Hardy’s eyes left her, went to Moses, who leaned back on his stool. “A guy puts a lime in a Manhattan, I feel it down to my toes.”
“Hey, I’m a little distracted, all right?”
“Maybe it’s the gun.” Moses did not like having a loaded weapon in the bar, but Hardy had come straight from downtown and was not about to leave it outside in his topless Samurai.
“What gun?” Frannie said.
“Nothing,” Hardy said.
But Moses explained. A little.
“This morning?” Frannie asked, suddenly worry all over her.
“It’s no big deal,” Hardy said.
“Some guy’s trying to kill you and it’s no big deal?”
“He puts a lime in a Manhattan…”
“Yes, okay, it’s entered my mind, all right?” His eyes went from Moses to Frannie. “Anyway, it’s not definite anybody’s trying to kill me.”
“But you’re walking around with a gun?”
Hardy leaned over the bar. He smelled jasmine. “Frannie, I took the gun with me this morning. I haven’t gotten around to getting home yet. End of story.”
“But you’re not going home?”
He straightened up. “I’ve considered it, living there and all like I do.”
“But what if this man tries to get you? What if he goes to your house?”
“Tell the truth, I’m more worried about me having to, or being tempted to, kill him if I see him, which my friend Abe tells me would be a problem.”
“Well, I don’t think you should go home. I think it’s too dangerous.”
Hardy patted Frannie’s hand on the bar. “Okay,” he said, closing the subject.
Moses had gotten up and was pulling a Bass Ale at the spigot. “How about you think about tending some bar.”
“I’m talking to your sister.”
“And she is my date tonight. I’m off work and I am pouring beer. Something is wrong here.”
Surprisingly, Frannie covered Hardy’s hand and squeezed it. “I mean it,” she said. A look passed between them. Hardy had been telling himself he wasn’t all that worried. Naturally, he’d been a little concerned, but the earlier adrenaline fear he’d felt in Rusty’s blood-soaked bedroom had passed.
Now, Frannie hearing about it fresh, she was passing some of it back to him. And it was a fact that he had garnished the Manhattan with lime. He tried to tell himself that it was just the way women were, especially Frannie, who’d so recently lost her husband. Nervous. But suddenly he wasn’t sure that was all it was.
“Two margaritas, no salt,” Moses called over, and Hardy started pouring into the blender. Moses sidled up next to him. “No sugar, either,” he said.
Hardy couldn’t get the till to balance, and he had continued to pour some pretty shabby drinks. Gin and coke. Rum and ginger ale. Thinking about it made him shudder. He’d started three Black and Tans backward, forgetting that while Guinness floats on Bass Ale, the opposite wasn’t true.
It was just after midnight and he had closed down the bar early. No sense continuing the charade longer than he had to. The clientele would get over it. After all, this was the Little Shamrock, Established in 1893. It wasn’t going to go out of business over closing early one time. Moses might bitch a little, but Hardy would explain it later.
He found he just couldn’t pay attention thinking that someone was going to come in and shoot him just as he was reaching up to the top shelf or wiping down a section of the bar with his rag or ringing up a drink tab.
After talking to Tony Feeney, Hardy had at last been able to get his gun back, and now it was stuck in his belt behind him as he counted the money for the sixth time. It was no use. He had $597 in cash and the register showed he’d rung up $613. It wasn’t going to balance.
He went to his tip jar and made up the difference, then crossed to the dart boards with a last Guinness, trying to decide what he was going to do.
He had talked to Glitsky and found out that he hadn’t gone down to talk to Louis Baker, that the ex-con was still on the streets.
Glitsky had started to explain something about other suspects, but Hardy, working the bar, was busy and didn’t have time for police procedural bullshit. Suspects be damned. Louis Baker had threatened Hardy’s life and was free as a bird. Thanks for all your help, Abe.
What Hardy was not going to do now, he was sure, was go home. Rusty Ingraham had gone home.
He kept all his dart paraphernalia in a well-worn leather holder that he carried with him at all times, most often in the inside pocket of whatever jacket he happened to be wearing. Now he took it out and began fitting the pale blue plastic flights into the twenty-gram tungsten darts.
There was one Tiffany lamp on over the bar and two in the dart area. Hardy had dimmed them down as low as they would go. He looked up at the clock on the mantel across from the bar, which hadn’t ticked since the Great Earthquake in 1906 and didn’t look like it was about to start now. Standing up, preparing to throw a round of darts, he first went back and checked for the third time that the front door was locked.
Since he was up anyway he went into the bathrooms, both of which had barred back windows, but you couldn’t be too sure. The place seemed secure.
He stepped up to the dart line and flung his first dart. It missed the whole board. Hardy stared at the dart, stuck in the wall next to the board, as though it were a vision. There was no way he could miss the whole board. That was like Nicklaus whiffing a tee shot. Even warming up, you didn’t miss the board.
Well, at least no one else was around to see it. He went and retrieved the dart, then took the.38 out from under his belt and put it on the table next to his Guinness.
It wasn’t only going home, he realized. He shouldn’t even be here at work. Baker could ask anyone and find out where Hardy spent his days, and Dismas wasn’t going to tend bar with his loaded police Special on his hip. Or even on a shelf under the bar.
He started throwing again, more naturally now. Not really aiming. The round all fell within the ‘20.’
His first thought was to go to Jane’s, but not only didn’t he have a key to her place, it was where he used to live when he was a D.A.
Moses? Everybody here knew Moses was his good buddy, knew where Moses lived.
Abe? Screw Abe.
Pico and Angela Morales? They had kids and little if any extra space.
He thought about a hotel, but since San Francisco’s main industry had become tourism, you couldn’t get a room here anymore for under $150 a night, and Hardy, doing okay, still did not have that kind of money. And who knew how long it would be?
Well, it couldn’t be too long. If Glitsky didn’t do something, then Hardy would. Flush Baker, make him commit.
Then what? Blow him away? He shied from the thought, but there was something there.
He finished his Guinness and pulled the darts from his last round out of the board. He picked up his gun, took his empty pint glass to the sink and turned off the lights at the switch by the mantel. Letting himself out the front door, Hardy stood in the recess off the sidewalk, his hand on the gun’s butt, scanning the shadows, listening.
There was a high, patchy cloud-cover and it was not very cold. Traffic on Lincoln was very light. Hardy stepped onto the sidewalk, turned right and walked quickly back around the corner to Tenth, where he had parked.
Distracted when he’d come to work, he had left the top down on his Samurai, and as he slid onto the damp driver’s seat he saw that somebody had opened his glove compartment. Papers were strewn on the passenger seat, on the floor.
Looking around again, he saw nothing move. Behind him, beyond the near buildings, the Sutro tower rose in front of a crescent moon, a skeleton clawing at the scudding clouds.
Hardy put the car in gear and turned onto Lincoln, up toward Stanyan and the tower. It wasn’t a skeleton. It was just a bunch of metal and bolts and wire-an idol to the great god television. Maybe seeing it close up would help. No sense in getting worked up over imaginings, letting the mind play tricks.