Curtis and The Cryptic Coyote

“How long this been going on?” Curtis asked calmly, staring at the young woman going batshit Coyote Ugly on the bar. Billy Preston sparked through his brain: Songs without melodies, dances without steps.

Neither reference would help here: Nearly everybody at The Mill tonight was in Pampers or swimming around a scrotal sac when the Tyra Banks movie was burning up the box office, and Drake seemed as soulful as this crew ever got. And The Dancing Queen had no melody or harmony to move her around.

“Jesus, maybe a half hour,” Officer Brainard half-shouted over the laughter and oblivious buzz of patrons going through their own transactional motions. “Bartender tried to get her down, but then she went all Coyote Ugly.”

Curtis’ mustache twitched. “Thought you just had your junior prom last week.”

Brainard shrugged. “Dad has a hard-on for the D.A. MILF on Blue Bloods —Tom Brady’s ex? He watched the DVD on like a loop ‘til Mom confiscated it. Now she’s threatening to take his Firestick, pardon the pun.”

“Pardoned. So, what, you got the call?” The Dancing Queen pirouetted from the brink of the bar and began twerking frenetically.

“Was running the bars along The Drag, and the owner rushed out with his ear bleeding where she clipped him with a heel.”

The longest and liveliest of Millington’s four downtown blocks, in fact, boasted seven bars — the redneck country joint between the vape boutique and the cupcake shop; the two-tiered distillery/tapas dispensary that catered to the late-week Millington Performing Arts Center crowd; the white linen steak-and-seafood /brown liquor establishment that pulled in the 1 percenters from the corporate anchors and hospitals; Under the Rainbow, the LGBTQetc. lounge flanked by a hipster coffee house and the other cupcake shop; two burger-and-ball bars on the Courthouse Square; and the sad old tavern across from the City Complex that caught the Eagles/VFW exiles and overflow when it wasn’t servicing recidivists parched after a hard day in DUI court. And The Mill, downtown’s pretender to a club scene.

“So I asked Danni – the bartender -- how much our girl, er, woman, had had, and she said just a diet Coke.”

Det. Mead bumped Brainard a half-point on the MPD IQ chart. “You think she got roofied.”

“Yeah, thing is, University home game got over an hour ago, and Danni’s been mobbed, and she didn’t notice if and when any guys were with her at the bar. And when she started flossing it up up there, she knocked everything off the bar, including her soda. Her BFFs are at a table toward the bathrooms – the two trying to look invisible? Shelby, they said that’s her name, Shelby Nason. I thought I better not escalate shit if she was drugged. So I called you and the EMTs and tried to just keep her from hurting herself.”

“So, I’m supposed to, what, talk her down?” Curtis murmured as the young brunette launched into a creditable Cabbage Patch. “Shit. Watch she doesn’t fall.” The detective stepped over a deconstructed mosaic of broken glass, lemon crescents, and maraschinos, and turned to the assembled. “Ladies and gentleman, yo! Let’s give it up for Shelby Nason!”

The club fell silent.

“I said,” Curtis’ ordered, “can we please put our hands together for The Dancing Queen herself, Miss Shelby Nason?”

The suggestible Friday crowd broke into applause and, at Det. Mead’s stiff gesture, wobbled to its feet for a standing O. Shelby stumbled to a halt and bowed until Curtis, beaming, extended a hand and helped her off the copper bartop onto a stool and then to the faux-distressed cement.

“And that,” Curtis told Brainard, “is how we do it. Now, tape this shit off.”

**

As they saw Shelby off to St. Marks, another potential piece of the puzzle fell into place. Or, more accurately, was dropped. In the alley behind The Mill, with a bullet in the brain.

“All this shit with that psycho bitch had me rattled, so I took a smoke break out back,” Darren, The Mill’s owner growled, caressing his wounded lobe. “By the way, I am pressing charges.”

“Yeah,” Curtis said. “Lemme just address this little mess, then I’ll process your paperwork and get the State Excise guys in to see there’s any under-aged witnesses to your grievous injury. No? Delightful. So You didn’t see anybody lurking in the shadows, hear anything before you came out to compose yourself? Maybe check the man was actually dead?”

Seven months along, it was determined Chris was better off eyeballing the body in the crisp night air than daubing at potentially tainted puddles and glass shards inside. The tech grunted, hoisting fetal Grissom off the cracked concrete, and handed Curtis an a bagged pleather wallet. “Algor mortis barely kicked in – 97.8 – and body’s still warm and tender, so dead prolly less than an hour. Clean, round entry wound in the forehead, no exit, and best I can tell here, no close-range stippling. Shooter was at least 10 feet away.”

Curtis looked to the long-decommissioned fire door, then to the victim, and nodded. He thumbed open the cheap wallet, and examined its license window under the caged alley bulb. “Seth Morantz, ah, 26. Ring a bell?”

The owner made a Dick Wolf-caliber try at sheer bafflement.

“Fucking asshole,” a husky female voice muttered behind them. The short, fit bartender -- Danni, Curtis recalled – was silhouetted in the doorway, an ornately wrought Cthulhu glaring on her right bicep. “Caught him trying to slip something in some dumb college girl’s drink a few months back. Thought you banned him.”

“Look,” Darren sputtered. “I can’t be fucking everywhere and remember every creep. You know, just, just get the hell back behind the bar before somebody robs us blind.”

“Robs you blind,” Danni corrected. “And there’s like five or six cops in there, so I think maybe we’re OK. Anyway, the CSI type at the bar has a couple questions for you.”

Darren nodded eagerly and squeezed past Curtis and the gender-neutered johns. The barmaid trailed him at a more leisurely pace.

“Heard Brainard’s been doing some bar wench downtown,” Chris related. “Wonder maybe that’s her.”

“That’s the case, boy may well be in over his head,” Curtis observed.

“Speaking of which, during the little staff meeting here, I did a little forensic trigonometry. Specifically, the angle of Morantz’ gunshot wound. Coroner’s guy needs to confirm, but appears it’s angled downward, like the shooter was standing above him.”

Curtis glanced up at the club’s black second floor window. Only a few of The Drag’s storefront lofts had gone condo or apartment, most of the upper-floor offices had vanished even before COVID, and Curtis assumed The Mill used the space for storage. The window likely was sealed by time if not by human hand, and the opposite side of the alley was the ass end of a one-story piano showroom store on its last lacquered legs.

“Nah,” Chris preempted, training her mag light on Morantz . “Look at his knees. The left one, in particular.”

“Barked up pretty good. Like he went down hard. Or was forced to. You thinking execution?”

“From 10 feet away? I am not. Look at the right knee. Clean and unbloodied. Now, somebody tells you at gunpoint to get on your knees, you get on your knees ASAP, right? You go down hard.”

“On both knees. Lower yourself to one knee, you’re not going to bang it up this bad. So what do you think?”

“I think we need to ship this guy where we can make better guesstimates,” the pregnant tech opined. “I think we need to get some other underpaid schmuck off his couch, and I think I need to see they got some toasted almond fudge Blue Bunny and Salt and Vinegar Lays at the EZ Mart.”

“Kinda stereotypical,” Curtis suggested.

“Based on sound empirical evidence,” Chris noted.

**

“Guy looked like a fucking creep,” Lori Choi stated. Seth Morantz would by now be on a metal table in the County Jail sub-basement; Chris and her inside man had bagged, tagged, and bailed. Curtis was awaiting a report from the St. Mark’s ER, and Shelby Nason’s crew seemed a fine time killer.

“I thought he was kind of hot,” countered Tristan Waller, studying the now nearly empty club as if for any remaining heat.

“Yeah,” Choi breathed. “’Go for it,’ she tells Shel.”

“Didn’t see you stopping her.”

“But you’re sure it was Morantz?” Curtis intervened, pulling closer into the rear table. “The guy in the photo?”

Tristan sucked broodingly at what Det. Mead deduced to be a chocolatini. Putin was probably the only white Russian she knew, and that in all likelihood from SNL. “Didn’t you have anything besides a dead picture?”

“It was him,” Lori stated. “Same shirt and those lame LeBron Soldiers. He was giving Shel this stalkery smile from the bar, and Tristan talked her into getting some.”

“That’s just gross. I said maybe she should check him out. He was a snack.”

“In a Dateline sort of way,” Lori grunted.

“You guys come from the game?”

“This is our regular Friday night hang,” Tristan said. “Well, Lori and me, but Shelby just had a breakup, and, well, she’s real straight edge, doesn’t mind being DPD. You know what it’s like, right? Gotta have your famalam, your girls.”

“Totes,” Curtis concurred.

“Can we go now? I gotta, you know, like now.”

“Please. Enough clean-up in the aisles tonight.”

Lori blinked when Curtis failed to vacate with her friend. “What?”

Det. Mead leaned back. “You got kinda quiet there.”

“Okay, so I probably feel like a piece of shit for what happened with Shelby, especially when… Look, I know Tristan’s a lot, but she was just watching my back. I had a…thing…almost happen at a frat party when I was a freshman, and Tris has been on my ass to get out again. Shelby was just basically our ride – I only know her from work -- and Tris didn’t want to leave me alone. In fact, I think he was maybe checking me, and Tris sent Shelby in as like a decoy. Um, she OK?”

“ER says she’s fine, coming out of it a little, though she doesn’t remember much of anything. Here’s the thing, though. Bartender swears Shelby had just the Coke, but I could smell a whiff of something, rum maybe, when I dropped the curtain on her. Hospital’s going to screen her, but Doc says all signs point to ketamine-induced mania. You know what I’m talking, right? Club drug, used to be used as a horse tranquilizer, and it helps with depression and suicidal thoughts. But it also can cause a loss of motor coordination, hallucinations, and euphoria, like with our Dancing Queen.”

“Fuck.” Lori whispered. “And you think this guy, this Morantz, slipped it into her drink?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Curtis said. He pulled a small plastic Ziploc from his windbreaker. He shook a trio of mint-green caplets “Rohypnol green 542. The original roofie, flunitrazepam. These were tucked into Morantz’ wallet. No sign of ketamine.”

He studied Choi as a toilet flushed nearby, but she frowned blankly. The Larry David polygraph wasn’t flawless.

**

“Where you two going?” Darren demanded.

Xander, The Mill’s cook, backstepped into the doorway of the club owner’s cluttered office. “Somewhere. Mr. Detective here cleared us to go, and we need some liquid therapy.”

“Yeah, I don’t remember clearing you.”

A black-nailed middle finger materialized around the jamb, and the chef and the barmaid vanished in dopplered hilarity.

“Well?” Curtis rumbled.

Darren growled ineffectually and yanked his center drawer open. “See, right there all the time.”

“Hands off.” Det. Mead. “Officer?”

A gloved Brainard extracted the Glock 19, savored it like a fine Merlot, and nodded soberly to the detective before bagging the weapon.

“You just keep it with the paperclips, huh?” Curtis murmured. “You at least lock up when you’re working the house?”

Darren creaked silently back in his chair, calculating.

“Painful to watch,” Curtis told Brainard, glancing instead toward the orphan chocolatini on the table cattycorner from Darren’s cramped domain.

**

“You serious? Those two?” Brainard murmured as they stepped out onto The Drag. The cocktail set and the after-concert crowd had fled long ago, and Curtis could see the last of the pickled septuagenarians moving slowly and uncertainly in the subdued glow of the Justice Center steps down the way. Down past the cupcakes and hookahs, under a twitching neon boot, the whooping had merely begun.

Curtis shrugged. “I’m exercising my God-granted right to speculate? Chris says Nason’s Diet Coke – what she could mop off the floor – was just Diet Coke. A broken highball glass – that was the soda – and the mortal remains of a couple beer mugs and a wineglass, accounted for by the witnesses up at the bar. Want to see the disposition of Choi’s attempted assault on the campus – she still seems to be nursing the PTSD, and Walking Emoji Girl seems protective. This is their regular ‘hang,’ so maybe they knew about the gun and spotted Seth the serial stalker step out back.”

The uniform threw a chin-wave at one of The Drag’s homeless children of the night. “Maybe the whole dance thing was staged, like, you know, a distraction to get the boss man out of the office and, and…”

“Avenge Choi’s honor? Nason self-medicating was a nice touch. See, this is why you should never speculate alone. Got to have your squad, your famalam.”

“You having an embolism or something?” Brainard asked. “I think you need to get home to Mrs. Mead. You saw the monitor in dickweed’s office – he’s probably got a camera on the bar. I’ll drop back in and make sure it’s secure. Go home.”

Curtis nodded, then turned. “By the way, Chris says you might have something going with the bartender?”

Brainard’s laughter crackled through the night. “Danni. No, I don’t think so.”

The detective frowned, then thumbed his fob. The SUV, angled in on the next block, blinked, illuminating a multicolored mural. After a tick, he raised the fob again with a staccato bark of his own.

**

“Clever,” Curtis grinned. “‘Somewhere.’”

The Under The Rainbow crowd was beginning to wane a bit at midnight, though Karaoke Night waged on, Xander performing tenor duties quite wretchedly.

“Dad used to watch it on TV every year when he was a kid,” Danni half-shouted over an improvised, butchery of Dua Lipa. “I caught it at the University Theater when I was a lit student for about five minutes. There was a blue shitload of subtext in the thing, which makes it even more hilarious Dad basically stroked out when I came out. When I click my ruby slippers, this is where I wind up. Kind of surprised to see you here, though.”

“We’re making great strides in homophobic remediation,” Det. Mead reported. The off-duty bartender snorted. “And in the end, a safe space is a safe space, right?”

“Yeah, guess I see that, though the vibe here’s been a little off since Orlando, you know? No, way off.”

Orlando, Ferguson, Stonewall, Charlestown, Laramie, Minneapolis. Only the geography ever seemed to change.

“That what this was tonight?” Curtis pressed on. “Staking out a safe place? For the Shelbys and Loris and straight-up fools like Tristan?” Danni looked off abruptly toward the cacophonous crew at the mike, then locked self-consciously back on Curtis. The cop leaned back, one eyebrow cocked. “Nobody’s safe out there, really, are they? You just wanted to even the odds a little.”

It came out in a rush. “Even that cracker dump down the street showed him the street, none too gentle, I hear. They got a Polaroid under the cash register and a no-fly gallery on the backbar. A customer’s a customer, Darren says. Seth was back three days after I told him I’d put his balls in a blender he ever showed his face again. He comes in before shift change, like dares me to say anything. Darren says just watch him — yeah, on a Friday night, along with all the other creeps sniffing around for prospects.

“Monday night, he offered to buy me a drink at closing, said I should learn to loosen up. Your guy Brainard offered to keep an eye on things, but shit, you know what The Drag gets like on a Friday, and fucking Darren doesn’t want a ‘police presence’ in the bar.”

Curtis sampled his coffee, gratified by the scalding surge of energy. “So this was a preemptive strike. Rum and coke, my guess, with a bracing shot of Special K? Cock-block him, give him a taste of his own? ‘Cept then Morantz finds a hot prospect, maybe just to bait you. Shelby’s abstaining, but that’s usually just a challenge to a guy like that. Girl grabs his special cocktail by mistake, takes a good slug before she realizes. You probably poured him a stiff one so the ketamine would hit harder. And it did. Hit Shelby, too, and when she took the stage, Morantz took off for the alley. The boss shows up, and the whole thing turns into a may-lay. Hit you what happened, and you got rid of Seth’s drink before the Dancing Queen cleared the bar. Then, while everybody’s enjoying the show, you grabbed Darren’s Glock.

“It looked at first like Morantz was executed, but the K was kicking in. His legs quit cooperating, and he went down maybe as you fired. You should take it up with your lawyer why you took the shot. No video on the alley, but we’re guessing the bar cam will tell its own little part of the story. Officer Brainard’s on his way after he settles a little kerfluffle at The Boot Scoot, but maybe you’d like one more for the road? Don’t know about you, but I don’t like to speculate or drink alone.”