Judas Horse by April Smith Page B

found out why.
    “What’s the place like?” I asked with false politeness. “Omar’s Roadhouse? Because I’m going there.”
    Marvin woke up.
“You?”
He looked at me—five four, 112 pounds—and then he looked around the room.
“Alone?”
    “Ana is the undercover,” Galloway explained.
    “I’m here to tell you.” Marvin’s eyes were wide. “Omar’s is rough trade.”
             
    N ow it is night and I am driving alone, past the men’s rescue mission, down a dark cobblestone lane once lined with shipping companies and foreign brokerage houses. At the turn of the last century, they called this street the “gateway to the Orient,” but tonight it is another deserted business district in twenty-first-century global America—vintage stone-and-brickwork buildings overwhelmed by tall black boxes made of glass, and not a mariner in sight.
    Trolley tracks, gleaming dully, curve into the diminishing light, where between two seedy parking lots a nondescript tavern of red timber, punched out with a row of small and unfriendly windows, identifies itself as one of those everlasting beacons of alcoholic wretchedness that through the ages have drawn the outcasts of the world—those who suffer, shuffle, buy or sell.
    Steve Crawford’s last known location.
    I park in a smattering of broken glass.

Six
    Like many of us, Omar’s Roadhouse has two sides.
    There are two separate entrances to help you choose between Omar’s Café and simply the bar. Inside, the common air is infused with cigarette smoke, the division between the two just a booth with a maple-stained partition, as if to prove the boundary between criminal and not is as makeshift as a quarter-inch piece of plywood.
    On the brighter side of the partition, two clean-cut African-American men in Polartec vests and corduroys are eating meatballs and spaghetti off paper plates, and there is pickled cauliflower in the salad bar. But here in this murky pool of bottom-feeders, blue light pours from an ancient cigarette machine and the brightest eyes are in the heads of the deer, elk, raccoon, bobcat, fox, and wolverine set up in rows above the redwood paneling like a mute jury. Decor is simple: a flag with a skull and crossbones, big enough for a coliseum.
    I settle at an L-shaped bar, going slow with a Sierra Nevada pale ale. How did Steve Crawford, on the same assignment, play this scene? I can picture his lanky body wrapped around a bar stool. A washed-up hippie? Meth addict? Lost businessman? Sloppy drunk? I really don’t know. They did not share his uc identity. Although we’d been colleagues for a decade since those days as naïve rookies, so high on the Bureau that we wanted to be married in the chapel at the Academy, I never saw the undercover side of him and he never saw the Darcy part of me.
    Would he have loved me anyway?
    I make an effort to look uneasy and forlorn in Omar’s swamp dive, paying particular attention to the 250-pound bruiser with a full dark beard down to his waist at the other end of the bar. It took him a long time to grow that beard, I reflect, and therefore he must mean it, or whatever it stands for, which cannot be pleasant.
    He is wearing an entertainer’s tall black top hat and mirrored sunglasses, and rings on every finger—skulls and swastikas, it looks like from here. No shirt, just a vest showing massive biceps no doubt hardened by lifting motorcycle parts. He could carry me out of the place under one arm, like a baguette. Embroidered across the vest are the flowered words
Terminate the helmet law.
    Although his bulk dominates like Mount Hood, Mr. Terminate is not the only major bonehead on the horizon. The area where Steve Crawford was murdered is known for meth kitchens and marijuana farms. Drug wars are fought in our national forests; left-wing anarchists and redneck Klansmen trying to blow each other up, and bikers after the spoils. On the face of it, each patron at Omar’s would fit one or more of those