Page 39 of Manner of Death
“I take the fifth.”
“Don’t you start lawyer-talking at me or I will cut you,” she warned as she led the way out to the parking lot.
“You talk a lot about knives for someone with little kids around the house,” Sawyer commented as they reached his car.
“I know, I have to get it all out of my system before I get home,” she said. “Same with swearing. Speaking of which, let’s go get that shitpissing motherfucker.”
There was a time to speak up and a time to shut up, and Sawyer knew which was which. He made a few calls to let other officers know to tap in if something came up on the case, then headed for his car. He and Nan drove in comfortable silence to Murphey’s Bar, a sleazy dive that catered to truckers not far from where they’d found Christopher White’s body. Sure enough, Kurt’s Mustang was in the parking lot. Sawyer waved Nan back when she made to get out of the car with him. “He’ll be easier to manage if it’s just me, I think.”
“He’ll be easy to manage if I get him in a hammerlock, too,” she muttered, but then shrugged. “Whatever you want.”
“Thanks.” Sawyer headed into Murphey’s tentatively—the last time he’d been here, he’d been tackled the second he stepped through the door. Or rather, someone else had been tackled, and then run into him. This time there was no full-body contact, but he did see two men arguing over a pool table in the background with an air of developing violence. Hopefully they kept it contained.
And there was Kurt at the bar, staring into a dark glass like it might just hold the secrets of the universe. Sawyer walked over and, after some consideration of its likely cleanliness, sat on the stool beside his partner. “Molly called,” he said.
“Thought she might.” Oof, he was drunk but not too drunk. Not staggering drunk, just drunk enough to say “fuck it” to everything. “Molls is a good woman.”
“She is,” Sawyer agreed. “And she’s worried about you.”
“Waste of her time.” He snorted. “Not that she’s not wasting her time already, spending it all on those two hags who moved into our home.”
“You’re referring to…your sisters?”
“Who else?” Kurt threw back the rest of his drink, then motioned to the bartender for another one. Sawyer waved the man off, which made Kurt turn on him with a gimlet eye. “Look, you little shit. You don’t come into my bar and try to tell me what I can and can’t—”
“I could send Nan in instead,” Sawyer challenged, and Kurt abruptly shut his mouth. “And believe me, I wouldn’t be doing this if Molly hadn’t asked me. I’m not your babysitter, but to be perfectly frank she isn’t either, and it’s shitty of you to make her call me to come and get you when you could be home with her right now.”
Kurt ran a hand over his moustache, tugging on it so hard Sawyer was a little worried he was going to pull it off. The fight over at the pool table was getting louder. Keep it together, people. “You have a sister, right?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Then you know what awful busybodies they can be sometimes.”
Did he ever. “That’s true.”
“Molly’s sister wants to be hands-on with everything, doin’ all the things for her that I ought to be doing, while my sister has taken over cleaning the entire house while telling me what an awful husband I am for not doing it earlier. We don’t live in filth or anything!” Kurt emphasized, stabbing his forefinger on the counter. “It’s not that fuckin’ bad! It’s just hard to remember to do laundry when you’re watching your wife fall apart right in front of your eyes, you know what I’m saying?”
Sawyer couldn’t say he knew exactly, given how he’d never been married, but he’d seen his parents’ relationship fall apart after everything that had happened with his mother. His father had been unable to cope with her new reality, and it had led to a complete fracture of their family unit. “I get it.”
“I just needed a break,” Kurt said with a sigh. “Someplace I wasn’t gonna be shouted at for having a second beer or told to scrub the damn toilets again, and where her sister can’t get mad at me for ‘keeping her to yourself.’”
Well. Sawyer hadn’t come in here expecting to commiserate with Kurt at all, but it turned out he could still be surprised. “That’s rough, but you still need to—”
He was cut off by being cut—literally, as the argument over who was cheating at pool erupted into a glass-throwing, bottle-breaking brawl that led to something shattering right over the bar and raining glass down on him, Kurt, and the bartender. A piece left a bleeding scrape along his cheekbone and more fragments lodged in his hair.
Kurt, drunk on beer and full of fury, lost his shit. “You sons of bitches are all under arrest!” he shouted before throwing himself at the nearest brawler.
“Fuck.” Sawyer turned to the bartender. “There’s a woman in a black Charger out in the parking lot. Tell her to call for backup.” Then he ran after Kurt just in time to keep his partner from being stabbed in the gut with the pointy end of a pool cue.
Sawyer had never arrested the entire clientele of a place before. Between sorting people into the drunk tank, taking witness statements, and getting looked over by the medics who’d come roaring in along with three other cop cars, it had turned into a long fucking day. But now, at last, all the paperwork was filed, Kurt was back with Molly and nursing a broken thumb on his right hand, and Sawyer had two stitches in his cheek and two bruised ribs from where a biker’s steel-toed boot had caught him while he was slapping handcuffs on the glass-thrower.
“You need to go home,” Nan said, wearily brushing hair back from her face.
“I can’t.” It was six-thirty; if Sawyer left now, he’d have just enough time to grab a bottle of wine before heading to Bashir’s. He’d only gotten one more text from the man throughout the day, this one related to the case: Toxicology will have to confirm what kind, but it looks like snake venom injected into the abdomen
Snake venom had been the cause of death? Seriously? For a second Sawyer had gotten excited, before Bashir told him you could buy a lethal dose of almost any kind—including King cobra, black mamba, and Christ knew what else— online for about five hundred dollars. There wasn’t a single distributor, either; dozens of different companies sold the stuff. It was rare, and it would help narrow things down if they could pin down an order sent to this area, but it wasn’t as rare as he’d hoped. A lot of companies to comb through before they found that order, and not all companies were willing to give up info like that without a subpoena, which would take time.
“Oh right, your date,” Nan said, bringing him back into the moment. She looked him up and down. “Are you sure you’re up for it? You look pretty rough right now.”