Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Sure,” I said. “How ’bout the dusty bottle?”

  Duke offered a whiskey to Tomás, who graciously grunted his refusal.

  Duke slid a tumbler of malt whiskey to me and simultaneously we took appreciative sips. “This whiskey’s over seventy years old, son, so don’t go gulpin’ the shit down like we cousins at the Elks Club on a Saturday night,” he told me. “So. Word on the street is you looking for wisdom on sex trafficking in our fair city. Thinkin’ about a new career since that cop thing didn’t work out?”

  I gave Duke the lowdown, then slid my empty glass back to him. He was kind enough to pour me another two fingers. “I grew to hate that business venture. Never was a sentimental fellow, but after seeing too much desperation and fear in too many women I got out of that business. The hard truth is some of them bitches wanted me to move ’em through the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Better than bein’ raped by some new Hong Kong millionaire or Saudi prince. Or beat to shit as Moscow or Turkish drug mules.” Duke took another sip of his scotch. “But here we are, right? Glorious new century. Glorious new possibilities.”

  “Your magnanimity is truly inspiring, Duke,” I said, nauseated by his cavalier assessment. “Real Nobel Prize stuff.”

  “Get to the fucking point,” Tomás growled at Ducane.

  The two men traded hard stares before Duke smiled and said, “The point is you got some off-book ICE units scoopin’ and skimmin’ Hispanic and Middle Eastern girls, moving ’em through a new private network. Heard they even pinched some white Irish girl, overstayed her visa. I mean, they can’t move ’em theyselfs on account it’s too risky, right? And the pros I know—used to know— don’t want no partnership with the feds—dirty or otherwise—’cause feds got a way of sittin’ on they hands and chokin’ on they thumbs. So, who they dealin’ with?” Duke took a moment to hold Tomás and me in suspense. “Skinheads, neo-Nazis, white supremacist biker gangs. And I mean if theys one thing Michigan got in more abundance than apples, cherries, walleye and deer, it’s white hate groups. Most of ’em just inbred, squirrel-eatin’ mothafuckas couldn’t find they ass with one hand nailed to it and the other holding instructions. And since the bigger ones be strapped for drug and gun cash, what better way to collect coin than to move girls? Move ’em through strip joints. Through high-end members-only sex clubs. Hook up with a couple big, badass biker clubs out of California and Texas.” Duke retrieved a notepad and Mont Blanc pen and began writing. “I was you? Thems the folks I’d talk to.” He tore the piece of paper from the notepad and handed it to me.

  “You’re being especially helpful,” I said. “Why?”

  “‘Not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.’ Hebrews 9:12. Not everybody walks the same path to redemption, Snow. This is my path. And my path has been carved out by my own blood. My history. This business? My business? A hundred legit. That’s a path that’s reduced my involuntary mortality odds by at least eighty percent. I like them odds.” Then he smiled. It was a smile I’m sure approximated that of the snake in the Garden of Eden. “Besides. I get my donuts and haircuts same place you do. And the wise pay homage to donuts and haircuts. You see what I’m sayin’?”

  I did.

  “You just like yo daddy,” Duke finally said. “Honorable man. A little slow on the up-take, but still it’s my belief that we, as honorable men, can disagree without poppin’ caps up each other’s ass.”

  “And what about the Compton twins?” I said.

  “I will, of course, inform the boys that you are no longer persona non grata and should be treated with the utmost respect,” Duke said. He laughed and added, “Of course, I may have to repeat this several times before it sticks, so . . .”

  I finished my scotch, stood and offered my hand to Duke. Surprised, Duke stared at my hand for a second before standing and shaking it.

  “Be careful out there,” Duke said. “I may have need of your friendship at some future date and I’d hate to see you get popped before then.”

  I looked at Duke in his lime-green polo shirt, white Kangol hat and white belted hot-pink shorts.

  “Are they shooting a remake of Caddyshack?” I said. “’Cause I mean you? Nailed it!”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” Duke laughed.

  “See ya ’round, boys,” I said to the Compton twins as we passed the conference room. They had resumed watching Miss Marple. “Try not to miss me too much, n’k?”

  “Assho,” Fergie said.

  “Assho,” Fin agreed.

  “Enjoy your visit?” Dahlia, aka White Girl, said as I traded her my ticket for my gun.

  “Feel like I need a shower with sacramental wine,” I said.

  Seventeen

  “This could get real ugly, real fast.”

  Tomás and I were waiting for our lunch at Tom’s Oyster Bar in Royal Oak. Tomás had wanted to sit at a table outside in the eighty-six-degree heat and 40 percent humidity. For Tomás, heat like this made cold beer taste better—though I’d noticed he had no problem enjoying the stuff during a midwinter Michigan blizzard.

  “Ugly and fast I can handle,” I said. “Right now, all I’ve got is boogeyman stories and a half-ass lead from an ex-con.”

  “But you trust your FBI lady friend, right?”

  “O’Donnell?” I said. “Yes. I do. But she’s not always right or quick to follow her instincts. The government employee syndrome.”

  Our waitress—a young woman with a bright smile, buoyant spirit and a cryptic upper arm tattoo that read “Camus Was Right”—brought our drinks. Tomás had a New Holland Dragon’s Milk stout (proof that not all was bible-thumping Dutch Reform conservatism in Grand Rapids). Having already indulged in Duke’s Highland malt, I opted for a club soda, lots of ice, with a slice of lime. Maybe next time a Valentine Vodka martini, chilled, up, two olives.

  Tomás devoured his Baja Fish Tacos while I savored every bite of my shrimp po’ boy. I still had half a sandwich to go when Tomás, finishing his last taco, said, “Shoulda done the world a favor and put Ducane down like a rabid dog.”

  “‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’” I said, quoting either Sun Tzu or Machiavelli. “As long as he’s doing his recording studio thing, he’s no threat to us.”

  “And the Compton twins? You think he can keep those King Kong mothafuckas on a short leash?”

  “The Compton twins don’t eat, sleep or shit unless Duke tells them to. Plus, if Duke wanted me dead, it would have happened long before now.” Then I said, “You still with me tonight?”

  “Si.”

  “Good,” I said. “Pick me up at around eight thirty.”

  “I’ll bring a hundred bucks with me,” Tomás said. “In singles.”

  He laughed.

  Me, not so much.

  Nicky Karnopolis may run one of Detroit’s most popular strip clubs on 8 Mile Road west of the Southfield Freeway, but dear God—he’s dumber than a bag of tube socks.

  Nicky’s father—Christophanos “CK” Karnopolis—once owned three clubs: The Barbiton in Greektown, Aphrodite’s Pillow in Grand Circus and Leto’s on West 8 Mile. The clubs were mostly clean and the strippers toed a very strict don’t-get-drunk-or-do-drugs line enforced by CK’s steroid-juiced security thugs.

  Karnopolis made no bones about not liking black people—“Why I got to let niggers in my clubs? Niggers, they animals! Don’t fucking tip!” He barely survived a couple racial discrimination lawsuits brought about by a few black patrons and one stripper.

  Having reached the ripe old age of seventy-eight, the cigar-chomping, ouzo-swilling CK decided strip clubs were a young man’s game. He sold two of the clubs and left the third largest—Leto’s—to his idiot son Nicky.

  “He screw up?” CK once uncharacteristically confided in me. I think half a
bottle of ouzo was floating his brain. “Fuck him. Always make more boys. Still got Greek Fire in the sack, you know what I say?”

  If Nicky knew anything about kidnappings, prostitution or human trafficking, he probably forgot it five minutes after his last line of coke or his fifth glass of marginally drinkable champagne.

  Still, he was on Duke Ducane’s list and FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell’s mind.

  For Nicky, the club was easy money. It was how he got laid. It afforded him a six-bedroom house on a suburban lake and a private pier for what had been a twenty-six-foot pontoon party boat (recently repossessed).

  Tomás and I were in Nicky’s cluttered back office.

  “Guys,” Nicky said, flashing a million-megawatt grin. “Seriously? Trafficking girls? Do I look that needy or stupid?”

  I chose not to answer.

  “Nobody in here from local or state cops? Maybe ICE?” Tomás said.

  “Whoa, whoa—whoa!” Nicky said, his hands dramatically pumping the brakes. “State cops? Fucking ICE? Guys, this is a respectable adult entertainment venue! Local po-po, yeah. Sure. But they usually just get a bellyful of my beer and a face full of complimentary tit, right? We ain’t had no trouble from nobody.”

  “Mind if we just hang for a while?” I said.

  “As long as you want, Detective,” Nicky said with his uniquely irritating and nervous screech of a laugh. I didn’t correct him on the “detective” thing. “I’ll even spot you drinks! Lap dances? I got these twins—Bosnia, Belgrade, some fuckin’ Middle East country—make your dick a diamond cutter, swear to God!”

  Walking back into the soupy darkness of the club, Tomás said, “Is it me or is that guy tweaked like nobody’s business?”

  “Like nobody’s business,” I said.

  The club’s DJ—a white dude with blond dreadlocks and an oversized Brooklyn Dodgers sweatshirt—was blasting some rap song about “phat stacks and mad pussy” while two women helicoptered around stage-to-ceiling poles.

  One of the women, with red-clay skin, large dark eyes and jet-black hair, barely looked legal. She spotted me, smiled and winked.

  For whatever reason I got an uncomfortable chill.

  Like I knew her from somewhere.

  If there’s one thing about strip clubs that’s always churned my stomach, it’s the smell: Humid funk. A sickly stew of sweat, farts, mold, dicey food, flat beer and premature ejaculation. The bathrooms are like walking into a tire fire.

  Aside from the smell and the sexually reductive denigration of women, I’ve always been bothered by the lack of poetic imagination in stripper stage names: Jade Green, Tiffany Diamond, Honey Potts.

  A caramel-colored woman exhibited a bit more initiative in adopting her stage name “Marqesh de Sade.” She walked with imposing sexual confidence on impossibly high Lucite heels up to our small table and said, “Looks like you sad-faced boys could use some stim-a-lation.”

  Before I could dismissively thank Marqesh for her interest in alleviating the sadness in our faces, she’d mounted my lap and pulled my head into glistening breasts intent on breaching the banks of her black imitation-leather bra. She smelled like moderately expensive perfume and a night’s worth of hard grinding.

  Tomás laughed. “My friend is a sad-faced boy, Marqesh. Think you can turn that frown upside down?”

  “Oh, I can do better than that, lover,” she said. Then leaning in to my ear, she said, “Outside, fire door, five minutes. Got some ICE shit for ya.”

  After a few minutes of grinding on me to concussion-inducing music, Marqesh winked at me, stood and walked back into the overheated crowd.

  “Was that as much fun for you as it was for me?” Tomás laughed.

  Five minutes later, Tomás and I stood by the club’s fire emergency door.

  The door clanked open and Marqesh came out wearing a purple polyester “Sailor Moon” kimono and fuzzy pink bunny slippers.

  “Y’all got a cigarette?” she said.

  “Smoking kills,” I said.

  “I strip for idiots who wanna animal-fuck me by that dumpster,” she said, pointing to what appeared to be a twenty-four-hour, all-you-can-eat rat buffet. “A cigarette ain’t gonna kill me any quicker than this job.”

  “Regular or menthol?” Tomás said.

  “Menthol.”

  Tomás reached into a cargo pants pocket and pulled out a pack of Salem Menthol 100s. He handed the box to Marqesh and she knocked one out. Tomás lit her cigarette and said, “Keep the box. Tryin’ to quit.”

  She nodded her thanks and dropped the box of cigarettes into a pocket of her kimono.

  “I know you,” she finally said, narrowing her eyes at me. “Cop who busted the mayor.”

  “Sorry, I don’t—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “You wouldn’t remember me. You came to his contractor buddy’s house in Indian Village. Bastard was trying to bribe you. I was at the top of the stairs polishing some jagoff’s knob from the State’s Attorney General’s office. You told the mayor’s buddy to go fuck himself. Then you punched him in his stupid face.” Marqesh took a deep drag off the cigarette and blew two columns of smoke from her nostrils. “I’m nobody’s hooker, but—easy money’s easy money. Sex has always been a negotiation. Ask any wife.”

  Marqesh took a last, deep drag off her cigarette, dropped the butt and crushed it with a furry bunny slipper.

  “Heard you and Nicky,” she said. “Fucking idiot. Yeah, there was a couple of them ICE dudes in last week. Four of ’em. No—three. Fourth guy looked like a biker dude: scraggly-ass beard, leather vest. Couldn’t see no club name. Drank like goddamn fish. One of ’em pays a C-note for lap dance from one of the white girls. Russian girl. Fucked up on meth and vodka.” Marqesh lit another cigarette and took a deep drag. “When was the last time you heard of some government grunt whippin’ out a C-note for anything? So anyway, this guy’s trashed, right? Wasted. Starts yellin’ shit like ‘I should check your papers, honey’ and ‘you know how much we could get for that sweet commie ass?’ That’s when his buddies stuff a couple twenties into the Russian chick’s G-string, snatch him up and they’re in the wind.”

  “Can you describe any of these guys?”

  “White,” she said. “I guess. Shit, you know what the lighting’s like in there. Coulda been Chinese circus midgets. But I know they was ICE. When they come in a couple of ’em flashed their creds at DaShawn like that would get ’em free lap dances. Assholes.”

  “DaShawn?”

  “Bouncer. Gone now. Nice guy just tryin’ to make ends meet.”

  Tomás and I thanked Marqesh.

  I started to fish out a couple bills from my pocket. “Keep it,” she said. “Just promise me you’ll skull fuck these guys. I do what I do ’cause I choose to do it. Some girls don’t got the chance to choose. You find these guys, awright?”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” I said.

  As Tomás and I walked to my car, I said, “Regular or menthol?”

  “You want somebody to talk in a strip club?” Tomás said. “Chances are they want a smoke. Makes for a moment of camaraderie. They didn’t teach you that at the academy?”

  “Must have been out sick that day.”

  Eighteen

  “So,” O’Donnell said. “You boys have fun tonight?”

  It was late Monday evening and I was stripped down. The shower was running when O’Donnell called.

  “Some of us had more fun than others,” I said.

  “Anything for me?”

  “Love and respect,” I said. “Other than that, I got jack shit.”

  I gave O’Donnell a download on our visit with Duke Ducane. And I told her about our evening at the strip club where a very stupid, very nervous Karnopolis gave us nothing and how a brave stripper named Marqesh de Sade gave us our first solid lead.

 
“Marqesh de Sade?” O’Donnell said. “Best stripper name I’ve heard in years.”

  “In the meantime, since you’re FBI, seems we’ve got neo-Nutsies and bikers somehow mixed up in this thing now. If I were you, I’d start collecting intelligence on bike-mounted Michigan hate groups, Lower Peninsula and local varietals.”

  “We’re monitoring eight such groups in our Wire Room right now,” she said. “Plus, we’ve got a guy inside the BMCs—Blutsbrüder Motorcycle Club—in Howell. Loose affiliation with the west coast BMCs. Nasty bastards, but mostly weapons and drug distribution. No human trafficking that we know of.”

  “Eight groups and one guy on the inside?” I said.

  “You have any idea how many of these whack-job groups there are in Michigan?” O’Donnell said.

  “The Southern Poverty Law Center puts it somewhere north of a buttload,” I said, standing in the thickening bathroom shower steam.

  “You get me a group name and location and I’ll get a warrant for a wiretap. What’s that sound?”

  “That’s me waiting to shower off an evening at a strip club.”

  “Jesus, Snow,” O’Donnell said. “I had no idea you were such a choir boy.”

  After my shower, I slipped on a well-worn pair of Wayne State University faded gold sweatpants and a black hoodie, climbed into bed and prepared to read a couple poems by Antonio Machado. Something that would help guide my dreams to water wheels and cathedrals.

  Of course, there are nights when I sleep on top of the sheets. Just in case Izzy comes for a visit to remind me that that corpse once held her soul, or the dark alleyways of my mind revert back to Kabul and Kandahar, Ghazni and Gardez. Nights when I wait for “the call.” The order to pull the trigger and watch the body fall.

  After forty minutes of reading, I was no closer to sleep.