Very Bad Men Read Free

locals began to fill the place with raucous voices and laughter. At eleven a woman came in wearing a leather skirt and a knitted blouse. Hair dyed black. Fifty-five years old, Lark thought, hoping to pass for forty.
    â€œThere you are, Charlie,” she said to the old man.
    â€œMadelyn, you vixen,” he said, patting the stool beside him.
    As Lark watched them from the corner—Madelyn producing a cigarette from a beaded purse, Charlie lighting it with a Zippo—he wished that he were done. He should have taken care of things at the cabin. He felt a headache coming on and took a pill ( Imitrex ) from a small tin that once held breath mints. He didn’t expect the pill to work. He could feel the pain creeping into the space behind his eyes, curling and twisting like the smoke of Madelyn’s cigarette.
    A voice in his mind said, The headaches are a symptom. His doctor’s voice. It was something his doctor had told him again and again.
    The trouble started near midnight. Lark had a beer in front of him that he’d been nursing for an hour. He watched a crowd of young people heading for the exit. Clean-cut, well-dressed—dealers from the casino, if he had to guess. The last of them held the door for a brawny man heading in.
    That one’s not a dealer, Lark thought. A laborer or a fisherman maybe.
    Madelyn knew him. She got up and met him halfway across the room.
    â€œKyle, my love,” she said carelessly.
    He was a younger man, maybe forty—the age she was pretending to be. He wore denim work clothes and heavy canvas boots. She led him to the bar, ordered him a drink. She chattered away at him, her hands brushing his collar or resting on his arm. She had the nervous energy of a woman caught where she shouldn’t be.
    The old man, Charlie, sat forgotten beside her, his face souring as the minutes passed. The other patrons at the bar seemed to lean away from the three of them, as if they sensed what was going to happen.
    Lark watched it from his corner table. Charlie putting a hand on the back of Madelyn’s neck. A proprietary gesture. Madelyn turning to shoot him a look. Kyle, hunched over his glass, doing his best to ignore what was happening, until he couldn’t ignore it any longer.
    Kyle got to his feet, and Charlie followed. Madelyn made a halfhearted effort to get between them, but Kyle pushed her gently aside.
    Lark knew that the quickest way to win a fight was to break the other guy’s nose. A broken nose puts a man down, takes all the struggle out of him. Charlie knew it too. He made a fist of his right hand and jabbed at the bigger man’s face.
    Kyle saw it coming and ducked down to catch the punch on his forehead.
    The bones of the hand are delicate, the bones of the skull less so. Charlie drew his fist back with a cry. Kyle shook his head to clear it, then stepped forward casually and scuffed a work boot over the wooden floorboards, sweeping the old man’s legs out from under him. Charlie landed on his backside and on his wounded hand, howling and curling up on the floor.
    Kyle reached behind him for his glass, drained it, and headed for the door, beckoning for Madelyn to follow. She glared at him and growled, “Damn it, Kyle,” but she went with him after only the briefest of glances at the old man.
    Lark left the bar a few minutes later. By then some of the locals had helped Charlie up onto his stool and wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles and set him up with another beer.
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    DARK UNDER THE BIRCH TREES. Lark found the cabin again, drove past it, and parked at the side of the lane. He cut the Chevy’s engine and waited. A tire iron lay on the seat beside him.
    Charlie’s pickup truck appeared at one in the morning, rolling to a stop on the lawn. The old man stumbled up the stone-paved walk and went inside. Lark got out of his car with the tire iron, crossed to the porch, and retrieved the key from underneath the wooden