The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  Shit.

  They’re here.

  The bartender poured a pint of PBR and a shot of Jack in a rocks glass and set it in front of the man.

  This will help.

  The man took a long pull off the draft, something greasy on his hand making it tough to grip the glass, and then took the shot, shaking as he did it, sloshing the bourbon around his mouth like mouthwash. He laid out a twenty and ordered another round. This time the bartender poured himself and Hailey a shot of Jack too. They bottomed up. Hailey gasped and slapped the bar.

  Set ’em up again. On me.

  The bartender gave her a spurious look.

  I think I like you.

  He poured three more shots of Jack.

  To the river! the man shouted, holding up his glass.

  Hailey shrugged at the bartender.

  To the river.

  They clinked glasses. The bartender asked the man which river he was toasting, and he replied the Green and laughed his ass off because the river’s name was perfect, but it was also the Delores, or the Colorado, or the Arkansas, or the Gauley. They’d both been boatmen to some degree, knew the towns, Salida, Cotopaxi, Buena Vista, Leadville, Steamboat Springs, Gunnison, Green River.

  You know the Tavern there on Main Street in Green River? I live above the Tavern.

  No shit.

  Against his best judgment the bartender shook hands with the man.

  James.

  Lorne.

  You guiding this season? The water’s running good I hear.

  No, just working at the bar.

  Yeah, me too.

  You know they make you piss now?

  To be a guide?

  Piss test even to work in the gift shop.

  No!

  Dude.

  Use’t be you’d light a big fatty as soon as you launched and brought extras to sell to the tourists.

  They don’t let you do that no more.

  Hell no.

  Those were better times.

  Yeah, they were.

  Hailey laughed.

  Listen to you guys. Oh no, I can’t smoke pot at work anymore. Seriously?

  Oh, I still smoke pot at work.

  Yeah, me too.

  Fantastic.

  Hailey put her hands up in defense and then rummaged through her purse and set a bottle of Oxycontin on the bar.

  This is what I take at work.

  She shook out a pile of pills in her hand.

  I think I really like this girl.

  The bartender put out his hand and she placed two pills in his palm.

  She slid two pills across the bar to Lorne.

  God bless you.

  Lorne shook his head and smiled to himself. His philosophy was right again. The Lord will provide. He swallowed the pills with a mouthful of whiskey.

  The quiet Mexican couple had paid their check and left a while ago, leaving the three of them alone in the bar.

  Hailey tried and failed to brush her hair out of her eyes. She put her hand on Lorne’s arm to steady herself, and then looked around to regain her balance.

  Lorne is it?

  Uh yup. That’s me. The man smoothed out his beard.

  Good. She slurred. You got a light?

  Uh, yup.

  She held a Marlboro Light between her lips while he struck a match and lit her cigarette.

  Did you recently start a fire at a mine back in Utah?

  Lorne squinted at the TV and thought deeply for long time.

  You know, I think we did. Lorne shook a finger at her. Oh, you’re good, how did you know that?

  I didn’t really, I swear, it was just a good guess.

  Wow.

  Yeah, wow.

  The bartender clapped two giant hands together.

  Hailey shrugged.

  Sometimes you just get lucky.

  Lorne looked at the bartender.

  Is she for real?

  Yeah, man. She’s a cop. You didn’t know that?

  Wow.

  Lorne looked at her with curiosity.

  Are you gonna bust me?

  Hailey ordered three more shots.

  Probably, but I really just want the shooter. The one who did the clerk. At the gas station outside of Eagar on U.S. 60. You remember. Just give me his name.

  The bartender laid three shots on the bar.

  That’s a good deal, right?

  Hailey blew the flagging strand of highlighted hair out of her eyes.

  That is a good deal, the bartender nodded.

  Come on, Lorne.

  She leaned over and gave Lorne a hug.

  Chevis. Chevis did the clerk. But he’s dead. Dead and buried.

  Who killed Chevis?

  The door jingled. They all turned their heads. A stranger stepped inside the bar room. There was something wrong with his face. He had a strap of skin dangling off of his jaw and a bandage tied beneath his chin soaked through and crusted with dried blood and yellowed with pus.

  He did.

  Lorne pointed at the stranger.

  The stranger stepped into the bar room smiling like a jack-o-lantern. Viscous liquid oozed from his bandaged neck.

  The bartender involuntarily backed up against the beer cooler.

  Weird. This night keeps getting weirder, huh? The bartender turned to Hailey, but she saw what the others didn’t because they were too transfixed by the dangling flap of skin and his mostly exposed trachea and esophagus—the man held a crossbow in one hand and a sawed off shotgun in the other.

  Lorne, you motherfucker, you enjoying yourself?

  The man chuckled, expectorating little red droplets of saliva.

  Lorne was speechless.

  I can’t be kilt. Specially by the likes of you, you little bitch.

  F...F...Frank.

  Lorne sort of gagged, his eyes wide.

  The sudden realization and vulnerability in Lorne’s voice made Hailey’s stomach hurt, even as she instinctually grasped the smooth form-fitting handle of the Glock in her purse.

  In the second that passed, the bartender realized the man was not only oozing puss and blood from his neck down the front of his shirt, but he was seriously deranged and heavily armed. James felt beneath the bar for the .38 kept there for just such encounters.

  No! Hailey shouted just as James found the grip of the gun.

  In a split second Bullfrog Frank tilted his left hand to the right angle and fired a crossbow bolt into the bartender’s neck. James flew backward and crashed against the rows of liquor bottles behind him and spasmed to the floor, writhing in shock and pain on the wet spongy bar mats.

  Lorne was between Hailey and the chinless psychopath, so when she rose up to fire she inadvertently used Lorne as cover, reaching around him to jerk the Glock three times, firing two slugs into a wall and the third into Frank’s left shoulder just as Frank was raising his right arm to fire the sawed-off. Struck in the left shoulder, Frank dropped the crossbow as he fired a pointblank round of buckshot into Lorne’s belly. Lorne was opened up and blown back, taking Hailey with him in a hail of shattered glass and barstools. She crashed heavy on the floor and was knocked out cold.

  Bullfrog Frank staggered back out of the bar room and into the small hotel lobby. He lay on the floor panting for a moment and laughing to himself. He felt the pain and laughed some more. He probed the shoulder wound with his finger and knew it had been a through and through shot. He wiped the blood from his hands onto his jeans and reloaded the shotgun. He emptied a twenty bag of meth onto his tongue and felt no more pain. Ashley. Where was that little piece of ass? Not like the other girls in the valley who were cracked out by the time they were seniors in high school. She was fresh. She’d texted him after all, so she was here somewhere.

  From where he lay on the lobby floor he could see the upstairs rooms through the glass lobby door. There was only one room with the light on. He got to his feet and pushed through the door to the staircase to the second floor. One hand slid along the balcony ra
iling. The other gripped the sawed-off.

  He stopped in front of the door to Room 27. The light was on behind the curtains. He thought the curtains might have moved slightly, were still moving, as if someone had peeked out and the curtains were still settling back in place. The night was still. He heard birdsong. No time like the present he said to himself in a low whistle, and he girded himself to bust down the door when there was a roar like two cannons firing, and the curtained window shattered. Frank was hit by flying shards of glass, but the two .44 slugs fired from inside the room went wide and into the night. Frank kicked down the Mexican pine wood door and spun to his left where he guessed the shooter must be. His instinct was right, and as Jimmy spun and fired the big .44, Frank let go with the sawed-off, just about blowing Jimmy in half. Pammy sat on the edge of the bed. She didn’t move and she didn’t speak.

  Goddamn.

  He swatted at the gun smoke in the room as if that would make it clear. Frank held out the sawed-off with his one usable arm like Zeus about to hurl a lightning bolt. He put the barrel to her forehead.

  Where’s the girl?

  Pammy looked up at the barrel pressed to her forehead making her eyes cross.

  Dunno.

  The bathroom door opened. Ashley stepped out.

  I was hoping you would come.

  Frank pulled the trigger, splattering Pammy’s head against the wall and ceiling.

  Ashley jumped.

  It’s okay, it’s all over now baby. I gotcha.

  Junior followed her out from the bathroom, buttoning his pants.

  Frank wheeled the shotgun on them.

  Step to the side baby. I’m gonna shoot this skinny Indian.

  I’ve got the money. They made me take it.

  I know they did, sweetheart.

  Ashley held out the little blue velvet backpack.

  This is yours, baby.

  She handed him the backpack, one hand on the strap, the other hand clutching the 9mm inside. As he reached for it, she jerked the trigger through the fabric as many times as she could, peppering his chest with bullets. He stumbled back, a genuine look of shock on his face. She followed him as he did his awkward backpedal, knocking over the TV and stepping into the splintered doorframe. Her big blue eyes stared straight into his as she backed him all the way outside the room and against the balcony railing. She jammed the pistol into his gaping neck wound and pulled the trigger.

  The shoestring-strapped little blue velvet backpack was shredded and singed from the muzzle flashes. It disintegrated in Ashley’s hand, and she tossed the remnants onto the now headless corpse that had recently been Bullfrog Frank. She hurried back into the room and sidestepped a shellshocked Junior who stood motionless, staring at the carnage in the room. She went into the bathroom and gathered up the rolls of cash she’d stashed under the sink. The money she’d stolen from Frank’s closet back in the trailer deep in the woods was rolled up tight and rubber banded in bunches of a thousand dollars each. And there were ten of them. She fumbled under the sink, brushing roaches out of her way, and finally corralled all ten rolls. Ashley was smart. There was no way she was going to leave the money in the blue velvet backpack and let it get all shot to shit if it came to that. And she’d known it would come to that. In fact, she counted on it. But now she had no way to carry the money. The pockets on her jean skirt were fake and couldn’t actually hold anything. She held the money in her tank top stretched out in front of her and went back out into the room. Junior still hadn’t moved. Nobody had a bag of any kind. Traveling for days and no luggage. She put the money and the gun in an empty Busch Light twelve-pack cardboard box, grabbed Junior’s hand, and led him out the door. She ushered him along the balcony and down the stairs to the lobby where they were confronted with another horrible scene. There were at least three corpses in the barroom, maybe more; it was hard to tell with all the blood and body parts. Junior made a move to run outside, but Ashley tightened her grip on his hand and rooted him in place.

  Wait here.

  No, don’t.

  Just wait here.

  She tiptoed into the barroom, conscious that she was stepping in blood still warm and sticky, not yet congealed. She found Lorne. He had been flayed but still seemed to be barely breathing. A blonde woman lay on the floor. Ashley grit her teeth and swore at herself for what she was about to do. She felt in the pockets of Lorne’s jeans until she found a small bulge. She held her breath, and with just her thumb and forefinger reached in his front pocket and pulled out the keys to the Malibu. As she held up the keys, the blonde woman seemed to wake up. She opened her eyes and tilted her head toward Ashley and held it there for a long time, trying to focus, or trying to understand where she was or what had happened or what she was seeing.

  You’re a pretty girl.

  She spoke in a whisper, Ashley barely heard her.

  Thank you, so are you.

  Ashley snapped up the keys, spun around, and never looked back.

  Chapter 28

  Tom stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the Malibu. A cloud of dust washed over his boots. He was crestfallen. The Malibu was proof that he was living in the reality he feared. He couldn’t erase the past. It chased him. It was unavoidable. But how much of it was real? If the Malibu was real, were the murders? Was the Network real?

  He heard the sound of gunfire. Instinctively he dove into a low drainage ditch running along the frontage road. He rolled through the weeds to the bottom of the ditch covering his face and head as best he could. More gunfire. He crawled up the side of the ditch clutching the long grass for leverage. His chin in the dirt, he brushed the weeds out of the way so he had a good view of the hotel. Just as he caught his breath, he watched as a large man backpedaled from a smoke filled room on the second floor to lean against a railing as his head was blown clean off. Tom ducked his head down and covered his eyes trying to wipe the image from his mind. It was all real. They were really after him. He breathed into the dirt. Felt the thistles in his hands. He pulled the tall weeds out by their roots, feeling them pluck from the soil, that little bit of resistance proving that nothing wants to die. He crept back up to the top of the berm. A boy and a girl ran out of the hotel. The girl dragging the boy by his arm. She pushed him to the passenger seat of the Malibu and then ran around to the driver’s side door, opened it up and tossed a cardboard beer box into the backseat, got in and slammed the door. The Malibu roared to life, the V8 engine rattling the rusted hood. She backed it up and then tore out of the horseshoe driveway in a hail of quartzite gravel.

  Nothing moved inside the hotel. When the Malibu was out of sight, the night grew entirely quiet. Tom climbed out of the ditch and approached the hotel cautiously. The lobby was covered in blood and shattered glass. A trail of blood led to the barroom. He slowly pushed open the swinging saloon doors and saw Lorne lying in a pool of blood that covered the entire floor. A woman lay on the floor next to him. Tom slipped on the blood, cursed and got up and shuffled his way through the pooled blood to Lorne. Lorne’s eyes were open but his breathing sounded like a death rattle. The sight of Tom hovering over him seemed to register with Lorne. He tried to speak and mouthed something that Tom couldn’t quite make out but could have been ‘I’m sorry’.

  You did good partner.

  Tom put his hand on Lorne’s forehead.

  You did real good.

  Tom saw the woman looking at him.

  He said he’d call for help, found Lorne’s hand and squeezed it, and then made his way across the blood-slick barroom floor and into the hotel lobby.

  Tom didn’t call for help. That would have brought the Network’s assassins on him in a matter of minutes. Instead he went up the stairs to the second floor and searched the headless man’s pockets for his keys. In the parking lot there was an old Nissan Sentra and an older Ford F-150. The keys unlocked the pickup. Tom put it in gear, hit the frontage road, and fishtailed as he lay down the gas. He took the long curve of the onramp onto I-40 heading west. A small army o
f police cars with lights blazing passed him on the other side of the divided interstate. It would be a while for the ambulances he guessed; the nearest hospital was a hundred miles away. He filed away a mental note that if he saw a helicopter it was probably Flight for Life, not the Network. Don’t get paranoid. That had been a close call back there. But he was alive. And he believed in the mission stronger then ever.

  Chapter 29

  After Hailey had been debriefed by the Arizona State Police, the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, the Navajo Tribal Police, and the FBI, and she’d taken the obligatory ambulance ride to Memorial Hospital in Flagstaff to have her concussion evaluated and a half dozen shotgun pellets removed from her right arm, she drove back to St. George. When she opened the door to her little house, her beast of dog wiggled to her like a puppy and tried to climb in her lap. She laughed and squeezed his big soft head. He half-howled and nuzzled into her knocking her over on her back, and she laughed until she cried. The dog licked the tears from her face, and she laughed and cried like that for a long time.

  I’ll never leave you again, she said rubbing his fat belly.

  He snorted and grinned revealing his huge canines.

  Three weeks later she did leave him again to drive the four hours west to Las Vegas for her friend Stef’s bachelorette party. The girls had booked the mack daddy suite at the MGM Grand, two stories, three bedrooms, and a beautiful patio overlooking the Vegas strip. After much champagne and an ill-advised visit from a male stripper, she sat in the hot tub looking at the lights from the strip with a couple of her girlfriends. She was glad she came. It turned out that her friends who she hadn’t seen in almost five years didn’t care what she did for a living, or where she lived, or how she’d screwed up her life, and that was just fine with her. They just wanted to have a good time. For the first time in a long time she thought about nothing.

  Sunday morning she was massively hung over. Instead of taking a couple Percocets, she just puked and took a lukewarm shower. She hugged her friends at the cab stand in the blazing Vegas sun and watched as they took a van to the airport to catch flights back to the cities they had come from.