Apartment Seven Read Free Page A

scratching at the gray stubble along the loose skin on his face, “took you for a reader.”
    “I used to be. Lately, not so much.”
    “Once a reader always a reader, that’s what I say.”
    For the first time I really looked at him. Of average height and weight, he had big, wide-set gray eyes, a pug nose and a thin-lipped slit of a mouth that barely contained a set of huge false teeth. Clad in a long overcoat that was once a cream color but had since faded and stained its way closer to brown, a rumpled shirt, threadbare workpants and a pair of black, badly worn army boots, I put him somewhere in his middle to late sixties. His hands were outfitted with fingerless knit gloves, and he wore a classic (though filthy and tattered) navy blue captain’s hat with a black brim, gold cording and a worn patch of an anchor on the front. Sprigs of white hair jutted out from beneath his hat, which reminded me of Mabel and only added to the man’s somewhat menacingly comic appearance.
    “Me, I like the classics.” He dug a paperback from his coat pocket and tossed it on the bar. “Ever read this one?”
    I glanced down at a dog-eared copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and gave a nod. “Long time ago. When I was a kid.”
    He gnawed on his cigar with a disturbing sucking sound. “Read it every Christmas. A gift to myself, you could say.”
    I halfheartedly motioned to an old string of multicolored Christmas lights strung across the back of the bar. “Well, tis the season.”
    He scooped some shelled peanuts from a bowl on the bar with thick, rough fingers, the nails longer than necessary and caked with dirt. “Name’s Payens,” he said, offering a hand. “Cap Payens.”
    Thankfully, before we could shake, the bartender, a young guy with a perpetually startled look, showed up with my drink and a bottle of beer for my new friend. I thanked him, flipped a couple bucks on the bar and took a long swallow of vodka.
    “How is it out there tonight, Cap?” the bartender asked.
    The old man powered down some beer then belched loudly. “All kinds of cold, Dewey, all kinds of cold. Busy, too. Ain’t nobody walkin’. Night like this, everybody wants to ride, right…” he hesitated and motioned to me, waiting for me to say my name.
    “Charlie.”
    “Charlie. Right, Charlie?”
    “Sure,” I said, eyeing the bartender for assistance.
    “He’s a cabbie,” Dewey explained, as if this information might help.
    “Been drivin’ cab forty years now,” Cap added.
    I raised my glass in congratulations as Dewey slid down the bar to refill a gin and tonic for a middle-aged woman a few stools away.
    “I know every inch of this city,” Cap said. “Every alley, every corner. City don’t have no secrets from me. Not one.”
    “You sure about that?” I asked.
    “I’m sure.” He swigged his beer then cracked open a peanut. “Gonna be a crazy night out there, Charlie. I can feel it.” He popped the peanut into his mouth without removing the cigar and chewed noisily. “Something about cold winter nights that’s kinda spooky anyway, don’t you think?”
    “Spooky?”
    “It’s a different world at night, especially in winter.”
    “That much is true.”
    “Better off getting under the covers and staying sleeping on a night like this. Can never be sure what’s out there in the cold.”
    “Can never be sure what’s waiting on you once you’re asleep either.”
    “Good point.” He tapped the cover of A Christmas Carol with his finger and grinned. “Like the book says …‘ There are some upon this earth of yours, who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’ Think about it.”
    “Will do.” I slid down off my stool.
    “Need a ride?”
    I gulped down the remainder of my drink. “All set