled. “Uh, yeah, I — give me a — or give her a martini… no, a Cosmopolitan. I’ll have — I’ll have a water, for now.”

  I hate ‘for now.’ ‘For now’ means they’re either afraid to drink in front of who they’re with or they just read too slow. If they just want a water, without the ‘for now,’ they’re probably a recovering alcoholic or they’re sick, or they’re just not wanting to drink that night. I can respect that, but a ‘for now…’

  I turned around to make the drinks, but the gal got in a quick order: “Make it up however you like it. I’m not picky.”

  Her voice danced around in the air, and I immediately latched on to her words. I respected that. Every bar has their ‘own way’ of doing things, and most of them aren’t any good. I don’t like messing with classic drinks unless they need messing with. I’ll squirt a lime over the top of a whiskey smash just to bring some of the flavors out, and I’ll kindly redirect an unassuming victim asking for one of the ‘candy martinis’ like a Lemon Drop or a Washington Apple to something a bit more respectable, but I’m not about to screw with a tried-and-true like a Cosmo.

  I made it up perfectly, using a jigger just to show her I cared, and brought that and the water back to them. They’d pulled up at the bar now, each taking a seat on an old wooden stool I’d salvaged from a liquidation a few months back, and started sipping.

  I watched, waiting to see if the man was truly content with the lukewarm H2O-on-ice or he’d man up and get something harder, but he was still off in la-la-land. She, on the other hand, followed my eyes and finally caught up to them.

  “This your place?” she asked.

  It was almost like she already knew the answer to the question.

  “Yeah,” I said. I flicked over to the frat boys to make sure the mark hadn’t taken off, then came back to her. “Been here ten years almost. Built it myself, trying to pay it off.”

  She smiled. “We — we’re just traveling through.” She motioned to the guy next to her. “He’s my brother. We’re heading to a funeral.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “Staying here in town?”

  She laughed. “Is there anywhere to even stay here?”

  I returned a smile, nodding. “It’s not big, but it’s got everything you need. Came here to settle down myself, but that sort of morphed into ‘making myself crazy trying to run a business.’”

  She sipped the cosmopolitan. “This is really good. Thank you.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was intended to be the end of our conversation or not, but as the man was still staring at the mirror along the back wall of my bar, I decided to see how the mark and his buddy were warming up to the night.

  “…She wasn’t even part of the —“

  He stopped talking when I came over, and Dawson turned to me. “‘Sup, champ.”

  “‘Sup.” I gave a one-shot back nod, like I’d seen the kids do, and tried to feign nonchalance. “Ready for a second round?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Dawson cleared his throat. “Probably need to be going after this,” he said.

  “Yeah? Whereabouts you headed?”

  As much as I’d tried not to, I had picked up some of the lazy small-town speak of the area when I’d moved in.

  “We, uh — we’re going to —“

  Kid B cut in. “Just around
. We were told this place had a decent nightlife, but…”

  I nodded, smirking. “I get it. Bunch of old folks clogging up the place. No music, no ladies. That about right?”

  Kid B laughed. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, man. It’s a nice —“

  I grabbed his drink — still half-full — and sloshed it up onto his shirt. On ‘accident.’ “My bad, bud, let me get a new one for you. On the house, of course.”

  He seemed rightly perturbed, and not a little bit shocked, either with the speed with which I’d sloshed him or the fact that I had in the first place, but he did exactly what I’d expected.

  “Let me — thanks, for that — let me hit the restroom. Back there?” he flicked his head sideways.

  “Mm hmm, yeah. Back there. Drink’s waiting for you when you return.”

  When he left I turned my attention back to the mark.

  “So, what else can I do for you this evening?” I asked. It was a long shot, that he’d just somehow and for some reason jump into a perfect explanation of why I should kill him. I knew it was vetted as well, by the boss, and that anyone coming in here as a mark was someone they deemed worthy to be offed, but I always got more proof. Just a little will do it, but I have to get it.

  For me.

  A lot of times it’s as simple as following them home. Sneaking in when they’re not around, checking message threads, emails, hell — one mark even left a sticky note on the fridge with the username and password of their online alter ego. An alter ego, I soon learned, that they used to lure adolescent children into scenarios that would allow this mark to ‘interact’ with them in person.

  I didn’t need to know any more details than that — the boss had already done the research and given the orders, I just wanted to make sure it was the right mark.

  It’s a sick world out there, and the kinds of things that piss normal people off drive me to do things I’m really good at: the ‘sticky note’ mark, for example, ended up skewered inside the smashed, twisted metal of a horrific vehicular explosion. What can I say? He came in and ordered an Irish car bomb.