“Sure,” the bartender replied, taking the jack with one hand while he laid out a row of glasses with the other. Raising a bottle filled with the murky spirit, he poured along the row of glasses with practiced ease, slopping very little between glasses. “What brings you back here? You know that Baron Al would be pleased to see you back.”
“Yeah, and he’d be pleased to know how little of your profit actually goes into his coffers, and about the way you let the gaudy sluts use the bar without giving him his share of the jack,” Lonnie added, indicating a corner of the room with his head.
Both Dean and Danny, curious, followed his movement and saw a woman in one corner, taking two customers at once. Her head was buried in the lap of a semiconscious man who seemed not to know what was taking place, while her short dress was hiked up above her waist and another man moved rhythmically behind her, his movements pushing her head into the other’s lap farther and farther.
“See, Baron Al likes to keep his businesses under strict control down here, so he can get his share of the jack. Jem here isn’t supposed to run gaudys, and she sure as shit won’t be giving the jack she fleeced from those dudes to Baron Al, will she?”
“I don’t take jack from her,” Jem said.
“No, but you take favors,” Lonnie pointed out. “In Al’s book, that’s more jack she don’t declare.”
“I knew I’d rue the day you came back—if you ever did,” Jem muttered, passing the glasses to the recce party. “So what do you want from me?”
“Not much,” Lonnie said, sipping the strong spirit from the glass and wincing at the sour taste. “But enough. Do the sec still drink here in force?”
” ‘Course they do,” Jem replied. “Why d’you think I can still have gaudy sluts on the house and get away with it?”
Lonnie nodded. “Figured as much. So what do you hear when they get to the third glass?”
“About what?”
“About the big convoy and the trade-off with Summerfield.”
“What d’you want to know for?”
Without warning, Lonnie reached across and grabbed the fat man by his beard, pulling him over the counter.
“Because, fucker, I do. Ask me no questions and I won’t slit your porky little throat.”
The rest of the recce party was astounded by this sudden turn of events. They had all, in their own ways, assumed that Lonnie would want them to blend in with the other ville inhabitants until such time as they had gleaned the necessary information and got the hell out. They had assumed that to enter the bar was part of that process. It would seem that Lonnie had a personal score that he wanted to settle while he was back in Charity, an assumption that was confirmed by his next few words.
“I should’ve chilled you when I had the chance before, Jem,” Lonnie growled. “Mebbe I’ll finish the job this time.”
Jak noted that, despite the fact that brawls were commonplace in bars and people usually didn’t interfere in case they got themselves chilled, the atmosphere had changed in the bar through the course of Lonnie’s discussion with Jem. Their exchanges could barely be heard by the rest of the recce party, let alone by anyone else in the bar, over the noise of the boom box. However, it was startlingly obvious to even the most intoxicated and junked-out inhabitant of the bar that there was something going on here that was beyond the normal bar brawl.
An undertone of clicks sounded around the bar as blasters were drawn and safety catches clicked off. Jak nudged Dean.
“Be ready—get out quick,” he whispered.
“What about the others?” Dean replied.
“We have got a rendezvous,” stated Doc, who had been listening, “and we know a time. I suspect we may very well have to leave the rest to chance.”
Meanwhile, Mik and Tilly were trying to stop Lonnie from going any further.
“C’mon, man,” Mik whispered hoarsely, pulling at the recce leader’s arm, “leave this. We can’t risk a firefight before we’ve even started, can we?”