Free PIKE by Benjamin Whitmer Page B

wind, rising like a dissipating halo over his head. He picks up the pay phone and dials. A one-eared cat slinks around the side of the restaurant and sidles up to Pike, mewling. Pike gives it the toe of his cowboy boot.
    “Yeah?” Jack answers.
    “This is Pike.”
    “Where the hell you been, Pike? I was out at the job site.”
    “Cincinnati. We’re taking the week off.”
    “What’s in Cincinnati?”
    The cat tries again. Persistency being one of the few virtues Pike admires, he hunkers down and scratches it between the ears. “You might be able to help me answer that.”
    “How so?”
    “I’m looking for a cop. I know the name of his partner. Derrick Krieger.”
    “The Derrick Krieger that’s moved in over at Cotton’s place? After shooting that black boy up there?”
    Pike had been hoping Jack might know a little less. “That’s my boy.”
    “What are you getting yourself into?”
    “Nothing I can very much help.”
    “Is it about Wendy?”
    Pike lets his lungs empty of smoke. “Yep.”
    “I don’t suppose you’re gonna tell me about it?”
    “You don’t want me to. Not yet, at least.”
    Pause. “It may take me a little while. You got a number where I can reach you?”
    “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
    Jack hangs up.
    Pike stands and grinds his cigarette out under the heel of his boot, the cat mewling. He opens the door just as Bogie returns from the bathroom, the scum skimmed out of his whiskers and a good portion of the dogshit and blood troweled off his jeans and wet down.
    The bartender looks at Bogie. Then looks down at the bar. Then looks at Bogie again. Then he deliberately opens the waist-high door in the bar and walks steadily to the bathroom door.
    “Motherfucker,” Bogie says, watching his back. “I oughtta spit in your mouth.”
    Rory slaps him on the back of the head. “Shut up.”
    The bartender opens the bathroom door and stands there. Very still. For a very long time.
    Then he closes the door, his lips mottled red and white with disgust. “Joseph,” he calls.
    A Mexican kid with a black eyes and a long ponytail sticks his head out of a dingy door next to the bathrooms.
    “This bathroom’s gonna need to be cleaned up.”
    “Fuck you,” Bogie says.
    The bartender looks at him blankly.
    “You heard me,” Bogie says. “You gotta come back in here and tell everyone how bad the bathroom needs cleaning after I use it? Like I’m some kind of dirty motherfucker? Like I ain’t fit to eat with normal folks?”
    “Joseph, call the police,” the bartender says.
    Joseph’s got one foot and a mop bucket through the door. He sets the bucket down tiredly and turns around. Bogie leaps at the bartender and whistles a wild roundhouse right crunching into his nose. “Call the police!” the bartender trills, his voice cracking.
    Rory moves to grab Bogie, but Pike drops a forearm across his chest, staying him. Bogie sinks another wild right into the bartender’s nose, then kicks his spindly legs out from under him and jumps on his chest, jamming his fists into his face. Pike lights another cigarette, his gray eyes wrinkled with a smile that has yet to reach his mouth. Joseph had already reached the bathroom. He sighs and turns around and walks very slowly back towards the door to the kitchen. Another Mexican kid passes him, and without even looking at the tangle of fists and spittle-laced blood that is the bartender and Bogie, holds a greasy paper bag of food to Pike. “Gracias,” Pike says, and takes it.
    “Llamé a policia,” Joseph calls out from the kitchen. “Estarán aqui pronto.”
    Pike lifts Bogie bodily off the bartender and carries him out the door, flailing and spitting like an enraged kitten.

CHAPTER 27
~ I’m looking for somebody that might convince me of it.~
    D ana’s mother’s house is a white Victorian trimmed in blue, with a golden weathercock atop its tallest spire and a welcome mat that looks suspiciously unused. It’s the same immaculately