Noble Lies by Charles Benoit Read Free Book Online Page B

theirs was the best bar in town. The music was better at the strip club but the beers were more expensive, the same girls everyone had seen naked since high school, the stretch marks hardly visible in the half-light. He hadn’t been back since the late nineties but he knew that it was still the same. And they wondered why he left in the first place.
    Despite what the locals like to think after a night of pounding back dollar drafts, there were no tough bars in Canajoharie. There were bar fights and once or twice a month the cops would be called when some drunk pulled a knife or fired off a few rounds in the parking lot, but in every bar on any night you’d find retirees, sipping away their pensions, the other patrons stepping out of the way as they shuffled past with their walkers.
    Mark knew more than a few tough bars. Back road juke joints a day’s ride from Camp Lejeune, after-hours hip-hop clubs in Dar-es-Salaam, back alley opium dens in Pakistan, a Kingston rum shop far off the tourist track. There was something about them, something primal, something that told you that this was no place to fuck around. They never had bar fights—at least not in the Hollywood sense—and the cops would never be called, never show up if they were, the crowds staying in the shadows, nobody watching the drug deals go down, nobody jumping up to stop the three-on-one beating, nobody saying nothing when a backhand flattened a mouthy hooker.
    The Horny Monkey was one of those bars.
    Unlike the wide-open bar-beers on Bang-la Road, Vegas-bright and Carnival Cruise-naughty, the windowless walls and steel door of the Horny Monkey kept the casual tourists away, drawing only those who knew what they would find. A tight spring yanked the door shut behind them and Mark felt the muscles in his arms twitch.
    Inside, a couple dozen people leaned on the bar, slouched in a dark booth or clumped around the pool table, the hanging low-watt lights giving form to the blue-white bank of cigarette smoke. The men in the bar—Thais, Chinese, a few Europeans—either ignored them or stared straight at them, looking for a reason to start something; and Mark knew he was standing taller, sending a clear message.
    There were fewer women than the other Phuket bars but more than he would have found in any bar in Canajoharie, and there was no uniform at the Horny Monkey, the women dressing to please themselves, not some Western tourist’s fantasy, all jeans and black tee shirts, baggy and unrevealing. And where the bar-beer girls were sweet and bubbly, the women of the Horny Monkey didn’t play that game—no flirtatious bullshit, just business. They were older, harder and, pound for petite-little-spiked-heel pound, the most dangerous people in the place.
    â€œTwo-drink minimum, each,” the barmaid shouted over the music, a high-pitched Thai pop singer and a drum machine squealing through a cover of last year’s number one. She held her arm out straight, two fingers pointing level at them like a forked stick. “You pay now.”
    Mark peeled off a five-hundred bhat note and set it on the bar. “Four Leos,” he said, pointing at the beer light on the back wall.
    â€œYou think this a cheap dump?” the woman shouted, her voice cutting through the din. “Twelve-hundred bhat. You pay now.” She popped the tops off the four beers to seal the sale.
    Mark added more multi-colored bills to the pile, and when the woman reached over to grab them he covered the bills with his hand and said, “I’m looking for a girl named Pim.”
    If he hadn’t been watching for it he wouldn’t have noticed her hand stutter when he said the name. Chin down, the woman raised her hooded eyes, trying to read something in Mark’s expressionless face. He moved his hand an inch to the right, revealing a pair of thousand bhat notes. The woman glanced down at the bills, her tongue darting out to wet her lips,