Jake Caldwell Thrillers

by Weaver, James

  “Like what?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat, Mr. Caldwell.”

  “You don’t know of any girls who have been there?”

  “The kind of girls going to Lockwood’s wouldn’t roam Independence Avenue. I’m afraid I have to go.”

  She rose and extended her cane. Fishing in her pocket, she pulled out a card. “Be careful out there, Mr. Caldwell.”

  “Jake.”

  “Call me if you have any other questions but remember one thing. The people who go hunting for girls at Lockwood’s aren’t the kind of people you want to mess around with.”

  Jake watched her tap her way back to the front door and disappear around the corner and into the early evening. He drained the luke-warm coffee and headed toward his truck. After hearing Christine’s story, he craved a hot shower to wash the stench away.

  Chapter Thirty

  Around ten in the evening, wearing the one suit he owned, Jake wheeled into a smooth, blacktop lot on the north side of Kansas City’s downtown. The lot was guarded by a couple of no-necked attendants, one black and the other Hispanic. Both could rip off the grill to his truck and twist it into a pretzel without breaking a sweat. After telling them his destination and palming a twenty, they let him pass. He wedged his truck between a BMW and a Jaguar. The rest of the luxury cars in the lot screamed a wealth and privilege Jake would never attain. Then again, he loved his truck. It would be tough to ram someone off the road in a Jaguar.

  He meandered down the street, eyes prowling for Lockwood’s. The bar didn’t have a website or show up on a Google search, which he found strange, like the proprietors didn’t want anyone to know the location. Given what Cat said and how Keats told him to dress, maybe that was the point. He felt like one of the characters in the adventure romance Maggie read on the beach during their honeymoon about Louisiana bootleggers looking for a speak-easy during Prohibition—Finnegan’s something or other. He thought he wouldn’t find Lockwood’s until he turned the corner and ran into a familiar face.

  The man was a mountain of black muscle squeezed into a tuxedo, his face dropping like the air from a popped balloon. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Marco? You quit working at the strip club?” Jake suffered an unfortunate and painful encounter with Marco’s fist in the backroom of a strip club called Dreams a few weeks ago while chasing after a slippery Russian with a briefcase. The goose egg on Jake’s forehead had barely faded away, and he had zero desire for another one.

  Marco’s deep-set eyes glowered at Jake, his voice dropping another octave if that was even possible. “Got fired. Because of you. You said you weren’t going to fuck up my club.”

  Jake raised his palms. “To be fair, none of that was my fault. Blame the dead guys.”

  “I blame you.”

  “This Lockwood’s?”

  Marco folded his arms and stepped across the doorway, the seams of his tuxedo jacket screaming in protest. “Why?”

  “I’m meeting somebody. There won’t be any trouble.”

  “That’s what you said last time and I got fired.”

  “You like this gig?”

  Marco nodded. “Pays a lot better and I don’t have to climb stairs.”

  “Well, consider it a win-win all around.” Jake moved toward the door, but Marco didn’t budge.

  “You ain’t coming in here. No way you’re on the list with your raggedy-ass suit.”

  “You think it’s raggedy?”

  “Looks like you bought it off the rack at Sears.”

  “You have a list?”

  Marco slipped a folded sheet from his jacket pocket and waved it. “If you aren’t on the list, you aren’t getting in. Club policy.”

  “Check it. Name’s Caldwell. Jake Caldwell.”

  “I know who you are.” After a few dramatic stare-down seconds, Marco unfolded the list and scanned it. His eyes reappeared when his brows shot up in surprise.

  “Guess I’m on there, eh?”

  “Guest of Mr. Keats? You know him?”

  Jake’s eyebrows arched. “Oh yeah. Used to work for him.”

  “Used to? I thought you couldn’t get out of that kind of deal.”

  “I got lucky.” Jake waved a hand toward the door. “Can I go in?”

  Marco moved his mountain of muscle to the side, allowing Jake a few inches to squeeze past. “Don’t make me come in there, Caldwell.”

  The interior of Lockwood’s was like one of those snooty men’s clubs from the movies. High-polished mahogany bar with racks of wine glasses hanging by their stems. Two tuxedo-clad men mixed cocktails and poured wine to clean-cut men in thousand-dollar suits listening to piped-in classical music. The occasional trophy wife or girlfriend hung on an arm, manicured hands cradling a twenty-dollar martini. Dim, high-backed booths scattered along the wall for those who wanted a little privacy, plush leather couches and benches filling in the gaps. Jake didn’t know much about furniture, but Lockwood’s was filled with décor you could admire but shouldn’t touch. One couch was probably worth three times more than all the furniture in his shitty apartment added together.

  Despite the existence of a no smoking ordinance in Kansas City, a thick cloud of sweet cigar smoke hugged the upper reaches of the room. Jake cut through the crowd, eyes probing for Keats, enduring the sneers from the men and flirtatious batting of lashes from women who undoubtedly entertained thoughts of going slumming with Jake. He found Keats in the back corner sipping a Scotch in a highball glass with a round chunk of ice the size of a meteor, a half-smoked stogie clutched between his thick fingers. His peppered hair was slicked back in its normal style, though he looked due for a haircut.

  Keats motioned for Jake to sit. “Nice suit. You go shopping at Goodwill?”

  “Only suit I have. I think I’m a little out of my league.”

  “You are. But that’s a good thing. A lot of narcissistic pricks in this place.”

  “You come here often?”

  “Only for business. You go to Heartstone?”

  “The driver I’m looking at is making off-book pickups from LA and some town in Texas named Lansdale. Know anything about them?”

  Keats swirled his glass, watching the ice chunk spin. “You can pick up anything in the world in LA. Lansdale is a border town. On the Mexican side is a town called Ciudad de la Sangre de Angel. City of Angel’s Blood. Controlled by a very dangerous Mexican cartel called La Familia. They ship product through a tunnel from the Mexican side into Lansdale.”

  “What kind of product?”

  “Guns and drugs, mostly.”

  “Any come your way?”

  “Some. Can’t avoid one of the biggest suppliers out there.”

  Jake pursed his lips. “Girls?”

  “Probably.”

  A raven-haired man appeared with a razor part sharp enough to slit your wrists. Keats raised his near empty glass. Jake ordered a beer and would’ve thought he told the man to bring him a bucket full of diarrhea and a straw based on the sneer he received.

  Jake waited until the man retreated out of earshot. “Well, that was a subtle look of derision.”

  “Might be the first beer ever ordered in this place.”

  “Excuse me for having simple tastes. Tell me more about the girls.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m trying to backtrack it to Langston. I think he’s involved with girls in addition to guns and drugs. Nobody has seen him since he busted out and if I can follow the trail of the girls, maybe it’ll lead to him.”

  “I don’t know a hell of a lot more than what I already told you, other than they get sorted and sold off around the country. The more marginal ones get dumped into lowly prostitution rings and massage parlors.”

  Jake shuddered. It was medieval. “And the higher end girls come here?”

  “Sold to the highest bidder at high-end clubs. Like Lockwood’s. I told you there’d be an auc
tion.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Keats laid out the process at Lockwood’s. At closing time, those interested in the auction would linger and disappear down a set of stairs in the back. The girls would be paraded around a stage to whet the whistle of the attendees, and then they would circulate through the room for an hour or so before the bidding began. The starting prices ran high, and the girls who didn’t sell would continue northeast to markets in Chicago, Boston, and New York. Jake wondered if any of them would eventually cross Christine’s path at Restoration House.

  He swallowed the last of his beer, the hoppy brew battling the knot in his gut. “How do they keep this a secret?”

  Keats stubbed out his cigar. “People who frequent Lockwood’s know how to keep their mouth shut. Plus, you don’t toss out bundles of cash to the sound of an auctioneer and walk out with a girl. It’s a well-protected process. I wouldn’t know if anyone attending the auction actually got a girl or not.”

  Jake zoomed back to his last meeting at Keats’s house—an incredible woman in lingerie waiting for Jason at the top of the stairs. “A process which you seem to know a lot about. The girl at your house?”

  “What can I say? I fell in love.”

  “It’s sick.”

  Keats’s face flushed as some of the customers filed out the front door. Others huddled in discrete groups, waiting. “Careful, Jake. You want to watch the auction or not?”

  Jake cast a peek over his shoulder to the closed door leading downstairs. The dead eyes of the girl in the trailer haunted him, but he wasn’t sure how much more he wanted to see.

  Twenty minutes after the majority of the Lockwood’s crowd left the bar, the remaining dozen patrons filed down the narrow staircase to the basement. Jake and Keats brought up the tail end, one of the bartenders pulling the door shut behind them. At the bottom of the stairs, the room opened to another lavish expanse with a raised stage passing through a curtain in the back wall. The walls were dark mahogany, lit by dim-bulbed sconces every ten feet. Abstract paintings and mirrors alternated occupancy between the fixtures, obscured by a thin fog of smoke swirling under slow-spinning ceiling fans. Men from upstairs filled the polished leather chairs surrounding the stage; though varying in age, they were all cookie-cutter versions of the same rich, white guy. A lone woman in her fifties who reeked of old money wandered amongst them as if she attended a normal cocktail party.

  Jake settled against the wall opposite the bar. “Looks like a high-end strip club.”

  “Which may happen on certain nights of the month,” Keats said, sliding in alongside Jake. “Not like I’d know much about it.”

  “Of course not. So, based on your limited knowledge, what are we going to see?”

  “Just what I told you upstairs. They’ll bring the girls out one at a time along the stage, kind of like a beauty pageant. After the girls hit the stage, they’ll circulate among the crowd and talk to the patrons. If the patron likes what he sees, he’ll submit a bid to the auctioneer.”

  “Auctioneer? Jesus, please tell me there’s not a yokel calling out bids at a hundred words a second?”

  “These girls aren’t cattle, Jake. It’s more subtle than that.”

  Jake bit his lip to keep his spirited retort to himself. No sense pissing Keats off when he was trying to get information. What did he expect to get from this sick process? How would participating in this barbaric event get him any closer to Langston? He opened his mouth to call it off when the lights dimmed, and some classical music piece flooded the room.

  Keats straightened. “Showtime.”

  The first girl strutted through the curtain as a man in a tux announced her name—Dasha. Mid-twenties, straight chestnut hair flowing down the back of a snug, emerald, sequined dress, chin jutting under high cheek bones. She was stunning with feline eyes scanning the crowd. She might as well have been participating in the evening gown competition at the Miss America pageant. Dasha winked at a bald old man with a mustache like an overgrown shrub before executing a razor-sharp one-eighty and disappearing through the curtain.

  “She didn’t look terrified,” Jake said.

  “Probably wasn’t. Some of these girls come from literally nothing, and the prospect of a sugar daddy in the good ole U.S. of A. is pretty damn enticing.”

  “It’s still exploitation.”

  The next girl, a Latino in a sparkling blue gown, waltzed across the stage. A step down from her predecessor, but well put together.

  Keats picked at his cuticles. “A lot of the trafficking is. There’s some sick shit in this business. Lowlifes get the girls hooked on drugs, pimp them out and throw them away when they stop generating money. At least these girls have a chance at a better life.”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed as he shot them toward Keats. “Jason, you may treat the one you bought like gold, but you have no idea what any of these people do with these girls once they get them. For all you know, they could chain them to a radiator and make them eat dog food. Makes me want to beat them with a tire iron.”

  Keats was silent for a beat. “You have a point. You want to get out of here?”

  Jake’s jaw widened to give a hearty “Hell, yes” when the girl from The Asylum sauntered onto the stage. The same girl who danced for Garvan and a clone of the dead girl in the trailer, her jean shorts swapped for a blood-red evening gown hugging her in the right places. “Hold up a second.”

  “Aha. Found one you liked?”

  “She has to be sister of the dead girl from Branson. I saw her dancing for Garvan at The Asylum.”

  Keats folded his arms. “Let me guess. You think she can help you find Langston?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You sure that’s all you want from her?”

  “Jason, I’m a happily married man.”

  Keats dismissed the comment with a hand wave. “Don’t worry. That’ll pass.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Fifteen minutes later, the parade of a dozen ladies ended, every one of them at least a nine on a scale of ten, but mostly Jake was thankful they were adults. If a child or teenager had walked through the curtain, he would have beaten the entire crowd and snatched the kid out of there.

  The dim lighting brightened, and the girls entered the room from a door in the back wall, still clad in their evening gowns and the plastic smiles of a contestant plastered on their gorgeous faces. Jake’s heartrate picked up when the girl from The Asylum didn’t appear with the group. A minute later she pageant-walked through the door. Her tardiness became a blessing, because while the early birds sucked the attention of the patrons, Jake managed to catch her eye and waved her over.

  Up close she was breathtaking. High, angular cheekbones, flawless cream skin and crescent eyes matching the color of the emerald pendant hanging from her slender neck. She wove her way through the crowd and stopped in front of Jake and Keats. Over her shoulder, Jake spotted Marco the Mountain thump down the stairs. He locked eyes with Jake and cracked his knuckles.

  “Hello, I’m Alina.” Her voice was husky in a sexy way, her accent present but not overwhelming.

  Jake reached forward and shook her hand. “I’m Jake and this is Jason. It’s nice to meet you, Alina. Where are you from?”

  “Ukraine. Kiev specifically. You are familiar with my country?”

  “Sorry, geography wasn’t really my strong suit. How long have you been in the United States?”

  She twirled her hair around her finger. “A few weeks. I like this country very much. You are looking for…how you say…a companion?”

  “I’m looking for some information if we could talk for a few minutes.”

  Her smile fell away. “You are with police?”

  “God, no. Listen, you are not in trouble, and what you say will not leave this table. But I need to find out how you got here.”

  Keats groaned and mumbled. “That was a smooth segue.”

  Alina stiffened and leaned away from the table. “And why is this?”

  �
�I think you can help me. I’m trying to find someone.”

  “Dat is why all the men are here. To find someone. All men but you.”

  Jake sensed she was a second from scurrying away. Maybe he should have lied to her at the start. He figured he may as well be direct since he might not have much longer to talk to her. “I saw you at The Asylum dancing for Garvan.”

  Lines creased her brow. “I am sorry, but I must go.”

  Jake caught her by the elbow. “Alina, wait. Please, I just want to talk.”

  “I have nothing to say about dat man. Let go, please.”

  Jake read Marco’s glare as the bouncer took a few steps in their direction. He released her elbow and watched her work her way toward the bar, and Marco settled back against the wall near the stairs. “Well, that went well, don’t you think?”

  Keats patted him on the shoulder. “I have to hand it to you; you do have a way with women. Hopefully nobody saw that exchange, or I’ll never be invited back again.”

  “You notice the way she clammed up when I mentioned Garvan? There’s something there.”

  “Maybe if you bought her, it would take the pressure off.”

  “Like that’s gonna happen.”

  Keats stood. “Well, let’s get out of here.”

  “Hold up. For the sake of curiosity, what’s the going rate?”

  Keats tilted his head up and down, appraising Alina from across the room. “For her? She seems smart, well-spoken, certainly beautiful. Twenty-five to thirty-five thousand here, more in New York.”

  Jake’s jaw dropped. “You’re shitting me.”

  “If I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’. There’s probably a million dollars in inventory in this room. But, keep in mind these ladies are high end, the cream of the crop. You get a couple of these guys in a bidding war; you could get into the six-figure range for some of these girls.”

  Jake flipped back to the semis in the Branson truck stop, wondering how many girls made up each load Delbert brought in. Did Alina know of the dead girl in Branson? He’d bet a thousand dollars the two were sisters. Jake flashed to the goddess he saw at Keats’s house when he was on the hunt for a crazy Russian with a silver briefcase a few weeks before.