The inside of Pike’s is dimly lit, hazy with the smoke of cigarettes. The room is twice as long as it wide, with low ceilings that make the space feel smaller than it actually is. Dark booths line the length of one wall, and an oak-paneled bar runs the length of the other. Behind it, liquor bottles rise in tiers against a mirror so tarnished it offers only a dim reflection. The absence of music strikes Lane, though the murmur of conversations is a music of its own.
Seward leads Lane toward two empty bar stools, hoists himself onto the cracked red Naugahyde of a seat cover. “Have a seat,” he says, patting the bar stool beside him. Lane obeys. The captain lifts a finger at the bartender, who is dunking, rinsing, then setting out glass after glass to dry on a rack behind the bar. He is a large, one-armed man with a thick gray beard; the shirtsleeve of his missing arm has been removed and the shoulder opening sewn tight. He glances toward Seward and Lane, but he seems disinclined to attend to them until he has finished what he is doing.
When the bartender has put the last glass onto the rack, he walks over, puts a large hand flat on the bar. He drums each finger once and clears his throat, looking from Seward to Lane and back to Seward again. His eyes are dark beneath the coarse white tufts of his eyebrows. “Kin I getch you?”
“Whiskey, double,” Seward says.
The bartender’s eyes glide from the captain to Lane. “You?”
Lane shakes his head.
“Kid’s teetotaling tonight.” Seward chuckles.
The bartender blinks, expressionless. He pours Seward’s whiskey and pushes the glass across the bar.
Seward sips his whiskey, grimaces. “Who do we see about some ladies?” he asks.
The bartender puts a cigarette between his lips, lights it with a match struck against something beneath the bar. “Booth in the corner,” he answers. He regards Seward with something like distaste, then disappears to the other end of the bar, where two men are waiting for drinks.
The captain turns to Lane. “Wait here,” he says.
Lane watches Seward limp across the room toward the booth, where a man sits bent over a magazine. As Seward nears, the man stands up, and after a moment of conversation, the two shake hands. Lane can’t hear them from across the room, but he feels despite and deep within himself a hot thrumming of anticipation. He looks up at the clock hanging at the back of the bar; it is nine o’clock. He thinks how twenty-four hours ago he was lying on a stiff cot in the sweltering heat. Someone in a nearby cell was singing a song he didn’t know. Then he fell asleep and had a dream about his mother that he can’t remember. And now it is nine o’clock again, and at twelve a man will die, and here they are. Here they are.
He looks back toward Seward and the man, who now stand above a booth where three women sit, their faces flashing in candlelight. Based on what he’d heard about Pike’s back at Angola, Lane would have expected black sequins, pasties, lace, the type of outfit you’d see at a brothel in New Orleans. But the clothing these women wear is unremarkable—tie-waist dresses, nylons, low heels. They look, for the most part, ordinary, their hair fashioned in similar bobs, their features plain.
Then, one of them stands. She begins to walk across the room toward Lane, her wide hips moving like a pendulum, her breasts trembling above the V of her neckline. Lane feels his mouth go dry, and drops his eyes.
He looks up only when he has to, his chin lifted by a cold finger, and then he is looking into the woman’s black eyes. “Hey, baby,” she says, and her smile reveals crooked rows of teeth. She tilts her head and pushes herself between Lane’s legs; she smells like vanilla and whiskey. “Come on, baby,” she says. “Fat man says to come along with me.” Lane thinks to protest, but before he can speak the woman reaches out to touch his face, then runs a finger down over his chest toward his belt, and he feels his body surge with a hunger that he knows he can’t deny.