Bullet River (The Garbage Collector 2) (3 page)

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 I 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.

“Fist 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, Ralph 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.