She got off the bus in Morgan City outside a place called the Blowout Lounge. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the wall of shipping containers across the street from the little dive bar, along with the levee only two doors down, gave the street a welcome coolness. Dahlia went in and took a seat at the bar, and when the door creaked closed behind her she mused that it could have been midnight out there for the way the paint sealed the door shut against the remains of the day. It was three months since New York, but she gathered a handful of peanuts from the dish the bartender put in front of her and she noted a weird clicking in the side of her head as she opened her mouth to pour them in. Each job left her with some kind of scar or alteration, and they were getting harder and harder to explain. One of these days, the only masks she’d be able to take on would be war veteran or grizzly-bear tamer.
The neon lights behind the bar gave the frizzy graying hair of the woman tending it a whimsical glow, and Dahlia could see a thin sheen of sweat on her sagging biceps as she wiped and arranged things back there. Penelope Brown seemed to hear Dahlia’s thoughts, went and turned the air-conditioning up, cursing gently at the remote as she punched and repunched the rubbery and stained little buttons trying to get the thing to work. Eventually the machine on the wall increased its thrumming, and the eternal war with the Louisiana heat took on a new energy inside the little establishment. Dahlia being the only customer of the lounge, if you could call it that, it seemed she and Penelope would fall into conversation at some point. But it took a few good minutes, and Dahlia was happy to wait.
“Where you hailin’ from?” Penelope asked eventually, and Dahlia accepted the beer she poured her with a nod of appreciation.
“Santa Barbara.”
“Out here for work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Must be.” Penelope sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “Only reason a sane person would come to a place like this. How long’ll you be in town?”
“Depends.” Dahlia sipped her beer. “How long do you think you’ll give me to find your missing daughter?”
Penelope stopped dead, peering at Dahlia from behind her greasy half-moon glasses.
“You’re her,” she said, when she’d regained her composure. “The one the investigator recommended.”
Dahlia smiled, rubbed at the clicky spot in the side of her head. Matt’s scar.
“Well, Jesus H. Christ,” Penelope said. She leaned over the bar. “I’m glad to meet you. I didn’t know if you’d come.”
Dahlia shook the offered hand. The grip was painful, tight with hope and desperation.
“I’m gonna do what I can to help you out, Penelope,” Dahlia said. “But first I’ll need to know some things.”
“Me first,” the older woman cut in. “What the hell do I call you?”
Dahlia sat back and thought about it.
Gave it a few seconds.
Never more than that.