Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (24 page)

As I turned to go, I found myself facing a full-length mirror. Looking in that mirror, I suddenly knew my plan would work. I understood exactly what I had been doing wrong. All this time I’d been trying to be some kind of action movie tough guy. I’d tried to be Malloy with tits and look where it got me. There was only one way I was going to get Ridgeway. It was the only way I knew. A girl’s gotta use her natural skills.

Sneaky Pete’s is to Eye Candy what your local taco truck is to Spago. Cheap, nasty and lowbrow. Full nude and no holds barred. I never danced there; frankly, you can hardly call what the girls do there “dancing.”

As I pulled into the lot beside the sleazy little edifice, I checked my new face in the rearview mirror. I straightened the glossy red wig on my head, touched up my black cherry lips and pressed down my the corners of my false eyelashes. There was no time to spare. Only twenty minutes till closing.

I went inside and asked to see the manager. There was a familiar stink inside of sweat and baby oil and dead-end lives. The men clustered in the shadows, nursing overpriced soft drinks and pretending not to notice one another. A tiny, flat-chested girl worked the single stage. She was a brunette with big eyes, hardly more than a child. Her hipbones were so sharp they looked painful. She wore nothing but a silver g-string and moved her skinny limbs with a slow, spacey grace, like she was underwater. Van Halen’s “Little Dreamer” crackled through the cheap speakers.

“Yeah?” the manager said, appearing suddenly at my elbow. “You looking for work?”

He was a burly biker right out of central casting. Beard. Ponytail. Beer gut. Tattoos. He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.

“I know it’s late,” I said, making my voice and posture all submissive and needy. “But I was hoping you’d let me audition tonight and then if you like me...” I gave a shy little smile and fingered a strand of red synthetic hair. “Maybe you can give me some shifts this weekend.”

“No problem, sugar,” he said with a gap-toothed grin. “You’re up next. It’s g-strings on the stage but you go full nude in the champagne rooms. Extras are up to you.” He winked and gestured toward the DJ booth. “Go tell Lenny your name and what song you want to dance to.”

I headed over to the DJ booth and that’s when I saw Ridgeway, sitting along the rail on the far right flanked by two men. One was the messy-haired thug who had carried me into the dungeon and the other a guy I’d never seen. Shaved head, goatee, bad tattoos. I didn’t care. I only had eyes for Ridgeway.

I felt that cold rush, that jittery crush-like feeling in my belly, and part of me wanted to bolt. Maybe I was crazy to think I could do this. But I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try. I stared at the back of Ridgeway’s head like hate alone was enough to kill him. He didn’t notice me.

“Hey,” a voice said. “How you doing, beautiful?”

I turned toward the voice. It was the DJ, who, by some bizarre coincidence turned out to be the lanky hotdog with the braids who had come to help Thick Vic get Roxette out of Taylor’s bathroom. I wondered if the eviction had been successful, or if Roxette was still in there digging into her leg with the bloody toothbrush. He clearly did not recognize me.

“Um, hi,” I said, fooling with the belt on the trench coat.

“What’s your name, little sister?” he asked.

I looked over at the back of Ridgeway’s head. He put a bill on the stage at the dancer’s feet and his men quickly followed suit. She smiled in a vague sort of way, like a ticket taker in a movie theater.

“Vendetta,” I said. “My name’s Vendetta.”

“Okay, Vendetta,” the DJ said with a grin. “What’s your favorite song? I got both kinds of music, rock
and
roll.”

I flipped through the CD wallet he handed me until I spotted a disk of
Highway To Hell
by AC/DC. I pointed to the track I wanted to dance to and headed over to the edge of the stage.

The tiny girl finished up in an awkward split and then gathered up her sweaty, rumpled bills and discarded bits of spandex.

“Let’s hear it for Missy!” the DJ said over the crackly PA system. “Show Missy some love, boys.”

The modest crowd clapped listlessly and a few threw in a bill or two.

“And remember, if you’d like to get to know Missy a little better, you can take this beautiful lady into one of our private champagne rooms for an unforgettable couch dance. Remember, you gotta to show the greenery if you want to see the scenery.”

An unkempt, dandruffy older man immediately nabbed Missy and dragged her off to one of the private rooms in the back. It looked like there were four rooms back there. Two were currently unoccupied, judging by the open curtains.

“Now boys,” the DJ announced. “Before you call it an evening, I’ve got a very special treat that’s gonna send you off with a bang. We’ve got a smokin hot new entertainer here at Sneaky Pete’s tonight. Gentlemen, I give you the luscious, the vivacious,
VENDETTA!”

My music started and I did what I could to calm my crazy speeding heart. Then I climbed up onto the stage.

Funny how old habits never really die. Just like riding a bicycle. I grabbed the roll of paper towels and antibacterial cleanser thoughtfully provided by the management and quickly wiped down the length of the brass pole. Then I went to work.

I slithered slowly out of Vukasin’s leather trench coat to the familiar hoots and whistles of masculine approval. I made sure to set the coat down carefully and not let the pistol in the right pocket clunk loudly against the stage. As I shook my moneymaker, grinding against the pole as if I’d never quit, I realized that Angel Dare wasn’t dead after all. She was alive and well, and she was pissed.

I peeled off the dress and thrust my gyrating ass into the eager faces around me, working my way toward Ridgeway. The marks ate it up with two forks.

“If you want blood,” Bon Scott’s distinctive rusty-hinge howl bellowed through the cheap speakers, “you got it!”

By the time I made my way over to the corner of the stage in front of Ridgeway and his cronies, I was down to my g-string. There was a green snowdrift of dollar bills and fives around my clunky plastic heels.

I got down on my hands and knees and rolled my spine, undulating my ass inches from the bastard’s nose. I watched him in the mirror on the back wall. He was staring, mesmerized, right between my cheeks, almost like if he stared hard enough, he’d see through the leopard-print spandex barrier between him and the good stuff. After everything he’d put me through, and everything I’d gone through to get here, it was kind of shocking to discover that the big bad boss was just a man like any other. I had been worried that he would recognize me, but it was clear that he was paying no attention whatsoever to anything above my tits. The two goons were equally preoccupied, but they didn’t matter. It was as if Ridgeway and I were alone. Like there was no one else on the planet. I’ve never felt so intense a hunger for someone. Not even Jesse.

I flipped on my back and bounced my legs into a deep splayed V, then arched back up to my feet as the song ended. If that motherfucker wanted blood, he was going to get it.

I gathered up the bills and clothing without turning away from Ridgeway. His eyes never left my crotch. His face had gone dumb with lust. I had him.

I slipped the trench coat over my g-string and deftly dodged several amorous suitors, heading directly to where Ridgeway sat.

“Would you like to get to know me a little better, honey?” I asked, pitching my voice low and whisper-sexy, sliding my body catlike against his.

The goons, seeing their boss was otherwise engaged, moved away to give him some privacy. The messy-haired guy started chatting up the tired-looking waitress while the bald one headed for the john. After all, what kind of danger could a 115-pound bimbo possibly pose?

“I’d love to,” Ridgeway replied, running a sweaty hand over my thigh. “But I’m afraid I’ve got a prior commitment.”

“You can’t spare even ten little minutes,” I asked, brushing my bare breasts against his chest. “I swear I’ll make it worth your while.”

“I don’t like pushy women,” he said, mouth a tight line and suddenly chilly.

“You’ll like me,” I said, putting my arm around his waist and pressing the muzzle of the gun into his belly through the pocket of the trench coat. “What do you say?”

He said nothing but his body language told me he had finally recognized me. The messy-haired goon’s back was turned. The bald goon was still in the bathroom. I could see Ridgeway’s pulse ticking in the soft spot beneath his ear. This was where it could all go to hell in a heartbeat.

“All right,” he finally said, getting slowly to his feet.

He let me lead him back to one of the two available champagne rooms.

Despite its classy name, the champagne room was actually a dingy cubicle with a cheap futon on a folding metal frame that looked like it had been scavenged from the trash outside a college dorm. I didn’t even want to think about all the bodily fluids that soaked into that futon over the course of any given shift. Luckily, there would be no couch dances tonight.

“Pull the curtain,” I told Ridgeway.

He did what I asked in hostile silence. There was a dull, monotonous rhythm of thumps and groans filtering through from the next cubicle.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” he said.

“That’s funny,” I replied. “That’s what your nephew said right before I killed him.” I tossed him the cuffs. “Sit down and cuff your hands around that.” I gestured at one of the futon’s tubular metal legs.

He caught the cuffs against his chest and fastened them around one wrist, eyes never leaving mine.

“You can’t get out of here alive,” he told me as he slowly lowered himself onto the futon. “You shoot me, everyone in the place will hear it.”

“Other wrist,” I told him. “Put the cuff through the edge of the frame—no, behind that piece. That’s right. Now cuff your other wrist.”

He did what I said, eyes narrow. This left him slouched down with his cuffed wrists locked between his knees, trapped in place by the frame of the futon. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“Why are you doing this, Angel?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just run with the money?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” I asked. “This is not just about me. It’s about Didi. About Malloy. About Sam.”

“Sam?” He shook his head. “Please. Sam sold you out, Angel. He set you up to save his own ass. You ought to be glad he’s dead.”

Ridgeway was just fucking with me, trying to get me to make a mistake.

“Bullshit,” I said. “He told me you had Georgie.”

But then I thought of seeing Georgie on the news, flanked by cops. I’d wondered then what had really happened and I was wondering now. Was it true? Had Sam set me up?

“People say all kinds of things,” Ridgeway said. “I bet Malloy said he would love you forever, right? Until he took off with the money. Or tried to, anyway.”

Malloy had never promised me anything like that. Ridgeway was grasping at straws, blindly groping for buttons to push and missing.

“You don’t know shit about Malloy,” I told him. “Or me.”

“Maybe not,” Ridgeway said, speaking casually like he didn’t have a gun pointed at his face. “But I know plenty about Sam. I know he loved girls with big tits. I also know he threw money at girls with big tits. A lot of money. Bought them pretty things, paid all their bills. Sam was in over his head when I offered to help him out. He just helped me out in return. Nothing personal, Angel.”

Of course I didn’t like hearing it all spelled out like that. It hurt to know that someone I’d thought of as a friend had sold me out. That I had been betrayed yet again. For money. Always for money.

But Ridgeway failed to realize that I had been hurt so much, so often, in so short a span of time, that in that particular moment, I couldn’t feel a thing. Later, when this was done and I had time to go over and over it in my head, I knew it would hurt plenty. Sam, Malloy, everything. But right now I felt weightless and ice cold. I had nothing left. I was finally the avenging angel I’d wanted to become all along.

“Alan,” I said. “No more talk.”

I traded the gun for the roll of electrical tape.

When I had a few layers of shiny black tape wrapped around his head from chin to upper lip, I paused. For some reason, I had never noticed the color of his eyes before. They were blue, like Jesse’s. Scared like Jesse’s. I looked into his eyes, smoothed the tape over his mouth with my thumb and then continued wrapping the tape around his head.

When I covered his nostrils, he went wild on the futon, bucking and twisting as he tried to wrench his hands free of the cuffs or the cuffs free of the metal frame. Next door the thumping sped up, moans louder now and heading into the home stretch. Ridgeway’s desperate struggles didn’t sound all that different.

I stepped back and watched the kaleidoscope of emotion in his wide eyes until the show was over.

Ridgeway was dead for nearly a full minute before the action next door reached a noisy crescendo. I pulled my gaze away from where he lay, cuffed and slumped over, his face purple above the electrical tape. I squeezed back into the vinyl dress and got the hell out of there.

When I left the champagne room, Ridgeway’s two thugs were back on the rail. They didn’t look away from the stripper they were watching. Nobody noticed me as I slipped out through a side door.

I dumped the red wig in a bucket that had been designated for cigarettes but was rarely used, judging from the number of butts on the surrounding ground. The cool night air felt good on my sweaty scalp.

From where I stood, I could see through the chain link fence to the warehouse next door. There was a van parked in the warehouse lot. The windows were tinted but it didn’t take much to picture the girls inside. The outgoing girls. The ones Ridgeway had used up and planned to dump like unwanted puppies that had outgrown their cuteness.

I thought again of Lia. Of everything she had gone through to stop what happened to her from happening to her little sister. That little sister, Ana, was probably in that building next door right now, waiting to be purchased like livestock. If Ridgeway no-showed, the men who’d smuggled Ana and the five other girls into the country would have no trouble finding another buyer.