Page 20

At a few minutes before seven that evening, the parking lot outside the Prairie didn’t contain a single car.

Instead, half a dozen pickup trucks stood with their tires partially buried in the potholes.

A pair of dirt bikes, held together by mud and spit, leaned against a wall.

A chain looped around the rear spoiler of an ATV, attaching the vehicle to a rusty drainpipe that ran down the side of the bar.

There wasn’t a sedan or a family-sized SUV in sight.

A neon sign in the window advertised Coors. Its blue-and-white letters glowed in the thin evening fog. Rock music thumped through the walls, and someone inside whooped and hollered. Stella assumed the backslapping in a place like that came with enough force to dislocate a shoulder.

She pulled open the door and stepped inside.

A bartender looked up, then returned his attention to the glass he was polishing.

The lighting in the bar was dim enough to hide most minor sins, but Stella could make out a line of faded military pennants on the walls.

Between the flags, crooked frames displayed photos of men in dusty uniforms cradling rifles in front of armored vehicles.

At the pool table, a man in a dirty trucker’s cap shot, missed, and swore.

Three men sat at one table, sleeves rolled up to their muscular biceps despite the cold air.

Two more men sat at the bar while the pool player’s companion clung to his pool stick as though the cue was the only thing keeping him upright.

Stella counted six empty beer bottles on the corner table behind him.

She’d met plenty of tough guys in her time in the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department and plenty more after she arrived at Quantico. These men looked like tough was all they had.

Hagen strode up to the bar and perched on a stool.

The bartender finished wiping and placed the glass on a display behind him, though the shelf looked as dirty as the rag he whipped onto his shoulder.

He had a bald head, small ears that grew too close to his skull, and thin, pale lips that would’ve struggled to stretch into a smile.

“What can I get for you?”

“Coke. Stella?”

Stella took the seat next to him. She wanted to ask for a dirty martini, though a cosmopolitan would’ve worked fine too. Duty sucked sometimes. “Same, I guess.”

The bartender sent two coasters skimming down the counter, landing neatly in front of Stella and Hagen with impressive precision. Ice rattled into glasses, followed by a quick hiss of soda from the bar gun, and then— thump —he set the drinks down with practiced finality.

“Want me to run a tab for that?”

Hagen dropped a twenty on the counter.

As the bartender grabbed his change, Stella thought of the cocktail bar she and Mac used to visit before Stella and Hagen had coupled up and before Mac met Werner.

They should head back there again when they returned.

At least she’d get a better drink than an ice-cold Coke on a frozen December night.

Hagen took his change and dropped a couple of bills into an almost-empty tip jar before taking out his badge and introducing them both. “I hear that Charlie Caine used to come in here a lot. You knew him?”

Stella expected the bartender to react the same way Sandie had. To display sadness at the loss of a friend and a desire to talk about a murdered buddy.

Instead, he planted his fists on the counter and sneered. “That’s all we need. A couple of government goons coming here to tell the locals what to do. Charlie was one of us. He was our friend. We don’t need your help.”

A man sat hunched at the end of the bar. He wore a padded khaki vest over a plaid shirt and jeans that might’ve been blue once but were now white from the knees up. His cap was pushed high on his head. His cheeks were pinched, and his narrow chin ended in thin strands of black bristles.

“Damn right.” He sucked on his Coors. “We’ll find that bastard and deal with him ourselves.” He pulled a Smith & Wesson from the back of his pants and placed it on the counter.

Hagen glared at him. “Don’t even think about it.”

The bartender lifted his chin toward the gun. “Get rid of that, Dennis. Don’t need anyone getting any stupid ideas.”

Stella lifted her glass. “He’s right. You should put that away. And mouthing off about enforcing your own laws in front of federal officers isn’t the smartest of ideas, is it?”

“We ain’t scared.” The claim came from one of the guys playing pool.

As Dennis stuffed his gun into his pants, Hagen swiveled on his stool. “You should be scared. Believe me, you should be very scared. ”

Stella changed the subject. “So Charlie came here a lot? That’s what we heard.”

The bartender shrugged. “He came.”

“He have any enemies? Get into fights with anyone?”

Dennis scratched his head through the top of his hat and cackled. “It doesn’t matter. Enemies. Friends. Fights. Punishment. None of that shit matters now. End of the world is coming.” He laughed again and tugged at the wet label on his bottle. “You heard it here first. End of the world.”

The bartender sighed and pulled a glass out of the dishwasher.

Stella rested an elbow on the counter. There was that talk again, the favorite conversation topic of everyone in the Dispatch group.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Don’t mean nothing by it. Just that the world’s about to end, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Who told you that?”

The man shrugged. “’S what I heard.”

Hagen took another sip of his drink. “Heard? Or read? Something you saw on the internet?”

Dennis waved away Hagen’s question with a clumsy swipe of his hand.

“I don’t go on the internet. Never have.

Never will. The government can’t track me with this.

” He reached into his pocket and tossed a Nokia cell phone on the bar.

“See? And the only reason I agreed to carry one was because my daughter said I had to. No, I was told all that stuff. Word of mouth.”

“Told by who?”

Dennis shrugged. “Brook. He knows stuff, man. He knows.”

The bartender snorted as he polished his glass. “Dennis, what are you doing listening to that fool? Brook’s nuttier than squirrel shit. ”

Stella relaxed. If Dennis didn’t use the internet, then he probably wasn’t a member of the Dispatch group. No, it didn’t seem like he was their guy. But this Brook character might be. “Who’s that?”

The bartender put the glass on the dirty shelf next to the first.

“Brook Irving. He’s a vet. And I shouldn’t have said that.

He’s not really a fool. He just had a rough time in Afghanistan.

Don’t know if it’s PTSD or TBI or a mixture of both.

When he came back, he wasn’t all there. It was sad.

” He rammed lemon slices onto the edges of their glasses.

“Forgot. Not a lot of demand for soft drinks around here. Anyway, Brook’s basically a hermit.

Charlie was the only person who saw him on a regular basis. ”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, Charlie used to give him some work at the farm, buy him groceries when he needed them, that sort of thing. I think he even bought him a cell phone. Charlie felt sorry for him, sort of protective. He was like that, Charlie. One of the good guys.”

Stella finished her too-cold Coke, still wishing it had been a cocktail. And that she was in a bar that served them. “Know where we can find him?”

“Brook? He moves around a lot. Sleeps wherever he can find a place to lay his head. But if I were you, I’d check out this shack out near Soldier Creek right now. It’s about three miles off, not far from Old Man Caine’s place. Here. I’ll draw you a little map.”

As the bartender drew the directions on a napkin, Hagen finished his drink with a gulp and sucked the lemon. “Thanks for this.” He pushed the car keys down the counter to Stella. “You drive.”