by Mia Gold
Just as she did so, a speeding car swung around the truck and rushed up behind her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The car filled her rearview mirror as Ruby’s ears got jabbed with the sound of a blaring horn and screeching brakes. With a wrench in her gut, Ruby realized the driver wouldn’t be able to stop in time.
The truck blocked her to the left, so she swerved to the right, her rental car bucking onto the sidewalk, something grinding in the undercarriage.
The car shot past, merged into the center lane, and kept going.
Ruby swerved back onto the road just before hitting a streetlight. Even so, she clipped it with her sideview mirror, which shattered with a loud thud. Zoomer screeched, looking all around for the source of the sound.
Back on the road, breathing hard, she glanced at the sideview mirror. Nothing left but a broken stump. In her rearview mirror she could see a constellation of glass fragments spread out over the road.
“First the hubcaps and now this,” Ruby muttered. “Helen is going to kill me.”
Her words sparked a thought. What if all this was a sham and Helen bumped off Bridget for some reason?
No, unlikely. If she had been involved, she wouldn’t be covering up the disappearance only to face awkward questions about her silence later. And she wouldn’t have brought in a stranger.
So no, Helen probably hadn’t killed her friend.
Damn, I’m developing a suspicious nature. I’m starting to automatically assume the worst about people.
Goes with the territory, I guess.
Being innocent of murder didn’t mean that Helen had told Ruby the whole truth, however. Helen seemed just as keen to cover her ass as to find her friend.
Some friend. Guess she figures she can always find another wing girl, another one-woman audience to her rebellious housewife show.
But it turned out Bridget was the real rebellious one. I wonder what Helen thought about that?
Rebellious. Rebels. What was the name of that Syrian militia that tried to recruit in the refugee camp? I’ll have to look it up. That could be the password.
And on and on it goes …
Within a couple of minutes she had made it to the Moonlight Lounge, a low, dark little glass-fronted place attached to the Moonlight Lodge. It was a short drive but a rather long walk from Caribbean Dreams.
Several cars were parked out front. Ruby pulled in and studied the place for a moment. The hotel looked like a budget place, not some cheap dive but rather a low-priced alternative to everybody’s dream of a beach view. The kind of place package tour operators with their glittering brochures of pristine beaches shove towards those tourists foolish enough to buy the bargain package.
Once again she left Zoomer behind before she headed to the lounge. She didn’t want to call attention to herself, and a monkey begging drinks was a bit of an attention grabber.
The interior was quiet, a dimly lit place with a few booths and tables. Mood music played softly, and a bored-looking bartender stood behind the counter, serving a slumped man another cocktail to replace the one he had just finished off. The nearest booth was taken by a quartet of British senior citizens, two elderly couples whose sunburns were visible even in this dim light. Ruby got the impression that only hotel customers came here and not many of them either.
That impression died when she looked further into the room.
At the far end, scattered in different tables and booths, sat four attractive women. All were in their twenties and all were dressed in fine eveningwear, at odds with the solidly middle-class appearance of the drunk and the elderly couples. All four women sat alone.
Odd.
Before she could think further on this, the bartender addressed her.
“Good evening, ma’am. What can I get you?” he asked with an utter lack of emotion. He was a young mixed-race boy, still pimply, and obviously disliked his job.
“What do you have?” Ruby asked, examining the selection behind him.
“Booze,” he grunted.
His future in the service industry looked dim.
“Booze!” the hunched man at the bar shouted, raising a thumb’s up.
The teen rolled his eyes.
Haven’t you drunk enough for one night? Ruby asked herself.
I’ll only drink the good stuff. And just one shot.
NO.
“Got any Bahamian Gold?”
What did I just say?
The words just came out. Automatic reaction.
Am I talking to myself?
Yes. Relax, at least you’re not doing it out loud.
The young bartender stared at her.
“Bahamian what?”
“Never mind. Give me an … orange juice.”
Ruby hated herself for how much effort those words cost her.
When the bartender came back with her orange juice, Ruby showed him the photo of Helen and Bridget.
“Um, I was supposed to meet my friends down here for a vacation, but we ended up in different hotels. Have you seen them?”
“Nope. Ask at reception. Why don’t you call or email them?”
Duh. I really need to get better at this.
“Oh, they didn’t bring their phones. Wanted a digital detox.”
I need a detox too.
“Oh,” the bartender obviously didn’t care. “Well, sorry, but I haven’t seen them.”
“All right. Thanks for the drink.”
The slumped figure at the bar gave another thumb’s up sign. “Drink!”
Ruby drained her orange juice, paid, and headed for a glass door she saw that connected with the front lobby of the hotel.
Then she paused, thinking of a better idea.
She headed back out to the parking lot, then rushed into the hotel entrance, all wide-eyed and out of breath. The night manager behind the counter looked up.
“Are you all right, miss?”
“N-no. There’s someone lurking out there in the parking lot! He tried to creep up on my car as I was parking.”
The night manager stood, checked the CCTV screen, and said, “I don’t see anyone but this only covers the entrance. I’ll go check, ma’am. You wait here.”
“Oh, thank you. Be careful!”
As soon as he stepped out, Ruby circled the desk and went to the computer.
She gave a nervous glance at the front door, which was made of glass, showing part of the parking lot. The night manager was still out of sight but could return at any moment.
The glass door connecting to the bar only looked on an empty booth. Neither the customers nor the bartender could see her.
That night manager wouldn’t stay out there long, though.
She sat in front of the computer. She needed to do this quick. Minimizing the Minecraft game the night manager had been playing, she pulled up the registration file and scrolled down the names. Sure enough, there was a reservation under the name Bridget Hansen. Room 226. She shut the registration file, and pulled up Minecraft, and stood.
A shadow appeared on the pavement just in front of the door. Ruby ducked behind the front desk.
She heard the door open.
The manager’s voice called out. “Whoever it is, they’re gone. Um, ma’am?”
She peeked over the counter. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Ruby stood. “What a relief! He scared me so much. Thank you.”
She came around to the front of the counter.
“Sorry about that. Even in the Caribbean we have crime.”
Tell me about it.
“I hope Ed is all right.”
“Ed?”
“Ed Jacobs,” Ruby said, naming the next person on the registration list after Bridget Hansen. “That’s who I came to see. What room is he in?”
For a brief second the night manager paused, looking her up and down. Ruby tensed. Had she said something wrong?
“Oh. One moment.” The night manager sat at the computer, retrieved the f
ile Ruby had just closed, and said, “Room 201.”
Ruby gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you. And thanks for checking the parking lot.”
“He’s probably long gone by now. When you come out I’ll walk you to your car, ma’am. Just to be sure. To get to Room 201, just follow that hallway to the end and take the stairs. It’s right next to the stairs.”
With a final smile, Ruby headed for the stairs.
She let out a breath of relief as she got out of sight of the night manager. That had been a close call. A close call that paid off. Finally, a solid lead!
Ruby’s nerves prickled in anticipation. She might solve this in the next few minutes. One less bit of drama in her life.
To her surprise, she felt a bit of regret about that.
Weird. I really am beginning to like this craziness. It gives an adrenaline rush like stepping into the ring.
The hotel interior looked as low budget as their lounge, with faded carpet, walls in need of a paint job, and watercolors of surf and sailing ships on the walls that looked like the ones you could buy from any beachside stall for twenty bucks. Ruby wondered if they got a bulk discount.
She got to Room 226. It looked like every other door on that level. For a moment she hesitated, unsure how to handle this. Anything could be going on in there.
Ruby pressed her ear against the door and listened. Nothing.
She smelled something, though, a musty richness. Faint but distinctly unpleasant.
What was that? It smelled familiar, a rare stink she had smelled once, years ago.
But she couldn’t place it. The memory lurked just out of reach.
Keeping her ear to the door, she knocked.
No sound from within. She knocked again. Still nothing. She waited a full minute, then pounded on the door.
Silence.
Ruby took a step back from the door and glanced in either direction down the hallway. Now what? She couldn’t ask the manager if Bridget was in, not after telling him she was going to an entirely different room.
A sudden flood of memory hit her like a Mack truck.
The wailing of women. An imam intoning prayers in Arabic. A mass grave where bodies of adults and children were being laid, wrapped in white sheets.
Syria.
The residents of the refugee camp had heard rumors that a village had been overrun by one of the militias. The villagers had housed a rival militia the previous week, forced to offer hospitality at gunpoint, and now their enemies had swept in to wreack a terrible vengeance.
A team from Doctors Without Borders had gone with an armed escort to see if the rumors were true.
They had been. Every man, woman, and child in that village—some two hundred all told—had been gunned down in the central plaza. The massacre had happened a couple of days before. The bodies had lain exposed to the sun and the flies, giving off a rich, sickening odor.
The smell had been overpowering. And Ruby, standing in the hallways of a hotel in the Bahamas, was smelling it again.
Nothing for it. She needed to get in there. The door had felt weak under her knock, certainly weaker than your average MMA contender, and she’d blasted through plenty of them.
She took a step back and gave the door a front kick right next to the lock.
The cheap wood around the lock splintered and the door flew open.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Inside, a woman lay sprawled on the bed, the naked body and white sheets soaked with blood.
Ruby gagged. It was a middle-aged white woman, and at first glance the blood covered so much of the face that she didn’t recognize the corpse as Bridget Hansen. Blood smeared the cheeks and forehead and matted her hair, the eyes bugged and glassy, the mouth open in a silent scream.
She lay tangled in the sheets, and both soaked in blood. Some had even dripped down the side of the bed to make a big stain on the carpet.
Ruby brought her hand to her nose and mouth, overcome by the stench and shaking a little as she remembered another body, a male body, lying amid the trash of a dumpster.
She had found that body only a few weeks before. What the hell was happening with her life?
Then the adrenaline kicked in. She ducked back outside and looked either way down the hallway. It appeared no one had heard her kick in the door. The hotel didn’t seem very occupied, and most people would be out on the town. Good. That gave her some time.
A tremor ran through Ruby’s body. She staggered a few steps down the hallway and leaned against the wall, trying to catch her breath.
I should have known she was dead. I just hoped …
No point hoping. She had stumbled onto a murder scene.
Crap. Now what?
She ran her trembling hands through her close-cropped hair, trying to get a grip.
Do the job. Helen wanted answers. Find them for her.
Go back in there?
You’ve faced trained fighters trying to beat you into a pulp. You’ve faced machete-wielding gang members who wanted to rob and violate you. This is no worse. It’s a whole lot uglier, but it’s no worse. At least Bridget can’t hurt you.
She a deep breath, cutting it off short as she caught a whiff of the travesty inside, squared her shoulders, and forced herself to move back into the room. She closed the door behind her as best she could, then cursed, reopened the door, and pulled her sleeve around her hand. This she used to wipe down the door where she had touched it. Leaving her fingerprints here after her prior history with the Nassau police would be a really, really bad idea.
Quietly closing the door a second time, she slowly turned and forced herself to look at the horror on the bed.
Ruby could see several stab wounds to the chest. There were a couple on the forearms and hands too, as if Bridget had tried to defend herself. Two fingers had nearly been cut off, and dangled by shreds of flesh. That hand lay in a thick pad of dried blood.
The body appeared somewhat bloated and emitted that telltale sickly smell. Ruby knew very little about how corpses decomposed, but she did know that these signs showed that Bridget had been dead for a while. Perhaps since that first night?
The room was a budget one, with simple furnishings and a small bathroom. Some clothing that Ruby assumed were Bridget’s lay draped on a chair. An ashtray sat on top of the television with cigarette ashes in it but no cigarettes. The smell of cigarettes was barely detectible under the smell of the decomposing body.
Using her shirt to check the room without leaving fingerprints, Ruby found the closet empty. The chest of drawers had nothing but a Gideon Bible. The nightstand was spattered with dried blood and Ruby winced as she opened it. Nothing. Some blood flaked off on to her shirt. Ruby cringed and shook it off.
Moving into the bathroom, she found nothing in the shower, although she noted that the clear little plastic bottle of free shampoo was half empty. Nothing in the medicine cabinet.
No extra clothes. No toiletries. Bridget had obviously not intended on staying here more than one night. Had she planned a one-night stand with Dirty Dancer?
The smell of Bridget’s rotting corpse began to nauseate her. She opened the window in the bathroom. It looked out onto the parking lot. She saw the night manager out there, peering around.
Still looking for that phantom stalker I invented. Seems like a good guy who cares about the guests, Ruby thought, suddenly pitying him. But the real trouble is up here, and it’s about to ruin his night.
Yes, she would have to call the police. No way around it. Less than a month after being questioned over one dead tourist, she had discovered another.
She had no idea what the homicide squad would say about that, but she knew it wouldn’t be good.
Before she called and perhaps ruined her life, she needed to check out the murder scene more. It would be her only chance.
Peeking under the bed and furniture, she found nothing but a lot of dust bunnies. She got up and took another look around the room. Nothing. Ruby gritted her teeth in frustration. S
he had no idea what to look for in a murder scene. She knew about fighting and about booze. Why did she keep getting pulled into homicide investigations?
With a conscious effort, she turned once again to the body and leaned over it to study it more closely. Ruby was no stranger to blood and broken bones. Once when watching a fight from ringside she had even seen a woman’s eye pop out of her socket. Nothing in her MMA past prepared her for this sight, though.
There were at least four knife wounds to the arms and hands, made from what appeared to be a pretty big blade. A half dozen stab wounds into her chest were what had killed her. With the blood dried, there was no way to see how deep the stabs were, but they looked pretty wide, suggesting that they had all gone in past the point where the knife flared to its full width.
Stepping back, she turned slowly to take in the room. The bloodstains were only on the bed and a bit of spatter on the headboard and dresser. Bridget had been lying in bed naked when she got killed.
The most obvious solution was that Dirty Dancer had done it. The stripper had called Bridget and gone back to Caribbean Dreams to find her. Helen and Bridget had only been in the club for twenty minutes or so. Dirty Dancer must have waited for them until they came out. Bridget probably got her call, said they’d be out, and then they left after finishing their drinks and scoring some coke.
And then what? How had Helen ended up in the alley with a matchbook from this place? Had she been here too? If so, why wasn’t she dead in the hotel room too?
Ruby leaned against a wall, trying to calm herself and sort her thoughts. From the angle where she stood, she noticed that the clothes draped over the chair partially covered a purse.
She lifted up the clothes, trying not to shift them. The purse was a mid-priced brand and not flashy. Something Bridget would carry and not Dirty Dancer. Unzipping it, she found a billfold inside with eighty dollars cash and a couple of credit cards.
Ruby blinked with surprise. So Helen had been dumped in another part of town after being robbed, while Bridget wasn’t robbed but killed? None of this made any sense.
Dirty Dancer’s behavior didn’t make any sense either. What motive did she have to kill a client? Bridget didn’t seem like the kind of woman to get rough in bed. On the other hand, she didn’t seem like the kind of woman to cheat on her husband with a female prostitute either.