O’Shaughnessy’s sounded like one of those mass-marketed Quaint Irish Taverns where the beer is overpriced and they serve your food with a bottle of HP Sauce on the side because HP Sauce is just oh-so British Isles, a place with a framed poster of The Quiet Man on the wall. It wasn’t. It was a rough place in a rough part of Jacksonville. O’Shaughnessy’s was the kind of bar where two varieties of beer were served, Budweiser and warm Budweiser, and if you bitched about the selection, they shot you. The Irish-sounding handle wasn’t a marketing gimmick; the bar was called O’Shaughnessy’s simply because the guy who owned it was named O’Shaughnessy. I’d been there many times in the course of my work and always felt like showering after.

It seemed like an odd place for Ria to meet me. Women didn’t go to O’Shaughnessy’s voluntarily; the clientele there was too fond of sexual assault. But that was where she’d asked to meet, and at five-fifty I arrived to meet her.

I parked a block down from the bar. Two young men, each wearing billowing oversized Jaguars jerseys, stood at the corner. When they saw me park they turned and ambled toward me, giving my car the eye. It wasn’t very new or very nice, but it was new enough and nice enough to be worth stealing or stripping in this neighborhood. I got out of the car and stood with one foot still inside. I opened my wallet and flashed a badge I’d bought for eight bucks from a mail-order place. The badge said "authorized auto repossessor" but looked official enough from a distance. The two youths saw it and stopped ambling.

"Just going down to the bar, guys," I said. "Sure like my car to be here when I come back."

"Man, whatchoo tryin’ ta say?" the taller of the two said. "Like you just assume we thieves."

"Nope," I said. "Just making a general comment."

"We ain’t gonna fuck with no car, man."

"Glad to hear it," I said. I made a show of leaning back inside the car to retrieve my .38 from the glove box, then stepped back and closed the car door and made a bigger show of clipping the gun to my waistband and draping my shirt over it.

The two youths didn’t tremble or break down in tears. The gun didn’t seem to bother them at all. They were probably packing more heat beneath their own tentlike Jags t-shirts. But the gun helped them decide I really wasn’t worth the trouble. The tall one nodded at me once and they turned and ambled back up the street. They took up residence again at their corner and paid me no more mind.

###

The sun was still up outside, and the darkness inside O’Shaughnessy’s reached out and smacked me in the face when I opened the door. The owner had painted the windows black long ago and only half the low-wattage light bulbs in the place actually worked, so the bar existed in permanent twilight. It took awhile for my eyes to adjust, but in the meantime the place had a smell I could see, the scent of unwashed man competing with faint remembrances of long-vanished vomit and urine.

A chipped and gouged bar ran the length of the room on the right side and looked like it had been bought at a fire auction. Along the opposite wall ran five secondhand booths that had been old around the time Vesuvius started making threatening noises. The floor was cement carpeted by a film of dried beer and piss and blood and puke, and it sucked at my shoes as I walked.

The place was nearly empty at this hour. Three men sat at the bar staring into glasses of beer and not talking. The guy behind the bar was big and bald and might have had a neck, but it would take an expert to know for sure. His forearms were each the size of an entire Olsen Twin and his hands were thick and misshapen from too many years of flossing drunks’ teeth with his knuckles. I happened to know that his name was Scotty, and he had a fantastic singing voice. He’d also killed a man in a knife fight last year and got off on self-defense. He recognized me and nodded. I nodded back then looked around the place for Ria.

Now that my eyes had adjusted I saw her sitting in the back booth. She was easy to spot. For starters, she was the only woman in the place. She also hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d told me she would be the cute one. Not that there was much competition in this joint, but Ria would have been the cute one in a pillow fight between the Miss America contestants and the Playboy Bunnies.

She was sitting at the outside edge of the booth, so I could see all of her from crown to sole. She was in her mid-twenties and slender and looked compact. It was hard to tell while she was sitting down, but I wouldn’t have pegged her as any taller than five-two. She wore no makeup. She didn’t need to. Her pale skin was accented with just a faint dusting of freckles across the nose. She had wide full lips and hair too flamboyantly red to be anything but natural. Her eyes were huge and almost black, which was unusual with redheads in my experience. Right now the eyes were unfocused and bored, but they looked like they could be friendly enough. She was wearing a snug pink halter top that showed off well-proportioned shoulders and denim short-shorts that showed off legs so miraculous they would’ve cured Roosevelt’s polio. Her feet were shoved into cheap dimestore flip-flops and her toenails were painted pink to match her halter top. She had a cute little backpack by her feet. She was drinking a flat beer from a glass so big she could have worn it as a hat. I went over and sat down across from her.

"Matt Salewski," I said. I flipped her a card and she picked it up and glanced at it. She had a lot less trouble with it than Annie had.

"Just assume I’m the cute one, huh?" she said.

"Well, except for Scotty."

Ria smiled politely and took another drink. "So what do you want to know, Matt Salewski?" she asked.

"Sheri called you about three-thirty yesterday. I wondered what it was about."

"She just wanted to see how I was."

"Any particular reason?"

"No," Ria said. "Just shooting the shit. We talked a lot."

"How long have you known Sheri?" I asked.

"All my life," Ria said. "She was my big sister."

###

I felt like someone had just opened the back of my head and made off with my brain. I’d been operating under the assumption that Teresa Tanner was the real woman, and Sheri Conroy was the fabrication. I was completely at a loss for what to say next. I finally settled on, "Huh?"

Ria smiled sadly and stuck her hand out. "Ria Conroy," she said. "Sheri told me a lot about you."

I took the hand numbly, shook it, put it down. I turned to the bar and yelled at Scotty to bring me a beer.

"You got legs," he said.

"And I’ll use ‘em to kick your ass if you don’t bring me a fuckin’ beer," I snarled.

Scotty’s eyes widened in surprise. He drew me a beer and walked around the bar and brought it to the booth. "Anyone else said that, I’d beat the shit out of him," he said.

I paid for the beer and threw a five on top for Scotty. "Having a bad day," I said. "Not your fault."

Scotty nodded and went back behind the bar. I took a long drink. The beer tasted like bat piss that had been marinating a dead hobo, but it was cold. I looked at Ria.

"You wanna run that by me again?" I said.

"Look, I know all about Dave Tanner and the name change and all that," Ria said.

"Did Dave Tanner know about you?"

"No. She was Teresa by the time she met him. Sheri and me didn’t have a real easy life. She was trying to reinvent herself, I guess."

"And forgot to tell everyone in her new life, ‘Oh, hey, I’ve got a little sister’?" I asked.

"I like myself fine, so I didn’t want to come along for the ride," Ria said. "But I wasn’t going to fuck up my sister’s good thing."

"Leave that for now," I said. "You have any idea who’d want to kill her?"

"No."

"No?"

Ria pursed her lips and fiddled with her beer glass for awhile. "Look," she said. "Sheri was into something. I don’t know what. I know she tried to get out of it about five years ago and wasn’t entirely able to. I don’t want to know what it was."

"Might have to if you ever want to find out who killed her," I said.

"Fuck that," Ria said with sudden force. "You don’t know what she had to do -- what we both had to do -- after we left home. She finally got away from all that, and I don’t want it shitting all over her now that she’s dead."

"What did you have to do after you left home?" I asked.

"Fuck you, Matt."

I ignored that. "This thing Sheri was into. Anything to do with drugs?"

"I don’t know," Ria said. "Just leave it alone."

"Number one: I don’t believe you don’t know anything," I said. "Number two: I’ve got no intention of leaving it alone."

"She’s my sister," Ria said. She was crying a little. "Shouldn’t I have a say?"

"No," I said. "I’m sorry for your loss. But Sheri had a husband who loved her too, and he actually wants to find the son of a bitch that shot her to pieces. To me, that trumps anything you want."

"You might not like what you find out about her," Ria said.

"I don’t care what I find out about her," I said. "You have my card. You change your mind, or you need help, call me. Might make both our lives easier."

"Why the hell would I need help?"

"Sheri obviously did."

"And a bang-up job you did there," Ria said.

I leaned forward and tried my best to stab her with my eyes. "Maybe if she’d been straight up with me at the beginning she wouldn’t be dead right now," I said. "I can’t help if I don’t know it’s needed. Just something to consider."

I got up and walked out and went back to my car. The sun was getting low, but there was still plenty of light left. Plenty of heat, too. Up at the corner, the two young Jags fans were still surveying their domain. They saw me coming and nodded again. I nodded back and shot them a thanks-for-not-fucking-with-my-car salute.

I opened the car up and pawed around in the backseat until I found an old hat and a wrinkled sportcoat. Then I removed the red Hawaiian shirt I was wearing and slipped the coat on over my white tee. It was really too hot for the get-up, but I was carrying a gun and my license required that I carry concealed. I fished a rubber band out of the glove compartment and tied my hair back and stuck the hat on my head, then grabbed my sunglasses from the visor and slipped them on. A regular Lon Chaney, me.

I leaned against the car and waited and sweated. After about ten minutes of waiting and sweating, I saw Ria come out of the bar wearing her cute little backpack and head up the street. I waited until she turned a corner and started after her. I wasn’t worried about losing her as long as she stayed on foot; I could’ve spotted all that red hair in a sandstorm at midnight.

I hooked a right where she had and looked up the street and there she was, about a hundred yards ahead of me. We walked about half a mile, always about a hundred yards apart. Ria walked pretty well for someone wearing wafer-thin flip-flops. She never looked back or acted like she expected a tail. She didn’t seem ill at ease in the neighborhood, either, and the neighborhood was a little questionable. Then, she hadn’t seemed ill at ease at O’Shaughnessy’s, and O’Shaughnessy’s was a slaughterhouse.

Ria ended up at a joint called Kisses, a low but sprawling concrete box with no windows and the glass on the door blacked out. It was painted white and purple and its sign featured the word "Nude!" repeated three times. Ria went in the black glass door. I crossed to the other side of the street and waited through a couple of cigarettes. After ten minutes she hadn’t come out, so I crossed the street again and went in.

Inside, as I expected, was the typical beefy guy collecting cover charges before opening the inner door to the club proper. I paid my twenty bucks and he told me to have a good time and let me into what seemed to be a very high-end strip club for the neighborhood. The place was clean and the chairs were comfortable, at least. The lighting and the music made my head hurt, but that was pretty standard in strip clubs the world over. Lots of purple neon, lots of thudding bass. I glanced at the stage and saw a blonde performing the usual gyrations and wearing only a baby-blue garter on her left leg and a pair of six-inch stilettos. The sign hadn’t lied, then; this was definitely a full-nude club. Which, unfortunately for me, meant no alcohol was served. It’s been a long time since any random naked woman could make me get up on my hind legs, but I definitely needed a scotch.

I took a table as far from the stage as I could get and ordered a six-dollar coke from a topless waitress. I lit a cigarette. At least you could still smoke in these clubs. Most of Florida was smoke-free, and I didn’t mind that much. But if I had to sit through Kid Rock’s "Cowboy" at ear-bleed level, and do it without alcohol, I by-god deserved a cigarette.

It was still early, and there weren’t many patrons here yet. Those that were here were the usual mix of frat boys and jowly businessmen. Only the frat boys seemed to be enjoying themselves. The businessmen looked bored and sad and a bit lost.

The topless waitress brought me back a plastic cup that held about six ounces of Coke – two, if you didn’t count the ice. I looked across the room at the gyrating blonde -- who, a glance below the waist confirmed, was blonder than God intended. At least there was something below the waist; I wasn’t a fan of the modern obsession with waxing. The bottle blonde wiggled over to the edge of the stage and got down on all fours and stuck her ass in the face of a fat fortyish guy in a suit and tie. The fat guy had a wad of bills in his left hand and a ring on that hand’s third finger. He stared at the blonde’s ass with absolute concentration for a moment, then smiled a slightly lost smile and stuck a dollar bill in her garter. She grinned and oozed around and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then she strutted back over to the pole, jumped up, and wrapped her legs around it. She hung upside-down for a moment. Her breasts, I noted, remained absolutely stationary through all of this, nary a wiggle or jiggle. I began to suspect that her hair wasn’t the only area where nature had been given some assistance.

"Wanna buy me a drink?"

A dark-haired waif wearing nothing but a transparent negligee had taken a seat beside me. She grinned and stuck out her hand. "I’m Stormy," she said.

"I’ll bet you are," I said.

"Buy me a drink?"

"Not today," I said.

Stormy was professional, I had to give her that. She just gave me another brilliant smile and said, "If you change your mind…" Then she was off to work other tables.

I waited through the rest of the blonde’s act. She picked up her costume -- already stripped and discarded by the time I’d come in -- and left the stage and started approaching the customers and soliciting lapdances.

"Let’s give it up for Sugar!" the DJ blared. "And now, gentlemen, let’s welcome Dusty!"

"Enter Sandman" discovered my eardrums and started raping them. Ria clumped onto the stage in lucite platform spike heels that boosted her five-two to almost five-nine. She was wearing a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit. It was on the floor soon enough. The rest of Ria was just as good as her face and shoulders and legs. Her boobs were real, I was relieved to note. I’d also called it on her hair being naturally red, but I tried not to gloat.

I watched her for awhile from my table, then took out my wallet and approached the stage. Ria saw me coming and smiled professionally and danced over to the edge. She didn’t recognize me until she was inches away. When she did her face froze.

I smiled at her. "Remember me?" I said. I took a business card from my wallet and slipped it into her garter. "Just in case you left the other one at the bar," I said. Then I walked out before she could wilt me with a snappy comeback.

Next Chapter: SEVEN