Free Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery by Steve Hamilton

bar. “You guys again,” he said, his voice a hell of a lot less cordial than the first time we heard it. “Just what I need.”
    “We just want to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.
    “Can’t you see I’m busy here? You want something to drink or not?”
    “A Molson and a 7-Up,” I said. “Our usual.”
    He didn’t smile. He hit the draft handle, drew me a glass that was at least half foam, squirted some soda water
out of his shooter into a glass and put it down next to the beer. “Five bucks,” he said.
    “Your prices went up,” I said.
    “It’s a tough business.”
    “Whatever your problem is—”
    “My problem is as soon as you guys left here today, Stan and Brian got in a big fight. Brian’s in the hospital.”
    I almost laughed. “Stan’s the guy who got his nose broken, right? And Brian’s the guy who didn’t stand up for him? What the hell does that have to do with us?”
    Vinnie leaned in front of me. “We’re just looking for somebody,” he said, raising his voice over the noises around him. “Do you think you could help us out?”
    “Who you looking for?”
    “My brother.”
    “Go check the parking lot. That’s about as far as an Indian gets before he passes out.”
    The look Vinnie gave him right about then should have scared him. But the bartender didn’t know Vinnie like I did. He didn’t know the kind of day we’d been having, or that Vinnie’s seven-mile-long fuse was about to burn all the way down.
    That’s when our friend Stan showed up. There was fresh white tape on his face, and his two black eyes looked even worse. “Lookee here,” he said. “It’s the Lone Ranger and Tonto again.”
    He was still wearing his Maple Leafs jersey. It took Vinnie about two seconds to hit him twice in the face and then pull that jersey right over his head. Somebody else jumped in, and then me. Usually I’m smart enough to cover myself in a bar fight, especially when I’m fighting over something stupid in a roomful of strangers. But somehow it all boiled over at that exact moment, all the driving and the dead ends, and everything Vinnie had told me about Tom. Having your brother go to prison and then
finding him in the shower, trying to hang himself. Somehow I was plugged into the same anger now, for Tom and for the men he had come up here with, and for everyone else in this goddamned backwoods bar. Fortunately, nobody else in the place seemed too interested in fighting. Most of them just watched us for a minute or two until they could step in and separate us.
    “Easy now,” a man said in my ear as he wrapped me from behind in a bear hug. “Just take it easy.” I struggled to break free, but he was strong enough to wait me out.
    Where all this anger had come from, I didn’t know. I was thinking about it thirty minutes later, as two officers from the Ontario Provincial Police station down the street had us sitting at a table in the corner. They weren’t happy about Vinnie not having a driver’s license, but they ran mine and stood around for a while, figuring out what to do with us. It wasn’t the first bar fight they’d seen that week—hell, maybe not even that night—so they let us go with the standard warning.
    I was still thinking about it at midnight as we checked in at the local motel. I sure didn’t feel like driving another four hours to make it home. Spending the night in Wawa wasn’t my idea of a vacation, but at least it wasn’t the local jail.
    I got Vinnie some ice for the scrape over his left eye, used the toothbrush the man at the front desk had given me, washed it down with tap water that tasted like pure iron. When the lights were out and I was staring up at the ceiling, I tried to let go of the anger. I tried to let go of it the way you let sand run between your fingers. When it was gone, there was nothing left but a question. And then another.
    “These guys didn’t just vanish into thin air,” I said. “Where in hell did they go?”
    Vinnie