Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem by Karen G. Berry Page B

of my way.” She pushed past him into the bar, shaking with agitation. She didn’t understand it. Hank Heaven was a sleaze bucket, but not exactly a threat. Her entire body felt danger in the air. What in Jesus Christ’s name is going on with me tonight, she wondered. Beau came down the bar with a shot of Maker’s Mark and a Bud chaser. “Hey Raven.”
    “Evening, Beau.” She tossed back a shot, calmed herself. “That skinny fella with all the pimp jewelry. Hank Heaven. I heard he was trying to start a church?”
    “He already has. He preaches Sunday services in the Clubhouse. He’s brought the Bone Pilers in with music.”
    Well, if anything would bring the Bone Pilers to God, it would be music. Bone Pile, slightly south of Ochre Water, wasn’t even a town, really, just a place. It was as if there had been a great broom that swept the country of its hillbilly population, and the sweepings settled like dust in the hills of Bone Pile. The hills were cooler than the desert, and there were a few secret springs. Families settled in clan-like groups of barefoot women and music-loving men. “And you said they were meeting over to the Clubhouse? My mother must be in on that, then.”
    Beau smiled. “I couldn’t say, Raven. I don’t see much of Rhondalee.” He moved off to help another customer. Raven looked around the bar. The usual beer-fueled foolishness was going on. Pool in one corner, politics in another. Quentin Romaine sat at the end of the bar, bending his elbow and talking to Jeeter Tyson about religion, how Jesus wanted the white man to have dominion. The Park’s stupidest man nodded along in agreement.
    A group of Bone Pilers hunched over a table in the corner, guarding their stacked instrument cases with the toes of their impeccable boots. She saw a couple of McGillicuttys, a McIver, a Dunnery. She was never sure of first names, since the men traded identities and drivers licenses around to evade warrants from unpaid tickets. They all had thick black hair, ravaged smiles, and skin so pale they glowed in the dark. Aside from their unsavory good looks, Bone Pile men were notorious for their musical abilities. If it had strings, a Bone Pile man could play it, and play it heartbreakingly well. And now Hank Heaven was leading them all to Jesus? Only music, she thought, only music could have let him near those men.
    Raven had never messed with a one of them, but she still enjoyed looking at the Bone Pile men. She especially admired that Dunnery, was that Angus or Enoch? Whichever one it was, his poisonously handsome features were marred with anger. He was arguing with a man whose face she couldn’t see. The stranger wasn’t a Bone Piler, because he had back fat and there was no fat anywhere on a Bone Pile man. His hair was light and thin, and much too clean.
    His voice rose hard and sharp over the jukebox. “I’m offering you a SWEET DEAL!”
    All over her body, fine hairs rose in waves. Her world narrowed to three things; the sound of her own heart, the feel of her knife in her hand, and glacial passage of one moment of her life.
    The tock of a cue ball making impact with another ball broke the spell. The bar sounds came back one at a time. The clack, smack and ding of the solitary pinball machine that had managed to attract a player. Glasses set down sharp on tables. The strike of a match in the hand of a man near her. The chuckle of a young girl, leaning over the bar to flirt. The song on the jukebox that had been playing all the while. And of course, the hard whine of the blonde man’s arguing.
    She looked down at her hand, forced it to release its grip on the shot glass. Beau set down another shot. “You’re awful pale for an Indian. You see a ghost? Your dad says the air’s full of ’em tonight.”
    She had, indeed, seen a ghost. How many years had she been pulling into stops, seeing his rig, moving on. Turning off the radio whenever his voice came over, rolling past wherever he was. How many