January in Atlantis - Alyssa Day (red white royal blue .txt) 📗

“Noel is in rare form tonight,” Missy whispered, tying on her black apron and then adjusting the fit of the short-shorts every waitress in the Copper Cantina had to wear. That and a tight, low-cut black T-shirt with Copper Cantina emblazoned across the chest constituted the waitress outfit.

As a bartender, Eva got off easier. She was allowed to wear jeans with her tight black T-shirt. She hadn’t bothered complaining. She knew better by now.

“Already?” She glanced at the clock over the bar. “It’s only six. He hasn’t even had time to get into the tequila yet. What’s up his butt this time? Did his wife give him a hard time about something again?”

Noel was married, much to the shock of everyone who’d ever met him. How a scumbag like Noel could find any woman who would put up with him, let alone marry him, was one of life’s great mysteries, right up there with who built the pyramids and why the Zebra cakes at the grocery were called different things depending on what time of year it was.

She didn’t care; she was down with buying Valentine cakes, Easter cakes, Groundhog Day cakes, or whatever. It was just strange.

She shook out her bar apron, tied it on, and started doing inventory for supplies. Denny, the day bartender, was one of the laziest individuals she’d ever had the misfortune to meet. He regularly left her with empty bottles, empty fruit trays, and a filthy bar. He also thought himself to be above washing out a glass or two when the dishwasher was backed up.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was Noel’s cousin.

Nepotism. Nice work if you can get it.

“I don’t know,” Missy said, shaking her head. “But I’ve only been here ten minutes, and he’s already yelled at me twice.”

Eva smiled at her friend, still surprised that she even had a friend. Missy was one of those people you couldn’t help but like though. With her copper skin and dark brown eyes, Missy was beautiful too, which normally would’ve made her a target of Noel’s lecherous advances, but Missy was married to the local high school football coach. A former college football player himself, he stood about six feet, eight inches tall and was as broad as the side of a barn. Eva gave a mental shiver at the idea of being on the opposing team against Bryce.

Off the football field, Bryce was one of the nicest people she’d ever met. He definitely didn’t have a violent bone in his body, except when it came to protecting Missy. Noel had tried on his pervert act with Missy exactly one time, she’d confided to Eva. The following night Bryce walked in, sat down on a stool at the end of the bar, reached over the shining wood surface, and picked Noel up by the shirtfront with one ham-sized hand.

Bryce hadn’t said anything at all. He hadn’t even scowled. He’d just sat there, looking calmly and pleasantly at Noel while he held the man a foot off the ground with one hand.

For several minutes.

By the time Noel had stopped squeaking and nearly passed out from lack of oxygen, Bryce set him back down and walked out of the bar. Missy had never had any trouble, at least in terms of sexual advances, with Noel ever since. And Noel hadn’t dared get his law enforcement cousins after Bryce in a town where high school football was a religion.

But he did yell at Missy as much as he yelled at everybody else, and she’d forbidden Bryce to do anything about it.

“If I can’t handle a little yelling, then I don’t deserve to work in a bar,” she told Eva. “I can stick up for my own damn self.”

But tonight Missy looked worried. “I haven’t seen him like this in a while. He’s acting almost like he’s afraid, and I don’t know what that’s about. The sheriff is one of his eighteen cousins, after all. Anyway, look lively and stay out of his way if you can.”

“Thanks.”

Missy nodded and hurried off, beginning her prep work for the dinner rush that would be heading into the bar any minute.

The Copper Cantina had a small but serviceable kitchen, and the burgers and fries were truly first-rate. A lot of the folks who worked at the copper mine liked to stop in for a quick dinner and maybe a beer or two before they headed home for the rest of their evening, especially the single ones. And today was Friday, so that meant payday. More money to spend, more beer to drink, and more tips for the bartender, Eva hoped. She really wanted to build up her savings so her escape fund was replenished when she needed to move on.

She said hello to a couple of the most-familiar customers seated at their normal stools and already deep into what was probably their third or fourth drink of the afternoon. Every bar had them—the regulars.

The drunks, if you wanted to be less charitable. These were people who were never, ever going to climb out of the bottle, but they didn’t hurt anybody. They just wanted a quiet drink in a quiet corner, and occasionally they needed Eva to pour them into a cab and send them home. In the years she’d been bartending, she’d heard two different philosophies on the subject of the regulars. She knew they were alcoholics, and for a long while she’d tried to get them into AA. But proselytizing, especially when she’d never known the pain of addiction, hadn’t helped anybody, and it just left both them and her embarrassed and unhappy.

So her philosophy now was simply to watch out for them as best she could and make sure they could get home safely when they were tired. She also made a point to be a bit slow refilling glasses or opening new beers for them. It was the most she could do, and she knew it was too little, but sometimes the best you could do had to be good enough.

Eva shook her head, trying to escape the gloom that had been dogging her all afternoon. She didn’t have time for it, and if she didn’t find a way to at least pretend to be cheerful, happy, and perky—perky, God forbid—then Noel would find yet another way to make her life a living hell. Speaking of the monster, he was clomping up the stairs from the cellar, and she could already hear him bellowing.

“Eva, get your ass down here,” he shouted. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times that we needed another ten cases of Heineken before the weekend. I’m tired of having to follow behind you and do your damn job.”

Eva sighed. Here we go. She headed toward the stairs as Noel came into view.

He was panting and gasping, his balding head sweaty just from his walk up the dozen steps from