The Pirates Cove Chronicles: Krugerrands and Kentucky Mules

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The Rusty Mermaid smells like it always does on a Friday night, salt and cheap bourbon and the ghost of every cigarette that's ever been smoked within a hundred yards of the place; even though nobody's allowed to smoke inside anymore. I take my corner seat, the one nobody else dares to sit in even when the bar's packed three deep, and I let my shoulders drop for the first time in fourteen hours.

"Rough one, Hot Shot?" Cici doesn't even look up from the register when she says it. She already knows. The petite blonde 5ft nothing bartender, saunters over with her special swagger to greet me.  

I don't answer. I don't have to. She reads me the way other people read a newspaper, quick and thorough, and by the time she turns around she's already got the bottle of Jose in one hand and two shot glasses hooked between her fingers in the other. She pours mine first, then hers, and slides a Corona down the bar behind it without me asking for the lime.

"That bad, huh."

"Paperwork," I say, which is the truth and also isn't. Paperwork is the cover story my whole life runs on these days. Sixteen months since I left a war zone with a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder and a résumé too dangerous for a normal police department to pretend it doesn't need. Now I sit at a desk at the Pirates Cove PD most days, filing reports on nothing, waiting on a call that hasn't come yet. The scar on my shoulder aches worse on nights like this, when the AC in the station cuts too cold. I roll it under my shirt without thinking. Cici notices that too. She notices everything.

We take the shot together. She doesn't wince. I do, a little, and she smirks at me like she's won something.

"You're a mess, you know that?"

"I've been told."

She leans on the bar, close enough that I catch the coconut smell of whatever lotion she uses, close enough that for a second the noise of the room, the pool table cracking in the back, some drunk arguing with the jukebox, all of it goes quiet in my head. She's got that effect on me. Always has, since the first time I saw her wrangling a room of half-naked women at Sirens like a general running a very specific kind of war.

A big guy at the end of the bar starts up loud, slapping his empty glass against the wood like it owes him money. "Hey. Hey, sweetheart, I've been waiting ten minutes."

Cici doesn't rush. She finishes wiping down the space in front of me first, slow, deliberate, before she turns to him with a smile that doesn't reach her eyes.

"Sugar, you've been waiting ten minutes because you've been yelling at me for nine of them instead of just ordering." She reaches under the bar, pulls his tab, slaps it down in front of him. "You're at your limit. Pay up or I walk you out myself."

He stands, chest out, the way big drunk men do when they think size wins arguments. "You gonna make me, little girl?"

I'm off my stool before I decide to be, weight shifted onto the balls of my feet, that old familiar stillness sliding into place, the one they trained into me a long time ago in a much hotter climate. Cici puts a hand up without even glancing at me.  

"Sit down," she tells him, and there's nothing playful in it now. She glances toward my partner Bones sitting at a table with Niko, his German Shepherd. Niko's ears perk straight up, his eyes locked on the drunk like he's just waiting for the word.

The guy looks at her, then at me standing behind her shoulder, then at the dog. A quiet growl rumble out of Niko's chest, filling the silence. The drunk decides right then today isn't his day. He slaps two twenties on the bar and stumbles out the door muttering under his breath, and Cici pockets the cash without blinking.

"You didn't need to get up," she says when she comes back.

"I know."

"But you did anyway." She tosses a leftover piece of steak to Niko, who catches it effortlessly before settling back down under Bones's table.

"Habit."

She pours us both another shot, slower this time, like she's savoring the excuse to stand close to me again. "You're not just a desk cop, John Tanner. Never have been. I've seen the way you scan a room. Where'd you learn to do that?"

"Places I don't talk about."

She lets it go, because she always does, and that's part of why I can't stay away from her. She doesn't push where it hurts. "You said something last week. About wanting a change of pace. Something with less paperwork."

"I did."

"Nate's looking for more security over at Sirens. Real money, real hours, and you'd be good at it. Better than good." She studies me over the rim of her glass. "It'd put you close to people you'd never meet pushing paper at the station. The kind of people who run this whole cove, whether the badge wants to admit it or not."

I keep my face still, but inside something clicks into place, quiet and clean, like a round sliding home. This is the door I've been waiting to walk through since I got assigned to this town. Cici doesn't know that. She thinks she's doing me a favor.

"I might take you up on that," I say.

"You should." She smiles, real this time, soft around the edges. "Nate trusts my judgment on people. I vouch for you, you're in."

I let the moment sit a second, then decide to spend a card I've been holding onto for a while. "I found him, Cici. Your ex."

Her hand goes still on the bottle. "I told you not to."

"I know where he lives. What he's doing. I haven't touched him."

"Because of my boys."

"Because you asked me not to."

She looks at me a long moment, green eyes doing the thing they do when she's deciding whether to be angry or grateful, and lands somewhere in between, which is the most honest place Cici ever lands.

"You're a strange man, John Tanner."

"So I've been told," I say again, and she laughs despite herself, and for one clean second the bar, the town, the whole rotten machine of Pirates Cove disappears, and it's just the two of us and the taste of tequila and something neither of us is ready to name yet.