Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (7 page)

I think he might have sensed my impure thoughts, but if he did, he chose not to comment. He just fished a pair of black sunglasses out of one of the bags, tore off the tag and told me to put them on. I felt suddenly embarrassed, hyperaware of my ugly, beat-up face and dumpy dress.

“Thanks,” I said quietly, slipping on the sunglasses.

“You’re welcome,” he replied and pulled out of the lot.

Malloy wanted to rent a car, something generic and forgettable, just to be on the safe side. He transferred all the shopping bags and a roomy green gym bag from his own SUV into the little rented Kia Rio. Then as soon as we were out of the rental place, Malloy pulled into a big supermarket parking lot and swiftly snagged the license plates off a crappy little Honda not unlike my hated Civic, stashing the Kia’s legit plates in the gym bag. I thought he was being kind of paranoid, but of course it turned out he was right.

On our way out of town, we stopped at a 7-Eleven. I changed in the bathroom and stuffed the hateful tranny dress into the trash bin. I brushed the sticky tangles from my hair and the funk from my teeth and then splashed some cold water on my swollen face. That hurt like hell but I felt better once it had been done.

A chubby blonde teenage girl with giant hoop earrings and too much lip gloss pushed open the bathroom door and then froze when she saw me at the sinks.

“Oh,” she said, tucking her pink face down like she’d been smacked. “Sorry.”

She turned and left without meeting my eyes. Like she had caught me fingering myself or shooting up. The bathroom had several stalls and was meant to accommodate more than one person, yet she fled the moment she saw me. I looked up into the spotted mirror at my face. I couldn’t really blame her. I put my sunglasses back on.

When I left the bathroom, I deliberately dawdled in the store, watching the reactions of the people around me. It was amazing. Once they noticed the bruises, they looked away like I was a leper. Men would scope my ass in the new jeans, but when their gaze hit my face their smirks would evaporate and they would suddenly notice some really fascinating nutritional information on the label of their Red Bull can. Women would cringe from my bruises like they were contagious, like looking at me would remind them that they weren’t really safe after all. No one wanted to see me, to think about what might have happened to me, and so they did everything in their power to unsee me. I had a sudden perverse urge to shake people and force them to look but it occurred to me that my new Teflon face was probably a good thing. After all, a murder suspect on the lam doesn’t want to be looked at.

I imagined a tan, handsome cop with a thick mustache questioning the girl with the big earrings.

“Can you describe the individual you encountered in the restroom?” he would ask.

“She was all beat up,” the girl would answer.

“What color was her hair?” he would ask.

The girl would chew her gooey lower lip and shrug.

“How about her eyes?”

“Black,” the girl would say.

As I hustled back to the rented car, I wondered briefly if people thought that Malloy was the one who did this to me.

The Silver Spur Motel in Vegas was just what you’d expect. Squeezed in between a gas station and a modest storefront that housed a different fly-by-night business every week, it was a blocky stucco U curled around a narrow parking lot. Cheap and tawdry but still clean and relatively safe, not too scary for a beautiful young woman traveling alone with a large roll of small bills. It was far from the flashy neon circus of the Strip but conveniently located within spitting distance of several of the biggest titty bars in Vegas. All the girls stayed there when they were dancing at Eye Candy or Cheetah’s or Sin. I must have stayed there myself a hundred times. It was almost like a dorm for road girls and feature dancers, except there was no watchful dorm mother to keep out gentleman callers. Just a silent, thousand-year-old Indian desk clerk who made an art out of looking the other way. As a result, there was tons of action at the Spur, both professional and recreational. The girls called it the Silver Sperm.

When I spotted the familiar cowboy boot-shaped sign, I told Malloy to make a left into the lot. It was early still, just before
1PM
. We saw a pair of hung-over afternoon-shift girls, bottle blondes in velour track suits lugging knock-off Louis Vuitton gig bags, but the place was otherwise pretty dead. Most of the night-shift girls would not even be awake for another hour or two. Malloy clocked the busty blondes as dispassionately as he took note of the other cars in the lot. I spotted Zandora’s Lexus parked right by the office and directed Malloy to park beside it. He shook his head and parked further back instead, as far away from the street and the girls as he could get.

“Put your sweatshirt on,” he said as we waited for the two girls to load their things into their rental car and pull out of the lot. “And put the hood up. Here.”

He handed me a pair of latex gloves. I watched him as he stretched a second pair over his own broad hands.

“Are you serious?” I asked, frowning down at the gloves.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Clearly he was. I put the gloves on.

Zandora was in room 202, upstairs on the second level. As I stood before the plain white door with its shiny silver number, I had a sick, visceral flashback of screaming that number at the top of my lungs. I shuddered and Malloy put a heavy, gloved paw on my shoulder.

There was a sudden frantic scuffle and thump behind the door, followed by a high-pitched man’s voice cursing loudly in what had to be Romanian. Then, a louder thump and Zandora’s voice shouting something that sounded sort of like “pizza man.” Apparently the guy didn’t like being called a pizza man, because what I heard next could only be fists on soft flesh.

“Jesus,” I said, belly twisted tight as my heart fluttered high in my throat.

“You up for this?” Malloy asked, reaching beneath his jacket to unsnap a shoulder holster I hadn’t even noticed until just then.

Was I?

Before I could answer, he kicked open the cheap lock and moved into the shadowy room, gun out and covering the space inside with smooth, professional ease. Cattle-prodded by adrenaline, I followed Malloy, feeling like an understudy with no time to rehearse.

My old pal was inside, that sawed-off, weasely Eastern Bloc guy that had been looking for Lia. He was crouching over a crumpled, fetal Zandora and shaking out his right hand like it hurt. His surprised face was turned up toward Malloy, eyes wide.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Get up,” Malloy replied, making a terse upward gesture with the barrel of his gun.

My eyes were scanning the shadows for the weasel’s buddy, that big blond redneck that had backed him up that day in my office. Before I could remember how to make my voice work and warn Malloy, the door slammed back into Malloy’s shoulder and the redneck was on him, gripping Malloy’s gun hand by the wrist. Together, they stumble-waltzed in a tight circle, slamming the door closed, knocking over a chair and bumping a tiny table to the right of the door. A flimsy pink and silver gown that Zandora had been ironing on a hotel towel fluttered to the floor at their feet. The iron followed, hissing and dribbling hot water on the carpet.

After a fierce struggle, the pistol flew from Malloy’s hand. The redneck broke loose and made an awkward sideways lunge for the gun. With a frightening economy of movement, Malloy smashed the little table with his right foot, ripped loose one of its metal legs, and spun around to crack the redneck in the temple. Malloy followed up with a swift kick and the redneck went down on his side in a crumpled, bleeding heap.

Before I could blink, Malloy had the gun again and was pointing it at the weasely guy straddling Zandora.

“Get off her and get your fucking hands up,” Malloy said. “Angel, get his gun.”

Recognition blossomed in the guy’s narrow eyes as he raised himself slowly to his feet, bloody palms framing his disbelieving face.

It seemed to take centuries for me to figure out how to peel myself off the wall and make my arms and legs obey my brain. I put on the toughest face I could muster, walked over to the weasel and forced myself to start feeling around under his obnoxious silk shirt. It was bright canary yellow with a jaunty, Vegas-themed pattern of playing cards and dice, made even more lurid by the recent addition of wet crimson splatters. I could smell his armpits and his hot, minty breath and his eyes kept darting between me and Malloy as I patted his wiry body down. My hands felt clumsy under the latex gloves. Someone with a clue probably would have found the compact .38 in the small of his back right away. I found it eventually and gingerly tweezed it between my thumb and forefinger like something nasty.

“Got it,” I said.

The weasel muttered while I backed away and tried to make my numb fingers hold the unfamiliar gun the way my firearms safety instructor had taught me.

“Over there,” Malloy told the weasel, gesturing with his gun toward the bathroom door.

“You’re dead,” the weasel spat, showing me his long yellow teeth like a dog. “Dead.”

“Shut up,” Malloy said.

“You too, big man,” he told Malloy. “You and this whore.”

I somehow managed to thumb off the safety, aiming low.

“Fuck you,” I said.

The weasel’s eyes cut over to his fallen comrade and widened slightly. Malloy frowned and turned back to the redneck just in time to dodge the airborne iron as it flew into the mirrored closet door, shattering the glass. The redneck barreled into Malloy, wrapping thick sunburned arms around Malloy’s chest. As they grappled and grunted, the weasel started inching closer to me.

“Stay back, fuckhead!” I said, hating the pinched, girly squeak in my voice.

“You gonna shoot me?” he asked, arching an eyebrow and sliding closer.

“I said stay back!”

“What if I don’t?” he asked.

There was a furious howl and my gaze flicked over toward Malloy. He had two fingers of his right hand digging into the corner of the redneck’s mouth, stretching the guy’s cheek out from his teeth in a painful imitation of a kid pulling a funny face.

Not a second later, the weasel was on me, slamming my head against the wall and groping for the gun. I wrenched my hand free from his grip and slammed the gun down into his leering face. He staggered back and Malloy looked over. The weasel locked eyes with Malloy. Malloy had a smear of crimson on his cheek and his eyes had gone dark and cold. The redneck was struggling in his arms. Malloy slammed a fist into his throat, hard, without breaking eye contact with the weasel. The redneck stopped struggling.

The weasel turned, tore open the door and ran.

“Shit,” Malloy said. He let the redneck drop and took off after the weasel. “Wait here,” he called from outside.

Then he was gone and I was alone in a wrecked motel room with a dying friend and a dying scumbag.

The redneck’s breath was coming in ragged, wet-sounding bursts. Malloy had punched him repeatedly in the throat, and I could tell he was choking. I tried not to look at his bruised and broken face. It looked way too much like mine.

I turned my attention to Zandora instead. She lay where the weasel had left her, curled small and barely breathing in front of the television. She was wearing panties and nothing else. Not a sexy hot-date g-string, but the sort of plain, comfortable cotton panties that come in packs of three, all childish, ice-cream colors. The kind of panties a girl wears when she isn’t planning for anyone to see them.

“Zandora?” I said, taking one of her manicured hands. I felt like I ought to take off the latex gloves, but I didn’t. “Zandora, can you hear me?”

She looked up at me with no recognition in her pale blue eyes. The left was nearly all pupil, a deep black hole rimmed in ice. That side of her head seemed to have gotten the worst of it. I don’t know from head trauma, but even I could see that something was very, very wrong. Tears made thin clean tracks through the blood on her cheek and she whispered in slurred Romanian.

“Lenuta?” I said. “Lenuta, it’s me, Angel.”

“Angel?” she whispered. “I feel dizzy.”

“Hang on, Lenuta,” I told her. “We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”

“I can’t...” she said.

Then she died. One second she was there and the next she just... wasn’t. I felt cold and sick, unable to let go of her lukewarm hand.

“Lenuta,” I said again, uselessly. “Lenuta.”

I thought of the first time I’d met her, how sweet and raw she’d looked back then, before she’d gotten bleached, implanted, liposucked, French-manicured and Brazilian waxed into this generic, tan, platinum blonde lying here like a broken doll on the cheap beige carpet of a Vegas motel. I remembered helping her pick out the name Zandora Dior and giving her some backdoor hygiene tips for her big debut in
Fresh-N-Tight
7. I remembered how nervous she was before her first scene with the freakishly endowed Monster Marcus Long and how she ended up dating him and eventually breaking his heart. I remembered coughing up her name when Jesse slugged me in the belly. I let go of her hand and got to my feet, feeling hollow and cold.

“Angel?” It was Malloy in the doorway. He was winded and bleeding from a split in his lip that mirrored mine almost exactly. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Where’s the other guy?” I asked.

“Fucker got away,” Malloy said. “We better do the same.”

“What about—”

I turned back to the redneck, whose face was turning purple. He wasn’t finished dying yet. It seemed unfair, somehow, that he should outlive Zandora, even by a few minutes.

“Now,
Angel,” Malloy said.

I did what Malloy said, but not without one last glance back over my shoulder at the crumpled body that used to be a girl I knew.

“Zandora’s dead,” Malloy said, the little Kia screeching out of the Silver Spur parking lot before I could even pull my door closed.

“Yeah,” I said.

Malloy hung a sharp left that threw me against the passenger side door. I put on my seat belt with shaking hands.