“Apart from the obvious,” said Phil.
“Like not to do it again,” said Scotty.
“You’d think they’d abduct nuclear scientists, or generals,” said Jackie. “Instead, all they seem to do is take crackers and rubes.”
“Foot soldiers,” said Phil.
“First wave,” said Scotty. “They’re the ones the aliens will have to, y’know, subdue.”
“But why the probing?” asked Jackie. “What’s with that?”
“Could be someone was yanking their chain,” said Phil. “Some Venusian: ‘Yah, you stick a probe up their asses, and they light up.’”
“‘They play a tune,’” said Scotty.
“I just don’t understand it,” Jackie concluded.
At the end of the bar, there was a man scribbling in a notebook. His face looked familiar, and I thought he might have been in the previous week, although he wasn’t a regular. He was in his early fifties and wore a brown tweed jacket and an open-collared white shirt. His hair was short, and either he was aging well or he was spending a lot on Grecian. When I’d served him earlier, I’d caught a hint of expensive aftershave. Now he had a finger width of beer at the bottom of his glass. I wandered over to him.
“Get you another?”
As he saw me approach, he closed the notebook and glanced at his watch.
“Just the check, thanks,” he said.
I nodded and slipped him the tab.
“Nice place,” he said.
“Yeah, it is.”
“You been working here long?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t even be working today if one of the regular bartenders wasn’t sick.”
“So, what? You the manager?”
“Just the bar manager.”
“Huh.” He chewed his bottom lip, and seemed to consider me for a moment or two. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Next time.”
“Sure,” I said. I watched him leave. Jackie caught the look on my face.
“Something?” he asked.
“Probably nothing.”
But I didn’t have time to think about the stranger for the rest of the evening. Thursday was always microbrew night at the Bear, with beer specials, and that night we were hosting a small brewery named Andrew’s Brewing Company, a father-and-son operation out of Lincolnville. Minutes later, we were swamped, and it was all that I could do to keep us out of the weeds for the evening. Two large birthday groups, one almost entirely male, the other exclusively female, hit the restaurant simultaneously and, over the course of the night, began to meld into one indistinguishable whonks±uishable le of booze-fueled carnality. Meanwhile, there was rarely more than one seat free at the bar, and everyone seemed to want to eat as well as drink. Shorthanded as we were, it meant that Gary and I were working flat out for six hours solid. I didn’t even remember seeing Jackie leave; I must have been changing a keg when he wandered into the night.
“This is still February, right?” asked Gary as he made a batch of margaritas for Sarah, one of the regular waitresses who always kept her head covered with a scarf, which made her easy to spot on nights like this one.
“I think so.”
“Then where the hell did all these people come from? It’s February.”
At about ten thirty, things quieted down some, and there was time to restock and deal with our casualties. One of the line chefs had sliced himself badly across the palm of the hand with a paring knife, and the wound needed stitches. Now that the Bear was a little calmer, he was free to drive himself to the emergency room. Apart from that, there were the usual minor burns and heated tempers in the kitchen. I’d give the line chefs this much: they were always entertaining. The ones who worked at the Bear were better than most. I knew people in the business who spent a significant portion of their time bailing their chefs out from jail, finding places for them to sleep when their old ladies threw their asses out on the street, and, occasionally, beating them into submission just to keep them under control.
A group of Portland cops had taken up position near the door. Gary had been looking after them for most of the evening. The Bear was a popular hangout for local law enforcement: there was parking, the beer was good, it served food until closing, and it was far enough away from the Old Port and Portland PD headquarters to make them feel that they were off the radar. Perhaps its bunker-like aspect appealed to them as well. The Bear didn’t have many windows-and most of those were bricked up-and if all of the lights were switched off, it was pitch-black inside.
Now, as I watched, the crowd of cops parted slightly, and a familiar figure made his way to the bar. I had assumed that they were all Portland cops, but I was wrong. One of them, at least, was a statie: Hansen, the detective out of the barracks in Gray who, more than anyone else, I believed was relishing my current situation. He was fit looking, his eyes more green than blue, with very black hair and a permanent dark shadow on his face from years of shaving with an electric razor. As usual, he was better dressed than the average cop. He wore a well-cut dark blue suit and a blue paisley tie. A gold tiepin twinkled as it caught the lights above the bar.
He took a seat away from the main group and placed his near-empty glass on the bar, then put his hands together and waited for me to come to him. I let a couple of seconds go by, then resigned myself to having to deal with him.
“What can I get you, Detective?” I said.
He didn’t reply. His jaw moved as his bottom teeth worried against his incisors. I wondered how much he’d had to drink, and decided that it probably wasn’t much. He didn’t seem like a man who liked to cut loose.
“I heard you were working here,” he said.
“Took you awhile to drop by.”
“This isn’t a social call.”
“I guessed that. I don’t think sociability is in your makeup.”
He looked away, shaking his head slightly, a reasonable man faced with an unreasonable one.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, gesturing with disdain at the bar, the clientele, maybe even the world itself.
“Making a living. You and your buddies dug up my chosen career path. I picked another temporarily.”
“‘Temporarily’? You think so? I hear your lawyer is making a lot of calls on your behalf. Good luck to her. Better rack up the tips. She doesn’t work cheap.”
“Well, here’s your chance to contribute to the cause. You want a refill on that, or should I just leave you to fill it yourself with piss and vinegar?”
Hansen leaned forward. His eyes, I now saw, were slightly glazed. Either he’d had more than I thought, or he just couldn’t hold his booze.
“This is a cop place. Don’t you have any dignity? You let good police see you like this, working behind a bar. What are you trying to do, rub it in their faces?”
It was a question that I’d asked myself. Even Dave had said, when he offered me the job, that he would understand if I didn’t want to take it because of the cops who drank there. I told him I didn’t much care what anyone thought, but maybe Hansen was hitting closer to the mark than I wanted to give him credit for. There was an element of cussedness about my decision to work at the Bear. I wasn’t going to slink away after what had happened. True, some of the cops who came to the bar seemed embarrassed at first by my presence there, and a couple were openly contemptuous of me, but they were guys who’d never much cared for me anyway. Most of the rest were just fine, and some had let me know how sorry they were for what had been done. It didn’t matter much either way. I was content to let things rest, for now. It gave me time to do what I wanted to do.
“You know, Detective, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that you had a hard-on for me. Maybe I could introduce you to some people? Might help relieve some of that tension. Or you could take out an ad in the Phoenix. Lot of guys out there aching for a man with a uniform in his closet.”
Hansen expelled a single humorless laugh, like a poison dart being blown from a pipe.
“You’d better hold on to that dry wit,” he said. “A man who goes home smelling of stale beer to an empty house needs something to laugh about.”