Augie would be home in a day or two. It could wait.
I debate calling Ellie and bouncing my insane hypotheses off her, but suddenly there is a heavy, insistent knock. I throw my feet off the bed. Two uniformed cops are at the door. They both wear scowls. They say that sometimes you start looking like your spouse. It applies to police partners too, I guess. In this case, both are white and overmuscled and have prominent foreheads. If I met them again, it would be hard to remember which was which.
“Mind if we come in?” Cop One sneers.
“You got a warrant?” I ask.
“No.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I mind if you come in.”
“Too bad.”
Cop Two pushes by me. I let him. They both come in and close the door.
Cop One offers up another sneer. “Nice dump you got here.”
This, I assume, is supposed to be some kind of clever insult. Like I’d personally worked on the décor.
“We hear you’re holding out on us,” Cop One says.
“Rex was our friend.”
“And a cop.”
“And you’re holding out on us.”
I don’t really have the patience for this, so I pull out my gun and aim it between the two of them. Their mouths make surprised Os.
“What the hell . . . ?”
“You entered my motel room without a warrant,” I say.
I point the gun at one, then the other, then back to the middle.
“It would be easy to shoot you both, stick your pieces in your hands, claim the shooting was justified.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Cop One asks.
I hear the fear in his voice, so I move toward him. I give him my best crazy eyes. I’m good at the crazy eyes. You know this, Leo.
“You want to have an ear fight with me?” I ask him.
“A what?”
“Your brah”—I gesture with my head toward Cop Two—“leaves. We lock the door. We put down our weapons. One of us walks out of this room with the other’s ear in his mouth. What do you say?”
I lean closer and make a biting motion.
“You’re fucking nuts,” Cop One says.
“You got no idea.” And now I’m so into it, I almost hope he’ll take me up on it. “You in, big guy? What do you say?”
There is a knock on the door. Cop One practically leaps toward the knob to open it.
It’s Stacy Reynolds. I hide the gun behind my leg. Reynolds is clearly not happy to see her colleagues. She glares at them. They both lower their heads like chastened school bullies.
“What the hell are you two clowns doing here?”
Cop Two says, “Just . . . ,” and then he actually shrugs.
“He knows stuff,” Cop One says. “We were just doing some legwork for you.”
“Get out. Now.”
They do. Reynolds now notices my piece against my leg. “What the fuck, Nap?”
I holster the gun. “Don’t worry about it.”
She shakes her head. “Cops would be better at their jobs if God gave them bigger dicks.”
“You’re a cop,” I remind her.
“Me especially. Come on. I need to show you something.”
Chapter Five
Hal, the bartender at Larry and Craig’s Bar and Grille, has a wistful look on his face.
“She was smoking hot,” Hal says. A small frown begins to surface. “Too hot for that old dude, that’s for sure.”
Larry and Craig’s Bar and Grille clearly has a bar and clearly has no grille. It’s that kind of place. The sticky floor is coated in sawdust and peanut shells. That combo stench of stale beer and vomit wafts from said floor and fills all nostrils. I don’t need to take a piss, but if I do, I know the urinal won’t flush but will be overflowing with ice cubes.
Reynolds nods at me to take the lead.
“What did she look like?” I ask.
Hal is still frowning. “What part of ‘hot’ isn’t good English?”
“Redhead, brunette, blonde?”
“Brunette is brown, right?”
I glance at Reynolds. “Yeah, Hal. Brunette is brown.”
“Brunette.”
“Anything else?”
“Hot.”
“Yeah, we got that.”
“Built,” Hal says.
Reynolds sighs. “And she was with a guy, right?”
“She was out of his league, that I can tell you.”
“And you have,” I remind him. “Did they come in together?”
“No.”
“Who came in first?” Reynolds asks.
“The geezer did.” Hal gestures toward me. “Sat right where you are now.”
“What did he look like?” I ask.
“Midsixties, long hair, raggedy beard, big nose. Looked like a guy who rode a hog, but he was dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, blue tie.”
“He you remember,” I say.
“Huh?”
“He you remember. But her?”
“If you saw the way she wore that black dress, you wouldn’t remember much else either.”
“So he’s sitting here alone drinking,” Reynolds says, getting us back on track. “How long before the woman came in?”
“I don’t know. Twenty, thirty minutes.”
“Then she comes in and . . . ?”
“She makes an entrance, you know what I’m saying?”
“We do,” I say.
“She goes right over to him.” Hal says this wide-eyed, as though he’s describing a UFO landing. “Starts hitting on the guy.”
“Any chance they knew each other before?”
“Don’t think so. Not the vibe I got.”
“What vibe did you get?”
Hal shrugs. “Figured that she was a pro. That was my take, you want to know the truth.”
“You get a lot of pros in here?” I ask.
Hal gets wary. Reynolds says, “We don’t give a shit about solicitation, Hal. This is a cop killing.”
“Sometimes, yeah. I mean, there are two strip clubs within a mile. Sometimes the girls from there want to do a little business off-site.”
I look at Reynolds, but she’s already nodding in my direction. “I got Bates working that angle.”
“You ever see her in here before?” I ask.
“Twice.”
“You remember?”
Hal spreads his hands. “How many times I gotta tell you?”
“Hot,” I say for him. I am good at denial. This “hot” might not be Maura, though, uh, the description, vague as it is, does indeed fit.
“Those other two times,” I continue, “she leave with guys?”
“Yep.”
I picture it. Three times at this dump. Three times leaving with guys. Maura. I swallow back the ache.
Hal rubs his chin. “Come to think of it, she might not be a pro.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Not the type.”
“What’s the type?”
“It’s like that judge said about porn: You know it when you see it. I mean, she could be. Probably is. But it could be something else. She could just be a freak, you know? We get these MILFs that come in sometimes, happily married, three kids at home. They come in here and they bed guys and, I don’t know. Freaks. Maybe she’s one of those.”
How reassuring.
Reynolds taps her foot. She brought me here for a specific reason, and it isn’t to follow this line of questioning.
Enough putting it off. I nod at her. It’s time.
“Okay,” Reynolds says to Hal. “Show him the videotape.”
The TV is an old console. Hal has it propped up on the bar. There are two customers at the bar now, but both seem enamored of the glasses in front of them and nothing else. Hal hits the switch. The screen comes alive, first as a blue dot and then, thirty seconds later, as angry static.
Hal checks the back of the TV. “Cord’s loose,” he says. He jams it back in. The other end of the fraying cord is plugged into a Zenith VCR player. The door is broken, so I can look into the slot and see the old cassette.
The play button descends with an audible click. The video quality sucks—yellow, filmy, unfocused. The camera is set up high above the parking lot so as to cover everything, and yet because of that, it pretty much covers nothing. I can make out car types maybe and some colors, but there’s no way to read license plates.
“Boss just tapes over and over until the tape rips,” Hal explains.
I know the deal. Insurance company probably requires a CCTV presence, so the boss complies in the cheapest way possible. The tape trudges forward. Reynolds points to a car on the upper right. “We think that’s the rental.”