On the Rocks Read online

She took another sip. It still tasted good, and the warmth deepened, but a hard knot of tension deep inside her would not be soothed.

  God, I wish I could get drunk.

  But she couldn’t. Two shots was all she could have. She had work tonight. The only thing she could do about the memories was to spend the day working out, hoping exercise would make her feel better.

  It would, a little. Not enough. No, she’d be stuck with the image of that poor guy in the dumpster until her shift was over and she could bring another bottle home.

  But what if Kristiano or someone else had found the body? What if she came into work to find the cops swarming all over the place?

  And even if they weren’t, could she work her entire shift knowing what lay just outside the back door?

  ***

  The Pirate’s Cove was in full swing when she made it to work at nine. All the regular drinkers sat in their usual places, and all the usual conversations swirled around her as she entered.

  People greeted her as they usually did, and she replied automatically, smiling and trading all the predictable jokes. Her eyes kept straying to the back door.

  Kristiano gave her a smile as she got behind the counter.

  “Doing good today?” he asked, putting a huge arm around her shoulders.

  “Good enough.”

  Neville leapt out of the back office. He had on his pirate hat and eye patch as usual, and had added a plastic cutlass and a real parrot. The parrot’s name was Flynn, as in Errol Flynn. Captain Blood was Neville’s favorite movie.

  “AAAAR! What’s that off the starboard side? Is it a mermaid? No, me hearties, it’s me favorite tavern wench! I have good news for ye. The landlubbers from last night have sailed for the distant horizon, and have not told the town watch. We be having clear sailing till the morn!”

  Kristiano laughed on cue. Ruby rolled her eyes.

  “Um, OK,” she said.

  “Now get to work!” he said, making a playful thrust at her belly with the plastic cutlass, apparently not being aware that a cutlass was a cutting weapon. “Raise the mainsail, paint the mizzenmast, polish the guns! We have a night of drinking to do. Look lively, or I’ll make ye swab the decks and drink the water from the bilges.”

  “Go away or I’ll keel haul you,” Ruby said with a smile.

  Neville shook the cutlass above his head. “Insubordination! Mutiny! I’ll make ye walk the plank!”

  “Walk the plank! Walk the plank!” Flynn squawked. It was the parrot’s favorite phrase.

  “Could I get another beer over here?” the Ufologist asked.

  “Right away, sailor,” Neville said, fetching one from the cooler behind the counter. “But don’t be telling me St. Elmo’s Fire be spirits from beyond the stars. It is the spirits of drowned men, sure as my name is Captain Blood!”

  Desaray raised her bottle to show it was empty and Ruby moved over to get her another.

  “Thanks for helping out last night,” the Bahamian said. “You’re a good friend.”

  Ruby smiled. She had a lot of good friends here. Totally bonkers, but good people.

  “Did you upload the video?” Ruby asked.

  “Yeah! I was waiting until you showed up.” She pulled out her phone. People gathered around. Zoomer scampered up Desaray’s back and hung on her shoulders to watch. He loved YouTube.

  She pulled up the video on her YouTube channel, Bahama Brawls. The latest was titled, “Brawling British Brunette Kicks Ass on Four Guys.” Ruby smiled. She wasn’t British and she wasn’t a natural brunette. Desaray accepted her desire for anonymity without knowing the reasons why. The video already had 35,000 hits and 476 shares.

  Everyone started cheering as the scene from the previous night replayed on the screen. Desaray had done well, keeping Ruby’s face out of the shot. That’s all she asked. She didn’t mind the videos, and she was glad to help supplement Desaray’s income. Somebody might as well get something out of the weekly fights that happened in this dump.

  “Awesome, Ruby!” the surfer cheered.

  “A scene reminiscent of the little-known pugilistic tales of Robert E. Howard,” the Professor said.

  “I still think they should have been probed,” the Ufologist said.

  Ruby’s eyes kept straying to that back door.

  Nobody’s said anything. That means he’s still out there.

  Damn. Lying dead and unknown in a dumpster.

  Ruby sighed and tried to make conversation with everyone complimenting her on the video. Soon the crowd broke up and people drank and talked about all the usual things. Ruby worked on automatic, but the thought of that dead man not forty yards from her would not leave her alone.

  Several groans from one end of the bar snapped her out of her thoughts. Reece, the insurance salesman, had tossed his cookies. Ruby turned to Kristiano, played a quick game of Rock Paper Scissors, lost, and went to fetch the mop.

  “A bit early for this, isn’t it?” she grumbled at him as she moved around the bar.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  Perry, his surfer friend, gave Ruby a grin. “I’ll get him cleaned up.”

  He led Reece to the bathroom.

  Ruby mopped up the mess, cleaned off the counter where he had spewed on some napkins, and threw those in a plastic bag.

  She stared at the plastic bag for a moment. Anytime this happened she’d throw the bag in the dumpster to get rid of the stink.

  I could go to the far dumpster, the one by the strip club and whorehouse.

  And ignore that guy a second time?

  Then another, terrible thought smacked into her like a hard right cross.

  Trash pickup is tomorrow morning. That dumpster is going to be emptied. If the workers don’t see him, he’ll go into the back of the truck.

  His body would be crushed. Pulped. Thrown with the rest of the trash into the city dump.

  Ruby sighed, calculating whether or not she could live with that knowledge and realizing she couldn’t.

  Slowly she turned toward the back door, clutching the bag. As she moved for it, everything seemed distant, sounds muted, as if she was hiding in the back of her head like a frightened animal in a cave.

  She pushed the back door open. No one was in the alley. A car drove past at one end, making her jerk from fright. From the strip club a few doors down, rock music thudded, the bass pounding like a heartbeat. She moved slow as an iceberg for the dumpster. More lights were on at this time of night and she could see it more clearly than the previous evening. She found no bloodstains in the alley or on the dumpster. She noticed that strange coin was gone, probably grabbed by some wino thinking it was real money.

  She reached her hand to the lid, paused, and took a deep breath.

  Squaring her shoulders and unconsciously getting into a fighting stance, she flung the lid open.

  He was still in there.

  She dropped the bag, screamed a scream she didn’t entirely have to playact, and rushed back in the bar.

  “There’s a man dead in the dumpster!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Twenty minutes later, Ruby stood by the back door, sweating bullets as a stony-faced local cop grilled her.

  “So you didn’t see anyone?” the cop asked.

  “No,” Ruby lied.

  “No suspicious activity?”

  “This neighborhood is full of suspicious activity, but I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Did you notice anything strange in the alley? Did you pick up anything?”

  “No.”

  Ruby was aware that she wasn’t meeting his eye, that she was talking like a schoolkid who had been sent to the principal’s office. If she was the cop, she’d think she looked as guilty as hell.

  The cop didn’t ask any more questions. He just stood there. Ruby looked at him, saw his dark eyes boring into her, and flicked her gaze away.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

  “Wait there,” h
e ordered, pointing to a barrel. She sat.

  She sat alone in the corner like a chastened schoolgirl.

  Most of the customers had fled, and those who hadn’t didn’t dare look at her. The cops had come in aggressive, suspicious. Ruby felt relieved the pot dealer had faded as soon as she had run in with her Frightened Woman act. Several others had followed suit. A lot of the regulars had things to hide.

  Zoomer hid too, scampering up into the rigging and screeching anytime a man in a blue uniform passed underneath.

  Other customers stayed, determined not to be disturbed in their night’s drinking. Desaray leaned against the bar, slowly sipping her beer and staring at the wall as if she was alone. Reece and Perry kept asking the cops for details about the body until an officer shouted at them to shut up. The Ufologist asked if it had been mutilated like cattle.

  “Generally the eyes and the genitalia are cut away with surgical precision,” he told the detective. “Especially the genitalia. I can check that for you.”

  The cops next questioned Kristiano and Neville, but neither had anything useful to say. Neither did any of the remaining customers. The police showed a photo of the dead man’s face, the neck wound carefully cropped out. No one recognized him as a customer at the Pirate’s Cove or from anywhere else.

  After twenty minutes, the coroner showed up, stayed out back for another twenty minutes or so, and came in whispering something to the cop who had questioned her.

  The cop glowered at her and walked over.

  “You mentioned in your statement that you took out the trash last night.”

  Ruby’s mouth went dry.

  “Yes.”

  “And you said there was no body in there at that time?”

  Oh no. The coroner noticed the guy has been dead a while. Why didn’t I think of that?

  “I went to the other dumpster, the one on the other end of the alley.”

  The ends of the officer’s mouth tugged a bit upward, as if he was trying not to smile.

  “But that’s further away. Why did you go that way?”

  “I saw someone near the dumpster. I got nervous and went the other way.”

  “If you were nervous, why didn’t you go back inside? Get the other bartender to take out the trash, perhaps?”

  “I was tired. I wasn’t thinking straight. And I figured he was just peeing. Just a harmless drunk, you know? I deal with them all the time. A lot of people do that back there. Happens all the time. Once I came across three American tourist girls all squatting in a row right outside our back door. Crazy, right?”

  Ruby realized she was babbling and cut herself off. The cop studied her for a long moment. Ruby looked everywhere except at his face.

  “Can you describe this man?”

  “It was dark. About six foot. White, I think. Normal build. I didn’t see his face.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “An old baseball cap. I could see it was frayed at the brim. I didn’t see anything else. It was dark, like I said. I only saw the frayed brim because it was silhouetted against the brighter light at the end of the alley.”

  “Didn’t see anything,” the cop murmured to himself as he wrote down the details in a notepad. He looked up. “Anyone else see this man?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  The officer snapped his notebook shut. Stared at Ruby for a moment longer, then went to talk with the coroner.

  More police came, and a detective who asked all the same questions all over again. After another hour or so, the police cleared out of the bar. The alley remained off limits. A crime scene.

  As the last officer disappeared out the door, the Pirate’s Cove settled into what looked like a slow night. The bar had no windows, no way to see the police car lights or the conversations of the detective and the coroner out back. Everything looked normal. About a third of the customers had remained, although no new ones would be coming in, not with half the Nassau police force outside. Although crime had been going up lately, murders remained rare.

  Ruby realized that this would be in all the local papers tomorrow. She hoped her name wouldn’t be there.

  Probably not, she tried to reassure herself. You’re a witness. The cops don’t give out the names of witnesses in ongoing investigations.

  But they wouldn’t have to say much. “Discovered by a bartender at the Pirate’s Cove.” That’s all they’d need to say to narrow it down to two people. It wouldn’t take much of a reporter to find out who discovered the body, then her name would be in the papers. That didn’t matter since she had a fake name on her residency card. But they might publish her picture. Although she had dyed her hair and changed her haircut, with her face on the Internet, anyone might recognize her. It would all come out …

  Ruby suppressed a shudder and busied herself behind the bar. She really, really wanted a drink.

  You did the right thing, she told herself. You did what you had to do.

  Neville came out of the office. He had taken off his pirate costume before the police had shown up and without it he no longer looked like an overgrown boy. He looked like a stressed out middle-aged man.

  He made a quick motion with his hand for her to come into his office. Reluctantly, she did.

  Neville’s office was a cramped little concrete box with a desk covered with paperwork and an aging PC, a couple of chairs in front, and walls covered with posters from pirate movies. In the corner, on a little swinging trapeze, sat Flynn the parrot. It cocked its head as they entered.

  Ruby sat. Neville paced. There wasn’t enough room to pace more than four steps before having to turn around, and with Neville pacing so quickly, he ended up looking like a spinning top.

  “This is terrible, absolutely terrible!”

  “Terrible!” the parrot squawked.

  “Shut up,” Neville snapped, then turned back to Ruby. “They barely asked me about the body, they just kept asking about the bar!”

  “The bar?”

  “My license. My deed. Fire inspection. Health code. Information about you and Kristiano.” Ruby’s heart sank. “They even asked if I had a permit to keep a monkey!”

  “I can understand why they would ask about me, but why would they ask about all that other stuff?”

  “They want an excuse!” Neville cried, flinging his arms up so that his hand smacked a plastic pirate skeleton hanging from the ceiling, making it swing back and forth.

  “An excuse?”

  “To shut me down.”

  “Terrible!” the parrot squawked again.

  “Why would they want to do that?” Ruby asked.

  “Oh, Ruby. You haven’t lived here long enough. You don’t know how things work. The cops here want things nice and easy. We better pray that guy wasn’t a tourist, because if he was, we’re toast. The police here protect the tourists and don’t give a damn about the locals, especially locals who aren’t native. That means you. That means me. This bar has a reputation. I can’t count how many times the cops have been here since I opened. Fights inside the bar. Fights outside the bar. Dealers selling in the parking lot. Christ on a motorcycle, they’ll use this to ruin me! They might even try to pin the murder on one of us.”

  Ruby felt her skin prickle. Her mind raced. “Why would we kill someone and dump him right behind the bar? That makes no sense.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it makes sense! Aagh!” Neville had flung his arms in the air again and this time broke the string the skeleton hung from, making it fall right on top of him. He struggled with it a second, then plunked it down on the chair next to Ruby’s.

  “Ruby, listen to me,” he went on. “The cops here don’t want scandals. Murdered tourists are bad for business. They’ll want to solve it quickly. They’re not above pinning it on the first easy suspect.”

  “Maybe he’s not a tourist.”

  “He’s white. He’s probably a tourist.”

  Ruby slumped. That was true.

  She looked up at him. “Did yo
u tell them you pay me in cash?”

  “They didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.”

  She let out a breath of relief. “Thanks.”

  “Did they ask about your background?” Neville asked, worry etched on his face.

  “Besides asking to see my residency card, nothing. But I have an interview with that detective tomorrow. Detective Anderson.”

  Neville stopped pacing and put a hand on her shoulder. Not many people were allowed to do that. Neville was one of them.

  “If he’s at all good at his job, he’s going to look you up. That’s going to lead to a lot of questions. You better have answers to all of them.”

  I’ve been here a year and I don’t have answers to any of them.

  “I’ll think of something,” Ruby said.

  Neville motioned to the door. “Go home. Take the night off.”

  “I’d rather work.”

  “It’s slow. Kristiano can handle it. And if the place fills up, I can step in.”

  “Thanks, Neville, but I’d rather work.”

  She couldn’t face being alone right now. If she was alone she’d drink, and she couldn’t afford to drink.

  She needed to come up with answers to all those questions the detective was going to hit her with the next day.

  ***

  Three hours later, she regretted not taking Neville up on his offer, because the widow came through the door.

  Right away Ruby could tell this was the murdered man’s wife. She was about the same age, a thin blonde, professional looking, in a white blouse and khaki shorts, wearing an expensive watch that would get swiped if she stayed in this neighborhood long.

  She looked out of place and she knew it. She glanced around, nervous but determined. Her eyes were red from crying and her face pale despite her tan.

  The woman walked over to the bar. The Ufologist, his face grim, got up from his barrel to offer her a seat. She sat with an absent nod and a rasped thank you. Silence settled around her like frost.

  Ruby’s first impulse was to run. There were still a couple of cops out back guarding the crime scene, though, and she didn’t want to look suspicious. She hated herself for that being the only reason she didn’t leave.