by Dave Stanton
I went back to the all-night restaurant, drank coffee, and tried to think clearly. It felt like it had been days since the cops woke me up in the morning. I reread the information from Samantha’s application until I memorized it, and considered flying down to LA to try to find her parents. But when I called directory service, the operator told me there were ninety-two listings for Nunez in Southern California.
Staking out her apartment was an idea, but Gloria told me Samantha said she was going “off the air,” and the gangbanger said she left with a suitcase. My face felt gritty, I hadn’t shaved since the day before, and when I looked in the mirror in the men’s room, my eyes were bleary and bloodshot. But I was wired, so I decided, Fuck it, let’s take it to another level, but first I wanted to kill some time. I had a piece of apple pie and read the paper until one in the morning, then I drove back to Samantha’s apartment.
I wore my black coat and an old ski beanie pulled low over my ears, and stayed in the shadows as I made my way to the gate of the Prairie Rose complex. I opened it with a quick jerk, not wanting a prolonged squeak. The night was still, the courtyard dimly lit. A couple of apartments across the way showed light through their drapes, but my timing wouldn’t get any better than one-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Hopefully the crack addicts were sleeping off their weekend binges. The last thing I needed was some paranoid pipe-head spotting me and making a scene.
I stayed on the balls of my feet, climbing the stairs, gliding carefully around the clutter to apartment 216. A cheap outdoor light fixture between 215 and 216 illuminated the area, and I burned my fingertips unscrewing the bulb. When the light went out, I knelt down in the dark and waited, letting myself relax, scanning the courtyard. Then I went to work on the door with my lock-pick tools. It was a process that required patience and focus; I was never successful if I tried to hurry. I had been pretty good at it when I was doing a lot of bounty hunting, but I was rusty. It took a couple of minutes, though it seemed longer, then the tumblers fell into place and the lock clicked open. I went through the door in a crouch, my automatic in my hand.
I quickly checked the small kitchen, the bedroom, and bathroom. No one was home.
I started in the bathroom, where an Easy Rider and High Times magazine lay next to the toilet. On top of the tank, a box of anti-lice shampoo was proudly displayed. I went through her medicine cabinet and pocketed two small prescription bottles, one for codeine, the other for some medicine I didn’t recognize. Both contained pills, but they were over two years old.
An unmade king-size bed took up most of the bedroom. The closets and dresser drawers were conspicuously empty—there wasn’t a stitch of clothing left in the place. Two pillows lay on the bed, and I ran my finger over one and snagged a few long black hairs. The other one had a number of shorter blond and gray hairs on it. Looks like Mr. 187 is losing his hair.
I rifled the nightstand drawer, found a box of condoms, a vibrator, half a joint in a plastic bag, a paperback-size mirror smeared with white-powder residue, and two packs of matches. One of the matchbooks was from the old Mustang Ranch whorehouse. Before I left the room, I checked under the bed, finding only a dog-eared porno magazine and some crumpled tissues.
I quickly tossed the dingy mess of a kitchen and surmised that Samantha Nunez wasn’t much of a housekeeper and also must have left in a hurry. A half-gallon carton of milk was left out on the counter, and a TV dinner was in the microwave. She must have really been in a rush to pack her clothes and split because she’d left two bottles of wine and a six-pack of Budweiser in the refrigerator.
I went back to the main room and pulled the cushions off the couch and easy chair. There was nothing but crumbs and pennies. Under an end table, an open phone book lay face down. I picked it up, and it was opened to the yellow pages under the letter “E” for entertainers. The two pages were filled with ads for the legal brothels in the Reno area, which were all on the outskirts of Carson City. I was scanning through the next few pages, reading the smaller miscellaneous ads for the sex trade, when I heard the heavy clump of boots on the balcony. I listened intently for a moment with my breath caught in my throat—it sounded like more than one person. I quickly retreated to the back bedroom. A few seconds later, they were knocking on the door as I slid open the window.
“Samantha Nunez,” a deep voice, probably a cop’s voice, called out. I climbed up on the sill and lowered myself down to arm’s length, my boots skidding against the stucco wall for traction, and they were still knocking and calling her name when I let go. I hit the hard sand of the back alley in good position, felt the shock of the second-story drop jolt my bones, rolled over, and came up on my feet. My ankle twisted a bit as I landed, and my knees complained, but it didn’t prevent me from moving away quickly.
I went through a missing slat in an old wooden fence and into the back parking lot of the adjacent apartment complex. I sprinted down the rows the best I could, limping a bit, staying out of the light. The lot ended in a narrow driveway leading out to the street. A sheriff’s cruiser was double-parked down the road. I moved across the street under the darkness of a blown-out streetlamp and made it around the corner to my car.
Despite the cold, I had broken a sweat, and I drove back toward downtown with my window open. I took a roundabout way, staying carefully at the speed limit, and checked into a small hotel on Virginia Street.
I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head, but every time I closed my eyes they blinked open like a ping-pong ball bouncing off a hard surface. I stood up and began pacing around the room. It was critical to locate Samantha Nunez quickly, although I wasn’t sure if the cops came to her apartment because someone reported me breaking and entering, or maybe they’d just learned Samantha was a likely witness to Sylvester Bascom’s murder. I hoped it wasn’t the latter. If the police were on to her already, any lead I might have in the race to solve the case would be precarious.
The prescription bottles were still in my jacket pocket. I tossed them on the bed, then flipped the hotel’s phone book to the same page it was opened to at the apartment. I set the phone book on the bed next to the bottles, laid down my handwritten transcription of Samantha’s employment application, and let my eyes wander over the words. The obvious connection was her stint at the Mustang Ranch and the phone book open to the page with the brothel’s ads, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
It was past two-thirty in the morning. I lay down again, but a minute later I was back up and wearing a path in the room’s cheap carpeting. It had been a long day, beginning with being woken out of a dead, boozy slumber by a cop with a bad attitude. My teeth grinded, my jaw swollen and sore where Osterlund had punched me. I took some deep breaths, tried to relax, and stood very still in the center of the room. Then I reached down and abruptly tore the pages out of the phone book and went to my car.
******
Conrad Pace pushed himself up on his elbow and snatched up the phone. “Whoever is calling me at three in the fucking morning, this better be good,” he croaked.
“Sorry, Cuz,” Louis Perdie said. “Our friend in Reno just called me.”
“What the hell about?”
“Someone just tossed Samantha Nunez’s apartment.”
“Samantha Nunez? Oh, yeah, Stiles’ broad.” Pace’s voice came down a notch.
“You remember her.”
“Some parts more than others, Louis,” Pace said.
Perdie chuckled briefly, then the humor went out of his voice, “Could have been the PI we tried to get to back off. He may know she was in the room when the guy was stuck in the gut.”
Pace yawned. “We got nothing to worry about unless he finds her. I don’t see that happening.”
“Depends how he goes about things, I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, Cuz, just a feeling I got on this guy. I think he’s in it for the long haul.”
Pace laid his head back on the pillow. “Perhaps he needs some additio
nal discouragement.”
“Usually that’s all it takes, Cuz,” Perdie said.
“See to it, then.” Pace yawned and went back to sleep.
CHAPTER 15
Things feel mighty lonely at three A.M. in the desert, I thought as I headed east on Interstate 80, out of Reno and into the quiet solitude of the Great Basin Desert. The land seemed particularly suited for death—cold, endless, void of water or shelter, and unnaturally dark at night. If you wanted to kill someone and hide the body in a shallow grave…yeah, this would be the place.
I watched closely for the signs, and five miles outside Carson City a small billboard advertising Darla’s Cathouse, The Velvet Ranch, and Tumbleweed Parlor Ranch appeared out of the blackness like a dream. I took the exit and navigated a narrow, unlit road that seemed to lead nowhere, until I came around the bend to a large gravel parking lot that served the brothels. I had a vague memory of being here years ago with a group of men, maybe it was a last hurrah before someone got married, and I remember driving around the desert wildly drunk in the middle of the night before we found the complex.
I idled slowly around the parking lot, past Darla’s, The Velvet, Tumbleweed 1, and Tumbleweed 2, which was a sad pile of sodden ashes and charred debris. A large sign on a steel post still remained, but apparently Tumbleweed 2 had burned down, and the unsightly aftermath looked like it was left as is, like a stoic testament to life’s inevitable disappointments. Whatever the case, it reduced my prospects to three. I started at Darla’s.
Two long mobile trailers set in a V met at a peaked façade that served as the main entrance. I pushed a button at the front gate, waiting in the still light. The buzzer on the gate rang and the lock released. I hurried out of the cold and into the lobby. A group of about ten prostitutes stood in a lineup in front of the bar and introduced themselves while I stood there awkwardly.
“Need a drink,” I mumbled, and they dispersed quickly.
There was no bartender, and one of the hookers walked around to fill her coffee mug. I asked her for a cup.
“It’ll be three dollars,” she said. “Okay?”
I checked my reflection in the bar mirror, wondering if I looked like someone who wouldn’t want to pay for an overpriced cup of stale coffee. My mug didn’t look indignant, just tired. Still, I probably looked better than the prostitute, a sour-faced thing who looked as bored and weary as an assembly-line worker. She had a sagging chest and bony legs and was probably barely out of her teens—twenty years old going on thirty-eight, I decided. I described Samantha Nunez and asked if she knew her.
“Nope,” she said, blowing a hit off her cigarette into the cloud of stale smoke above the bar.
I took my coffee and walked into the adjoining room, where most of the prostitutes had retreated to a circular couch. I knelt down and started talking to them one by one. They were definitely the B team. One woman had a body like a skinny man, her shoulder disfigured by the blurry remains of a tattoo that looked like it had survived an attempt at removal. Another was a pretty brunette with a tempting cleavage, but her hips and ass spread out massively. A third had a pleasant face but a vacant stare, and when she opened her mouth I saw she was missing a number of teeth. I talked to them all, and none had heard of Samantha Nunez.
As I was going out, three Mexican dudes pulled up in an old red work truck, and I could smell their sweat and the liquor on their breath when we passed on the walkway.
“How are the señoritas in there, amigo?” one asked.
“Muy bonita,” I replied, and walked out into the empty night, away from a sordid haven banished to the lost hills.
Across the gravel and sand, down a four-foot ridge in the terrain, was Tumbleweed 1. When I entered the building, the interior surprised me. If the other ranch was a greasy-spoon diner, the Tumbleweed was a luxurious five-star restaurant. A long mahogany bar overlooked the main parlor, where yellow lamps flickered faintly against the red walls. Dark velour sofas were grouped strategically in the shadows to the right and left, creating the impression that there were two separate, intimate rooms. About a dozen men sat scattered about the bar and the sofas, drinking and talking to the hookers. A few girls made a halfhearted attempt at forming a lineup as I came in, but they retreated when I walked up to the bar.
The bartender was busy mixing drinks, so I took in the scene while I waited. I tried to count the prostitutes, but different ones kept appearing from the hallways, and I lost track at fifteen. For the most part, they looked like strippers at a first-rate men’s club. There were blondes, brunettes, Asian women, a few black girls, and a tall, stunning redhead in a leopard bikini. The bartender made his way over to me and asked what I was having. I ordered a Coke, then requested to talk with the madam.
“She’s in the back. She should be out in a bit. Why don’t you relax and partake in the fun?” He gestured with a sweeping motion.
“It’s tempting, but I’m here on business.”
He gave me a doubtful look. “Suit yourself,” he said.
I sipped at my soft drink and after a minute a woman with long blond hair falling down her back approached me. She had a big nose but nice eyes and an open smile, along with a body that looked like it walked off the pages of Playboy. Her leotard was split down to her belly button, showing off a smooth, suntanned stomach.
“Hi, I’m Joanna. Why don’t you and I go get naked?” she said.
“You’re so gorgeous I doubt I could afford you.”
She stuck out her lower lip in a mock frown and sat next to me. I smelled her perfume and felt her body’s warmth as she leaned toward me, putting her lips up to my ear.
“I’ll give you a blow job that will change your life,” she whispered.
“That’s certainly something to consider,” I said. “But maybe you can help me with something else. I’ve been hired by a family to find their daughter. There’s a serious illness in the family, and they’d like to reach her, to let her know.”
“I see,” she said, her eyes wandering out to the parlor.
“Her name is Samantha Nunez. She’s thirty-two, dark hair, dark complexion, looks part Hispanic maybe, and had breast enlargement. Does that ring a bell?”
“Hmm,” she snorted. “Sounds like that tough bitch Tina who used to work here. She got fired ’cause she’s got a real gutter mouth and doesn’t know how to treat customers.”
“Did you know her?”
“Not really. She left about two weeks after I started. I stayed away from her.”
“Why?”
“She was the ultimate hard-ass chick. Nothing but trouble.”
“Do you have any idea where she is?”
“No, but I know who probably does.”
“Who?” I said.
“Come to my room, and I’ll tell you afterward.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Is this person here tonight?”
“Yeah, she’s here.” She looked down the bar and around the room. “I don’t see her now, but she’ll be around.”
“It’s important that I talk to her. I’ll wait here until she comes out. Could you just point her out for me?”
“Honey, I’m working. You come to my room, and I’ll find her for you when we’re done.”
“I’d rather wait for her,” I said. Just then a man in blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt sat down on the barstool next to her. He had glassy eyes, a smarmy smile, and his hair hung in his face. She turned toward him, and I touched her arm.
“Okay, Joanna, let’s go,” I said. “You just promise you’ll take me to her.”
She took my hand and led me down a long hallway to her room.
******
I walked back to the bar a half hour later and $150 lighter in the wallet. Joanna brought an Asian woman to where I sat. “This is Connie,” Joanna said, then she winked and fluttered her fingers at me as she strutted away.
“Hi, Connie, I’m Dan.”
“Actually, I just changed my name,” she said. “I’m Sasha today. But you
can call me Con, or Lola, or Sue Lin, or your little minky fuck toy. I don’t care as long as you buy me a drink.”
I ordered her a vodka Collins and decided to have a drink myself.
“Two cherries,” Sasha yelled at the bartender. She looked about thirty. Her figure was slight, her chest relatively modest, but she had bedroom legs and perfect skin.
“Sasha, I’m working for a family that wants to find their daughter. There’s been a sudden illness in the family, and they’d like her to know. I’m looking for Samantha Nunez. Do you know her?”
“Sure, we’re buds,” she said. Her features were a little too pronounced to be Asian—maybe she’d had plastic surgery or was part European. Her eyes were dark diamonds, and she had a wide smile and great teeth.
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
“I didn’t know she had family.” She put a cherry in her mouth and pulled on the stem until it popped off, then rolled the cherry around with her tongue and licked her lips. She smiled at me like we were sharing an inside joke.
“They’re in LA,” I said.
“Really. So one of Samantha’s relatives is sick?”
“That’s right. They want to reach her before it’s too late.”
“Why don’t you tell me, and I’ll call her?” She smiled again.
“I don’t know Samantha. But my guess is if someone in her family is dying, it’d be best for her to hear it from her family.”
She tilted her head. “I guess that’s logical. Okay, she called me a couple days ago and said she’s gonna go work a six-week shift at the Cat’s Meow Ranch down near Vegas. Said she was tired of the cold up here.”
Or more likely running from the heat, I thought. It was the break I needed—at this point I felt it was a given that Samantha Nunez was the key to the case. I thanked Sasha and walked out into the morning, but the sky was still black, and the distant glare of the moon shined in my eyes as if it was mocking me.