Chapter 8: Oyster Roast

Lawton called Libba from the roof.

She picked up on the first ring.

"Somebody just wired four million dollars out of the household account to Nassau," he said.

"Lawton, I've been sitting next to you since nine." Her voice was hurt and gentle. "Ask anyone at that table."

He hung up on her.

He stood at the rail with the phone in his fist.

"She's right," I said. "She was in the room the whole time."

"Then somebody else has the keys."

Neither of us said who.

We both thought it.

Back at Sallie's, I put my apron on and did the math on a bar napkin.

Thirty-eight thousand six hundred dollars.

Sallie cleared about two thousand a week in a good month, and October wasn't a good month.

"Oyster roast," I said.

Sallie looked up from the fryer.

"We do one every January."

"We do one Saturday. On the dock. Forty dollars a head, all you can eat, and the bar's open."

"Where am I getting oysters for three hundred people by Saturday?"

The old shrimper with the bad hip was sitting at the end of the bar.

He set his Pabst down.

"I know where," he said.

By Wednesday half the shrimp fleet had promised a bushel.

Clancy said he'd run the fire, which mostly meant he'd stand next to it and tell people he was running it.

The fry cook made a sign in red marker. SAVE SALLIE'S. OYSTERS, BEER, AND A GOOD CAUSE.

I posted it everywhere I could think of.

Saturday came up blue and windy.

By four o'clock the line went out the gravel lot and down the road.

Clancy had the fire going on a sheet of steel over cinder blocks.

Oysters steamed under wet burlap, and the smell came off the creek like low tide and smoke.

I worked the bar alone.

I had a cash box, a stack of plastic cups and the best ponytail of my life.

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