Hawk Channel Chase Read Online Free PDF Page B

said Liska. “That one I was seeing, five, six years ago?   She told me once… her name was Carla. I don’t think you met her. She said denial made her the happy woman she faced each day in the mirror. She worshiped her own bliss. She couldn’t find enough bad history to deny.”
    “And you became excess?” I said.
    “I declared myself such. Here comes Wonsetler. Go the fuck away.”
    Mission accomplished, with a typical Liska send-off. Now I knew why Bobbi Lewis had been running hot and cold. The insight offered me no relief, no clues toward salvaging our romance.
    I returned to my mojito. Two boardsailors, college-age kids, male and female, swooped toward the beach and changed direction in the shallows. Silence engulfed the Afterdeck. The young woman wore a huge sports bra and a skin-toned thong that was lost in the shadow of her ass crack. It was a matter of perspective and perception. I guessed that every man present would bet his own home that she’d been naked from her belly button down.
    A man two stools away from me broke the spell. He leaned toward Liska and said with a slur, “Hey, I overheard. You really the county sheriff?”
    Liska shrugged and stared at the man for a moment.
    “What was all that horseshit yesterday, Sheriff? I couldn’t go home.”
    “Am I supposed to ask you what shit?” said Chicken Neck. “You got questions, call the office.”
    “Bay Point. They wouldn’t let me go to my house. They finally let me go to my house and nobody could tell me why they wouldn’t let me go to my house. That, by any doofus explanation, is horseshit, wouldn’t you say?”
    I could see Liska sizing this up as far too public. “I’ll have to check and let you know. Write down your phone number for me.”
    “They evacuated the neighborhood, Sheriff. You didn’t know?”
    Liska stared at him.
    “Come on, Sheriff, pile it a bit higher,” the man said. “We can stick a fork in it.”
    Stone-faced, pissed, Liska said nothing. Everyone within earshot expected the bartender to stifle the heckler. That wasn’t happening. Miranda was about one-third the guy’s size.
    “My neighbor didn’t answer his door, Sheriff. He saw them making our other neighbors leave their houses. They all had to get into their cars and drive away. So he pretended he wasn’t home. He saw all those county cars surrounding that vacant house on stilts. He couldn’t see what had their attention, but he saw more unmarked cars than he’d ever seen in one place. Car after car after car. Some of them didn’t even have license plates, Sheriff.”
    “Sounds like a movie script to me,” said Wonsetler.
    “My take, too,” said Liska. “UFO flick or a sea monster epic. Subtitles, flaming eyeballs.”
    “Well they stayed so long that someone brought in pizza. They spread it out on the hood of an unmarked cruiser. Pizza, two-liter jugs of Pepsi, what have you. A damn picnic.”
    “That wouldn’t have been our people,” said Wonsetler.
    “You’re flaming out your stupid, frigging…”
    Everyone but the drunk saw it coming. He was grabbed by the restaurant owner’s son and hustled toward the deck’s exit. It was probably the quickest the man had walked backward in years.
    Liska nudged Wonsetler, tilted his head toward the exit. The men pushed back their bar stools, stood, and reached for their wallets. Liska waved a fifty, indicated that he’d cover the tab. He must have felt me staring at him. It took him a while to look my way. He growled, “Don’t fucking ask.”
    Liska and Wonsetler walked toward the next-level dining patio so they could exit through the lobby entrance, probably to avoid the man who had been eighty-sixed. At the top of the short stairway a man in a business suit approached Liska.
    “You left a message?” he said.
    Liska nodded and made a “shh” sign, his finger to his lip. The three men departed through the inside dining room.
    I borrowed the bar’s phone, called Marnie, and got her voice mail.