Harlan Coben - Stay close

“Hmm.” Goldberg rubbed his chin. “Kinda like Stewart Green?”

“Maybe.”

Broome ejected the flash drive from the computer. Maybe he’d have Erin look into them. She had a good eye for that kind of thing. He could drop them off on his way. He hurried past Goldberg. As he turned the corner, he looked back, worried Goldberg would still be on his tail. He wasn’t. Goldberg was hunched over the phone, cupping the mouthpiece like that did some good.

Twenty minutes later, after quickly dropping off the flash drive at Erin’s, Broome sat across from Tawny Allure in La Creme’s quietest booth. Rudy stood behind her, arms crossed. Tawny was all attitude and implants and daddy-didn’t-love-me-enough self-esteem issues. That was the cliche in a place like this, and truth was, most of the time the cliche applied. Tawny was young and brick-house built in a surgically enhanced way, but she had the kind of harsh face that had already seen too many guys sneaking out at daylight and then changing their cell phone numbers.

“Tell me about Carlton Flynn,” Broome asked.

“Carlton?” She blinked with eyelashes so fake they looked like dying crabs baking in the sun. “Oh, he was a sweetheart. Treated me like gold. Always a gentleman.”

Tawny wasn’t a very good liar. Her eyes darted about like scared birds.

“Anything else you can tell me about him?”

“Not really.”

“How did you meet?”

“Here.”

“How?”

“He bought a lap dance,” Tawny explained. “They’re legal, you know.”

“And then, what, he took you back to his place?”

“Oh no. We don’t do that here. This place is totally legit. I’d never.”

Even Rudy rolled his eyes at that one.

Broome sighed. “Tawny?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not vice, so I don’t care if you bang monkeys for doughnuts-”

“Huh?”

“And I also don’t think you had anything to do with what happened to Carlton. But if you keep lying to me-”

“I’m not lying!”

Broome held up a hand for her to shut up. “If you keep lying to me, Tawny, I’ll nail you for it and put you in jail, just for kicks. I will frame you and make it look like you murdered him because, really, I’m bored with this case and need to clear it. So you can tell me the truth, or you can end up serving time.”

It was, of course, an idle threat. Broome almost felt bad about it, what with this girl who was too dumb to get out of her own way. She glanced behind her at Rudy. Broome wondered whether he should tell Rudy to take a hike, but Rudy nodded for her to go ahead.

Tawny looked down. Her shoulders slumped. “He broke my finger.”

She had been keeping her right hand under the table. There was a red glove covering it-the color matched her bra top-and when she took it off, Broome could see that it hadn’t been set right. The digit was pointing to the side, the bone still nearly poking through the skin.

Broome shot a glare toward Rudy. Rudy shrugged. “What, you think we got a good medical plan here?”

A tear ran down Tawny’s cheek. “Carlton is mean. He likes to hurt me. He said if I told anybody or complained he’d kill Ralphie.”

“Is that your boyfriend?”

She looked at Broome as though he had two heads. “My poodle.”

Broome looked at Rudy. “You know about this?”

“What, you think I keep track of the girls’ pets?”

“Not the dog, dumb ass. Carlton Flynn being a sadistic prick.”

“Hey, if anybody hurts my girls, I tell them to take a hike. But if I don’t know about it, what am I supposed to do, am I right? It’s like that tree falling in the woods or whatever. Does it make a dent if you don’t hear it? If I don’t know about it, I don’t know about it.”

Rudy, the gentlemen’s lounge philosopher.

“Did he hurt you other ways?” Broome asked.

Tawny nodded, eyes squeezed shut.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“No.”

“So you hated him.”

“Yeah.”

“And now he’s missing.”

Tawny’s fake lashes flew open. “You said you didn’t think I had anything to do with that.”

“Maybe not you,” Broome said. “Maybe someone who cares about you. Maybe someone who wanted to protect you.”

Again she gave him the confused look.

“A boyfriend, a parent, a close friend.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Sadly her confusion was justified. She had no one, other than a poodle named Ralphie. Dead end.

“When did you last see Flynn?” Broome asked.

“Night before he, uh, left or whatever.”

“Where did you two go?”

“Here first. He liked to watch me dance. He’d buy random guys lap dances and he’d smile and watch and then he’d take me home and call me a slut for dancing with them and hurt me bad.”

Broome tried not to show anything. You want to come here, get your rocks off, whatever, he didn’t judge. But the thing they never tell people is, it’s never enough. So Carlton Flynn started off as some two-bit player, getting some ass, but after a while, you crave more. That’s how it always works. Everything is a gateway drug to the next. Broome’s grandfather said it best: “If you were getting pussy all the time, you’d want a second dick.”

“Did you make plans to see him again?” Broome asked.

“He was supposed to meet me the night he, you know, disappeared.”

“What happened?”

“He called and said he’d be late. But he never showed.”

“Did he say why he’d be late?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he went earlier that day?”

Tawny shook her head. The stale stench of hairspray and regret wafted toward him.

“Anything you can tell me about that day?”

More head shaking.

“I don’t get it,” Broome said. “This guy kept hurting you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It was escalating.”

“Huh?”

Broome bit back the sigh. “Getting worse and worse.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah.”

Broome spread his hands. “How did you think it’d all end?”

Tawny blinked, looked away, considered the question for a moment. “The same way it always does. He’d get tired of me. Move on to the next thing.” She added a shrug. “Either that or he’d kill me.”

The words “law office of Harry Sutton” were stenciled into the pebbled glass. Old-school.

When Megan gently rapped on the pebbled glass, Harry answered with a resounding “Enter!”

She reached for the knob. A few hours ago, she’d called home and told Dave that she wouldn’t be home till late. He wanted to know why. She told him not to worry and hung up. Now here she was, back in Atlantic City, in a place she had known all too well.

Megan opened the door, knowing that doing so would probably change everything. The office was still a seedy one-room operation-small-time with a lowercase s — but Harry would have it no other way.

“Hey, Harry.”

Harry was not an attractive man. His eyes had enough bags under them to take a three-week cruise. His nose was caricature bulbous. His hair was a shock of white that wouldn’t come down without the threat of gunfire. But his smile, well, it was beatific. The smile warmed her-brought her back and made her feel safe.

“It’s been too long, Cassie.”

Some called Harry a street lawyer, but that wasn’t really what Harry was. Four decades ago he had graduated Stanford Law School and started on a partnership track at the prestigious law firm of Kronberg, Reiter and Roseman. One night, some well-meaning colleagues dragged the quiet, shy attorney down to Atlantic City for gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The shy Harry dived in-and never left. He quit the big firm, stenciled his name upon this very office door, and decided to champion the city’s underdogs, who, in many ways, consisted of everyone who started out here.