by Dave Stanton
“Maybe you should get a lap dance,” I said to Cody as we approached the front door. “They got some real babes here.”
“Not in the mood for it.”
I withheld comment. We walked inside and the bouncer behind the cash register took my twenty and stamped our hands. On the main floor, the music was turned low, a murmur compared to the thumping rock I’d anticipated. I stopped near where the central runway split the room. There was no dancer on stage and only a few girls lounging in the dark corners.
“This place is deadsville,” Cody said.
I shrugged. “Midweek, two o’clock. Must be a slow time.”
We moved to a booth against the wall. A couple of tables away, a stripper was performing a lap dance for an unshaven fat man in a T-shirt that clung to his bulging gut. At the runway, two fellows in baseball caps, barely drinking age, chugged bottled beer. A dancer came out from behind a curtain, surveyed the clientele, scowled, and disappeared.
“Hi there,” said a girl who’d approached from the side. “Would you like a lap dance?”
She was a Latina, wearing the prerequisite platform heels that created the illusion of height, but I doubted she was five feet tall. The red lingerie hugging her body left little to the imagination. Her small breasts were perky, and her body was naked below the waist except for a G-string that disappeared between the cheeks of her round ass.
“No, thanks,” Cody said.
“How much?” I asked.
“Twenty.”
I took a bill from my wallet and gestured for her to sit.
“Cual es tu nombre?” I said.
She looked at me in surprise. “Celestina,” she said. She had a mole under her eye and small white teeth and red lips bright against her brown skin. If she was eighteen, she hadn’t been for long.
“I think I saw you in Tijuana once,” I said in Spanish.
“I used to live near there, in Rosarito.”
“Now you live in Sacramento?”
She hesitated, then said, “For now.”
“You like it here?”
“It’s okay.” She put her hand on mine and began scooting out of the booth. “Are you ready for your dance?”
“Let’s talk for a minute, okay?”
She looked at me with doe eyes. “Okay.”
“Are you sending money home to your family?”
“What does that matter?”
“Here.” I passed her a twenty and took another from my wallet, along with a picture of Valerie.
“Do you recognize this girl?”
She studied the picture. “She worked here.”
I nodded. “Did you know her?”
“I saw her, but we never spoke.”
“Did she have any friends? Boyfriend or girlfriends?”
“Why are you so interested in her?”
“It’s better you don’t know, Celestina.”
Her lips twitched, and she looked away. I saw a brief shudder in her shoulders.
“What about her friends?” I said.
“The motorcycle man with the bald head had a thing for her. That’s all I know.”
“He got a name?”
“They call him Roscoe.”
“How about Mike Zayas? Did he have a thing for her?”
Her face froze. “I have to go,” she said, sliding her bare cheeks off the seat. I pushed the second twenty over the table to her, but she hurried away without it.
“How about a translation?” Cody said.
“She said a biker named Roscoe liked Valerie. When I asked about Mike Zayas, she boogied.”
“I saw the color go out of her face.”
“Zayas is probably not a warm and fuzzy boss.”
“You think he’s pimping her?” Cody’s lips looked bloodless, a tight line over his jaw.
“Or worse.”
“Let’s go have a word with him.”
“I want to see if Roscoe is here. I think he’s the one I talked to before.”
We got up and walked around the vacant stage, past a pair of bouncers who eyed us. I felt Cody hesitate and I prodded him with my elbow. “Keep walking,” I said.
Around a corner and toward the back of the place, the stools at the small bar were full. Two Hispanic men in black Suave logo golf shirts sat next to two bikinied dancers. A pair of bikers wearing vests stitched with the double Bs occupied the stools at the far end.
The bartender was the same man I’d seen when I was here last, his shoulders narrow and his chest sunken over a small potbelly. Cody and I stood and waited for him to stop surfing the channels with the TV remote.
“Hey, bub, how about a beer?” Cody said.
The heads at the bar turned, the faces displaying varying degrees of annoyance. Then they turned away and back to their conversations—all except for the biker I was looking for, the bald man with a billy-goat beard. He swiveled on his stool and our eyes locked.
The second biker, a large-knuckled dude with greasy hair who looked like he’d dry shaved, ignored us until the biker I assumed was Roscoe said to me, “I was hoping I’d see you again.” Then the second biker also turned and regarded Cody and me. His body was all sinew and muscle, his jaw line dented and ridged with knots.
“Well, I couldn’t stay away from this place, Roscoe,” I said.
He gave me a sharp glance, then eased off his stool. “Join me for a smoke?” he said.
“All right.”
“I’ll keep your seat warm,” Cody said, wedging his frame next to the other biker.
I followed Roscoe toward the front, but he peeled off to the far side, to the VIP room. He punched in a code on a keypad next to the door and we went in.
The lighting was dim, and I could barely make out the rows of curtained nooks. From behind one of the curtains, a man’s voice breathed, “Yeah, that’s good. Suck it, mama.”
We went behind a curtain and sat in two chairs. It was a small alcove, about six feet square. The scent of disinfectant didn’t quite hide the musk of stale body fluids.
“You still investigating Valerie Horvachek’s murder?” Roscoe said.
“Yeah.”
“Making any progress?”
“Some. You got anything that might help me?”
He leaned forward on his chair, his fist propping his bearded chin. In the scant light, I could see a puckered scar glowing on the dome of his head.
“Maybe I do,” he said. “Valerie was a nice girl, a good kid. She didn’t deserve to die.”
“Who does?”
“Whoever killed her.” His lips curled around his chipped teeth, and he stared at me bluntly.
“And who’s that?”
He peeked outside the curtain, the skin around his features tight, and he lowered his voice to just above a whisper.
“Valerie was holding drugs, enough someone might kill her for it.”
“Who?”
“There’s a ragtag gang out of Stockton. White supremacists.”
“Why do you think they’re involved?”
He leaned back and scratched at an eyebrow. “There’s bad blood between us and them.”
“How does that relate to Valerie?”
“I dug the chick, all right?”
“So what, your enemies killed her because they knew you liked her?”
“That, and also to steal her stash.”
I sat with my elbows in my lap and studied the man across from me. He had dark bags under his eyes, and his nose was oily with blackheads. His lips were pursed in an uncertain expression, as if he was trying to gauge whether his words were believable.
“The gang from Stockton,” I said. “Their name?”
“War Dogs,” he rasped.
We stared at each other in the small space. The air had turned warm and a fetid odor rose from the carpet.
“Why are you telling me this?” I said.
“Look, man, I’d go after these cocksuckers myself, but I got to act within my gang.”
“They tell you to
lay low?”
“It’s a timing thing.”
“So you think sending me after them is the solution?”
He blinked. “I thought you were investigating her murder.”
“I am.”
“Then do as you see right, man.”
It grew quiet again, then he shuffled his feet and peeked out the curtain. “I’ll go out the back way,” he said.
“You really liked her, huh?”
He sighed and dropped his eyes. “Fuck, I thought I loved her.”
I shook my head as I watched him leave the alcove, and after a moment I went out toward the front exit. I was nearly there when a fat man stumbled from a behind a curtain, a black stripper on his arm. He giggled and put his squat hand on her jiggling ass. I fell into the shadows and tailed them out to the main floor.
As I headed back toward the bar I caught a glimpse of the young Latina watching me with round eyes from a doorway. Then the crash of broken glass and a loud thump sounded, followed by angry shouts.
“Shit,” I said, and ran around the corner to see Cody standing in front of the bar and covering up as the biker he’d sat next to whipped a flurry of punches at his face. A stream of blood ran from Cody’s eye into his beard. The biker’s face was split in a maniacal grin as he relentlessly hooked and jabbed, his fists moving in a blur. Then Cody stepped forward and threw a short upper cut into the man’s gut. It didn’t look like much of a punch, but the biker’s smile vanished and his mouth went round. He gasped and keeled over, and Cody grabbed his hair with both hands and slammed his face into the bar top with a sickening crunch. The biker’s face erupted in a burst of red, and he collapsed to the floor.
In a second, one of the bouncers at the bar rushed Cody, and the other came at me. He tried to tackle me, but I side stepped him and popped him across the back of the head with my sap, not hard, just enough to sit him down and take the fight out of him.
Cody was not as charitable with the bouncer foolish enough to try to take him on. The man was big, maybe 250, but his attempt at a tackle barely budged Cody, who wrapped his huge arms around the man and squeezed. I watched as the poor fellow went red in the face, then purple.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, but then Mike Zayas came out of the door behind the bar. Behind him were two bikers, bearded, tattooed, wearing dirty jeans and stomp-ass riding boots, one holding a knife, the other with a set of brass knuckles on his fist.
Zayas wore slacks and pointy shoes, and his shiny black hair fell onto the white collar above his dark sports coat. Cody turned toward him, still holding the bouncer in a bear hug. Zayas stopped, but the man with a knife came at Cody.
I pulled my stun gun and leapt forward. The knife arced toward my face, and I tried to catch the man’s arm, but the blade sliced through my coat and cut deeply above my left wrist. I thrust the stun device into the man’s midsection and his body went rigid, his hair on end, the knife falling as his hands splayed. I held the device to his ribs until smoke started to rise from my fist. Then, before he could topple, I reared back and hit him as hard as I could in the jaw.
The biker with the brass knuckles had stepped in front of Zayas as if to shield him, but now he turned to me, his face bunched in a mask of fury. He feinted to his right and I danced back, blood dripping from my arm. At that moment Cody rushed forward, pinning Zayas against the bar with the nearly unconscious bouncer in his grip. Zayas yelled and squirmed, then lost his footing and fell to the ground under Cody and the bouncer’s mass.
“Maybe you’ll bleed out, bitch,” brass knuckles said to me. He faked a punch, then pounced from the left, going for my injured limb. I caught him with a snap kick to the solar plexus, and he stopped as if he’d hit a wall. He opened his mouth, but no sound came. I swung with a right, and he made a feeble attempt to duck the punch, but I connected just under the ear, and he went down like a skid row whore.
Cody pushed himself upright, and Zayas struggled from beneath the dead weight of the bouncer, who was blinking and lying flat.
“Sorry about this,” Cody said, glancing my way. “I was just trying to have a beer.”
Zayas rose to his feet, his clothes scuffed with dirt and his hair in his face. He smoothed his pants and jacket, then his hand went inside the coat.
“Wrong move, Rico,” Cody said, his pistol suddenly trained at Zayas’s forehead.
I went to Zayas and removed a .25 automatic from his breast pocket, popped the clip, and tossed the gun behind the bar. My arm was soaked in blood, and it was falling in fast drops off my fingers.
“Take off your shoe,” I said to Zayas. “Take out the shoelace.”
“This some kind of joke?”
“Do it, asswipe,” Cody said.
Zayas did as I said, then I had him tie a tourniquet around my forearm. When he was done, we backed around the corner and two more bouncers wearing Suave shirts came hustling at us from the other side of the joint. They stopped when Cody waved at them with his piece.
“There’s a big mess at the bar,” Cody said. “Get some brooms and mops and go help your boss wipe the shit off the floor.”
The bouncers froze, incredulous, and we went out the front door. Roscoe was sitting on a Harley smoking a cigarette. He flicked his butt away and started putting on his helmet, then he saw us. He swung off his bike and stared, his face frozen in disbelief.
“What the fuck?”
“Your buddy at the bar has anger management issues,” Cody said.
“You ought to find yourself some smarter friends,” I added.
Roscoe started for the door, then stopped, his hand on his chin. We continued to the side of the building where we’d parked. My arm was beginning to throb, but the blood flow had ebbed. I hadn’t looked at the cut, but I knew it would need stitches. I grabbed Cody and stopped him.
“Care to tell me what we accomplished? Besides announcing to everyone there that we’re the enemy?”
“Be happy to, Dirt. Bear with me.” He opened his truck and took something from the glove box, then knelt down and stuck his hand into a shrub growing along the stucco wall.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s a receiving unit. I stuck a bug to the back of Zayas’s belt when I took him down.”
I paused and looked back the way we’d come. “Really? How effective is it?”
“Very. You really need to study up on your gadgetry.”
I didn’t argue the point. We climbed into our trucks and drove out to the main lot and toward the frontage road. I looked over and saw Roscoe watching us. He stood at the edge of the awning where the green carpet led into the Suave, and he was still there in my rearview mirror when I hit the gas and followed Cody down the street.
• • •
The emergency clinic in Sacramento was nearly empty, but it still took two hours to get six stitches in my arm. When they released me, it was almost five and the street was crammed with rush hour traffic. Cody leaned against his truck, squinting into layers of orange smog that spread across the horizon and muted the sun.
“How’s the arm?” he said.
I peeled back the bandage, clenched my fist, and watched the stitches tighten across the skin. The flesh was numb.
“Have you heard anything on the bug yet?” I said.
Cody studied his mobile phone and punched a few buttons. “Nope. There’s typically a delay in the download. It’s not instantaneous.”
“I don’t buy Roscoe’s story on the War Dogs.”
“Why not?”
“For one, whoever killed Valerie didn’t rob her. She still had her stash. And two, a gang wouldn’t go after a rival’s girlfriend. That would be a chickenshit thing to do.”
Cody grunted and shook a smoke from a pack of Marlboros. “Maybe it was a crime of opportunity.”
“What opportunity? She wasn’t robbed or raped. We’re dealing with something different here.”
“Why did Roscoe put you onto the War Dogs, then?”
“He doesn
’t know Valerie wasn’t robbed. Maybe he really thinks they did it.”
“Or maybe he just wants us to go hassle them.”
“What for?” I said. “Give me a cigarette, would you?”
He tossed me his pack. “To piss them off. Or distract them.”
I lit up, took a drag, and studied the blue eddy of smoke twirling into the afternoon.
“The Blood Bastards and War Dogs were both in South Lake Tahoe during the timeframe when Valerie and Terry were murdered,” I said. “My theory is one of the gangs, if not both, is in bed with Nick Galanis, paying him off. The question is, how do we find out?”
Cody looked at me, a smile on the corner of his mouth. “Just a matter of asking the right people the right questions. Maybe we should start with your buddy, Jake Massie.”
“Where do you think that will get us?”
“Who knows, Dirt? I’d just like to meet the dude. He sounds like an outstanding citizen.” A nurse had washed the blood from the cut on his forehead and applied a butterfly bandage. She had missed some blood, which had dried in the crow’s feet spreading from his eye.
I stared out at the hazy sunset and watched a stream of cars crawl by. “If we leave now, we can be in Stockton before full dark,” I said.
“On the road again,” Cody hummed.
• • •
We crawled through a couple lights, but once we hit Highway 5 it was open road, fifty miles straight through the agricultural heart of the San Joaquin Valley. Rows of green crops spread from either side of the highway, stretching toward mountains distant and dwarfed by a purple sky. Cruising at eighty, we reached the outskirts of Stockton just as the first stars appeared.
I passed Cody’s rig, and he followed me to a brewery offering American food, strong beer, and wireless Internet access. I gathered my computer bag, and we went in and took a table in the lounge near a crackling fireplace.
A pretty waitress in a short dress and a pushup bra came to take our orders. Cody flirted with her while I powered up my PC and connected to the Internet.
“And for you, sir?” I looked up into her bedroom eyes and lush cleavage and felt a sudden reminder to get home to Candi tonight, hopefully before she fell asleep.