Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Alexandru
The Muddy Pint is a squat brick building on River Road.
Its small windows blaze with neon signs, and motorcycles line the curb in diagonal formation.
Across the street is the much-ballyhooed river walk, now empty.
Perhaps it is the hour, or perhaps it is the specter of the Crossbow Killer, which, according to Ms. Renfield, is “all over the news.”
I pull open the heavy door and the scent hits—grease and stale ale. The peasants huddled around scarred wood tables go quiet as we enter, gazes lifting one by one. Ms. Renfield greets the barmaid, with whom she appears to share some history, and orders two beers.
And there in the far corner, as promised, are the Snag Tooth Riders, sprawled across two tables, leather vests bearing their club’s insignia: a skull with one unaccountably large, crooked tooth.
Good. We have come to see if Dooley Brogan knew Razor Johnny.
“Lucky for us nobody wants to sit next to them.” Ms. Renfield nods to the empty table that seems to be the buffer between the bike pack and the villagers.
I take the seat nearest to the pack; they’ll be no trouble for me, and I have no doubt Ms. Renfield would prefer to face them and see all. I do not need to see them to know their movements.
The barmaid delivers our ales, and then the Snag Tooth Riders order three plates of Widowmaker nachos.
Ms. Renfield widens her brown eyes and elongates her red lips, forming what I have come to know as her WTF face, because she’ll often whisper those letters to accompany the expression, which should be displeasing, but somehow isn’t. “Not the ‘gross beard nachos’!”
A strange thrill of pleasure runs through me. I raise a brow.
Ms. Renfield leans in. “I’m not sure exactly how to do this. I don’t think people just normally talk to these guys. And they seem a little riled up.”
Indeed they are. Their pulses beat fast, adrenaline high. I stand and turn to the men. Eleven pairs of eyes turn upward. The man at the head—older, perhaps fifty, with gray in his beard and patches on his jacket, seems to be the leader. I meet his gaze. “Your brother was slain,” I say simply.
“What’s it to you?” the leader barks.
I can feel Ms. Renfield’s alarm behind me. I say, “The town speaks of Dooley Brogan.”
Another pause. The younger ones shift in their seats. They wait for the leader. The leader simply watches me.
“What do you make of it?” I ask.
He says, “What I make of it is that Razor Johnny rode with us for twelve years and that coward shot him in the back with a crossbow.”
A younger man stands up beside him, all lean muscle and coiled energy. “And that coward is a dead man.”
Grunts go up from the table.
“We’ll see.” The captain keeps his gaze fixed on mine. “Question is what you’re making of it. You a cop?”
Ms. Renfield speaks up here. “We’re just wanting to know what happened.”
“Why is that?” one of the men barks at her, this one with mottled skin and a scar bisecting his eyebrow.
I give him a look, and he stills like a rabbit.
The leader studies me with new interest. “You’re that guy who bought Kingston Manor. The castle up on the hill.”
“I am.”
“You doing some kinda Iron Man thing? Crime fighting?”
“Just interested in seeing that the right person dies,” I say.
He nods. The barmaid chooses this time to deliver the nachos. The man next to him grabs a hunk and shoves it into his mouth.
I ask, “Did Dooley Brogan and Razor Johnny know each other?”
“Not that we can figure,” he says. “Cops asked us that and we told them the same. There’s some here who think Dooley just wanted to go back inside, but why, then, not confess?”
I nod. “Indeed.”
“Some of us think Dooley got a taste for killing,” the leader continues. “Maybe wants to do a few more and then go out with a bang.”
“Man ain’t right,” a gray-haired man says. “Some men ain’t right.”
The leader takes a slow drink of his beer, never breaking eye contact with me.
Ms. Renfield speaks up again. “Did Dooley interact with any of your fellow Snag Tooth Riders in prison?”
The man nods at a small, wiry biker with frizzy hair. Primitive insignias decorate his face and neck. “Hound there was in Dooley’s cell block most of this last year. Tell him, Hound.”
Hound sets down his ale with a thunk. “Man kept to himself mostly.” His moustache becomes lively as he speaks, food bits catching the light. “Real straight-edge type. Checking out books from the library, kissing butt and all that. No one knew him. Did his time in his own world.”
Ms. Renfield fixes her gaze at the wall just beyond his ear. “Anything at all unusual about him doing his time in there?”
Hound thinks about this a moment. “He didn’t get many visitors.
Didn’t seem to have much money. But then in the last few months, that all changed.
Guards were coming and getting him pretty much every week.
He was flush with commissary money, too.
You’d see him giving out candy bars to guys he wanted favors from.
Man was broke as a joke before that, so I figured it had to be this visitor juicing his account. ”
“Candy can be like a currency on the inside,” the leader explains to me.
“Do you know who was visiting him?” Ms. Renfield asks.
Hound shrugs. “No clue. Don’t see what that has to do with anything, though.”
“Wasn’t any of us,” the leader assures me. “Certainly wasn’t Razor Johnny.”