Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

"Police!" he repeated, eyes darting to Gaynes, who confirmed she was ready. Boldt stepped inside and snugged his back against the near wall. Gaynes flowed in behind him, moving to the center of the small room. Boldt took the galley kitchen to her right.

"Clear!" he announced.

Gaynes rushed the tiny bedroom to the left. "Clear," she echoed.

They lowered their guns, though kept them at the ready. Boldt shut the door as best as possible. "Need a pair?" he asked, indicating the latex gloves in his hand.

"All set." She retrieved a pair from her pocket.

They moved through the small area fluidly, two investigators accustomed to their work. The warrant called for a plain-sight search for any materials relating to the thefts, but Gaynes conveniently found drawers and cabinets surprisingly left open to where she could search them. Boldt made sure his back was turned.

"Milk is dated next week," he announced. "So she's been living here recently." He wondered if kicking the apartment had been the right thing the do. They could have placed it under long-term surveillance, but Boldt's guess was that if Samway was hooked up to the Flek brothers, then she'd already been advised to avoid her own digs.

"Couple of roaches left in the ashtray," Gaynes announced. "We could get her on that if we had to. She's on a year's probation following her parole."

"We want her," Boldt reminded. He would worry about the technicalities later.

"Here we go," Gaynes announced from the bedroom.

Boldt approached her voice, but with his back to it, his attention mostly on the apartment's broken door. He glanced to his right-an unmade bed; cigarette butts piled high in an ashtray. Facing the bed was a 37inch Trinitron with a cable box on top. He said, "We should have checked the cable company. Maybe we'd have found her or Flek's name there."

"Not that. This," Gaynes said, swinging the bathroom door open further. Bathing suit thongs and bikini tops the size of corn chips.

"I guess she likes the pool?" Boldt said, the image not fitting with his vision of Courtney Samway.

"This here is her work uniform," Gaynes corrected. "She's stripping, L.T. We're looking for matchbooks, coasters-"

"Check stubs, T-shirts-" he interrupted. "Something with the name of the club on it," he said.

Boldt walked through the small bedroom, carefully studying the place. He reached the side of the bed and a mound of cigarette butts in a plastic ashtray. He dumped the butts onto the floor without a second thought. His gloved fingers wiped away the ash and tobacco smudges, cleaning the bottom of the ashtray. He held it up then for Gaynes to read from across the small room.

"Mike's Pleasure Palace," he said.

"Table for two," Gaynes replied. "I shouldn't admit it, but I love strip joints."

"I like the female body," Gaynes told him from the Crown Vic's shotgun seat. "You guys fantasize about jumping their bones, but I fantasize about looking like that. They're gorgeous, these girls. On top of it they can really move. And they choose to be there, so don't give me that shit about it being exploitive. They rock their hips and some asshole stuffs a twenty into their Gstring, thinking he's some kind of big shot, when she's gonna take that thing off regardless. He's gonna pay her another twenty. And then she goes backstage and drinks for free and awaits her next performance."

"And the lap dancing?" Boldt asked.

"Hey, most of that is voluntary. Extra credit work. Sometimes not, sure. Sometimes management demands it. But it's a power trip for the girls-it's gotta be. Drag your crotch down some guy's thigh and cream him in his pants. Fifty bucks for five minutes' work? There's no kissing, no fluids exchanged. No harm, no foul."

"I'm hearing this from a woman."

"A woman who likes to watch other women," she reminded him. "Not touch, despite what they say about me. Not woman on woman-nothing like that. But I appreciate the SI swimsuit edition as much as any of you. The boys can't understand a woman appreciating the female body-but they can watch one guy pound another guy on the scrimmage line every Sunday-so that's their problem, not mine. I'd never been to strip joints until the guys from our squad dragged me in one time. And them thinking they would gross me out. You should have seen them! Have I ever gone down on a woman? No. Do I want to? No. Disgusting! Do I like marble nudes? You bet. Nude dancers? Why not?"

"I think I have more information than I need," Boldt said.

"If I had a body like that, I might show it off for a few bucks. I'm built like a truck. So what can I do about it?"

"You are not!" Boldt objected. "You're a good-looking woman."

"That's horse shit, L.T."

"Lacey Delgato is one thing." He hesitated, "I'm not having this conversation," he said vehemently.

After a long silence, Gaynes said under her breath, "Thank you for saying that, L.T. You're a peach."

"So I'll make you a deal," he said.

"Shoot."

"I'll handle the bouncer and the bartender if you'll do the talking with the ladies." He checked to make sure a cruiser was following, as ordered. "If she's here, it's straight into the radio car for a ride downtown. I want her scared."

"They're girls, L.T." Correcting him. "Bodies as hard as that; they just don't last all that long."

Upon entering Mike's Pleasure Palace, Boldt shouted to be heard above Don Henley's grinding rock and roll.

"These girls don't often use their real names, even with the help," Gaynes said, pulling him down to hear. "Use the mug shot from BCI."

"Unnecessary," Boldt said, pointing to the stage where pulsing blue light welcomed the next dancer to the platform. Wearing a translucent wet T-shirt and an equally showy, wet white cotton thong, the relatively small-chested Courtney Samway strutted out onto stage, her platinum blond hair showing slightly from beneath a black wig. There was no mistaking her. She didn't have the meaty frame of a stripper, and the crowd of men seemed to be assessing her until she began to move to the music, at which point all eyes took to the stage.

Boldt scanned the crowd for Flek. "You see him?"

"No," Gaynes replied. "But I'm thinking we might want to hang for a while in case he shows. We approach her too soon we could scare him off."

"I'm not hanging around, if that's what you're sug gesting," Boldt said. "I want her downtown. I want some answers."

She slithered like a snake, wrapping herself around her own frame suggestively. The T-shirt came off somewhere in the process, followed a moment later by the thong. Boldt told himself he wouldn't have watched if he hadn't been required to, but in truth there wasn't a male not watching. She didn't have a centerfold body, but she was shapely enough.

"Hair coloring's a match," Boldt said, still looking.

"Thing looks like a sheepskin rug," Gaynes said. " 'Bout as natural-looking as one of those car seat covers."

"You take the dressing room," Boldt advised Gaynes. "I'll stay out here." He reminded her: "Radio car's out front." Probably hadn't been helping win Mike any customers.

Gaynes never met Samway face to face that night. Following her dance, the woman slipped into a robe and stepped off out front, summoned for a lap dance. Boldt cut the private performance short. Two minutes later Samway was escorted to the backseat of the police cruiser and was headed downtown to Public Safety.

Samway occupied the chair inside the interrogation room in her satin robe. Chewing gum kept her jaw pumping. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Delgato could see this all for herself, since Boldt had summoned her to the 1 A.M. interrogation. The witness had requested a public defender despite the fact she was only in for questioning. Where a public defender appeared, prosecuting attorneys followed; hence Delgato. Daphne too had been rousted. Gaynes watched from the other side of the room's one-way glass with Delgato. Boldt's ATeam. All but LaMoia. It hurt Boldt to think about him laid up in the hospital.