Familiar Lies (13 page)

“Oh, right.” Max told Liz his passcode and she began transferring the photos of the flophouse basement and the cabin to her own phone.

“We can go back to my hotel room for a while,” Max said.

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“Wait, what?”

“I’m joking,” Liz said, with a slight grin.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. It was a bad joke. I’m just trying to lighten the mood a little.”

“This is pretty heavy, isn’t it?”

“You could say that.”

“We can start putting our statement together there. I have my laptop with me. We can type something up and include the photos. We’ll get it ready for the cops and drop it off in the morning.”

“I suppose morning works then. It’s only a few hours away now. I’m glad we found that cabin sooner than later.”

“Yeah.” But a part of Max wished they hadn’t found it at all.

Max’s phone buzzed in Liz’s hand. She stared at the screen. “Ruby.”

“What?”

“A text from Ruby.”

“Read it.”

Liz opened the text and read it out loud. “Gabe didn’t show up for work tonight. I overheard some stuff, might be important.”

“Ask her what she heard.”

Liz typed the question and pressed send. A few minutes later another text flashed on the screen. “She says she can’t say over text. Too risky. She wants you to meet her after work tonight so she can tell you.”

“I guess nobody’s found Gabe just yet.”

“If she’s telling the truth.”

“Do you think she’s lying?”

“I don’t know. I guess not. Are you going to meet her?”

“I feel like I should.”

“I should tag along.”

“You might spook her.”

“No, I mean in my car, from a distance. I’ll keep watch, make sure nothing happens.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Liz grinned. “I know it is.”

They arrived back at Max’s hotel room twenty minutes later. After letting himself inside he kicked off his shoes and collapsed onto the bed. “I’m exhausted.”

“Me, too.”

“If I’d known I was having company I’d have gotten two beds.”

“No rest for the wicked, Max. When does Ruby’s shift end?”

“Last call is at one-thirty a.m. They let out by two o’clock or so.”

“Maybe there’s time for an hour nap. My eyelids are closing as I stand here.”

Max scooted toward the edge of the bed. He set an alarm for fifty minutes on his phone. He patted the empty space beside him. “Come on.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“Are you still joking?”

“No.”

“Liz, my only idea is to catch a few minutes of much-needed sleep right now. I’m not some horny teenager.”

“Then we both have the same idea.” Liz kicked off her own shoes and climbed into bed beside Max. She was asleep within a minute. Max followed her there soon after.

* * *

By one o’clock a.m., Max found himself back behind the wheel of his car, headed again for The Hustle. Not even in his youth had he visited a strip club so many times. Odd, how things turn out.

Liz traveled behind him in her car. He felt better about meeting Ruby with someone else at his back this time. If Ruby had some good information it would be that much more he could add to what he and Liz planned to give to the police.

He’d worked the details out with Liz before they left the hotel; she would park across the street from The Hustle, avoiding detection. Max would meet Ruby in the parking lot. If they stayed there, Liz would watch from afar. If Ruby insisted they go somewhere else, Liz would follow them and watch. Outside of that, Max had no plan. He found himself winging most of this, a thought that didn’t exactly sit well with him.

Max pulled into the parking lot adjacent to The Hustle and took up residence in the dark spot, as usual. He watched Liz park her car across the street and kill the headlights. He felt antsy, on edge. He couldn’t shake the feeling. He chalked it up to nerves. He had, after all, discovered the body of a dead police detective in a remote cabin only hours earlier. He had a right to be a little shaken.

The parking lot was packed tonight. Saturday night brought in triple the customers seen on the weekdays and it took a while for them all to clear out. Max watched a middle-aged couple make out beside a station wagon for ten minutes before staggering into the car and peeling out. He chuckled to himself; forty-somethings acting like teenagers. Maybe if he and Katie had done more of that kind of thing they’d still be together. That thought took the smile off his face.

Ruby emerged from the club’s front door at ten minutes to two and headed across the parking lot toward Max’s car. A few other girls followed after her, eventually splitting off and heading toward their respective cars, or boyfriends, or johns. Max saw the bouncer he’d had the unfortunate chance of meeting a few days back and found he still didn’t like the guy.

Ruby opened the passenger door and got inside. She closed it and the dome light dimmed before going dark. “Thanks for meeting me. I know it’s unexpected.”

“That’s okay. You said you had some information?”

“Yeah. Gabe didn’t come to work today.”

Max decided not to mention his involvement in Gabe’s absence. Not yet, at least. “You mentioned that in the text.”

“Right. Well, I got curious about that, especially after the owner showed up. His name is Caldwell.”

“You saw him? In the white suit?”

“Yep. He had the suit on and everything, so no mistaking him. Anyway, I found an excuse to be outside the office door and overheard a phone conversation.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. It’s too dangerous. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.”

Ruby continued, unaffected. “I overheard Caldwell talking to somebody on the phone about Gabe. I only caught one side of the conversation, but Caldwell mentioned something about paperwork that Gabe had taken. Apparently Caldwell thought Gabe was going to put the squeeze on him and either take this information to the cops or use it to blackmail him. Gabe not showing up to work seemed to have spooked him.”

Max remembered Gabe carrying something out of the flophouse the night he’d tracked him there. A suitcase or a satchel; something that could easily hold paperwork. Was this another piece of the puzzle falling into place?

“So maybe Gabe isn’t part of this,” Ruby continued. “Or maybe he was, but had a change of heart.”

“Or maybe he found an opportunity to extort money out of Caldwell. Josh said in his letter that he thought Gabe had lied to Caldwell about him. Sounds like Gabe has been playing his boss for a while now.”

“Possibly.”

“You shouldn’t go back to work, not until this thing blows over. We’re going to the cops tomorrow.”

“We? You mean you and me or you and somebody else?” She paused, giving him a perplexed look. “Did you tell somebody else about this?”

Shit
. He hadn’t meant to bring up Liz. He covered as best as he could. “I meant you and me.”

Ruby shook her head. “No way. I don’t want to get involved with the cops.”

“We need to go to the police.”

“I don’t trust the cops.”

“But you trust these guys? The creeps from this bar?”

“Of course not. But if I go to the cops and Caldwell finds out I don’t want to know what’ll happen.”

“The police will protect you,” Max said, but it sounded hollow even to himself. He didn’t much trust the cops either, of course. If he had, he would have gone straight to them at the beginning of all this.

“They tell you that,” Ruby continued, “but once you testify then they’re done with you. You’re on your own after that. I’d have to leave town. But even if I do, I’ll never really get away. I’ll always be watching over my shoulder, always wondering if they found me. Guys like Caldwell don’t go to prison forever. The system doesn’t work. He’ll get a slap on the wrist and he’ll be back out, gunning for whoever cramped his style by putting him in jail for one hot minute.” She opened the door.

“Ruby, wait.”

“Look, Max, you’re a decent guy. A good dad who cares. But I can’t get any deeper into this. Please, all I ask is that you let me stay out of this.”

“I have to tell them as much as I can. I can’t guarantee that I can keep you out of it.”

A look of frustration and disappointment spread over Ruby’s face. “I have to go.”

She got out of the car and closed the door. She walked around the front of the car and into the dim light of a nearby overhead light.
 

A moment later she dropped to the ground like a bag of wet cement, a spray of blood and brains exploding from the side of her head.

Max sat in his car, frozen, as his mind struggled to process what his eyes had just witnessed. The sound of the gunshot echoed a split-second after Ruby hit the ground.

Time seemed to slow down, as each millisecond ticked slowly by. Then the back window of Max’s car shattered as the sound of another gunshot rang out in the night.

That got Max moving. He pushed the start button on the car and the engine came to life a second later. He slammed the transmission into reverse and backed away, the daytime running lights illuminating Ruby’s body lying motionless on the ground. Another gunshot crackled, the echo making it sound as if the shooting might be coming from everywhere at once. But the shot seemed to have been off its mark and didn’t hit Max or his car.

Max smashed the brake pedal to the floor, bringing the car to a jerking halt. He jammed the transmission into drive and floored the gas pedal. The front wheels spun before catching hold, jerking the car forward and out of the parking lot.

Max heard no more gunfire behind him as he sped out of The Hustle’s parking lot and onto the two-lane road running parallel to the club. In the rearview mirror, he saw Liz’s headlights flare as she started her car and followed him away from the scene and back to the hotel. He needed time to think, to figure out what to do next. Things were escalating faster than he could manage.

He glanced at the speedometer and saw that he was driving at nearly eighty miles per hour. He let off the gas and maintained the speed limit the rest of the way back to the hotel.

Only later did he realize he’d been talking to himself the entire time, but he couldn’t remember anything he’d said.

* * *

“They killed her,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor of the hotel room. “They killed her right in front of me.”

“I saw.”

“What the hell do we do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Two people are dead now because of me,” Max said. “First Vanessa and now Ruby.”

“Just take a deep breath. Stay calm. Breathe.”

“I can’t stay calm! They killed her!”

“I know, Max. I saw it too.”

“How can you be so calm about all this?”

“Somebody has to be.”

Max opened his mouth as if to say something but didn’t. Instead, he sighed and dropped his face into his hands.

“We have to go to the cops,” Liz said. “I’m not saying this was your fault, but I’m saying that we’re in over our head here. We don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t want anyone else to die and I know you don’t either.”

“I just want this all to be over.”

“Then we go to the cops with whatever we have. We tell them everything. Our stories will match because we’re going to tell the truth. As long as we do that we’ll be fine.”

“Who would just shoot her like that?” Max said, lifting his head and looking at Liz. “Who could just kill somebody in cold blood?”

“The same kind of people who would rape teenage girls on camera, that’s who. The kind of people we have to stop. You and me.”

Max nodded. A moment later a knock sounded on the door.

Max and Liz looked at each other and froze.

Max looked through the door’s peephole. On the other side stood a man dressed in jeans and a striped short-sleeve shirt.

In his right hand, he held a pistol.

The man knocked again. Max nodded at Liz.

“Who it is?” Liz asked.

“Police,” the man said.

“He doesn’t look like a cop,” Max whispered in Liz’s ear.

“What do we do?”

“Stall him.”

Liz nodded and spoke again to the man on the other side of the door. “Just a minute. I’m not dressed.”

“Take your time, ma’am.”

Max looked around the room. His eyes fell upon a small fire extinguisher attached to a hook on the wall. He retrieved the red cylinder and returned to the door. He stood behind it, out of sight and nodded.

Liz opened the door and took a few steps back.

“Hands up where I can see them, take two steps back,” the man said, stepping toward her.

Liz raised her hands and stepped back as instructed. The man in the striped shirt stepped into the room and just past the door.

That’s when Max hit him in the head with the fire extinguisher.

The gun toppled to the floor as the man in the striped shirt dropped hard. After ensuring the man was down, Max checked the hallway for any backup. He saw no one, so he closed the door and locked it.

He turned to Liz. “Strip that bed.”

“Huh?”

“We need the sheets.”

Liz still looked confused.

“To tie him up.”

“Oh.” She peeled the sheets from the bed as Max lifted Striped Shirt off the floor. The man wasn’t out cold, but the fire extinguisher to the temple had knocked him for a hell of a loop. Max planted the barely conscious man in a chair as Liz arrived with the bed sheet.

“Help me tie him up,” Max said.

“What if he’s a real cop?”

“Then he’ll be able to prove it.”

“And if he’s not?”

“I’d rather err on the side of caution.”

Liz began tying off the man’s hands to the chair while Max worked on his feet. Striped Shirt’s head lolled to the side as drool dripped from his mouth and onto his jeans. A trickle of blood ran from a small laceration on the side of the man’s head.

Once they had him secured, Max and Liz sat back and waited for the man to get his wits about him. He groaned, still somewhere between conscious and not. Eventually, his eyes fluttered and he opened them. He shook his head and winced at the pain. He pulled the sheet binding him to the chair as his eyes darted left and right, eventually landing on Max and Liz. “What did you idiots do to me?”