Where There's Smoke

Bowie Cato came awake when he was nudged hard in the ribs with the toe of a boot. “Hey, you, get up.”

Bowie opened his eyes and rolled onto his back. It took him several seconds to remember he was sleeping in the storeroom of The Palm, the loudest, raunchiest, and seediest tavern in a row of loud, raunchy, and seedy taverns lining both sides of the two-lane highway on the outskirts of Eden Pass.

As the recently hired janitor, Bowie did most of his work after 2:00 A.M., when the tavern closed, and that was on a slow night. In addition to the piddling salary he earned, the owner had granted him permission to sleep on the storeroom floor in a sleeping bag.

“What’s goin’ on?” he asked groggily. It seemed he hadn’t slept for more than a few hours.

“Get up.” He got the boot in the ribs again, more like a bona fide kick this time. His first impulse was to grab the offending foot and sling it aside, throwing its owner off balance and landing him flat on his ass.

But Bowie had spent the last three years in the state pen for giving vent to a violent impulse and he wasn’t keen on the idea of serving another three.

Without comment or argument, he sat up and shook his muzzy head. Squinting through the sunlight coming from the window, he saw the silhouettes of two men standing over him.

“I’m sorry, Bowie.” Speaking now was Hap Hollister, owner of The Palm. “I told Gus that you’d been here all night, didn’t leave the premises once since seven o’clock last evenin’, but he said he had to check you out anyway on account of you being an ex-con. He and the sheriff asked around last night and, best as they can tell, at the present, you’re the only suspicious character in town.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Bowie mumbled as he slowly came to his feet. “It’s all right, Hap.” He gave his new employer a grim smile, then faced a bald, bloated, burly sheriff’s deputy. “What’s up?”

“What’s up,” the deputy repeated nastily, “is that Ms. Darcy Winston nearly got herself raped and murdered in her own bed last night. That’s what’s up.” He gave them the details of the attempted break-in.

“I’m awful sorry to hear that.” Bowie divided his gaze between the uniformed deputy and Hap, but they continued to stare back at him wordlessly. He raised and lowered his shoulders in a quick, quizzical motion. “Who’s Ms. Darcy Winston?”

“Like you don’t know,” the deputy sneered.

“I don’t know.”

“You, uh, were talking to her last night, Bowie,” Hap said regretfully. “She was here while you were on duty. Redheaded, big tits, had on those purple, skinny-legged britches. Lots of jewelry.”

“Oh.” He didn’t recall the jewelry, but those tits were memorable all right, and he figured that Ms. Darcy Winston knew it better than anybody. She’d been guzzling margaritas like they were lime-flavored soda pop and giving encouragement to every man in the place, including him, the lowly sweep-up boy.

“I talked to her,” he told the deputy, “but we didn’t get around to swapping names.”

“She was talking to everybody, Gus,” Hap interjected.

“But only this ’un has a prison record. Only this ’un is out on parole.”

Bowie shifted his weight and ordered his tensing muscles to relax. Dammit, he knew instinctively that trouble was just around the corner, barreling full steam ahead, ready to knock him down. He hoped to hell he could get out of its path, but the odds didn’t look good.

This two-hundred-fifty pound sheriff’s deputy was a bully. Bowie had tangled with too many in his lifetime not to recognize one on sight. He’d seen them large and muscular; he’d seen them small and wiry. A man’s size and strength had nothing to do with it. The common denominator was a meanness-for-meanness’ sake that shone in their eyes.

Bowie had first encountered it in his stepfather soon after his desperate, widowed mother had married the drunken son of a bitch who got off by slapping him around. Later, he’d recognized it in the junior high school boys’ gym teacher who daily, deliberately, humiliated the kids who weren’t natural athletes.

Standing up to his abusive stepfather and defending those pitiful kids against the gym teacher had been the start of the troubles that had eventually landed Bowie in county jail as a juvenile offender. Slow to learn, years later he’d graduated to state prison.

But this wasn’t his fight. He didn’t know Darcy Winston and couldn’t care less about the attack on her. He told himself that if he just stayed cool it would be all right. “I was here at The Palm all night, just like Hap told you.”

The deputy surveyed him up one side and down the other. “Take off your clothes.”

“Excuse me?”

“What, are you deaf? Take off your clothes. Strip.”

“Gus,” Hap said apprehensively. “You sure that’s necessary? The boy here—”

“Back off, Hap,” the deputy snapped. “Let me do my job, will ya? Ms. Winston shot at the intruder. We know she hit him ’cause there was blood on her balcony railing and on the pool deck. He left a trail of it as he ran off through the bushes.” He hitched up his gun holster, which fit in the deep crevice beneath his overlapping beer belly. “Let’s see if you’ve got a bullet wound anywhere. Take off your clothes, jailbird.”

Bowie’s temper snapped. “Go fuck yourself.”

The deputy’s face turned as red as a billiard ball. His piggish eyes were almost buried in narrowing folds of florid fat.