Page 17

When I straightened up, I saw a man standing at the end of the bar.

He definitely didn’t look like a tourist. No, he looked like he was either cosplaying a historical figure who’d frequented Whiskey Row back in the day, or maybe was someone like me who just liked to wear vintage clothes. He had on a striped charcoal gray three-piece suit and a jaunty black fedora.

“So, you’re Hazel’s girl,” he said, looking me up and down. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”

I stared at him for a moment, and then it hit me.

That wasn’t a man.

That was a ghost.

I suppose I should have expected this. Hazel had all but warned me that there would be other ghosts I’d eventually meet and had even hinted that the bar had its own resident spirit.

He inclined his head toward me, but I noticed that he didn’t extend a hand to shake. That made sense, I supposed; just because I could see ghosts didn’t mean they actually had corporeal forms I could interact with.

“Mack Donovan,” he said. “Pleasure.”

Somehow, I managed to keep my expression neutral. “Lorelei Cosgrove,” I said.

“I know who you are, doll,” he said. “Your great-aunt talked about you.” Another of those up-and-down glances, one that seemed to indicate he was taking a little more pleasure in inspecting my person than a man who’d been dead for decades probably should have.

“So,” I replied. “How’d you end up haunting this place?”

Rather than reply right away, he pushed his hat backward a bit so it sat on the back of his head. I estimated that he’d been in his mid-thirties when he died. Because his hair was slicked away from his forehead, I had a hard time telling what color it had originally been, but I guessed it was probably medium brown, several shades lighter than mine. His eyes were blue, and glinted with interest as he looked at me.

“I’ve been here since 1925,” he said. “There were speakeasies that operated all up and down this block back then, and me and my team were raiding this place one night that August.”

“You were a fed?” I asked. That fit, since he looked like an extra from The Untouchables or something.

“I worked for the Bureau,” he said, then added, when I raised my eyebrows, “in the Prohibition unit. It was part of the Treasury Department back then. We knew this block was crawling with speakeasies, so we raided them on a regular basis.” He stopped there, and although he frowned a little, he didn’t seem actively annoyed about his eventual fate. “The bootleggers were waiting for us. Got my partner and me the second we came through the door.”

As soon as he spoke those words, I looked around, halfway expecting to see his buddy lurking somewhere in the shadows near the unoccupied stage.

Almost at once, Mack chuckled. “Oh, he’s not here,” he said. “They got him in the leg, but he was able to crawl off while I laid down some cover fire.” He paused, and for the first time, I saw a trace of unease in his expression. “After that, it gets kind of fuzzy. I remember the noise, the muzzle flashes, somebody yelling. And then nothing, like a reel of film with the middle cut out. Next thing I knew, I was standing about where you are now, looking down at a fella in a cheap suit who turned out to be me.”

“You don’t remember getting shot?” I asked.

“Not the moment of it. Couldn’t tell you which one of them did it, either — it was dark, and they all had the same idea about where to point their guns.” He said those words lightly enough, but I could still detect a thread of tension in his tone. “Took me a while to piece together the where and the how. But the actual dying part?” He spread his hands, a gesture of surrender. “Gone. I’ve had a hundred years to chew on it, and it never did come back.”

“What happened next?” I asked, and his shoulders lifted.

“Your guess is as good as mine. I found out quick enough that I couldn’t leave the building. The second I stuck a foot outside, I just reappeared somewhere in the bar.” He looked down the length of the antique oak surface, still shiny even after decades of elbows and accidental spills. “Guess some people would say that was ironic, a prohi getting stuck in a bar for all eternity.”

I’d never heard the slang before, obviously, but I guessed he was referring to his role as a prohibition agent. “So you’re not big on drinking.”

He laughed then, so loudly that if I hadn’t already known no one else could hear him, I would’ve expected to see Roz’s head pop out of the office to find out what was going on. “Nah, I had a glass of whiskey neat every night when I got home from work. What the brass didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, right?”

The world, I reflected, was a very complicated place.

Even the world a hundred years ago.

“I’m glad you’re here, though,” he went on. “I liked having Hazel as the boss because it gave me someone to talk to. Although that woman had opinions on everything.”

I could practically hear the capital letter he assigned to “opinions,” and I had to agree. Say what you want about Hazel Cosgrove, but you could never accuse her of being wishy-washy.

“All the other owners before her, I couldn’t talk to them,” Mack added. “But I still watched the place, saw all the comings and goings. It kept me entertained all those years.”

That was one way to look at it, I supposed.