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I dug a fingertip into his side, making him wince. “Caleb!”
“We’re not exactly dragging her back. Look, I know both of them pretty well. He isn’t going to hurt her, he just wants a valuable item she took with her when he and she had their last, um—”
I raised my hand to cut him off. “Let’s go with ‘date.’â??”
“OK, then. On their last date, Lolo informed Trixie that he wasn’t planning on leaving his wife. And while he was in the shower, she took his wedding ring from the nightstand.”
“Why doesn’t he just have the ring replaced?”
“Well, it’s Lolo’s father-in-law’s ring. It’s an antique and apparently pretty distinctive. Plus, Lolo’s sort of superstitious. He wants his wedding ring back. He’s afraid that without it, his marriage will be doomed.”
“Yeah, his carrying on with a stripper named Trixie won’t have any effect on it at all.”
“All we have to do is get the ring back to Lolo in Anchorage. I thought you’d be excited to finally get there.”
“I object to this job on moral grounds . . . on several levels. Quests for evil rings rarely turn out well. Too many potential Gollum issues. Also, I don’t like the idea of working for a guy whose name could belong to a Star Trek villain.”
“Them’s the breaks, sweetheart,” he said, shrugging as I pouted. “We aren’t actually taking custody of anyone, so your argument isn’t valid. And you’ve objected to most of the jobs we’ve done together on some grounds. If it was up to you, we would let everybody go with a sternly worded warning.”
“Fine,” I grumbled. “How do we find this girl?”
“My buddy Abe owns a bar down in Goose Creek—”
“Yet another member of the League of Caleb’s Barkeep Super Friends,” I interjected.
“Please don’t mix Marvel and DC references. You’re better than that,” he said, shaking his head disdainfully. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Abe’s on Trixie’s circuit. Most of these places can’t keep girls on full-time. You don’t find a lot of pretty girls willing to strip in a small town year-round. So these girls travel a sort of circuit a few months each year. The bar pays a flat fee, the girls keep all the tips. The male patrons see a little boob. Everybody walks away happy.”
“Except for feminists. And health inspectors.”
“Is this going to be your attitude for the entire job? Because that will make it real difficult for me to enjoy working on this with you.”
I frowned, although relief at seeing the old Caleb return was gradually setting in. “Am I supposed to try to help you enjoy a job involving strippers?”
“I honestly don’t know how to answer that without getting poked in the ribs again.”
Abe’s bar, which was just called Abe’s, was more respectable than most of the places we’d visited so far. It was an old, shopworn sports bar, but it was clean. And nobody propositioned me as I walked through the front door, which I considered a much higher recommendation than any Zagat rating.
Of course, the lack of propositions could have had something to do with Caleb’s arm being firmly wrapped around my waist, but why split hairs? The interior reminded me a lot of the Blue Glacier in Grundy: scarred pine bar, worn pine floorboards, neon beer signs, and taxidermically preserved fish specimens decorating the walls. Two obviously well-loved pool tables occupied the far corner of the room. Since one of them was marked with a little green “reserved” sign, I assumed that one would serve as Trixie’s stage for the evening.
There were plenty of perfectly respectable teetotalers in the Great North. But in some smaller towns out “in the bush,” bars and saloons served as the social hubs, sources of gossip and entertainment to break up the monotony of living in a place where a snowfall could mean being cut off from your neighbors for months. People didn’t come for the booze so much as the conversation. The problem was that some bars were “less nice” than others and attracted people who were similarly less nice than the average citizen. It all depended on what the ownership was willing to let the patrons get away with.
My opinion of the caliber of the bar changed when a tall bottled redhead with an ass you could bounce a quarter off of sidled up to us, calling out to Caleb. My werewolf paled a little and pulled at the collar of his jacket.
“Mary Ann, hi,” he said, clearly uncomfortable, which in some perverse way amused me immensely. “How are you?”
“Lonely.” She scowled at me. “This your old lady now?”
Caleb looked from her to me and back to her. And then back to me. “Uh . . .”
Part of me enjoyed watching Caleb twitch a little bit. But a much more influential part of my brain wanted this woman away from us, away from my man, before I started some Maury Povich catfight, rolling around on the floor, pulling at her hair. So I decided to step in.
“Oh, come on, Caleb, don’t try to hide our love,” I cooed, stretching my arms around him. I beamed at her, all silly and cow-eyed. “We just got matching tattoos.”
Mary Ann’s eyes widened. “Really? Can I see?”
I winked at her. “Not where we put them, no, ma’am.”
“I thought you said you didn’t want big commitments,” she said to Caleb.
