Free The Glass Highway by Loren D. Estleman

no unescorted ladies at the bar. I stuck my neck out serving you two here already. I’ve only had this job a week and a half. I’d sort of like to hang on to it till I see my first paycheck.”
    “I know your boss, sonny.”
    “Yes, ma’am. So do I. What he says is no unescorted ladies at the bar and no unescorted ladies at the bar is what he says.”
    “She’s escorted,” I said, slipping onto the stool next to hers. “One more for the lady, and a glass of Scotch I can stand up in.”
    The bartender’s face wore a thin sheet of suspicion. He had a coppery sprouting on his long upper lip that looked as if it had taken a month to show. He said, “You know her from somewhere, or this a pickup?”
    Meaning was she wildcatting without kicking in to the house. I turned to her. “You left the cap off the toothpaste tube this morning.”
    She beckoned the bartender closer with her index finger. When he leaned his ear down: “Call a cop. I don’t know this guy from Billy Graham’s chauffeur.”
    Still hunched, he slid hostile eyes in my direction. Then they slid back to her face and he straightened. “Sure, green the help. I’m just trying to eat like everyone else.” He moved off to fix the drinks.
    “Class bars, phooey. Give me a dive down on Mt. Elliott anytime.” She got out a cigarette and tapped it noisily atop the bar while she hunted in her purse for an Aqua-filter. Then she gave up and speared the weed between her lips cold.
    I lit it and one for myself. “You’ve never been any closer to a Mt. Elliott dive than the Renaissance Club. I’m on to your act, remember?”
    “You and everyone else. They all think I’m too good for me.” She squirted smoke at the ceiling and looked at me. She had glitter-dust on her long eyelashes. Her thick red hair hung down her bare back to the stool. “Sorry I left you hanging before. I’m sensitive about my height.”
    The bartender brought our glasses and picked up the money I’d left him on the bar, made change from the cash register. I accepted it and stared at him until he moved down to the other end.
    “Heard from Bud lately?” I asked Fern.
    “He came by last night to drop off Christmas presents for the family .Sharon asked him to stay but he said he had to get back. He’s still living with Paula. How’d you find out where she lives?”
    “I beat up a guy.”
    She almost choked on her drink. She set it down and dabbed at the front of her dress with her droll cocktail napkin and killed the cigarette I’d just lit for her in a black ashtray mounded over with them on the bar. They all wore traces of her red lipstick. “We’re a good match,” she said, squashing out the butt. “We like to pretend we’re hard. We’re as hard as a couple of toasted marshmallows.”
    “Philosophy yet,” I said. “Ain’t we hell.”
    She turned right around and took another one out of her pack. I let her fire this one up herself with a slim gold lighter from her purse. I had a hard enough time keeping up with my own bad habits. “I hate this season,” she said.
    “So do I. Drink up and let’s go caroling.”
    “They start hyping it around Halloween and don’t let up until it’s time to start getting ready for the George Washington’s Birthday sales. The air conditioners are still running in the stores while they’re piping in ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nose Reindeer.’”
    “Cute tune.”
    “I bet all the bars in all the cities in the whole Christian world are jammed tonight.” She ran a scarlet-nailed finger around the inside of her glass and tasted it. “Chock full of toasted marshmallows like us busting their asses to make themselves merry. The hell with all of us. You can take all the mistletoe and all the trees and bright ribbons and shiny paper and cut rate Santas and canned sleighbells and Perry Comos and sink them in the Detroit River with a rock. The last thing we need is a whole season just to remind us how alone we are.”
    “You’re right. Let’s