Page 134 of Never Flinch

“Seen him at meetings,” John says. “Crewcut. Sells cars.”

“That’s him, right. Billy Top.”

A Mr. Businessman type bellies up to the otherwise empty bar. He’s red of eye and pale of face. To John’s eye he looks like trouble. Mr. Businessman yells for a Scotch, no rocks. John serves him with a practiced pour.

“What can I do for you, Robbie?”

“I still can’t member the name that guy used a couple of times instead of Trig, but I do member something he said at that Upsala meeting, had to’ve been more’n a year ago, but it stuck in my head because it was so fuckin funny. Got a big laugh from the group.”

Mr. Businessman tosses back his Scotch and calls for another. John is good at reading people—as a bartender it’s a survival skill—and besides being trouble (or because of it), this guy has the look of a man who just got bad news.I’ll be pouring him out of here around three o’clock, he thinks, but the guy is still relatively sober, so John pours him another drink but tells him to slow down.

“What?” Robbie asks.

“Wasn’t talking to you. What did John or Ron say that was so funny?”

“He said, ‘Have you ever tried to hire someone to clean up elephant shit at ten in the morning?’ Got a big laugh.”

“Thanks, Robbie.” Thinking,For nothing. “If you think of his name, call me back.”

“I’ll do that, and if your friend gets some money, push a few bucks my way.”

“I don’t—”

Just then Mr. Businessman picks up his glass, rears back, and throws it at the backbar mirror, which shatters and knocks several bottles of booze—not well pours, either, the expensive stuff—off the shelf. He then bursts into tears and puts his hands over his face.

“Gotta go, Robbie. Trouble in the valley.”

“What kind of tr—”

John ends the call and dials 911. Mr. Businessman puts his face down on the bar and begins sobbing. John goes around the bar and gives him a squeeze on the shoulder. “Whatever it is, buddy, it’ll pass.”

10

In the Breezy Point Sober Club, Bonnie Tyler has been replaced by Chrissie Hynde talking about life on the chaingang. Billy Top is holding out his hand for his phone. Robbie hands it over.

“That guy didn’t call himself Ron or John,” Robbie says. “It was Don. It just come to me. Out of the blue, like.”

“That always happens when you stop trying to think of sumpin,” Billy Top says. “Rises up to the top of your mind. Want to play box hockey?”

“You’re on,” Robbie says, and five minutes later he’s forgotten all about the guy who needed elephant shit cleaned up at ten in the morning.

Chapter 21

1

1:00 PM.

Someone is walking toward Corrie, stepping carefully across the beams laid on the concrete floor. She turns her head as far as the tape around her neck will allow, which isn’t far. She’s not quite choking, but it’s like breathing through a tube. It makes the headache from whatever Gibson dosed her with that much worse. She can’t believe this has happened to her. And that it happened so fast.

It’s a dark-haired woman in a pants suit, but the rink is so shadowy that Corrie can’t make out her face at first… but when she speaks, Corrie recognizes that low, slightly husky voice. She heard it once before, in Reno. Telling her to suffer not a woman to usurp the authority of man.First Timothy, bitch.

“Hello, Corrie Anderson. This time I know who you are. And I bet you know who I am.”

Corrie does. It’s Christopher Stewart.

Stewart drops to one knee in front of the penalty box and stares at her the way a scientist might study a test animal that will soon be sacrificed to the greater good. Which is exactly what Corrie feels like. Her terror is overlaid by surrealism. She could almost believe she’s having a terribly vivid nightmare, because how likely is it that she should be drugged and taken prisoner by one obviously crazy man only to be confronted by another?

“He didn’t kill you,” says the man in the wig. “He killed the other one, but not you.”

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