Free Blood Ties by Victoria Rice Page B

couple of guys from a frat house, flipped him over and his jersey fell over his head. The girls leaned over to check out his abs, all of them except me.
    I plopped down next to a girl I didn’t know and grabbed a beer and a slice of pizza. I gave her a smile. Her look wasn’t friendly. It must have been her beer. Maybe it had been her pizza.
    “Here’s to Sally!” I called out.
    A murmur of disgust went up around us. “God rest her soul.”
    “Here here.” And with that, we raised our glasses.
    It was Tuesday night and still raining. You’d think a Tuesday night in St. Germaine would be quiet, very low key. Oh no, I’d been sadly mistaken. Every night was an excuse to party. The beers were half price. Too bad the pizza wasn’t. We were hanging out with the townies getting hammered. Our lifeboat in this drizzle was a small dive at the edge of town. And when I mean a dive, I mean a low rent bar that smelled like Sally’s office. It was so filthy your shoes stuck to the grimy carpet. Old license plates covered the holes in the walls.
    The bartender, as ancient as the hills, with a beard halfway down his stained wife-beater-covered chest, stood behind the bar. His hair matched his beard, frizzy like a cluster of grey hairballs. He’d entertained me all evening with his spittoon. He caught my gaze and gave me a grin. His crooked and yellowed teeth shocked me in to chugging my beer.
    Jen bumped into me and I almost dropped my pizza. “Hey come with me to the john.” She grabbed my free hand. We headed to a hallway at the back of the bar. I crinkled up my nose. The pizza hanging out of my face wasn’t enough to mask the smell. A man stepped out of the men’s bathroom in a t-shirt with a yellow moose on it, pulling up his pants and zipping his fly. I saw what was behind him and the pizza came out of my mouth in a spew.
    “God, ” I hissed. Before Jen had a chance to take a look, the filthy door had shut behind him. “You missed it.”
    “I don’t need to see what I can picture in my head,” she said. “Come’ere.” She plastered us up against the wall then slowly peeked around it. She pulled back with a quick movement. “There’s a table of creepy dudes. They followed us in. They’ve been watching you all night.”
    “Le’me see.” I switched places with her. Two guys in their late twenties or early thirties sat at a table close to the door. They weren’t talking. They huddled around their beers, occasionally flicking their eyes to our group. One looked towards the back of the bar. I flipped back around. “Yeah … creepy. Get that one’s t-shirt. It’s got ex-con written all over it.” It was a black and white print of Charlie Manson.
    Jen’s eyes went wide and she broke out into laughter. “Oh my God! It’s your parolee boyfriend. Here, le’me take a picture.” She grabbed my arm and yanked me back. She pulled out her cell phone and held it up to her face then slid her head around the corner. I heard a soft click.
    We huddled around the digital picture. “ I like the one with the tattoos. You can take the other one,” she said, slurring her words.
    I argued with her. “No, you know how much I’m into tats.” We did rock-paper-scissors. I won.
    “Names, we need names, good scary names.” We settled for the classics, Eddie for mine and Mick for hers.
    “ Okay, they’ve been out of the joint for what, three months. It makes them par-tic-u-lar-ily dangrus.”
    “Yeah,” she replied. We hit our knuckles together in a salute. We went into the ladies bathroom. There was a toilet and a sink, no mirror. The toilet hadn’t been flushed in a while. I dropped my pizza on the floor and we ran out gasping for air.
    “I’m not using the boy’s. It look s just as bad,” I said.
    “Fuck this, I’m going outside.”
    We grabbed our umbrellas and ran out into the rain, around the corner. I shielded Jen with her umbrella. A feeling as if I were being watched from the trees crept over