On the Rocks (A Ruby Steele Cozy Mystery—Book 1)

CHAPTER ONE

Ruby Steele could tell these guys were trouble.

There were four of them, all beefy and blond and in their forties. Looked like new arrivals to the islands judging by their sunburns. Drunk, too.

Aggressively drunk.

They swaggered into the Pirate’s Cove in a tight group and stopped just inside the door. Their eyes took in the giant treasure chest overflowing with oversized doubloons in the center of the room, the rigging hanging from the ceiling, the barstools made of barrels sporting the inscription “Yo Ho Ho Rum,” and the stuffed parrots perched atop the bar.

One of the newcomers turned to Ruby and in some Eastern European accent she couldn’t identify asked, “Hey, we in Caribbean or in movie set?”

“A bit of both. What will you have?” Ruby asked.

“A round of vodka and four sluts.” That got a burst of laughter from his buddies as they sidled up to the bar.

Ruby ignored the joke and poured the vodka. Anyone who passed over Bahamian rum for the bottom shelf vodka this bar served was a fool.

The leader tapped a stubby finger on the bar. “Leave here.”

He said it like an order, like she was a servant.

Ruby left the bottle, making a mental note to charge them for the whole bottle even though it was only two-thirds full.

So far it had been a quiet night at the Pirate’s Cove. Ruby had only cleaned up two puddles of vomit, broken up one drunken fistfight, set a dislocated finger after a tourist fell off the treasure chest, and endured an hour-long lecture about how aliens had a UFO base beneath the Bahamas they used for human experiments.

Yeah, that was a quiet night. And she had a feeling it was about to stop being quiet.

She deserved better than this.

Granted, it paid the bills, she got an employee discount on booze, and the regulars all cared about her, but did she really have to work in a dusty old dump one step away from drinking in an alley?

Sure, she’d fled to Nassau to become anonymous. That didn’t mean she wanted to end up on the tropical version of skid row.

As she poured another shot of rum for a Bahamian hotel worker who couldn’t sit on his barrel straight, she surveyed the bar’s dim interior. The heaps of fake gold piled up next to the treasure chest had lost most of their paint thanks to drunks like that tourist clambering all over them. Now the Spanish doubloons looked like the aluminum they really were. The plaster coral on the walls was chipped and faded and stained with God-knows-what. And the bathrooms? Better to call them the bilges.

At least no one would think of looking for her here.

The owner, a deeply tanned Englishman named Neville Patterson who wore Bermuda shorts and a loud floral shirt that made him look like a tourist even though he’d been living here ten years, came out of the back office and up to her and her fellow bartender, Kristiano Rolle. He had his pirate hat on and a patch over one eye.

“How goes the sailing, me hearties?”

“Stop,” Ruby said.

“Everything is shipshape, captain!” Kristiano replied, a wide grin cracking his dark Bahamian face. For some reason the big lug thought their boss’s pirate act was funny. Ruby didn’t. None of the customers did. And the Eastern Europeans were looking at Neville like he was mental.

Kristiano laughed, though. The big teddy bear. Three hundred pounds of muscle, so kind of an unusual teddy bear, but he always laughed at everyone’s jokes.

The only joke Ruby saw here was her life.

At the moment there were about twenty regulars, mostly men but a scattering of women. Ruby and Kristiano kept busy serving beer and shots to a mixture of locals, expats, and a lone tourist who, after having his finger reset, ordered a round for everyone in the place. He even offered a drink to Ruby and Kristiano. A sharp glance from Neville kept Ruby from accepting. No drinking until after her shift. Then it was open season on her liver.

Ruby shot back a look of her own. Neville wasn’t intimidated. Nobody was intimidated by her anymore.

She shrugged it off. She couldn’t blame Neville for stopping her from having that drink. There were enough drunks in here. The Eastern Europeans at the end of the bar were nearly done with that bottle already.

As she moved up and down the bar, she overheard the same familiar, comfortable snatches of conversation she always did.

“The lizards from the constellation Draco are fighting the greys from the galactic rim who want …”

“… this German was so sunburned he couldn’t use towels, so he had room service bring him up Handi Wipes!”

“My kids? Yeah, they’ll visit sometime …”

“Washa mean I’d hadda enuf? One more shot won’t kill you. Um, I mean me. Ruby! Two shots over ’ere. Da usual.”

“You puke on the floor again and you’re cleaning it up,” Ruby said with more heat than she felt, grabbing a bottle of rum and refilling the shot glasses of a retired insurance salesman from New Jersey and a native scuba and surf instructor a third his age who had struck up an unlikely bromance over hard liquor. Zoomer, the bar’s resident capuchin monkey, sat on the barrel between them eating from a bowl of salted nuts. He slapped the bar with his hairy little hand and Ruby poured a drop of rum into the bowl. Zoomer jumped up and down on the barrel and clapped.

“Uh-oh,” Kristiano muttered.

Ruby followed his gaze.

At the other end of the bar, the Eastern Europeans were now openly staring at Desaray, the Bahamian woman who had been complaining about the sunburnt German. She worked as a chambermaid in one of the hotels. Petite and dark, she was a regular here, drinking away the stress of a menial job.

Desaray didn’t need one of the Slavs sliding up to her and offering her a drink.

She took a slug of her beer as a silent statement of the obvious—that she preferred to drink alone. She was friendly enough to the regulars, because they all knew she had a husband and two kids, but gave everyone else the cold shoulder.

“Come on,” the guy whined. “Just one. Then sit on my lap while I tell you about life in Bucharest.”

Desaray looked him right in the eye. “There’s a whorehouse two doors down on the left.”

She wasn’t lying. It was that kind of neighborhood.

Ruby moved toward the group.

“Easy,” Kristiano whispered.

“I can take care of myself,” Ruby replied.

Kristiano frowned. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Yeah, she could take care of herself, especially against these jokers. Fit, all four of them, but drunk with no situational awareness and all bunched up. No spacing. She could knock them down like bowling pins.

The guy was still trying to sweet talk Desaray, getting in her face and not noticing that her leaning so far back that she almost toppled off her fake barrel of rum was a sure sign she wasn’t interested.

Ruby shoved a bowl of nuts in front of the letch, hoping to distract him. Women and food, two good ways to distract men. Most guys thought only with their stomach and something a bit further south.

Unfortunately, the southern portion of his anatomy won.

“Come on, girl, you never been with Romanian man before?”

“I’m a smoker,” Desaray told him.

“So?”

“With the amount of alcohol on your breath, if I lit up, this whole place would explode.”

“Bitch!” the man snorted, then turned to survey the rest of the room. Of the three other women, one was making out in the corner with the local pot dealer, and the other two were old enough to be his mother.

He turned back to the bar and his gaze settled on Ruby.

Ruby sighed.

Here it comes.

“You’re a good looker. Fit too. You work out?”

“I have black belts in three different martial arts.”

All the Romanians laughed. No one else did.

Zoomer scampered over and started eating the man’s nuts.

“Gah!” the Romanian shouted, jumping back. The shout startled Zoomer and he leapt up into the rigging.

“Careful, you’re scaring him,” Ruby said. Her heart beat faster now.

Please go away. Please don’t make me snap.

One of the Romanians said something in his own language, pointed at Kristiano, and made monkey noises. They all laughed. Kristiano ignored them.

“Hey!” one of the drunks called over to him. “You speak English?”

“It’s our national language,” Kristiano said with a grin. His patience never ceased to amaze her.

“That monkey. He your son?”

Even Kristiano couldn’t grin at that. He turned away to help another customer.

Oh, hell. You idiots are going to make me do it, aren’t you?

The other three Romanians moved over to check out Desaray like she was a side of beef. The one facing Ruby leaned over the counter. Ruby could have taken a step back but decided not to. He would have sensed it as weakness. Maybe that would have defused the situation, maybe that would make it worse. Ruby didn’t know—drunks were always hard to predict—and she was beginning not to care.

The Romanian leered at her, taking in her spiky brown hair cut close at the sides, her sparkling blue eyes, and her trim and athletic thirty-year-old body. He looked like he was trying to come up with a witty one-liner. It took some time.

“We got nice bungalow on beach. If you so tough, maybe you take on all four of us.”

If they had left at that moment, stopped disturbing the closest thing Ruby had to family (pathetic as that was to admit), she would have swallowed her pride with several swallows of rum in the ladies’ room and tucked it away as just another bad memory from a bad job, but this guy was far too stupid for that.

Instead, he did the dumbest thing he could.

He grabbed her breast, his face cracking into the grin of a naughty schoolboy. His friends laughed.

Ruby did nothing except slap his hand away. No shouting, no stepping back, no calling for the huge black man she shared her job and troubles with.

Inside, though, she was shaking. Adrenaline coursed through her system.

Her lack of reaction confused the breast grabber. He stared at her.

“You have three seconds to get out,” she told him.

The guy only laughed.

A right cross to the bridge of the nose? Lay him out in one punch like I did with Christie Sanders in the Northeastern Regionals? Or a quick leap over the counter followed by a roundhouse kick to the jaw like I did with Melanie Hampton in the European Finals? Stop him from talking for a while.

But you can’t. If the cops come, they might look into who you are. And if they do that …

The guy grabbed his crotch. “Stupid bitch. Get us another bottle then come back to bungalow with us. You too.”

He grabbed Desaray by the shoulder, swung her around, and planted a rough kiss on her lips.

Ruby grabbed the man by the ears and slammed him chin first onto the counter with a loud crack of breaking teeth. As he fell to the floor, Ruby vaulted over the counter to end up in a fighter’s stance, arms up to protect her head.

Protecting her head was vital. Another bad blow to the head could kill her.

A simple front kick to the solar plexus sent the nearest guy into his neighbor. They both ended up on the floor. The last man standing edged to the left, getting free from the bar area.

More free to move.

His arms were up, and he got in a fighter’s stance too.

No training, from what Ruby could judge, just plenty of experience beating up fellow drunks in dive bars.

She dropped to the floor so his haymaker went wide. The easiest thing to do at this point would be to grab the man by the balls and give them a good twist, but she didn’t want to be accused of sexism. Instead she swept his legs, sending him crashing down.

Ruby turned in time to see the sole survivor stagger to his feet. He was the one who had gotten knocked down but whom she hadn’t directly hit.

She proceeded to correct that oversight.

A quick jab to the stomach doubled him over, then she threw him toward the door.

It helped that the Professor was just coming in. The man flew right past him and landed in the street. The Professor adjusted his glasses, brushed a hand down the front of his immaculate white suit, glanced at Ruby, and said in a Southern drawl, “Young lady, if Hemingway were alive, I do believe he’d buy you a drink.”

“Hemingway was a misogynistic slob. I can buy my own drinks.”

Ruby dragged two of the groaning forms out the door, saving the man who had come onto her for last.

The Professor sat at one of the recently vacated barrels. “Kristiano, a mint julep, please.”

“Coming right up, Professor.”

Ruby lifted up the last Romanian and dragged him out to the street, piling him up on top of his friends. Desaray stood nearby with her phone.

“Is my face in the video?” Ruby asked.

“I know the rules.”

“Will this be another viral video for your YouTube channel?” the pot dealer asked Desaray as they walked back inside.

“Gotta save for my kids’ college somehow,” Desaray replied.

“Don’t come back!” Ruby shouted over her shoulder as she slammed the door shut behind her.

“Those guys deserve to be probed,” the saloon’s resident ufologist declared.

“Care to volunteer?” Ruby asked.

The rake-thin Bahamian, who had never revealed his name because “they” were after him, shook his head and took a sip from his beer. “I’m not from a sufficiently advanced species. I wouldn’t be able to do it right.”

Ruby made a beeline to the ladies’ room. Holding her breath against the stink, she went to one of the stalls, pulled out a flask duct taped to the inside of the toilet paper dispenser, and took a deep swig, almost dropping it, her hands shook so much.

She tried to control her breathing. Tried to control the shaking all over her body. Another slug of rum helped. The third helped even more.

The door to the bathroom creaked open. She spun around, ready to smash the bottle into the face of whichever Romanian was dumb enough to come back for more.

Kristiano filled up the doorway, concern etched into his face.

He said nothing, only moved to her and wrapped his huge arms around her.

Ruby didn’t cry. Ruby never cried. Instead she merely buried her face in his obsidian slab of a chest and felt the tension ease away.

“This place is driving me crazy,” she whispered.

Kristiano plucked the rum from her hand and stuck it in his pocket.

“This place is keeping you sane,” he replied. “You’re the one driving you crazy.”

It was five in the morning, and the last drinkers had left half an hour ago. Kristiano and Ruby tossed a coin to see who cleaned the bathroom. Kristiano lost, cursed, got a chaste peck on the cheek as compensation, and lumbered off to mop up the nightly spill of toxic waste. That gave Ruby the slightly less offensive job of wiping the tables and sweeping the floor. Once she was done with that, she squeezed past Neville counting the money from the register and emptied the tip jar. She counted out half, slapped down most of it in front of her boss, and took a bottle of rum from behind the counter.

“I should get rid of the employee discount,” Neville grumbled.

“You do that, I’ll kick your ass.”

“You kick too much ass already. What if those Romanians had called the cops?”

“After losing against a lone girl? I don’t think so.”

Neville shrugged, then put a hand on her shoulder and another hand on the bottle.

“How about you take a night off?”

Ruby smiled. “You offering me a paid vacation?”

Neville slumped. “No, I mean—”

“I better take out the trash.” Ruby pulled the bottle from his hand, put it in her bag, and got back to work. She could feel Neville’s eyes on her. She didn’t look back at him. She didn’t want to give him a chance to start talking again.

Without another word she emptied the bins and, with a heavy trash bag in each fist, kicked open the back door.

The back alley was narrow and dark, and still retained much of the warmth of the tropical night. The saloon stood on a strip of cheap stores and bars. Behind that loomed a large warehouse whose wall made an unbroken slab of concrete for the other side of the alley. A dumpster stood at each end. Ruby marched for the nearest one, then stopped short.

A dark figure in a tattered baseball cap detached itself from the shadow of the dumpster and disappeared around the corner.

For a second Ruby thought it might be a mugger. Street crime was on the rise in Nassau. The way the guy moved off showed he wasn’t interested in sticking around. Probably had stopped here to take a piss like lots of people did. She could smell it every night.

Ruby fantasized about sticking the guy’s face in his own puddle of pee like a poorly housetrained dog. She didn’t go after him, though. She saved her skills for the truly undeserving, not the merely disgusting or obnoxious.

You’re still pissed off about those guys. Go home and have at least half a bottle of rum,

she told herself as she set the trash bags next to the dumpster. She lifted up the plastic lid.

And froze.

Letting out a choked cry, Ruby stumbled back until she hit the far side of the alley, cold sweat breaking out all over her body and her heart hammering in her chest.

A body lay amid the trash bags, its throat neatly slit.