A Song of Shadows by John Connolly Page A

preferring to leave the running of the place to its chief bartender and ten percent shareholder, Lenny Tedesco. Skettle liked to keep quiet about the fact that he had a big piece of the Hurricane Hatch. His family, from what Lenny knew of them, contained a high percentage of holy rollers, the kind who visited the Holy Land Experience down in Orlando a couple of times a year, and regarded the Goliath Burger at the theme park’s Oasis Palms Café as damn fine dining, although Lenny doubted if they would have used that precise term to describe it. Lenny Tedesco had never been to the Holy Land Experience, and had zero intention of ever visiting it. He reckoned that a Christian theme park wasn’t really the place for a Jew, not even a nonobservant Jew like himself, and he didn’t care if it did boast a recreation of a Jerusalem street market.
    Then again, the Hurricane Hatch was about as authentic in Florida bar terms as the Holy Land Experience was as an accurate reflection of the spiritual makeup of Jerusalem in the first century AD. It looked like what a classic Florida beach bum’s bar was supposed to look like – wood, stuffed fish, a picture of Hemingway – but had only been built at the start of the nineties, in anticipation of a housing development named Ocean Breeze Condos which never got further than a series of architect’s plans, a hole in the ground, and a tax write-off. The Hurricane Hatch remained, though, and had somehow managed to prosper, in large part because of Lenny and his wife, Pegi, who was a good fry cook of the old school. She prepared fried oysters that could make a man weep, the secret ingredients being creole seasoning, fine yellow cornmeal, and Diamond Crystal kosher – kosher – salt. Neither did Skettle evince too much concern about making a large profit, just as long as the Hatch didn’t lose money. Lenny figured that Skettle, who didn’t drink alcohol and appeared to subsist primarily on chicken tenders and chocolate milk, just enjoyed secretly giving the finger to his holier-than-thou, pew-polishing relatives by owning a bar. Lenny’s wife, however, claimed that Skettle’s sister Lesley, a Praise Jesus type of the worst stripe, was not above polishing other things too, and could give a pretty accurate description of half the motel ceilings between Jacksonville and Miami, giving rise to her nickname of ‘Screw-Anything Skettle’.
    Lenny was alone in the bar. This was one of Pegi’s nights off, and Lenny had sent the replacement cook, Fran, home early, because he knew she’d have better luck selling fried oysters in an abandoned cemetery than in the Hurricane Hatch on this particular evening. Midweeks were always quiet, but lately they had been quieter than usual, and even weekend business was down from previous years. There just wasn’t as much money around as before, but the Hatch was surviving.
    Lenny glanced at his watch. It was nine-thirty. He’d give it until ten, maybe ten-thirty, and then call it a night. Anyway, he was in no hurry to go home – not that he didn’t love his wife, because he did, but sometimes he thought he loved the Hatch more. He was at peace there, regardless of whether it was empty or full. In fact, on evenings like this, with the wind blowing gently outside, and the boards creaking and rattling, and the sound of the waves in the distance, visible as the faintest of phosphorescent glows, and the TV on, and a soda water and lime on the bar before him, he felt that he would be quite content just to stay this way forever. The only blot on his happiness – if blot was a sufficient word for it, which he very much doubted – was the subject of the TV news report currently playing in front of him. He watched the footage of the two old men being transported by United States Marshals into the holding facility somewhere in New York City: Engel and Fuhrmann, with almost two centuries of life clocked up between them, Engel barely able to walk unaided, Fuhrmann