She arched her back. Sweet Jesus, she arched her back. I did a quick inventory — the shotgun was strapped under the bar down by the cash register, six feet away, the S&W .45 underneath the bar towels down near my feet.
“I think I’m a woman. But what do you think?”
Raz’s voice was a growl. “I think you’re a little girl. I don’t think that boy of yours over there ever once made you squeal. You ever squealed for him?”
Tinker’s stool scraped again, sharper this time, as he got up and walked around to Raz, cupping his hand around Raz’s tattooed bicep. “Come on, man, let’s go.”
Raz shook him off, his gaze never leaving Tina. “You got someplace to go, go. I got business here.”
“You got no business here, man,” Tinker said, and that got Raz’s attention. He turned away from Tina slowly, the tendons in his neck taut, but his shoulders loosened, their muscles oiling up in instinctive preparation.
“I got every business here. We got business here. This is our bar.”
“That’s right, Raz. We belong here. She doesn’t.”
“What do I have to do to get initiated into this fraternity?”
Both men looked back at Tina, sitting there with one arm on the bar, puffing on that Camel like she was Lana Turner in a wiseguy dive. All the color drained from Tinker’s face, and his fists clenched and opened, clenched and opened. Raz ran his hand up her thigh until it was cupping her ass.
“All you gotta do is go for a ride. My bike is right outside. Wanna ride?”
All four of us were frozen in a tableau that would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so terrifying, and then it shattered. Tinker pulled at Raz’s left shoulder. Raz’s right arm cocked back, and then his fist snapped into Tinker’s face, slamming into his left cheek instead of his nose as Tinker turned away and down. Tinker came back up leading with his right, catching Raz on the jaw. I heard the crunch of teeth grinding together, breaking, and I crouched, reaching under the towels for the .45, and when I came up, there were three men there, three men in a clumsy group hug. And then Raz fell away.
He hit the floor on his left side, and that’s why I didn’t see it. I heard it, though, that thick, dull squish of sharp metal in soft flesh that I’ve heard a few times in my life. I knew what I’d see before I saw it. A dark pool was forming beneath Raz’s ribs. He rolled onto his back, and I saw the shaft of a pocketknife sticking out from the T-shirt. He was still breathing, but it was a nasty, gurgling sound, and a second later, I saw a bubble of blood come popping out of his mouth.
Denise was already on the phone to 911. I could hear her low, frantic voice murmuring into the portable just behind me. I was just standing there, the automatic loose in my limp hand, stunned by the knowledge that I was watching my first killing in ten years. I tell myself that I was in shock, and that’s why I didn’t react.
But I saw it all. I saw Tinker take a step towards Brad, saw him pull the kid into a one-arm embrace, the boy’s back to his chest, saw his other arm reach up, the hand grab the jaw, saw it pull once, sharp, final. And I heard the crack.
It’s funny. I don’t remember the screaming, though Denise says there was a lot of it. Mostly from Tina, she says. But I didn’t hear that, just the snapping of Brad’s neck, cannon-loud and reverberating in the canyon of my skull.
The police closed us down for a while, and when we opened back up, the Yuppies didn’t return. A few bikers straggled in, but not enough to stay in the black. For a few months there, I thought we were going to have to shut our doors, but the owner was an old biker himself. He said they’d come back eventually, and they did, but business hasn’t been the same since Raz died. Tinker’s doing a life stretch in Leavenworth, and the owner’s getting old. He hasn’t got any kids, at least none that he knows of, so when he goes, I reckon this place’ll go too.
I hear Starbucks is looking for a location in these parts.
Paul Revere’s Bell
by Edward D. Hoch
Ellery Queen considered the mystery involving real historical figures the hardest type to write. “It is really a monumental task — so herculean a labor that your editors have never had the temerity to attempt it...The historical figure has to be convincing as well as authentic, and the scene, speech, and manners have to be projected with equal authenticity.” Mr. Hoch frequently brings real figures into his Alexander Swift stories, and does a fine job integrating them with fictional characters.
It was the spring of 1794, a time when British seizures of American ships in the Caribbean was becoming a major problem. Alexander Swift had arrived in Philadelphia to report to President Washington on continued progress with the Patowmack Canal, but he found that Washington had other things on his mind.
“It is always good to see you, Alexander,” he said, offering a firm handshake. “I hope your wife and son are well.”
“Very well, sir. And this city seems back to normal following the yellow-fever scourge.”
Washington nodded. “It’s difficult to remember how bad it was just six months ago. Now our attention is given over to foreign matters. The British are disrupting our trade with the West Indies. Jefferson wanted us to be firm with them, to retaliate in kind, but since he resigned as Secretary of State our policy has floundered a bit. My new Secretary, Edmund Randolph, is no Jefferson. Nonetheless, I am resisting retaliation and will send Chief Justice John Jay to London in hope of averting war. Our country is too young to risk another clash with the British.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Alexander asked, more out of habit than anything else.
President Washington eyed him for a moment, perhaps remembering all his earlier assignments, in the days of Benedict Arnold. “There is one thing,” he said slowly. “You can go to Boston and see about Paul Revere’s bell.”
Boston in 1794 was the third-largest city in the United States, with a population approaching 19,000. Built on a somewhat isolated peninsula connected to the rest of the state by a narrow strip of land called Boston Neck, it was the center of the universe for the new nation’s first immigrants. Though he was approaching his sixtieth birthday, Paul Revere remained the acknowledged leader of the city’s artisans, with his own foundry on Lime Street near the tip of North Boston and a silversmith shop on Anne Street.
He received Alexander Swift on a cool May morning in his little office at the foundry, a place that brought back memories for Swift of the one north of West Point where the fabled Hudson Chain had been forged during the war years. “Sometimes I think Boston is a city of rope,” he told Swift after being complimented on the foundry. “From the earliest days there have been cordage factories here for the shipyards. Ropewalks, they call them. I have always dealt in sturdier stuff.”
Paul Revere was a stout, dignified man with hair that was turning white and the beginning of a jowled appearance to his face. Swift wanted to ask him if he still rode horseback a great deal, but the remark might have seemed flippant. Instead he said, “President Washington tells me you have recently begun casting bells.”
“So I have, Mr. Swift. Sit down and let us take tea together. I cannot believe the President sent you to Boston to talk about my bells. I should never have informed him of my misgivings.”
An employee named Rossiter brought them a pot of tea and two cups, and Swift remarked, “You seem to have a good relationship with your workers.”
“I pay them well and treat them like human beings. I know I could hire men for less, but they wouldn’t be loyal like my people. John Rossiter has been with me for twenty years.”