“Thanks, I’m just preoccupied,” Liam said, picking up the smudged shot glass.
“Troubles for each and every one, my dad used to say.”
Liam threw the shot back and let the whiskey burn all the way to the base of his stomach and back before looking at his beer and wondering how fast he could finish it.
“You just passing through?” the woman asked.
“Kind of.”
“Me too. Interesting town, though. I heard there was a double murder here last night. Did you hear anything about that?” Liam tried to hide any reaction, and shook his head before downing half his beer. “I mean, how horrible. It sounds like it was pretty brutal. A doctor and his wife, if I’m not mistaken.”
Liam turned his head just enough to look at the woman and saw that she was staring at him intently, the look of a child waiting for a firework to go off.
Liam tipped his head back to study the low ceiling. “What station you from?”
“What?”
“I said, what fucking news station are you from?” He focused his gaze on her and felt a spark of satisfaction at the surprise on her features. She opened her mouth once for rebuttal, then closed it before deflating a few inches in her seat.
“KQSL Channel 9, out of Saint Paul. I’m Shirley Strafford,” she said, holding out a manicured hand.
Liam tipped the rest of his beer back and stood in one motion. “Thanks for the drink,” he said as he walked toward the outline of the entryway.
“Mr. Dempsey, if I could just have a minute.”
Liam heard the bartender grumble something and Shirley’s reply—“I can talk to anyone I want, thanks”—before he walked out the front door of the hotel and toward his waiting truck.
Liam spent the next two hours driving around the small town, getting his bearings as he paused at each intersecting street. He coasted past businesses, homes, several two-story apartment buildings, and a park set on the banks of the river. He stopped at the park and took in the large menagerie of playground equipment, the swaying swings, and the creeping merry-go-round turning clockwise with the breeze. It was eerie to see a place made for laughter and people so empty. He knew why there was no one here; if he had children, he wouldn’t let them play alone in this town either.
Liam got out of his truck and walked across the well-trimmed lawn and the sand of the playground, onto a wide wooden boardwalk that ran parallel with the park. The boardwalk threaded through a dense copse of hardwoods and then emptied out to a panoramic view of the river. Jagged chunks of rock stretched away from the boardwalk until the ground dropped into the swift water beyond. Across the river, Liam spotted the corner of a building, its general outline barely visible behind the thick growth of trees and brush that encumbered the opposite shore. The structure looked to be at least two stories high, and the last vestiges of a pier poked above the water like an ancient sea creature waiting for a meal. A sign with the same message as the one on the way into town from Colton Inc. grew out of the long grass next to the sunken pier.
Liam stood there for a long time, watching the sun gather on the brown water and turn it into a reflection of the reddening sky so that it looked like a flowage of blood. His hand stole to the pocket of his jeans, and he traced the edges of the straight razor that lay against his thigh. It was a custom blade made by a friend of his father, for the barber. Instead of the customary pinion mounting that most razors had within the handle, his father’s locked when opened, and the handle was flat black, the once-polished ebony stone scuffed and abraded by years and years of use. Liam remembered when he asked his father why he always used the same razor day in and day out. The older man had merely smiled, the cigarette tilting up in the corner of his mouth, and said if a man does something well, his tools should be precious to him. The blade had shaved more faces than Liam could count and was still sharp enough to split hairs. He’d taken to carrying it wherever he went after his father passed away, the feeling of it in his pocket never failing to help calm him.
His phone vibrated in his other pocket, letting out a chime that startled him from his reverie. When he looked at the glass display, the number calling only said Blocked.
“Hello?”
“Is this Mr. Dempsey?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sheriff Barnes. Would you still like to stop by for a bit?”
Liam turned from the river and began walking toward his pickup. “Yes. Are you at your office?”
“Yep, you can park around back of the building. I’ll let you in the door on the east side.”
“Sounds good, thank you.”
There was a pause, and then a grunt from the other end of the phone. “I’ll see you in a few.”