the smell of burning tobacco—and occasionally something else—was still noticeable even out in the open air. He caught the down-at-the-heels Montana-tavern scent of the sawdust covering the floor as he entered, stale sweat overridden by colognes of both the male and female persuasions, and he felt that peculiar brand of personal loneliness that drove folks to the Boot Scoot when they had better things to be doing elsewhere.
Hutch nodded to a few friends as he approached the bar and then ordered a beer.
Two or three couples were dancing to the wails of the jukebox—he thought of Opal’s description of the tavern and smiled at its accuracy—but most of the action seemed to center around the two pool tables at the far end of the long room.
Hutch’s beer was drawn from a spigot and brought to him; he paid for it, picked up the mug in one hand and made his way toward the pool tables. By the weekend, when the rodeo and other Independence Day celebrations would be in full swing, the crowds would be so thick in here, at least at night, that just getting from one side of the tavern to the other would be like swimming through chest-deep mud of the variety Montanans call “gumbo.”
Finding a place to stand without bumping elbows with anybody, Hutch watched the proceedings. Deputy Treat McQuillan, off duty and out of uniform but still clearly marked as a cop by his old-fashioned buzz haircut, watched sourly, pool cue in hand, while another player basically ran the table, plunking ball after ball into the appropriate pocket.
Never a gracious loser, McQuillan reddened steadily throughout, and when the bloodbath was over, he turned on one heel, rammed his cue stick back into the wall-rack with a sharp motion of one scrawny arm and stormed off.
A few of the good old boys, mostly farmers and ranchers Hutch had known since the last Ice Age, shook their heads in tolerant disgust and then ignored McQuillan, as most people tended to do. Getting along with him was just too damn much work and consequently the number of friends he could claim usually hovered somewhere around zero.
For some reason Hutch couldn’t put his finger on—beyond a prickle at the nape of his neck—he was strangely uneasy and getting more so by the moment. He watched the deputy shoulder his way toward the bar, evidently impervious to the good-natured joshing of the people he passed.
Hutch had never liked McQuillan, and he certainly wasn’t in the minority on that score, but in that moment he found himself feeling a little sorry for the man, if no less watchful. The very air had a zip in it, a sure sign that something was about to go down, and it probably wasn’t good.
Halfway across the sawdust-covered floor, McQuillan stopped at a table encircled by women, put out his hand and jerked one of them to her feet, hard against his torso and into a slow dance. At first, Hutch couldn’t make out who she was, with folks milling in between.
A scuffle ensued—the lady evidently preferred not to participate, at least not with Treat McQuillan for a dancing partner—and the other females at the table rose as one, so fast that a few of their chairs tipped over backward.
“Stop it, Treat,” one of them said.
And then, as people shifted and pressed in on the scene, Hutch recognized the woman who didn’t want to dance. It was Brylee.
He plunked down his mug on another table and instinctively headed in that direction, ready to take McQuillan apart at the joints like a Sunday-supper chicken just out of the stewpot. But right when he would have reached the couple, an arm shot out in front of his chest and stopped him as surely as if a steel barricade had slammed down from the ceiling.
“My sister,” Walker Parrish said evenly, “my fight.”
Hutch hadn’t spotted either Walker or Brylee when he came in, so he hadn’t had a chance to square away their presence in his mind. He felt a little off-balance.
In the next instant, Parrish shoved McQuillan away from Brylee, hard, hauled back one fist and clocked the deputy square in the beak.
That was it. The whole fight. Though in the days to come it would grow with every retelling, eventually becoming almost unrecognizable.
McQuillan’s eyes rolled back, his knees buckled and he went down.
Walker, meanwhile, gripped Brylee firmly by one arm, barely giving her a chance to retrieve her purse from the floor next to her chair, and propelled her toward the exit.
“We’re going home now,” he was heard to say in a tone that left no room for negotiation.
“Damn it, Walker,” Brylee yelled in response, struggling in vain to yank free from her brother’s grasp. “Let me go! I can take care of myself!”
In spite of everything, Hutch had to smile a little, because what Brylee said was true—she could take care of herself and in the long run she’d be just fine.
Oh, the woman had spirit, all right. Life would have been so much simpler all around, Hutch thought, if only he could have loved her.
Moments later, the Parrishes were gone and somebody was helping McQuillan back to his feet. He was rubbing his jaw and had one hell of a nosebleed going, but he looked all right, otherwise—no obvious need for any wires, stitches or casts, anyhow.
“I’m pressing charges!” McQuillan raged. “You’re all witnesses! You all saw what Walker Parrish did to me!”
“Ah, Treat,” one man drawled, “let it go. You put your hands on the man’s sister, and after she told you straight out she didn’t care to dance—”
McQuillan’s small, beady eyes flashed fire. He was trying to staunch the nosebleed with the sleeve of his shirt, but not having much luck. Some of the sawdust on the floor would definitely have to be shoveled out and replaced.
“I mean it,” he insisted furiously. “Parrish assaulted an officer of the law and he’s going to face the consequences!”
Hutch, standing nearby, flexed his fist slowly and waited for the urge to drop McQuillan right back to the floor again to pass.
Presently, it did.
The show was over and Hutch turned, meaning to go back for the beer he’d set aside minutes earlier. He nearly collided with Brylee’s best friend, Amy Jo DuPree in the process.
“You have your nerve coming in here, Hutch Carmody!” Amy Jo seethed, standing practically toe-to-toe with him and craning her neck back so she could look up at him. Five-foot-nothing and weighing a hundred pounds soaking wet, Frank and Marge DuPree’s baby girl was a pretty thing, but feisty, afraid of nothing and no one.
Montana seemed to breed women like that.
Hutch arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?” he countered, raising his voice a little as the jukebox cranked up and Carrie Underwood took to extolling the virtues of baseball bats and kerosene-fueled revenge.
Maybe that was what was making the whole female sex seem more impossible to deal with by the day, Hutch speculated fleetingly. Maybe it was the inflammatory nature of the music they listened to on their iPods and other such devices.
“You heard me,” Amy Jo all but snarled through her little white teeth, and gave him a light but solid punch to the solar plexus.
Intrigued and, okay, a little pissed off at the injustice of it all, Hutch
