Tangled Vines Read Free Page B

and the desperate need for a drink.
    With relief Dougherty spotted the Miller Beer sign in the window of a crumbling brick building. The faded lettering above the door identified the establishment as Ye Olde Tavern, but the locals who frequented the bar called it Big Eddie’s.
    Leaving his car parked in an empty space in front of the bar, Dougherty went inside. The air smelled of stale tobacco smoke and spilled drinks.
    Big Eddie was behind the bar. He looked up when Dougherty walked in, then turned back to the television set mounted on the wall. There was a game show on. Big Eddie loved game shows.
    Dougherty claimed his usual perch, the stool at the end of the bar. “I’ll have a whiskey.”
    Big Eddie climbed off his stool, reached under the counter, and set a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey in front of Dougherty, then went back to his seat and the game show.
    Dougherty bolted down the first shot in one swallow, feeling little of the burn. With a steadier hand, he filled the glass again. He gulped down half of it, then lowered the glass, the whiskey flowing down his throat like lava. The foreclosure notice he’d stuffed in his shirt pocket earlier poked him in the chest.
    Thirty-five thousand dollars. It might as well be three hundred thousand for all the chance he had of getting his hands on that kind of money.
    Damn her eyes, he thought, remembering Katherine Rutledge’s steely gaze boring into him. He threw back the rest of his drink and topped the glass again, dragging it close to him.
    He lost track of time sitting there, one hand clutching the bottle and the other around the glass. More of the regulars drifted in. Dougherty noticed his bottle was half empty about the same time he noticed the level of voices rising to compete with the television. Tom Brokaw’s face was on the screen.
    The legs of a barstool scraped the floor near him. He glanced over as a baggy-eyed, heavy-jowled Phipps, a reporter with the local paper, sat down beside him.
    â€œHey, Big Eddie,” a man called from one of the tables. “A couple more beers over here.”
    â€œYeah, yeah,” Big Eddie grumbled.
    Dougherty cast a sneering look over his shoulder at a garage mechanic in greasy coveralls, sitting with a painter in splotched whites. Common laborers all of them, he thought contemptuously. Punching time clocks, letting others tell them what to do. Not him. Nobody gave him orders; he was his own boss. Hell, he owned a vineyard.
    He remembered the paper in his pocket and felt sick. He couldn’t lose that land. It was all he had left. Without it, where would he live? What would he do?
    He had to stop the Rutledges from stealing it. He had to find a way to get that money. But how? Where?
    Nothing had gone right for him. Nothing. Not since Becky had died. His beautiful Rebecca. Everything had gone sour after he lost her.
    Tasting that sourness again, Dougherty tossed back the whiskey in his glass. As he did, his glance fell on the television screen.
    â€œIn a scene reminiscent of the assassination attempt on President Reagan,” Tom Brokaw was saying, “New York State Senator Dan Melcher was wounded tonight and a policeman shot. Kelly Douglas has more on this late story from New York.”
    A woman’s image flashed on the screen. Night darkened the edges of the picture, held at bay by the full illumination of a hospital’s emergency entrance in the background. She stood before it, a kind of restless energy about her strong and angular features that briefly pulled his attention.
    He looked down when she started to speak. “Tom, State Senator Dan Melcher has been rushed into surgery suffering from at least one gunshot wound to the chest....”
    That voice. His head came up fast. The low pitch of it, the smooth ring of authority in it. There could be no mistake. He knew it. He knew that voice as well as his own. It had to be her.
    But that woman’s face was no longer on the