by Scott Blade
The newest feature to the outside of the haberdashery was the parking lot. That was obvious.
Handicap signs were posted up on two parking spaces closest to the entrance. A wheelchair ramp zigzagged off to the side of a front porch.
Looking over the front of the building, Widow saw why it was called Motor Bar .
Out front, along the walkway near the entrance, eight motorcycles were parked in a neat row. There was a special canopy set up on poles that covered that row of the parking lot.
Overly’s was a roadside museum by day and a biker bar by night.
The bikes were all the same basic colors and all the same basic models. All were Harley Davidsons.
From the looks of them, the riders had been at the bar for a while. The bikes were all cold and lifeless and the tires were caked in snow, but there were no tracks behind any of them.
The rest of the lot was snowed over. One set of fresh tracks caught Widow’s eye.
The tracks appeared to have either pulled into the lot from the highway or from the snowy country road that he had walked in on.
It was hard to tell, but his suspicions couldn’t help but wonder if the vehicle he had seen out in the dark had been there, right in front of him.
The people from inside the car could’ve been in the bar right then. That would’ve made them the dumbest people probably in the whole state. But it wouldn’t have surprised Widow. In his professional history, he had encountered a lot of dumb criminals.
Besides the eight motorcycles, he saw four parked cars and two parked pickup trucks.
He couldn’t tell which of them had left the tire tracks in the snow because the tracks had filled in by the time they led to the cluster of parked vehicles.
Any of them could’ve left them behind.
The only thing that Widow could rule out were the motorcycles and the pickup trucks because the taillights he had seen were closer to the ground than the rear lights for the two trucks in the parking lot. But any of the cars could’ve been the taillights that he saw because all four cars were old enough to have doors on squeaky hinges or a trunk that wouldn’t close properly.
In fact, it was entirely possible that none of the cars made the tracks. And it was possible that none of the cars were the taillights that he had seen.
Beyond the haberdashery Widow could see a bubble of lights over the trees like there was a town there.
Town or not, Widow was going to stop here. He was nearly drained from the exertion of carrying the girl. No way was he going to go down the road. His body couldn’t go any farther.
He trekked up through the snow and stepped past two of the cars and over a parking lot divider. He passed the eight parked Harley Davidsons and the handicapped parking spaces and the wheelchair ramp. He trudged farther through more snow and made his way to the front porch. He carried the girl up the stairs, and stopped at a set of huge, double oak doors.
A sign scrawled in sloppy handwriting on a piece of torn cardboard from the lip of a cardboard box was duct-taped to the left door.
It read “Doorbell busted. Knock. Hard.”
And stated nothing else.
Widow gathered this meant that the entrance was locked after dark for protection of the staff or it meant that it was to warn them of cops, like an alarm system. Unlike a normal bar, cops couldn’t just walk through these front doors like a normal customer. They had to knock and wait for permission to enter, giving the bartender time to warn the patrons and to hide whatever it was that needed hiding.
Widow also noticed a plaque next to the right side of the doors that indicated he was on camera.
He looked up and saw a security camera bolted to the top corner of the porch’s ceiling.
Widow stared up at the camera and called out.
“Hello!”
No answer.
“Somebody! I need help!”
No response.
With a quick one-two motion, he bent down and jolted back up so he could adjust the girl’s body in his arms. He wanted to get a grip on her with one arm, so he could free up the other one. He used his free hand to try the doorknob. Nothing. He readjusted and tried the other one. Nothing.
The snow picked up behind him. The wind picked up. Both combined to drop the temperature five degrees, just like that in an instant. And both forces sped up like it was the beginning of a snowstorm.
The sudden temperature drop made Widow’s body shiver vehemently. He had to get in.
He didn’t give up. He doubled his efforts and banged on the door with his free fist, hard like a battering ram. The sound was loud enough to be heard deep inside the haberdashery. He knew it. Then he realized that no one would hear him if there was loud music.
He leaned forward as best he could and listened, but heard nothing.
He had to repurpose his hand and grip once again to brace the girl’s body in his arms.
After he still heard nothing, he decided it was time to go all the way.
In a burst of violent movement, Widow sprang back, knees bent, with the girl clung close to his chest, and his adrenaline pumping through his veins like a rush of drugs. He reared back on one foot, and came up hard with the other. He landed a solid kick right below the doorknob and the lock.
Widow prayed the deadbolt was unlocked, which he figured it was because the door was on an electronic lock so that it could be unlocked by someone on the other end of that camera by a buzzer. A deadbolt system with the electronic buzzer would’ve taken forever to open every time someone came to the door. Plus, it would’ve been overkill for a bar.
He was right. The electronic lock was only for the doorknob’s internal lock.
The lock busted. And the door burst open. One big wave of power and force and pressure and Widow was in.
Wood splintered around the lock. Half of the metal ripped out of the doorframe.
Behind Widow the night was dark. Cold fog rolled on the ground whipping past him and rolling into the haberdashery’s foyer. Wind gusted in and chilled his back.
Inside the bar, the front door opened right up to one enormous space. On the left was a small gift shop with buttons in cases and zippers and old sewing knickknacks—the daytime side of the business. The rest of the place was one huge open room with tables, chairs, stools, some armchairs by a fireplace, and a long horseshoe bar that started on the far wall and thrusted out like a stage to the center of the room.
There were fourteen people inside. Three at the bar, two sat on the armchairs at the fireplace, one bartender, and eight bikers around a single pool table and a dartboard. They had two games going on at once.
Widow saw pitchers of beer on three tables they shared.
Everyone in the bar turned and stared at him at the same time, like it was right on cue.
At that moment, Widow realized that he must’ve looked like a monster returned from the grave. His shirt was off. His vascular system was working overtime, exposing his veins like they were all going to pop. He stood tall and weather-beaten by the snow. His hair was wet and slicked back. And there was a naked, dying girl laid out in his arms.
The looks on the faces of the patrons in the bar were nothing short of utter shock, which quickly turned into sheer horror.
Chapter 8
T HE PEOPLE IN THE HABERDASHERY BAR ranged from middle-aged white locals to older white locals and the eight bikers, who were mostly older than Widow.
The bikers were a part of a motorcycle club, sporting the appropriate patches and attire. They wore the leather vests, jackets, and blue jeans. Except for the fact that they had differing facial features and shapes and sizes, they could’ve been interchangeable. But they weren’t.
The bikers stopped and stared at Widow, but said nothing. They weren’t that surprised as they had been around the block and they had seen things.
The bar’s regular locals were a different story.
The two sitting in the armchairs were old men. One had a harmonica in his hand like he was showing it off a
nd the other was playing around on his phone. They looked like Widow had interrupted them from what they thought was a deep philosophical conversation. Maybe it had been about music.
The three at the bar were all middle-aged women. They were drinking and sharing an evening together. Perhaps after work. Perhaps, they were having a regular get-together, like a weekly custom, established long, long ago and kept up with. What else were they going to do?
The bartender was the youngest of everyone in the bar. He was a guy of average height, but a stocky build. He had faded tattoos showing on folded arms.
Everyone stared at Widow in shock and dismay, like he was holding a gun, which he wasn’t, but the bartender had one. He reached down in a fast, fluid movement behind the register and came up with a pump-action shotgun. It was a time-tested store-bought thing like from a local sporting goods store. Nothing special. But a shotgun blast was a shotgun blast. It was bad news no matter what brand or year the model was from. It was bad for whoever was on the business end of it.
Right then, that was Widow.
Widow paused a beat, tried to let his brain settle. Hauling the half-dead woman through the cold and elements for more than an hour had taken more out of him than energy and muscle fibers and breath. It drained his mind to the point of only focusing on the simple things, as if the brain had been the place where his body tapped into the rest of the energy needed to carry on. Now, it was tapped out.
Nobody spoke.
Widow looked up at the bartender and then past him and froze because he saw exactly what they were seeing.
On the counter, behind several half-empty whiskey bottles, was an old, black-and-white TV monitor, about a ten-inch screen on it. On the screen, Widow saw himself exactly as the patrons in the bar had seen him.
On the TV monitor were four split-screens. Each showed the view coming from security cameras. One was footage from outside. Widow saw emptiness and the parking lot beyond the front porch. In the inside left of the feed, he saw the shattered lock and busted front door.
The other three screens were of the interior of the bar. All three were different angles of the inside.
He saw himself in each of them big and intimidating, holding a half-naked, half-dead girl.
The picture quality was good enough to show that his hair and face and shoulders were covered in snow. And his skin had turned ghostly white.
To the patrons in the bar, he looked like the abominable snowman come out of the mountains or the Black Hills to kill.
Breaking his thought process, the bartender crunched the shotgun. It was a statement more than a necessary action. Widow knew that instantly because the weapon had already been ready to fire. The second that the bartender cycled the crunch completely, a perfectly good slug ejected out of the mouth and flew through the air and bounced and rolled across the bar top.
A shotgun crunch is one of the most powerful sounds invented by man. No one confuses the crunch of a shotgun for anything other than the crunch of a shotgun. That’s why the bartender pumped it.
He wanted the whole room to know that he had the weapon. That he was ready to shoot Widow. That he was in charge.
It worked too.
Widow thought he could hear his heartbeat above the silence filling the room. The bartender still said nothing. No one else spoke.
The silence carried on for another long moment, until Widow made the first move. He opened his mouth to speak, hoping to clear the air, but standing there, still, had caused the cold in his blood to catch up to him. He started to shiver, then he was out of breath.
He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a jukebox in the foreground to the far left of the room. It had either been silent before he busted through the door or it was dormant on a timer because suddenly the thing kick-started to life.
The jukebox wasn’t one of those new electronic ones. It was an old, push-button machine with actual vinyl records in it. He could see them through a glass dome on the top of the machine.
As the jukebox jumped to life, the room filled with mechanical sounds. He heard scratching and bumping and motorized whirring noises.
After a few seconds, the automated sounds subsided, replaced by music. An old song started playing. It was “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” which was either ironic or appropriate or both.
Finally, the bartender said, “Who the hell are ya?”
Widow slowly stepped into the room, keeping the girl up in his arms. He passed the jukebox, halfway to the bar, and walked down a couple more steps that were marked with neon orange tape for safety.
Widow stopped on a soft shag rug in the center of the room. He looked like he was going to speak again, but didn’t. Instead, he unintentionally dumped down onto his knees, hard. Even on the shag rug, he felt the hard flooring beneath.
He said, “Help.”
After that, Widow’s arms moved against his will. They slowly laid the girl down on the rug. He held her head gently and let it lay on his open palm, making sure not to injure her.
Once she was safer, Widow lay down next to her, kept one hand under her head, and passed out.
Chapter 9
A LASKA ROWER STARTED UP a year-old Ford Taurus, black with law enforcement lights packed into the front grille and packed into the rear brake lights. They were all blue, no red lights.
The plate on the car was only in the rear. The state of North Dakota, where she had borrowed the car from a police motor pool, did not yet require front plates, unlike the state she was stationed in. The plate was government issued and issued with government designations, alerting the cops and the state troopers that the vehicle was law enforcement classification. It did not indicate whether the driver was FBI.
A Glock was nestled tight into a holster on her left hip. Driving with it was a bit uncomfortable the first month of working for the FBI. One of her trainers had hammered it into her to keep it there. Better to wear it and know where it is in a pinch versus the alternative.
In the front cup holder, she had a Starbucks black coffee in a Starbucks-branded paper cup. Grande, not a tall like she usually got. She saw a long day ahead of her, about a five-hour drive, going the speed limits. Therefore, the grande was the right choice to go with.
Special Agent Rower worked out of the Minneapolis field office, but was spending time in Bismarck, North Dakota, working a case that she had literally wrapped up the day before when her SAC, Special Agent in Charge, called her late in the night. He had told her to get her ass down to South Dakota. Some place she’d never heard of.
The FBI field office in Minneapolis was assigned to watch over both of the Dakotas—North and South. They had satellite offices in both states and there were agents closer, but Rower had seniority and experience, and she had worked a case in the same field as the one that was happening in South Dakota.
She spent a lot of time in one of the Dakotas or the other. Both big states. Both small populations compared to other states. Both large interiors with long spaces to drive through in order to get from one lowly populated place to another.
This time she was driving to the Black Hills, about three hundred miles south.
Her SAC told her to be there in the morning. She had wished that she was in Minneapolis because that was a distance of one thousand plus miles, which meant she could fly to Rapid City and rent a car from there because the drive would’ve been eight hours, nonstop.
Instead, her luck had plopped her into Bismarck. And her luck made it to where she was just finishing up one thing. So, she was free for another.
She’d slept four hours in a motel room after she clicked off the call. Now she was up and showered and dressed and in the vehicle.
After stopping at Starbucks, she pulled into a gas station, filled up the Taurus’s tank. She was the only person in the gas station other than the clerk behind the register and behind bulletproof glass. Or at least that’s what a sign posted inside the window had read.
Automatically, she wondered if her Glock 22 would shoot
through the glass. A .40 caliber weapon. A nine-millimeter parabellum round. And the likelihood of a major oil and gas company spending the extra expense on bulletproof, reinforced glass to protect a minimum wage employee at three o’clock in the morning seemed highly unlikely. And not because she didn’t think that the extra security was needed. It was only because she was skeptical of a major corporation taking all those steps and spending the money.
Rower was skeptical by nature. That was one of the aspects of her character that made her a good agent.
After she pumped her gas, she paid the clerk at the window with a gas card, FBI-issued, naturally. She did not shoot him.
Rower paid at the glass because she hated paying at the machines. It seemed too robotic, too impersonal. She liked to take every opportunity to interact with people over life’s easy solutions.
She figured the card swiper on the pump was best used if she needed to be in and out in a hurry. And what was the hurry?
She didn’t even know the details of why she was going to Reznor. She guessed that if it had been a life-or-death situation, her SAC would’ve given her more details.
Rower wore black jeans and a black button-down top tucked into the jeans. On top of that she wore a warm bomber jacket, also black, and simple. No girly design features. It was just a straightforward winter bomber jacket which she considered to be a part of her comfortable clothes.
This time of year, North Dakota was too cold to be dressing like an FBI agent every second of every day. Because of the early November cold, gusts were blowing down south off the Canadian Rockies.
The weather was cold out, so she also wore a thick wool scarf for good measure.
Just then, as Rower slipped the gas card back into her wallet, revealing her badge to the clerk, her phone started to ring in her pants pocket.
She turned, slipped the wallet into her inner jacket pocket, and took out her phone.
She checked the caller name and phone number first. It was her SAC.
