I know all the cops from the Third Precinct. They come in during their shifts to check on me and shoot the breeze while pretending not to notice the array of shifty characters sharing the bar with them. They come in after work dressed in their civilian clothes so they can throw back a few shots before heading home to their wives or girlfriends or Playstations. They’re good guys, most of them. They treat me with respect and keep an eye on the place when I’m not around.
I’m no badge bunny, but I’ve taken a few of them home. Usually the single ones who’ve had a rough shift and would rather sit on a bar stool all night than go home to an empty apartment. I’ve done my part as marriage counsellor and sex therapist, too. Being a cop is tough on a relationship and wreaks havoc on the sex drive. Sometimes a man just needs a good no-strings fuck to remind him that he’s alive, that there’s something worth living for. Call it my pro bono contribution to society. Not that any of the wives or girlfriends would thank me.
I never thought of Leo like that. He just looked too damned young for me to go dipping my fingers in that particular pie. He came in one night with a look I’ve seen on a hundred cops’ faces before. That bleak, empty-eyed stare of a man who has seen something he wishes he hadn’t. It’s a hazard of the job and it fades with time, but a little bit of their soul gets replaced by a hard edge of cynicism in the process.
He claimed his usual seat at the bar and gave me a wobbly nod of acknowledgement. I sidled up in front of him, wiping down the already clean mahogany bar.
‘Bad night?’
He nodded, studying his hands as if they contained the secrets of the universe.
‘What was it? Homicide?’
He jerked his head up. ‘How’d you know?’
I shrugged, almost embarrassed by my own nonchalance. Everything I knew about police work was second-hand information. I’d feel differently if I’d been the one standing over the body. ‘Seen that expression before. First one, huh?’
‘Yeah. Never seen a … dead person … before.’
‘That sucks,’ I said, filling a beer glass with seltzer. ‘What’s your name, kid?’
‘Williams,’ he said. ‘And I’m no kid.’
‘Yeah, I know. What’s your first name?’
‘Leo, ma’am.’
‘Well, Leo, I’m no ma’am. My name is Kayla,’ I told him. ‘This is my bar.’
‘Yeah, I know. The guys told me.’
I wondered what else the guys had told him. Cops talk. They’re more gossipy than a bunch of housewives drinking the kitchen sherry. I knew more about their lives than their own families did.
I fished a couple of maraschino cherries out of the container under the bar and dropped them into his glass, sending little tendrils of syrup spiralling down into the carbonated seltzer. I pushed the glass in front of him. ‘There you go.’
He held the glass up to the light, studying it. ‘What’s with the cherries?’
‘For your first homicide. You broke your cherry, kiddo.’
He rewarded me with the first smile I’d ever seen on his face, which served to reinforce how young he looked. ‘Thanks. You just made my night.’
I felt something spread through my belly the way the cherry syrup spread through his glass. ‘Any time,’ I said, putting more meaning into the words than I intended.
I left him alone to drink his cherry-flavoured soda, but there wasn’t quite so much tension in his shoulders as there had been when he walked in. That made me feel good. Bartending is about more than serving up drinks – it’s about understanding people and what they need. Or maybe I’m just trying to justify having the hots for a young cop.
After that, we were on a first-name basis. Some nights, he’d walk in with that familiar dejected expression and say, ‘It’s cherry time, Kayla.’ Then, if the bar was slow, he’d tell me what he’d been through that night. Sometimes he’d wait for me if I was busy and that gave me a little thrill, even though a part of me believed he only saw me as his bartending therapist.
I was there when Leo made his first suicide call and I listened without comment as he described the knife wounds on the woman’s wrist and how she looked almost happy in death. He told me about his love of animals and the first time he had to put a bullet in the head of an injured deer hit by a car. I dared to pat his hand when he told me about his first experience with a car full of drunk teenagers, half of them dead on the scene after a collision with a tree. That one brought tears to my eyes, thinking about my own two sons.
They weren’t all traumatic events; some were good career firsts. His first search warrant, his first drug arrest, the first court case he won. Other firsts were just plain embarrassing and he’d relate them in hushed tones, looking over his shoulder to make sure none of the other guys overheard his shame. Some things he could laugh at, like the first time he caught a couple going at it in the backseat of a car. That one made him blush and his blushing turned me on.
‘They didn’t even care that they were sitting there naked,’ he said, naïve incredulity in his voice.
‘Lust makes people do crazy things.’ I thought back to some of my antics, not all of them in the distant past. ‘Lust is the devil.’
He shrugged, as if he didn’t have a clue. ‘I guess.’
We had an easy camaraderie that wasn’t quite like what I had with the other guys in the precinct. There was no swagger to Leo, no macho bullshit to peel away like layers of an onion. At night, after I locked up the bar and headed home alone, I thought about Leo in ways that would surely make him blush. Naked, sweaty, hard. Part of my heightened lust was the fact that I wasn’t taking anyone home any more. Not for a lack of trying on their part – I just wasn’t interested. I tried not to dwell on the reason I wasn’t interested.
Then one night Leo came in looking like a man who’d lost his best friend. The lines etched into his exhausted, stricken face aged him by ten years. The bar was hopping more than usual that night, so it took me a good five minutes to make my way down to him.
‘Hey, what happened?’
‘Dead kid. Five years old,’ he said, as if giving a report. ‘Wandered off and drowned in the lake.’
‘Fuck. I’m sorry.’
He bent his head. I thought he was crying, but then I saw that he cradled something on his lap. ‘It was his,’ he said, holding up a bedraggled orange and white kitten in his big hands. ‘Parents said he was in the yard playing with the cat, last they saw. Thought the father was going to strangle it, so I took it.’
His words were punctuated by rough strokes of the cat’s fur. That little furball was all that was holding him together but a kitten wasn’t company enough to fight off his demons once the lights went out.
‘Let me get Quentin to close up shop for me and I’ll get you home.’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ he said, a little too loudly.
I ignored him and walked to the other end of the bar. I snagged Quentin as he went by on his way to serve a round of beer to a bunch of rough-looking bikers. ‘Can you close for me? I’ve got something I need to do.’
Quentin looked from me to Leo. He’s been with me for seven years, as rough around the edges as some of our customers, but he’s a decent bartender and had become a good friend. ‘Got yourself another rescue?’
‘Something like that.’
He winked, but