Jeff Abbott - Cut and Run

‘If she had killed them and taken the money while you were stuck in traffic, why the hell would she come back?’

Bucks held up the casing. ‘She found she was missing one and came back for it.’

‘Eve would be thorough if she planned a heist like this.’

‘She’s Hot a hit man, Paul. She could have missed a casing in a panic. Or she was coming back for another reason.’ Bucks put the casing on the desk.

‘Her coming back was a huge risk.’ Doubt in his voice.

‘I’m telling you what I saw. Even a lady sharp as Eve isn’t going to think straight all the time.’

‘I don’t like not knowing who the man was with Doyle.’ Paul sat down. ‘I want you to find out. The cops are going to be looking closely at a banker getting killed down at the Port. They’ll come after us if they make the connection between my dad and Alvarez Insurance.’

‘First they have to make the connection,’ Bucks said.

Paul shook his head. ‘This is like finding out your favorite aunt is a two-dollar whore. It’s depressing.’

‘People often disappoint.’

‘You better not,’ Paul said. ‘I’m trusting you, man. Find her. Find the money. See if we can push back the deal with Kiko until Saturday night. But he can’t know we don’t have the green. He knows that, we’re dead in the water. No one will supply us. That money’s the starting point for us.’

‘Starting point,’ Bucks said.

‘The reason I wanted you working with me,’ Paul said, ‘is that I’m going to be bigger than my dad ever was. I need your expertise a lot more than I need muscle with guns. We’re gonna run Houston, Bucks. And when we’ve got that base to work from, I’m going after the men that humiliated my father, that drove him out of Detroit. Barici. Vasco. Antonelli. They’re dried-up old men now. The racketeering laws have broken most of them. They worry so much about the Feds, they won’t see me coming, but I’m going to annihilate them and they won’t be able to touch me.’ He jabbed a finger at Bucks, his face reddening. ‘But I need this deal to jump-start us. To build a stronger power base with an ally like Kiko.’

‘You’re not mob anymore,’ Bucks said quietly. ‘With all due respect, Paul, leave it alone. They’re old men. They don’t have nearly the power they once did. What’s to be gained from it?’

‘Eve knows those guys. She could run to them with the money, if she wanted. They’d give her sanctuary, shelter. She’s old school. She and them, they’d understand each other. She knows how I work. So you got to find her and the money. I’m not gonna let my family be humiliated again.’

‘If I can’t find her-’ Bucks started.

‘Hey, Bucks,’ Paul said. ‘If you don’t find her, nobody’s ever gonna find you.’

Whit passed under the eagle eye of the bouncer, who looked carved from a redwood, paid the twenty-dollar cover, walked into the thump of the music, the strobe lights blinking against his skin.

Club Topaz was dark as a dimly lit closet, a happy-hour crowd thinning out and a well-heeled, post-dinner crowd settling in. The only fully lit areas were the stages, awash with white glows from both ceiling and floor. The crowd was mostly men, with the exception of a few women who wore uncomfortable smiles, as if here under mild protest. The decor was heavy on gold and chrome, a strange mix of Roman antiquity (perhaps to suggest an impending orgy) and contemporary sleekness. The club had retro-guido written all over it, probably part of the cheese-factor appeal, but it was spotlessly clean, the waitresses moving among the tables with precise energy, the cogs of the club all warming up to produce a night of longing and money.

A woman was dancing solo on the stage, and her moves were not of the simple shake-the-tits variety. She was tall, redheaded, and she moved with easy grace and wry suggestion, performing to David Byrne’s cover of Cole Porter’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ as opposed to a generic dance-club beat. She was dressed as a skimpily clad cowgirl, a Stetson perfectly angled on her head, topless but wearing a thin bandolier that divided her high and mighty breasts, leather chaps over a sparkly G-string, and a holster. She drew her guns and sprayed a couple of heavy-jowled men with water. They hooted and clapped. She blew imaginary smoke from the gun’s barrel and the men howled in appreciation. She moved with the confidence and style of a Broadway dancer who happened to be showing her breasts, a funkier Fosse girl. Removing her gunslinger gloves, she dropped them on the balding head of a delighted patron.

Whit moved to the bar, looking for Gooch. They’d decided to come in separately. Gooch had been in for ten minutes already. He saw Gooch, sitting alone at a corner table, nursing a beer, watching the stage. He selected another corner table and sat down.

His stomach dropped as he realized his mother was possibly less than a hundred yards away from him. He could come face-to-face with the shadow that had always loomed over his life. While surrounded by strippers and men waving crisp dollar bills. It was not the reunion he had envisioned as a child. Little flowers of sweat blossomed under his arms, along his ribs, on his back.

A waitress, dressed immaculately in a white shirt, red leather vest, black bow tie and a black leather miniskirt, snug over supple hips, appeared almost instantly. ‘Sir? What may I get you?’

‘A Corona, please.’

The frosty beer, with the requisite lime slice perched in the bottle’s opening, quickly materialized on a napkin before him. He paid with cash and watched the tall redhead finish her show to wild applause while the announcer’s voice said, ‘Give it up for Red Robin! She’s heading back to the plains to’ – a pause hung in the air – ’rope her dogies, and she’ll be back in a while. Now coming onto our main stage is Desire O’Malley, she’s got a pot of gold at the end of her rainbow!’ And in a burst of Celtic drums and fiddles, a bosomy colleen with a jaunty green hat and suit jacket riverdanced onto the stage, clogging with a surprising degree of expertise, barely restrained breasts jiggling. She wore a little fake leprechaun’s beard that she tossed into the crowd amid laughter and clapping.

It was horndog-ridiculous, but the women were extraordinarily pretty. None of them – and Whit watched a few working the room, offering lap dances or sitting and chatting with customers – had a weary, worn look to them from eking out a living in an exploitative field. Playboy could come through with a camera crew and do shots to fill a year’s worth of magazines in ten minutes.

He glanced past the stage. He saw two doors that looked like they led to restrooms and a darkened alcove, lit with a thin, red gleam. Offices, he guessed. On the left side, away from the stage, stood a curving staircase, with burnished cypress rails. A small velvet rope closed the staircase off, with a PRIVATE sign hung discreetly on the rope. At the top of the staircase stood another door, shut.

He took a sip of his beer and a voice next to him said, ‘Would you like a dance, sir?’

Whit glanced up to see one of the most beautiful women he’d ever laid eyes on. She was movie-star gorgeous; skin the color of lightly milked coffee, hair cut short because the hair could never be more than a frame for that stunning face. Full mouth, cheekbones high, delicate jaw, brown eyes you could drown in. A brief bra of CDs covered her top; a thin, fake computer screen, shaped to fit, covered her loins over tearaway hot pants.

‘I got Ds in computer science,’ he said.

She laughed. Politely. Like the line wasn’t new.

‘I’d die of happiness if you danced with me,’ Whit said.

‘Not with you,’ she said. Letting him have his joke. ‘For you.’