by Dan Ames
“Tell me again what brought you here,” Old & Tan said.
“A job.”
“And you do what for a living?” he said.
“I’m a security consultant.”
“Yeah, right,” Young & Tan said, scoffing it out of his mouth like a hairball.
“What were you hired to do?” the old one said.
“Security on the estate where I’m currently staying.”
Young & Tan rolled his eyes. His hand went to his sunglasses like he wanted to drop them onto his nose, but then he remembered he was indoors, so he scratched his girl stubble instead.
Old & Tan spoke again. Clearly, he had wanted the younger one to lead the interview, but that hadn’t gone very well and so he finally just took over.
“Tell us again why you were on the river, and how you managed to find the body,” he said.
By now, telling the story again felt like reciting a poem I had had to memorize in elementary school. I repeated it the same exact way I’d told it the first seven times.
Young & Tan looked at the ceiling, clearly bored with me.
“Know a girl named Crystal Stafford?” Old & Tan said.
I thought for a moment. “No. If he was talking about the girl in the river, well, I knew her all right. I just didn’t know her as Crystal Stafford.
O&T tapped a pen against a blank pad of paper. Clearly, my answers hadn’t been worthy of a lot of note-taking. I took a little bit of pride in that.
“When is this security project expected to end?” he said.
Y&T laughed outright at that one.
“I don’t get how you can say shit like that with a straight face,” he said to his partner.
“He’s a good cop; that’s why you don’t understand it,” I said.
Y&T almost stood up like he was going to throw a punch at me, but the older one waved him down.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said to me.
5
I grew up in a world without religion. In fact, when I was younger and perfecting my skills at hurting people, I was always somewhat amused when they called out for God to help them. Begging for Jesus. Praising Allah, etc. As far as I could tell, those benign beings never helped out any of them.
Maybe they didn’t want to mess with me.
So even though I’ve never set foot in a church my whole life (except that one time to kill a pedophilic priest, which probably doesn’t count) I felt a little guilty doing so much lie-telling.
Because unfortunately, the correct answer to the detectives’ question would have been, “I don’t know Crystal Stafford, but I sure know who that girl in the river is.”
But they hadn’t asked me that, in those exact words. Nor did they tell me not to leave the area.
Which explained why I was on Delta Flight 1419 as it touched down at Detroit Metro at about seven o’clock. By eight, I was in a rental car headed for a strip club called the Bermuda Triangle on the infamous 8 Mile Road.
Okay, continuing on the religion theme: I have a confession to make.
My relationships with women have been exclusively transactional in nature. Why? Generally speaking, a few reasons, I suspect. A lifetime with virtually no permanent address. Instead of friends, a loose network of less than prominent lawyers, bail bondsmen, and other employers in the field of fugitive apprehension. And a need for some form of environmental isolation to help identify the approach of those harboring ill will toward yours truly.
So escorts and strippers. Which are usually one in the same.
I thought of this as I left the rented white Chevy Malibu with the strip club’s valet, an ambitious young man in a white shirt and tie. I then went inside, got a booth, and a bucket of beer.
I felt nothing of the somewhat relaxed state I had been in during my stay in Florida. I was back in Detroit. Where people knew me. And knew the things I’d done. Maybe even the things I’d done recently.
It was a dead feeling inside me. This is where I’d met “Crystal.” It was all coming back to me, even as the waitress took away my first empty, and the first girl slid in beside me.
She looked like Gwyneth Paltrow with a weak chin.
“What time did you get here?” she asked me. Strippers always ask this so they can gauge how much you may have had to drink, how desperate you are for some company, and to get an idea if other girls had taken a shot at you.
“Ten minutes ago,” I said, as I polished off my first beer. Nothing makes me want to drink like airplane travel. I hate it.
It would have been nice to dispense with trying to get some questions answered, but the club had very little privacy. The booths were right next to each other, and there was even an elevated walkway behind the booths. You never knew when someone might be listening.
So when she offered to take me back to the VIP rooms, I agreed.
She led the way to a section of the club guarded by a bouncer. He nodded to us as we passed him. The dancer guided us past at least a dozen small booths with black curtains pulled across their entrances. She went to a booth at the very back of the space, pulled the curtain aside. I sat on the leather bench as she closed the curtain.
I held onto my beer as she took off her top, kicked off her giant, clear, plastic stripper shoes, and sat on my lap.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. She started grinding out of habit.
“Did you ever know a girl whose stage name was Kiki? Her real first name was Kristen.”
The girl looked at me. “Sounds familiar. What did she look like? As she said this, she turned around, bent over, and shook her ass in front of my face.
I looked past her butt cheeks.
“She had short brown hair, muscular legs, a little tattoo of a butterfly on her lower back.”
She stood up and turned back to me, shook her head. “No, but you should ask Viv. She’s been here forever and remembers everyone. She’s kind of the House Mom around here, always taking care of the younger girls.”
The song ended and I stood up. I gave the girl a fifty—twice the cost of a lap dance.
She thanked me, and when we emerged from the VIP section, I had her point out Viv.
Viv looked to be of Arabian descent, with big, black hair, a hawk nose, and barbed-wire tattoos coming out of her panties.
She turned and smiled at me as I approached. Beautiful teeth, and I could just make out crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, buried beneath an inch of pancake.
“How about a dance,” I said to her.
She smiled like she hadn’t been asked that in a long time.
Viv hooked her arm through mine, and we found another VIP room.
“First time here?” she said.
“No, I’ve been here a couple times, mostly to see a girl named Kiki. Know her?”
“Kiki! Sure I knew her,” Viv said. “She left here a few weeks ago, not sure why. Never said goodbye to any of us. Sometimes that happens, but I wouldn’t have expected it from her.”
By now, Viv was rocking back and forth on me, and she wasn’t petite by any means.
“How can I find out where she went?” I said.
Viv narrowed her eyes at me. She stopped gyrating.
Old strippers, man. They can see a lie from a mile away.
I pulled a hundred dollar bill out of my wallet.
Viv raised an eyebrow.
She snatched it out of my hand.
“Juju would know,” she said. “He’s over at the main bar, in the yellow baseball cap. He runs a lot of the younger girls. Don’t tell him I mentioned his name, though. It’s not a good idea to get on his bad side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“You’ve been warned.” She got off my lap and left.
After a minute or two, I walked out and found the main bar.
Juju was an Albanian guy. I’d never met him, but I knew who he was. His love of Ralph Lauren clothes was obvious. He always wore Ralph Lauren khakis, Ral
ph Lauren shirts, and he was never without a Ralph Lauren baseball cap just to make sure you noticed the logo.
“Are you Juju? The manager?” I asked. Albanian mobsters were infamous for imitating their Sicilian counterparts, right down to the goofy nicknames. I had no idea what Juju’s real name was. Probably Juhitsigov Markozuliac or something like it.
“Is there a problem?” he said.
“Yeah, I don’t see Kiki around.”
“Who?” He had a bored expression on his face. He had already pegged me as another desperate loser, a sucker who’d fallen for one of his employees.
“Kiki. She’s a dancer,” I said. “Really nice looking girl, athletic body, short brown hair, muscular legs.”
JuJu laughed and spread his hands out wide. “That’s half the girls who work here, man. Are you kidding me?”
“Oh, gosh darn it,” I said.
But JuJu was lying. I suddenly had the idea that it would be a lot of fun to take an actual polo club and bash JuJu’s teeth in.
He may have sensed it.
“What can I tell you,” he said. “Lots of pretty girls here for you. Take your pick.” He turned his back on me.
“Maybe I will,” I said as he walked away. I went back to my booth. The waitress had refilled my bucket. I drank two beers in four minutes and had another idea.
After a half hour watching the girls, I had picked out the oldest, nastiest, most desperate woman I could find. She was getting no free drinks, no dances, no attention at all.
She was perfect.
I drank and waited until she looked at me. When she did, I held her eye contact and gave a slight lift of the chin.
Within thirty seconds, she appeared at my booth like a dog who’d just graduated from obedience school.
“Would you like some company?” she said. Her voice sounded like a worn-out belt sander.
“Boy, would I,” I said.
“My name’s Pammy,” she said.
“Great.”
Compassion has never been my strong suit. But the sagging skin, the wrinkles, the faded tattoos, I knew she was prepped for serious exploitation.
I bought her two shots of tequila at ten bucks a pop and slipped her a hundred dollar bill.
“Look, I’m not gonna lie,” I said. “I don’t want a dance, I only want information.”
“What do you want to know?” she said. This girl had seen it all. Nothing surprised her.
“Kiki.”
“What about her?”
“Who ran her?” I said. “And don’t say JuJu.
“Same guy who runs most of the young ones,” she said. Her voice took on an especially bitter tone when she said the word “young.”
“And that would be Juju’s boss, right?” I said. “Who is he?”
Pammy glanced around the club. She knew where JuJu was, and if he was watching.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “I’ll tell you, but you have to take me in the back, get a dance, then come back and take a couple more girls back, so they don’t know who told you.”
“I’m not the kind of guy who talks,” I said.
“They can make you talk,” she assured me. “They can make anyone talk.”
I made a mental note of the cash I had on me. More than enough.
“You got it,” I said.
She tossed off a third shot that had magically appeared at our table.
“His name is Darko Fama,” she said. “Everyone just calls him Darkie.”
“That’s nice,” I said. I thought about a Dalai Lama joke but figured it’d been done a few million times.
“Where can I find him?” I said.
“He hangs out at a coffee place around 15 Mile and Hayes. Called Goodfellows. He’s there all day, every day.”
I nodded.
“Time for you to take me back,” she said.
“No problem,” I said.
I was a man of my word, after all.
6
I knew I had a decision to make. Until now, I’d just asked around a bit, bought drinks for some dancers, maybe gotten a lap dance or two.
But going into Goodfellows was a whole new step.
There would be no going back.
I sat in my rental car outside the coffee shop. I’d spent the night at a Holiday Inn a few blocks away. The breakfast buffet had looked like a scene from Overeaters Gone Wild. I’d stuck with some toast and coffee.
As I waited for my Albanian friends to show some signs of life in Goodfellows, I thought about why I was doing all of this in the first place. And was there a way to avoid it? I could, after all, just skedaddle back to my hideaway in northern Michigan on Drummond Island. No one could get to me there.
But I’d taken the little Florida housesitting gig, and it had gone off the rails. No point in looking back.
The easy answer: I knew Crystal Stafford. I actually knew her as Kristen, even though her stage name was Kiki.
And I had known her quite well.
Since I had found her body, the Lee County Sheriff’s detectives would be looking at me as their prime suspect. I had to figure out who was responsible fast and get back to Florida before they realized I was gone.
Which brought me back to Goodfellows and Darko Fama, or the politically incorrect nickname “Darkie” to his friends.
Things were about to get ugly, but I saw no better option.
Two guys pulled up in front of the coffee shop in a silver Cadillac.
One of them looked familiar to me.
After a few minutes, I got out of the car and went inside.
* * *
•
* * *
The first thing I noticed was a tattoo on the forearm of a short, squat guy with a T-shirt that read “The only thing to fear . . . is a lack of beer.”
Classy.
The tattoo, however, was nothing to scoff at. It was worn by a lot of Albanian gangsters, and more than a few soldiers who had fought, if you want to call it that, for the Kosovo Liberation Army. As a group they were legendary for the kind of atrocities that would give John Wayne Gacy nightmares. I’m sure their opposing counterparts were equally guilty of war crimes, but the only gangsters from that part of the world I’d run into were all from Kosovo.
There were two other guys in the shop besides Squatty. A thin guy in a track suit sitting at the coffee bar with an iPhone in his hand. He was just playing with his phone. I could tell that most of his attention was focused on me, try as he might to not make it look that way.
There was an old man standing behind the counter, next to a wall of stainless-steel, coffee-brewing equipment from the 1950s.
I walked up to the counter.
No one said hello. The old man didn’t speak. I glanced around, saw a security camera in the back, and a door that was partially open.
Sloppy.
“I’ll take an espresso,” I said. The old man contemplated me for a moment, then slowly turned and started making my coffee.
I turned to the guy in the track suit who had set down then picked up his phone twice. Clearly I was creating a bit of anxiety for the young man.
“How you doin’, Darkie?” I said to him. Much like Juju, I’d never met Darkie, but I knew who he was. He seemed to twitch a bit at the sound of his nickname, but tried to act like he hadn’t heard me.
Over the sound of the old man clanking around near the coffeemaker, I heard a strange sound behind me, which I identified instantly.
When a man wearing a ring slides his hand along a wooden baseball bat to get a better grip, the little scrape is unmistakable.
Trust me on this one. It’s years of experience talking.
The stainless-steel coffeemaker in front of me was not a good mirror, but the reflection of something light-colored moving up and to my right told me exactly what was about to happen.
I spun and caught Squatty in full backswing. I lashed out with my steel-toed boot and caved in his knee. There is nothing quite like seeing the confusion on someone�
�s face when they feel a key body part is suddenly not working correctly.
The swinging bat still came, but its force was vastly reduced. I blocked it easily, then wrenched the bat from his hands and swung a huge looping strike that landed squarely on top of his bald head. If it had been an axe, I would have cleaved his skull nicely in two. Squatty’s neck bulged oddly to the side. He sank to his knees and then tipped over onto his face.
I swung from the same position at Darkie, who had flung his iPhone onto the counter and was trying to fumble a gun from his waistband.
The bat connected solidly on his left side and I heard, and felt, a little crack. It could have been audible, or simply the vibration through the wooden bat.
Gosh, I really liked this bat. It was a beauty.
Darkie went down, and I carefully retrieved the gun from his waistband.
The old man hadn’t moved.
Darkie struggled back to his feet. His face was pale, and he was hugging his midsection.
Self-love is so important to one’s well-being.
I pointed at the old man with the baseball bat.
“See that, Darkie?” I said. “That’s experience.”
“Fuck you,” Darkie said, wincing with each word.
The old man just stared at me.
“He didn’t do anything stupid like you did,” I continued. “He knew immediately what was happening. His thought process centered on surviving what I was about to do and then figuring out how to kill me, eventually. And as painfully as possible.”
I glanced over at Darkie.
“I think I got your eleventh or twelfth rib,” I said. “Those are called floating ribs, not really connected to the sternum. Also less likely, if broken, to puncture anything serious. So you should consider yourself lucky.”
“Fuck off,” Darkie said. His voice was somewhat high-pitched, something he’d probably spent a lot of his life trying to compensate for.
I looked at the gun. It was a Glock .40, all the rage these days. Walking backwards I went to the coffee shop’s door and slid the lock, then flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED.