Doyle always sits at the far corner facing the entrance, affording him a view of the day drinkers perched along the dark walnut bar, the traffic in and out, plus a wide, clean space to set his paper and mug of coffee. Sometimes he works on the crossword until the stupid puns start to annoy him. Mostly he reads the sports page even though he believes sports, like everything else, has been corrupted by money. The hard news he scans so he can pretend to be informed. Periodically, Tina, the day shift bartender, wanders down to his end of the bar to refill his coffee and check if he wants anything else. He never does, but she asks anyway, out of habit, Doyle thinks, a long-inculcated Midwest courtesy. She is a nice girl, except she’s a pushing forty and he shouldn’t refer to her as a girl, even to himself. His daughter would tell him that. But he is pushing sixty with a hard-to-shake Midwest chauvinism.
At 3:00 PM on a Friday, he watches Tina coming his way— slim figure in black jeans and a white T-shirt, short dark hair framing a narrow face. She looks tired but smiles as she pours.
“Freshly brewed.”
He nods. “I can smell it. Thanks.”
“Anything else?”
“I’m good.”
“Okay. Give a holler if you do.”
As she moves away, a rectangle of sunlight flashes in the front of the bar and Doyle squints to see a tall, round-shouldered man push the door open. Dressed in dark navy coveralls, he trudges to the bar. As he eases onto a stool, Tina sets a beer in front of him.
“Hey, Carl.”
The tall man nods. “Thanks, Tina.”
She smiles and moves back down the bar, past one of the day drinkers finishing the last of his beer.
“Another?”
“You read my mind, sweetheart.”
“It’s not hard, Al.” Tina angles a fresh glass below the beer tap faucet.
Al lets out a phlegmy laugh that dissolves into a cough. “I guess not. I’m not a complicated guy.”
Tina shakes her head. “Not really, but that’s all right. Being complicated is overrated.”
Fucking Tina, Doyle thinks. She can sling drinks and banter with customers without provoking anything. She knows where to draw the line. And she is not hard to look at. He would catch himself staring at her as she moves along the bar in her tight jeans, especially when she leans over to retrieve a bottle from the lower shelf. At such moments, he snaps his attention back to the sports page. His daughter would tell him it was wrong to objectify women. Doyle thinks it is hard not to notice, but rude to stare. He doesn’t have to stare to notice something off about Tina. She’s all smiles and banter, but beneath the surface there is fatigue and flashes of wariness.
He looks down the bar. Besides Carl and Al, there are three others, two men and a woman, hunched over their drinks. The woman and one of the men are engaged in a mumbled conversation. The other man stares at his reflection in the wall-size mirror behind the bar. On the other side of the room, a scrawny man with a protruding belly plays pinball with messianic intensity, stopping only to fuel himself with long swallows of beer. Doyle pities them, but reserves harsher judgement. There but for the grace of God, his daughter would say.
Doyle had been a day drinker a couple of years ago, in the months after he retired. It was easy to do with the days stretched out before him and no responsibilities to anyone. He was free-floating and formless. He sat at the bar nursing glasses of beer and an occasional shot of bourbon, keeping to himself, until one day the bartender, a pretty brunette with luminous brown eyes, asked him what he was doing. All afternoon he’d been watching her moving up and down the bar, serving drinks, clearing glasses, laughing, chatting up the customers, and here she was standing in front of him looking concerned.
“What?” he asked.
“You’ve been sitting here all day, I just wondered if you’re all right.”
“Fine.”
“Yeah?”
Doyle smiled. “I’m good.”
She ran a damp cloth over the bar. “You used to be a cop, right?” Lowering her voice, she added, “The one whose daughter was killed?”
Doyle blinked, nodded, blinked again.
She said, “I’m sorry. Truly.” When he didn’t respond, she started back down the bar.
“Your name is Tina?”
She turned back. “Yeah.”
“Is that short for anything?”
“Nah. Just Tina.”
Doyle nodded slowly, as if considering that. “My daughter’s name was Jessica, but she liked to go by Jess.”
Tina stepped closer and rested her arms on the bar. “Can I ask you something?” She nodded at the half-empty glass of beer in front of him. “Does it help?”
Doyle stared at her until she turned away.
He didn’t stop drinking, but he drank less, substituting black coffee. He liked watching Tina and talking to her when she swung by to refill his coffee. She didn’t save him exactly, but she gave him something to look forward to when he woke up each day.
He told her about his daughter. How good it had been until it wasn’t. Looking back, he figures he had about a dozen good years with her, from the time she was two and started to walk and talk until she hit fourteen and went to war with her parents. The war took the form of an unrelenting truculence, plus some drinking and dope-smoking that Doyle thought were more for provocation than enjoyment. Her parents were already engaged in their own war, a cold, low intensity conflict that ended in divorce. Even in a town like Sangamon, being a cop was not easy on a marriage and family. The crime rate was nothing compared to Chicago or St. Louis, but every year he worked enough homicides and robberies to keep him wired long past the end of shifts and send him to a cop-friendly bar for a couple of cold ones before heading home. The job consumed him, or maybe, he admitted, he allowed it to consume him. Eventually, it consumed his marriage. Doyle lost his house, half his income to alimony and child support and custody of Jess.
He told himself that Jess was better with her mother, that he wouldn’t be any good sorting the problems of a teenage girl, but that was a crock. Girls needed their fathers. He tried to make it up when she was older, after she was on her own and married. He took her to lunch or met her for breakfast a couple of times a month, remembered her birthday, slipped her a hundred dollar bill every so often to make sure she had money for herself. Her husband, Brian, wasn’t the steadiest worker and Jess was putting everything she earned into keeping them afloat. Did she resent it or was Doyle projecting his own annoyance at this treatment of his daughter? Didn’t it bother Brian to have his wife taking care of him? he asked once sitting across from her in the diner where they met for breakfast.
“Dad,” she’d said, face squinched into a frown, “this isn’t the 1970s. Women can be the breadwinners.”
“I know.”
“Besides,” she said, green eyes flashing, eyebrows arched. “Brian takes care of me in other ways.”
“Jesus, Jess.” He raised his hand in protest, but she was laughing and he shook his head, unable to keep a straight face as he poked a fork at his scrambled eggs.
That’s how it was with Jess, turning to a joke whenever he tried to probe. She wouldn’t have a serious conversation with him about her marriage, even after Brian lost his second job. As far as Doyle was concerned his son-in-law was nice enough, charming in his own way, but a loser. He didn’t know what Jess saw in him.
“Don’t you think she knows how you feel?” his ex-wife asked. “That’s why she won’t talk to you about it. She doesn’t need your judgment.”
Apparently Doyle could not separate his judgment from his concern when it came to Jess. So he sat across from her and listened as she described her work or her friends or any number of safe topics. Twenty-seven and beautiful, his daughter tried hard to project toughness but often seemed to Doyle as vulnerable as the little girl he gathered in his arms to soothe after a playground scrape.
Tina listened more than talked, but she did tell Doyle she was divorced and had a daughter away at college, whose father, her ex, was out of the picture and good fucking riddance. She didn’t say so, but from the edge in her voice when she mentioned her ex, Doyle figures he was abusive. For all the times he saw it on the job, it never ceased to amaze him how many women ended up in abusive relationships. What was it about these douchebags that attracted women as bright and good looking as Tina? He wanted to ask her but she hadn’t confided in him, hadn’t given him permission to cross that boundary. So instead, he watched her each day, enjoying her banter with the day drinkers and the snippets of conversation they shared when she came to his end of the bar. He tried to conceal the tangle of emotions he felt each time she looked at him, as she is now, after refilling his mug.
He nods. “Thanks.”
“No problem. You still good?”
“I am. How about you?”
She smiles quizzically and in that moment he sees a flicker of discomfort that is gone in the next blink of her eyes. The kind of tell he’d looked for in the faces of witnesses and suspects. And victims.
“I’m good, thanks,” she says. But Doyle doesn’t believe her.
He’s observed Tina’s boyfriend on the evenings he meets her at the bar at the end of her shift. About six feet, broad through the shoulders but developing a paunch, thinning brown hair, good looking once, but losing it. He’d probably played football in high school and fucked the homecoming queen and that, Doyle thought, had been the high point of his life. When Tina greeted him with a kiss, he slid a beefy hand onto her ass just to show he could. Tina grabbed his wrist but he pulled free and gripped her arm, hard. All of this took a few seconds, fast enough to miss if you blinked, but Doyle didn’t blink. Tina said her boyfriend was a good to her. But there was something in her expression. Doyle knew.
***
Tina’s shift ends at seven o’clock. She retrieves her jacket and purse from the small office in the back and heads out the front door, calling goodbye to the regulars, including Doyle. He waits a moment before slipping off his barstool to follow. On Fridays, she has told him, her boyfriend and some of his boys hit a bar after work.
Outside, it is already dark, and the air has an autumn chill. Tina parks in the small lot behind the bar. His car is on the street in front. He climbs behind the wheel and waits for her blue Corolla to emerge from the alley and turn right. Then he starts his car, eases it out of its space and follows.
They travel through downtown, past office buildings and shops. The route is familiar to Doyle, who has followed her several times over the past six weeks. There are Halloween displays in some of the shop windows—pumpkins, witches, skeletons. One of his good memories of Jess is taking her trick or treating when she was three or four. She dressed as a princess from some Disney movie and Doyle loved watching people’s reaction when they opened their doors and saw her. So pretty. Such a sweetheart.
Tina turns on one of the main thoroughfares and heads north towards the older part of town where squat brick bungalows sit next to fading Victorians, many converted into apartments. Doyle grew up on the north side and his daughter lived there after she got married. He feels haunted driving these streets, but can’t turn away.
Tina slows and turns into the driveway of one of the bungalows. Doyle drives by, then slows and kills his lights as he eases to the curb. Through his rear view mirror he can see the bungalow and the driveway. Tina has gone inside. Lights come on in the front room. He leans against the headrest and waits.
Years on the job taught him to trust his instincts. The beefy hand on her ass, the possessive attitude, the flash of anger. Last night as she was getting ready to leave, he’d called Tina over. “You know,” he said, looking right at her but resisting the urge to take her by the hand. “You can talk to me if want.”
She nodded, eyebrows knitted, and smiled uncertainly. “Sure, Doyle. That’s sweet.”
But he hasn’t left it to his instincts. He asked a buddy on the force to check and learned there had been two domestic disturbance calls to Tina’s address in the past five months. Doyle couldn’t recall Tina showing up to work with bruises on her face, but there were ways to hit a woman without messing up her looks. You could kill a woman and not leave a mark on her face.
There were no marks on his daughter’s face, no visible signs of abuse. But there must have been other signs he’d missed before the night Brian came home and shot her through the heart before turning the gun on himself. Nothing happens all at once.
If Brian hadn’t killed himself, Doyle would have done it, but not as quickly as Brian. Doyle would have beat him half to death before finishing him with a bullet to the head. He’d be serving a life term if he’d done it, but he would have had the moment he still imagined almost every night—seeing the look in Brian’s eyes as he realized he was about to die. He’d failed his daughter when she needed him most and been cheated out of the chance to avenge her.
Through the rear view he sees a car pull into the driveway of the bungalow. The driver’s door opens and Tina’s boyfriend steps out. He slams the door, stumbles a step, straightens and walks towards the house. He stops again in front of the porch steps before mounting them unsteadily, one at a time.
Two domestic disturbance calls in the last five months. Doyle pictures Tina’s wide brown eyes, her compact body as she moves up and down the bar, then he imagines her boyfriend grabbing her as she tries to get away. He removes his revolver from the glove box and slips it into his jacket pocket before opening the car door and stepping into the street. He doesn’t have a plan. When he gets to the house, he will listen for sounds of a disturbance. Or maybe he’ll just knock on the door, rely on his instincts.
The air is chilly as he walks down the sidewalk, dark except for lights from inside the houses. The light is on in the front room of the bungalow, and he sees movement behind the sheer curtains. He moves slowly up the front walk, pausing at the foot of the porch steps. Does he hear voices? He mounts the steps and listens at the door. Voices rise and fall, interrupted by sudden piercing sounds, laughs or cries, he can’t tell. He straightens, knocks. The voices go silent. Doyle is conscious of his own breathing, the sound of air exhaled through his nostrils, the same as when he paused in front of the interview room before interrogating a suspect. He slips his hand in his jacket pocket and feels the revolver.
The door opened and Tina’s boyfriend stands with one hand on the door handle and the other pressed against the frame, as if to block entry, but also, Doyle thinks, to steady himself. His dark eyes narrow in his beefy face as he stares at Doyle.
“What?” The boyfriend sucks in his breath to stifle a belch.
“I was looking for Tina.” Doyle is the same height as the man in the doorway, but about thirty pounds lighter and twenty years older. Still, he figures he could take him. And he has the revolver.
The boyfriend’s eyes glance left, then back at Doyle. “Why?”
“Darrell, who is it?” Tina’s voice comes from inside.
“Some old guy.”
“Who?”
Darrell looks at Doyle.
“It’s me, Tina,” Doyle called. “Doyle.”
Tina appears behind Darrell wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt. “Doyle?” She looks at him, brow furrowed. “Are you okay?” She dips her head to look at him beneath Darrell’s outstretched arm.
“Never better.”
“It’s okay,” she says to Darrell. “I know him from the bar. He’s a regular.”
Darrell drops his arm, but remains standing in the doorway. “Day drinker,” he smirks.
Doyle smiles. “Only if you count coffee.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Tina asks.
Doyle nods. “Are you?”
“What?” Tina cocks her head and squints as if she hadn’t heard him.
“Okay, that’s it. Goodnight.” Darrell starts to close the door.
Doyle holds up both hands. “Wait.” He looks at Tina, then at Darrell. “Please.”
Tina touches Darrell’s arm.
“I’m not trying to fuck with you,” Doyle says. “I grew up around here. My daughter used to live in this neighborhood.” He glances at Tina. “I sometimes come here at night just to walk around. I know that sounds strange. Anyway, I was walking by and thought I heard shouting, so I knocked. Old habits die hard.” He smiles and lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug.
Darrell makes a sour face. Tina stares at Doyle, who holds her look while keeping Darrell in his peripheral vision. She’s calculating, he thinks, like a witness deciding how involved to get. First person to talk loses.
“Thanks for your concern, but we’re all good here.” Darrell forces a smile.
“Do you want a cup of coffee?” Tina asks.
“Yes, thanks, that would be very nice.” Doyle steps through the doorway, glancing at Darrell, who yields space grudgingly.
There is a sofa and an easy chair in the living room, both covered in the same worn blue fabric. Darrell plops onto one end of the sofa and crosses his feet on a dark wood coffee table that looks as well-travelled as the sofa. He looks at Doyle and gestures toward the chair. Doyle sits, taking in the rest of the room. Flat screen TV on a low wood cabinet against the wall opposite the sofa, a bookshelf with paperbacks and a few framed photos. All of it serviceable, Doyle thinks, none of it expensive. Walmart or Target. When he finishes scanning the room, Darrell is still looking at him.
“You’re that cop, aren’t you?”
“I’m retired from the city police force.”
“Yeah, Tina’s talked about you, your daughter and all. I think she feels sorry for you.”
This makes Doyle wince. “I don’t need that.”
“Well, you got it anyway.” Darrell gives his shoulders a slight shrug.
This close, Doyle thinks he could put a bullet in the dead center of Darrell’s forehead.
“Okay,” Tina says, coming from the kitchen. In the pajama pants and T-shirt, her body looks looser, freer. “Two mugs of black coffee. I know you didn’t ask for one, Darrell, but I think you could use it.” She hands a mug to Doyle before taking a seat on the sofa next to Darrell, who accepts his mug without looking at her. Tina squeezes his knee and smiles at Doyle. “So you like to walk through your old neighborhood?”
Doyle nods.
“Kinda’ weird if you ask me.” Darrell cocks his head to one side and narrows his eyes.
“I like taking walks around the neighborhood,” Tina says. “It’s really nice.”
Darrell turns to her. “You go for walks during the day, which is normal. Not at night like some kind of stalker.”
“Doyle’s not a stalker, are you, Doyle?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Whatever,” Darrell says, slouching back on the sofa. “It’s fucking weird to go walking around at night knocking on doors.”
Doyle sips his coffee, sets the mug on the table. “Were you fighting?”
“What?” Darrell eyes widen and Doyle sees his body tense.
“What I heard earlier. Were you fighting?”
“Fuck you.”
“Is that a yes?”
Darrell sits forward. “It’s a fuck you.”
Doyle looks at Tina. “Were you fighting?”
Tina looks at him uncertainly.
“Is he laying hands on you?”
“What the hell.” Darrell gets to his feet and glowers at Doyle. “I don’t know what your deal is, old man, but you need to get your ass out of here, now.”
Doyle stands slowly, eyes on Darrell. “Tina?”
Tina stares up at him, brows furrowed. “Doyle, what are you doing?”
“Making sure you’re okay.” He looks at her as he says this and in that moment, Darrell lands a heavy right fist against the side of his face, sending Doyle backwards. Stunned, he tries to recover his balance when Darrell is on him with all his weight slamming him against the wall. Pain radiating from the back of his head, Doyle bends over, gasping for breath.
“Darrell, stop!” Tina grabs Darrell’s left arm, but he shoves her away. He steps towards Doyle, who staggers sideways, reaching into his jacket pocket. As Darrell starts to swing again, Doyle points the revolver and fires. The gunshot mixes with Tina’s scream as Darrell drops to the floor in a gurgling heap, blood pumping from the hole in this neck.
Doyle stares at Tina on her knees bending over Darrell, pressing her hands against the wound, crying and repeating his name. He kneels beside her and looks at Darrell’s beefy face, eyes wide open in a final, disbelieving stare. Tina leans back on her haunches, absently wiping blood on her T-shirt and pajama pants. She looks at Doyle with an expression he has seen before on the faces of the loved ones of murder victims—a twisted mask of anger and anguish. It’s possible, he thinks, that she loved him. He saw it on the job—abuse victims loving their abusers.
Very gently, he puts his arm around her and is relieved when she doesn’t resist. He feels her face hot and damp against his chest. He strokes her hair and rests his chin against the top of her head.
“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re safe now. I’ll take care of you.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Brian Lundquist on Unsplash]
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- Doyle’s Revenge - September 5, 2026
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