Ladies' Night by Jack Ketchum Read Free Book Online Page B

that maybe you'd have to have worked here night after night to notice it so he'd mentioned it to Erica. But Erica just gave him a look. So he'd thought, well, maybe it's my imagination —but he didn't really believe that. Since he'd come on at six, before the bar was even very busy, he'd been aware of some kind of thickness in the air, a kind of tension, a sort of manic strain to the conversation. Like the night was coiling up for something.
    He'd seen it before.
    New Year's Eve was always pretty strange, and Saint Patty's Day, and sometimes even Christmas, when the bar was filled with people too lonely to have anywhere else to go. He remembered working a union bar once on a night after a long hard truckers’ strike had ended — how the room was charged with a high mix of rising spirits and downright bloody murder. The kind of night when, for whatever reason, fights break out and drunks get dangerous and you kept your eyes open and an empty bottle handy just in case.
    It was irrational, maybe, but he had one now behind the bar rail.
    Because of the strangeness.
    Since six o'clock he'd been feeling it, a sense of disquiet just below the surface. And despite Erica's response to him, he thought that the waitresses must be feeling it too. They were all a little distant tonight, working their jobs like it was sheer drudgery — when usually they managed to have some fun here. It was that kind of place.
    So actually he was glad to have been able to give Tom a hand with Cindy.
    That, at least, was normal.
    He wondered what Susan did the nights Tom was out prowling. Or how she took it in the morning. He liked Susan, even though he didn't know her as well as he knew Tom. Not for him to judge. But this kind of stuff was not terrific for a marriage.
    Down at the end of the bar a woman was crowing for a gin and tonic. He poured it for her, thinking he was going to have to cut this one off soon if she kept on slugging them down like this, unusual for a woman to get so loaded so fast and so intently, thinking this while carrying the drink over to her and looking at the two young girls who for some reason were standing there glaring at him over by the jukebox, when the weirdest fucking notion occurred.
    What if it was the women?
    Customers, waitresses.
    What if it was all of them?
    Nah , he thought. You're losing it. That's nuts .
    But he looked around. He poured and served and looked around.
    And the thought refused to go away. Every time there was the slightest lull in business the thought would prick at him and he'd feel the thickness start to rise in the room and the walls start to close a little.
    It wasn't the guys.
    It was the women who kept reminding him of those truckers blowing off steam after four months of no pay and no work and the wife and kids howling, who reminded him of bad Christmas Eves and bad Saint Patrick's Days.
    It was the women.
    And then he thought, that's bullshit, just look at Cindy sitting there with Tom, nice woman, everything fine. Check her out. Look at her looking at him like she'd like to reach over and just . . .
    . . . eat him up.
    I'm gonna have to watch this closely , he thought.

Troubled Sleep

    The wind was hot.
    It was a burning wind — it burned through Susan's sleep like acid on silk, reaching deep into each smooth furrow of her body. The nightgown was too much. Her breasts felt as though covered with sand, with insects, as though she lay buried to the neck in an anthill in a hot summer storm. By turns it was terrible and then sweet — a tickling, moving, crawling sensation. An awareness of the physical that not even sleep could override.
    Her fingers moved to the neck of her nightgown, traveled down its front and parted it over her body. The feeling remained but it was better now, more purely pleasure, less frightening in the complexity of its overwhelming sensuousness.
    Her tongue moved over dry cracked lips. Her fingertips went to her breasts, plucked the nipples up,