Past Due by William Lashner Read Free Book Online Page B

one.
    “You sure yous are in the right place?” said the bartender, a crag of a man with a great head of white hair and a missing arm. The thief, Lloyd Ganz, I presumed.
    “We’re in the right place,” I said. “I’ll have a sea breeze.”
    Ganz blinked at me. “Say what?”
    “A sea breeze. It’s a drink.”
    “Hey, Charlie,” said Ganz without looking away, “guy in the suit says he wants something called a sea breeze.”
    A slim-jim at the end of the bar, long, brown, and desiccated, said in a rasp, “Tell him to drive his ass on down to Wildwood, face east, open his mouth.”
    I turned away from the derisive laughter swelling behind me. “You don’t know how to make a sea breeze?”
    “Are you really sure yous in the right place? We don’t got no ferns here.”
    “Careful,” I said. “My mother’s name is Fern.”
    “Really?”
    “No, not really. Do you have grapefruit juice?”
    “It’s late for breakfast, ain’t it?”
    “Cranberry juice?”
    “You kidding me, right?”
    I let out a long disappointed breath. “Why don’t you then just inform me as to the specialty of the house?”
    Lloyd Ganz blinked at me a couple times more. “Hey, Charlie. Man here wants the specialty of the house.”
    “Give him a wit, Lloyd,” said Charlie.
    “A wit?” I said. “Something Noel Coward would have ordered, no doubt.”
    One of the guys behind me said, “Wasn’t he the councilman up in the Third District, caught with that girl?”
    “Yes, he was,” I replied. “All right, Lloyd, let me have a wit.”
    Lloyd took a beer glass, stuck it under the Bud spigot, pulled the spigot with his stump, placed it before me.
    I looked up at him, puzzled. “That it?”
    “Wait.”
    He took a shot glass, slammed it on the bar next to my beer, filled it with tequila. When I reached for the tequila, he slapped my hand away. Then he lifted the shot glass, hovered it over the beer, slop-dropped it inside. The beer fizzled and foamed and flowed over the edges of the mug.
    “What the hell’s that?” I said.
    “A guy comes in,” said Lloyd, “sits down, says, ‘Lloyd, let me have a Bud,’ he gets just the beer. But he says, ‘Let me have a Bud wit,’ then this is what he gets.” He leaned forward, cocked his head at me. “Mister, it’s the closest we got to a specialty of the house.”
    I stared at the still foaming drink for maybe a bit too long, because an undercurrent of laughter started rising from behind me.
    Beth reached over, snatched the beer with the shot glass still inside, downed it in a quick series of swallows, slammed the empty glass back on the bar so the shot glass shook. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, swallowed a belch.
    “How was it, missy?” said Lloyd.
    “It’s not a sea breeze,” said Beth, “but it’ll do.”
    I took a twenty out of my wallet, dropped it on the bar. When another wit sat before me, boiling over, I lifted the glass high, turned to face the crew watching me from among the tables, said loudly, “To Joey Cheaps,” and downed my drink.
    It roiled in my stomach like a pint of sick. I shook my head, gasped out a “God, that’s bad.”
    I expected a jiggle of laughter at my discomfort with the drink, I expected a few expressions of surprise that I had mentioned Joey Parma, I expected maybe a few murmurs of assent to my toast, a few sad exclamations of poor bastard as they remembered the man who had turned Jimmy T’s into his local tap. I expected something different from what I got, which was a dark, glum silence.
    It took me a minute to figure it out, but I did.
    “So,” I said, “how much he end up owing you guys when he died?”
    There was a moment more of quiet, and then one of the men said, “A hundred and six.”
    “Thirty-eight,” said another.
    “Fifty,” said a third.
    “How about you, Lloyd?” I said. “What was his tab here?”
    “Two hundred, thirty-six, and fifty-nine cents,” said Lloyd. “Approximately.”
    “Well, we