Plus, Joe had heard, they let regular customers keep tabs. That was helpful to those who had seasonal employment. They could charge their light beers and drafts during lean times and pay them off during flush months. It was perfect for on-again, off-again fishing guides like Bert Kizer.
The Wet Fly was also the kind of establishment that would be open on Thanksgiving night when most people were at home with their families and friends and the small downtown was closed up tight. The bar attracted loners and outliers and people with no place else to go.
* * *
—
Joe turned in to the unpaved parking lot from the highway and parked in front of a hitching post. Neon Coors signs glowed from the windows and onto the hood of his pickup. As usual, there were three other cars out front.
It was a long, low-slung building with a metal roof and faded siding. The front door was metal and painted yellow.
Marybeth hadn’t been crazy about the idea of him running into town at night and leaving all of them, but she relented when Deputy Bass began a circuit between Lola’s trailer and the river house. Additionally, she was as curious as Joe was to find out if he could learn more. He’d promised to get back as soon as he could.
He swung out of the cab and his boot heels thumped on the frozen ground. He’d deliberately not changed into his uniform shirt and he wore his holiday Cinch shirt untucked to help conceal the Glock clipped to his belt. His old down vest was stained with leather treatment from when he’d wiped down his saddles and tack the month before. He didn’t want to look official.
The first thing that struck him when he entered the saloon was the pall of cigarette smoke that hung in the air. He sometimes forgot people still smoked, and he recalled that the Wet Fly was officially located in the county and not the town and that smoking wasn’t prohibited. He liked it. It made it seem like a real bar, even though he knew his clothes would stink of tobacco smoke later.
The interior was dark, but not gloomy, with most of the light provided by lamps above the backbar and a bright light that hung from the ceiling over the unique L-shaped pool table in the side room. Both pool players looked up and squinted at him as he entered. It was obvious from the way they leaned against the table for stability that they’d been at it for hours. Empty beer bottles littered the side tables.
“Looking for a challenge?” one of them asked him.
“Not on that,” Joe said with a smile. He’d heard that previous owners of the bar had found the L-shaped table somewhere in New Orleans and had driven it back. He’d never seen another one like it and he had no wish to try to play on it.
“Suit yourself, game warden,” the man said.
Joe hadn’t fooled anyone, including himself. Everyone in the valley knew who he was, whether he was in uniform or not. The game warden’s whereabouts was always a hot topic in a hunting and fishing community.
There were three people seated on stools at the bar with their backs to him. An older man with a billy-goat beard and a crumpled slouch hat nursed a draft beer at the far left end, and a portly middle-aged couple sat side by side at the center of the bar, looking up at the late football game on a television set mounted to the wall. Pittsburgh versus Baltimore. It was nearly over.
Joe chose a stool between the billy-goat man and the couple. The bartender was a woman he recognized, even though he couldn’t recall her name. He’d given her a warning citation the previous summer for fishing without a license and being inebriated at the same time out at Saddlestring Reservoir. Her real violation in his mind was that she’d been fishing with a can of worms—but he hadn’t told her that.
At the time, she’d been in a white tank top, jeans so short that the pockets stuck out from the hem, and flip-flops. Behind the bar, she was still sleeveless, but dressed in tight Realtree elk-hunting camo tactical pants and top. She had dyed orange-red hair, full-sleeve tattoos, and green eyes nearly blacked out by a raccoon-like application of eyeliner. She greeted him by flinging a cardboard beer coaster toward him on the bar from a column of them on the backbar. It landed directly in front of him and stopped. It was a good trick.
“I’ll have a Coors, please.”
“Sixteen or twenty ounces?”
“Sixteen.”
“I bought a fishing license, if you want to see it.”
“That’s okay. I’m not working right now.”
She fetched the beer and placed it on the coaster. “On the house,” she said. Then: “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Same to you.”