Liquor Page 27

  The walk-in, Rickey thought. Oh, fuck. He had almost forgotten the dustup on his last day at Escargot’s, but now it came back to him in vivid detail. How had Mike blown it to such ungodly proportions? It didn’t matter. Mike was fried, toasted, over the edge, and Rickey had no idea what to say to him. “I never even met your father,” he tried.

  “You lie,” Mike said again. He half-rose from the artichoke box, leaned across the space that separated them, and almost tenderly placed the muzzle of the gun against Rickey’s forehead. Three thoughts ran simultaneously through Rickey’s mind, erasing all else: that he hoped G-man wouldn’t be the one to find his body, that he was glad his mother had lived to see him open his own restaurant, and that this was a goddamn gyp of a way to die.

  Something thumped against the outside of the walk-in door. Mike’s head turned a fraction of an inch, and Rickey saw his chance. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it would have to do. He brought his left hand up sharply and pushed Mike’s arm aside. With his right hand he grabbed the vegetable peeler out of his jacket and jammed it into Mike’s throat.

  The gun went off in his face. The muzzle flash blinded him, and he felt a searing pain.

  G-man yanked the door open and saw Mike reel to one side, his right hand clutching a pistol. He kicked Mike in the back as hard as he could. He was still wearing his heavy work-boots, and Mike sprawled forward onto the walk-in floor. The gun went spinning away. Terrance, right behind G-man, leaned over and grabbed it.

  “Rickey?” G-man hauled Rickey off the floor, touched the blood that covered the side of his head. “Rickey!”

  “I’m OK,” Rickey said. “I think it just grazed my ear. Stings like a bastard.”

  G-man looked closely at Rickey’s ear. There was a definite notch in the top of it, but no other damage. For a long moment he just stared at Rickey, as if assuring himself that Rickey really was alive. Then he let go of Rickey’s shoulders, turned, and kicked Mike in the ribs. Mike groaned and rolled halfway over. Some black plastic object was sticking out of his throat. He tried to crawl away, but there was nowhere to go. G-man pounced on him, knelt on his chest, and punched him in the face.

  “Leave it, G!” said Terrance. “You gonna kill him!”

  “I don’t care!”

  G-man grabbed the black plastic thing and yanked it out of Mike’s throat. He didn’t register that it was a vegetable peeler; he saw only sharp metal, which was just what he wanted. He was about to jam it into the underside of Mike’s jaw when somebody caught his wrist. He turned on the person, ready to attack them too, but it was Rickey.

  “Come on, dude,” said Rickey. “I’m fine. I need you over here. Forget about him.”

  Lenny made it halfway to the restaurant before he got pulled over for speeding. “There’s some kind of hostage situation,” he implored. “Check it out on your radio.” The cop just kept examining his driver’s license as if translating the Rosetta Stone. Lenny pulled out his trump card: “Come eat at my restaurant. Either of them. Any time you want.”

  “I’m from California,” said the cop. “I hate all that rich stuff. You people are going to kill yourselves.”

  Lenny accepted his ticket and drove a little more slowly the rest of the way. Liquor’s parking lot was a riot of whirling blue and red lights. Lenny saw paramedics loading a stretcher into an ambulance. He pulled up, got out, and was relieved to see a detective he knew. “What’s going on, Frank?”

  “It’s all over,” said the detective. “You know these people, right? You can go on in.”

  “Is anybody dead?”

  “Everybody’s OK except that one guy they just put in the ambulance. I don’t know who he is.”

  The restaurant’s interior was a solid wall of uniforms. Lenny pushed his way through to the kitchen. The crowd was thickest around the open door of the walk-in. He saw Terrance, Tanker, and Mo talking to cops. Despite what the detective had told him, he was almost afraid to look into the fridge.

  Terrance caught sight of him. “Hey, Lenny,” he said. “Everything’s cool. They’re fine.” He stepped out of the doorway, and Lenny saw Rickey and G-man sitting on a tomato box, their arms around each other, their foreheads pressed together. Their whites were bloodstained and one side of Rickey’s bleached hair was stiff with gore, but they appeared reasonably intact. An invisible bubble seemed to envelop them, as if they had simply shut out all the surrounding people and events. Lenny was about to turn away when Rickey looked up and saw him.

  “Hey, Lenny,” he said. “I guess you weren’t such a dick-head for giving me that cell phone. Thanks a million.”

  chapter 31

  (From Sid Schwanz’s column, one year later)

  This just in from my erstwhile Fair Grounds correspondent, the Sheik of Arabi and Chalmette:

  Q. If a little boy wears his daddy’s trousers, what New Orleans street corner is he standing on?

  A. Toulouse and Broad.

  OK, so the Sheik ain’t much when it comes to jokes. But it’s a good way to remember the location of Liquor, the local restaurant that just snagged a James Beard Foundation nomination for Best Newcomer. That is, one of the best new restaurants in the USA. The winner will be announced in May at a gala gathering of restaurant professionals in New York City. (Bet they don’t serve rubber chicken at that banquet.)

  Used to be when you thought of Broad Street in Mid-City, you thought of the jail if you’re an optimist and the morgue if you’re a pessimist. Now you might find yourself wondering where you should eat. The stretch of Broad between Tulane and Esplanade looks to be our new Restaurant Row, with at least five chowhouses opening their doors during the past year. At the head of the trend and still the hottest ticket of them all is Liquor. The few readers who don’t know it for the eclectic French-influenced menu (hey, that’s how they told me to describe it) may recognize it as the scene of the 1980 Red Gravy Murder and last year’s Chef Stalker case. I tried to do an investigative follow-up on these cases, but had little luck. The Red Gravy folks all seem to have gone to that big pasta buffet in the sky, and Chefs John Rickey and Gary Stubbs of Liquor said “No comment” (actually that’s a polite version of what they really said). Michael Mouton, nastily but not fatally injured in the events of the case, hasn’t answered my letter. Sources tell me the Angola Prison P.O. is pretty slow—I’ll let you know if I hear from him.

  Fortunately you don’t have to rely on my journalistic prowess, since Stiletto Press has published Dark Kitchen, the new book by my colleague Chase Haricot. A riveting account of the two cases and the strange connections between them, Dark Kitchen has already topped local bestseller lists and could end up being the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil of the restaurant world. You heard it here first…

  “God, I hope not,” said Rickey. He’d already seen customers carrying copies of Dark Kitchen, though so far nobody had asked him to sign one. He wasn’t sure what he would say if they did. He hated the book, but between it, the four beans Haricot had given them, and the Beard nomination, they had as much business as they could handle.

  “Well,” said G-man, “you didn’t have to let Haricot interview you for the damn thing.”

  “I thought it would turn out even worse if I didn’t.”

  “Yeah. So why’d you cut your hair so short? It wasn’t to show off that notch in your ear, was it?”

  “No!” Rickey ran his hand over his close-cropped hair. “I just got sick of all that bleach.”

  “Uh huh.”

  It was inventory day, the first Monday of the month, and they were sitting in the bar after having counted, weighed, and made a note of every last item in the place. They had decided to drink some Irish whiskey with an eye toward featuring it in tomorrow’s dinner special. Highball glasses of Old Bushmills, Jameson’s, and Power’s were lined up on the bar. They’d been sipping these whiskies for about an hour, batting around ideas for the special but in no hurry to decide on anything, before Rickey picked up the newspaper. He had already read Schwanz�
��s column early this morning, but he felt compelled to glance at it again and again throughout the day, just as he had done with the four-bean review, the Big Easy magazine profile, and the two-page Gourmet article entitled “Stalker in the Fridge.”

  Haricot’s book freaked him out, though. A newspaper story was gone after a day, a magazine article after a month. That book would be in the stores for God knew how long, might even be some kind of big hit if you believed Schwanz. What if people started coming in just because of that, crowding out diners who actually cared about the food?

  They’d have to find ways to keep that from happening, Rickey thought. The book, the Beard nomination, the endorsement offer he’d recently gotten from a cell phone company (“Cell phones save lives,” they wanted him to say, smiling earnestly into the camera)—he couldn’t let himself start thinking any of it was too important. If he got distracted, the restaurant would find some way to smack the shit out of him, reminding him that it demanded his sole, undivided attention at all times. This happened on a regular basis, and Rickey was almost used to it by now.

  “I was looking at the books last night,” said G-man. He had rediscovered a talent for math forgotten since high school and was now doing all Liquor’s accounts. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “The profit we turned since last September is more than we made in our entire previous careers.”

  “That’s kinda sick.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “Probably we ought to hand out some more raises,” Rickey said.

  “Hell, we ought to do that just for loyalty.” They were amazed to still have the same kitchen crew they’d started out with. No one had been fired; no one had quit. There had been plenty of turnover in the front of the house, but the kitchen was solid. Not even a dishwas her had left. Rickey and G-man had gained major points with those guys when they tracked down Wardell, the young night porter Mike Mouton had chased off, and told him his job was waiting for him if he still wanted it.

  “Let’s do it, then,” said Rickey. He took a long sip of Bushmills. “You know what this would be really good with?”

  G-man pushed his shades up on his nose and waited for Rickey to tell him.

  “Lobster flambé au whiskey … we could roll it out to the table on a gueridon.”

  “What’s a gueridon?”

  “Remember those carts they use to do the bananas Foster tableside at Commander’s? Those are gueridons.”

  “Oh my God.” G-man rolled his eyes. “Here we go with the fossil foods again.”

  “It’s not a fossil—it’s a classic. There’s a difference, you know.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “The classic stuff still tastes good.”

  “OK, but why you gotta put shit on a gueridon?”

  “They do it at Commander’s.”

  “And it’s cheesy there, too.”

  “Bite your tongue,” said Rickey. “It’s great. It’s drama. It’s fucking rock and roll.”

  They were still debating the merits of a gueridon fleet when Lenny and Anthony B came into the bar laughing like a couple of loons at something Karl had said to them. “Looks like we’re not the only ones getting drunk on a Monday,” said G-man.

  “Aw, we just had a few beers,” Anthony said.

  “You had more’n a few,” said Lenny. “I thought the bar owner was supposed to be a model of sobriety.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  Lenny slung an arm around Rickey’s shoulders. “I heard some news,” he said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “It’s just a rumor at this point.”

  “Well, then don’t tell me,” said Rickey. “I hate rumors.”

  “But it’s a well-substantiated rumor.”

  “It’s about the Beard Awards,” Anthony said, and Lenny shot him a dirty look.

  “What?” said Rickey. “What is it?” The usual ambient sounds of the restaurant—the hum of the air conditioning system, the traffic outside—suddenly seemed very far away. He could feel the warm buzz of the whiskey creeping up on him.

  “Can’t tell you,” said Lenny. “Let’s just say you might have to reconcile yourselves to going to New York at least once in your lives.”

  Rickey drew himself up straight on his barstool. G-man was grinning at him, but Rickey felt very serious. Seriousness seemed to befit the occasion. He picked up the glass of Bushmills, tipped a solemn toast to the three cooks who had brought him to this moment, and knocked back the remainder of his shot.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “what are you drinking? The next round’s on me.”

  about the author

  Poppy Z. Brite is the author of six novels, three short story collections, and a fair bit of miscellanea. She began her career in the horror genre, but gradually became more interested in writing about the unique culinary subculture she knew from working in several restaurants and being married to a chef for more than a decade. Her other works about Rickey, G-Man, and the Stubbs family include the novel The Value of X, several stories in the collection The Devil You Know, and the forthcoming novel Prime. Brite lives in New Orleans with her husband, Chef Chris DeBarr. Find out more about her at www.poppyzbrite.com.

  Copyright © 2004 by Poppy Z. Brite

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  THREE RIVERS PRESS and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brite, Poppy Z.

  Liquor: a novel / Poppy Z. Brite.—1st ed.

  1. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction.

  3. Restaurants—Fiction. 4. Unemployed—Fiction. 5. Cookery—

  Fiction. 6. Cooks—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.R4967 L57 2004

  813′.54—dc22

  2003017508

  eISBN: 978-0-307-53772-0

  v3.0_r1

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