Extra Dirty Read online

  “They were sure knocking them back in The Pirate’s Cove.”

  “Yeah, I figured they were slumming. The brunette, the one who hired you, was the loudest. As soon as she came in, she let out a whoop and did a little shimmy, imitating the girl onstage. Her blonde friend—Bridget you said her name was?—looked a bit nervous but played along. She was as tanked as the leader.”

  “Then what happened?” Ruby asked, feeling like she was watching a car crash in slow motion.

  “Well, I had been standing here, but I followed them in. I didn’t want some customer to feel them up. They looked like just the kind to call the cops.”

  “Calling the cops on some sleazy guy sexually harassing you? Imagine the nerve.”

  “If women don’t want to be sexually harassed, they shouldn’t go to strip bars in the bad part of town.”

  Ruby shrugged. “Point taken.”

  John grinned. “Or they should have a black belt in ju-jitsu like you.”

  “Actually I have black belts in several martial arts. What happened next?”

  “I followed them in like I said. The boss got all goggle-eyed, not sure if they meant money or trouble. They took a seat and one of the girls served them. They got flirty with her.”

  Ruby snorted. All of their waitresses worked topless. “Both of them got flirty?”

  “The missing woman more. Your client was into it too, though.”

  “Interesting. Go on.”

  “So they have a drink or two. I got distracted with other stuff, but the next thing I know the brunette is on stage taking it off.”

  Ruby swore. These two had been begging for trouble. “Did Bridget, the blonde one, join in?”

  “She did after a minute. The crowd went totally wild. Not that those two were all that good looking, but they were obviously amateurs and the guys like that. Horny housewives! Common fantasy. A lot of our customers are working class, and usually middle-class women like those two don’t even look at them twice. Now they were stripping for them.”

  “Did any of the customers try to get on stage?”

  “I took care of that. I got right on the edge of the stage and gave the guys The Look.”

  Ruby nodded. While John had a soft spot inside, he had an intimidating exterior. She’d seen him dealing with rough customers. He could handle himself, and he could handle them. John went on.

  “So the guys didn’t try anything. Threw a lot of money on stage, though.”

  “Did the ladies, um, bare all?”

  “The brunette got down to her underwear. Tossed her bra to the crowd. The guy who grabbed it sold it to another guy. The blonde flashed her tits a few times but never took her shirt completely off. Kept her pants on too.”

  Ruby was seeing a familiar pattern she’d seen a million times at the bar. Friends would come in and there would be a wild one and a shy one. The shy one thrilled to be in the wild one’s borrowed limelight, but would never fully step into center stage. They’d often wake up the next day with regrets.

  Ruby hoped Bridget got the chance to wake up.

  But the fact that she had been the one flirting with the waitress and not Helen didn’t quite fit the mold.

  “So once they came off stage, how did you get the guys to keep their hands off?”

  John laughed. “I nearly had a riot. Big Jim came out from behind the counter to help.”

  “I thought your boss wanted white girls dancing here.”

  “White girls who can take care of themselves like you. Not some slumming housewives in over their heads. We made them go in the dressing room and get decent.”

  “I’ve seen your dressing room. It should be called the undressing room. No one gets decent in there.”

  John nodded. “Yeah, that was a mistake. They stayed in there too long and made me nervous. When I went in to check on them about fifteen minutes later, I caught them doing lines with a couple of the girls.”

  “Jesus. These two should get the Stupid Tourist of the Year award.”

  “Big time. I shouted at the girls about it. We can’t have that going on. We’ll get a bad reputation.”

  “Yes. Wouldn’t want to ruin your sterling reputation.”

  “You use sarcasm a lot.”

  “It’s the company I keep.”

  “Everything that happens here is consensual.”

  “You hope.”

  “I try,” John said, a note of sadness coming into his voice. “I pulled them out of there before they got into something worse and put them at a table near the bar where Big Jim could keep an eye on them. Most of my job is putting out brush fires. Ejecting drunks, keeping guys from getting on stage, making sure the girls aren’t getting too wasted. I don’t have time to stand guard duty for a pair of drunk housewives.”

  “You keep calling them housewives. Why are you assuming they don’t work?”

  “Because people who hold down a job have more sense.”

  “You should hang out in The Pirate’s Cove sometime. So how long did they stay?”

  “Right until the shift change at midnight. They left with a couple of the girls.”

  Ruby groaned. Helen hadn’t mentioned that. Of course, she might have been too plastered to remember, but Ruby’s gut said no. Helen looked like an experienced partier.

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “Didn’t ask, didn’t want to know.”

  “Who were the girls?”

  “Look, Ruby, I—”

  “This is important. One of those tourists is missing. Do you want the police all around this place?”

  John groaned and rubbed his forehead. “Ask Big Jim. I can’t talk about that stuff. It could mean my job.”

  Ruby curled her lip. The owner of The Tropical Twerker was the last person she wanted to speak to. Still, while the guy was a sleaze ball, he wasn’t stupid, and he’d survived in a rough business for a long time. He had a sense of self preservation.

  “All right,” Ruby grumbled, yanking open the heavy metal door.

  As soon as she did, she got hit with a shockwave of hard rock thudding and buzzing through huge speakers that tried to hide their age and cheapness through sheer volume. Dim red lights illuminated the interior, focusing on a central stage on which a tired-looking Bahamian woman dressed only in a thong gyrated around a pole.

  Around three sides, men sat at small tables drinking and staring at the woman as if hypnotized. Ruby scanned the booths along the edge of the room and noticed that the Ufologist sat alone at one of them. She’d heard that he liked coming here to check the women for “evidence of probing,” although John had told her he never did any probing himself.

  The rake-thin Bahamian man gave her a nod. Ruby nodded back, suddenly feeling embarrassed, and went to the bar area. Ruby noted with pride that their prices were much higher and their selection much smaller.

  Their bartender was a whole lot uglier too.

  Big Jim was a strip club owner straight out of Hollywood central casting. Fat, greasy, with a loud floral print shirt open to expose a sweaty chest adorned with gold chains that were probably fake, he leered at her openly with his soft face and moist, slack lips.

  “Ruby! Good to see you. You reconsider my offer?”

  “I’m not dancing for you.”

  “Come on, you’ll make a whole lot more than Neville pays you. Drink? You’re a rum girl, aren’t you?”

  The way he said “rum girl” made it sound like it had a double meaning. Ruby didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know.

  Instead, she pulled out her phone and showed him the photo of Helen and Bridget.

  “Not again! Which one ended up in the dumpster?”

  Ruby cringed. “Neither of them. At least not yet. The blonde one’s missing. The other one hired me to find her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Big Jim said with a dismissive wave. Someone came up to the bar and he used that as an excuse to turn away.

  Ruby waited until he served the customer. The guy, drin
k in hand, turned to Ruby, smiled, and took a step forward.

  “Don’t,” Ruby said.

  Big Jim shook his head. “Seriously. Don’t.”

  The guy looked from Big Jim to Ruby and back to Big Jim again. With a little shrug, he took a sip from his beer and returned to his table.

  “So tell me what these two got up to last night,” Ruby said. “If I can find the missing woman before the police get involved, it will save you a world of hurt.”

  Big Jim grumbled. He swore and he kicked the bar. He took a swig from a cocktail. He glared at Ruby.

  But he saw sense.

  He told her the same thing John had told her. Ruby didn’t interrupt. It was always good to hear a story from more than one source and look for differences in the telling.

  Big Jim’s story didn’t differ from John’s, except that while John was dealing with some other problems, Big Jim had to warn a couple of the customers away from Helen and Bridget’s table. Big Jim sensed that their amateur dance didn’t mean they wanted to do what the other girls got up to.

  “If they’d gone upstairs,” he said, “those two would have called the cops on me within half an hour. I’ve seen it before. They come wanting some of the dangerous life and blame everyone but themselves when they get it.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Ruby said. “We get people like that in our place all the time.”

  Big Jim got a weary look. “It’s worse in my kind of place, believe me.”

  “No sympathy. So who did they leave with?”

  Big Jim’s face registered surprise. Fake surprise. “Leave with?”

  “They left with two of your girls. Who?”

  “That’s their business.”

  Ruby grew angry. “No, that’s your business. Your real business. And you get a cut. That makes you criminally liable. Come on, you were acting smart up until now.”

  Big Jim rubbed his temples. “I’m getting a headache.”

  “Turn the speakers down and stop drinking. Who did they leave with?”

  “Lollipop and Dirty Dancer.”

  “Real names?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Everyone knows them by their street names. You ask for them by their real names and most people won’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Lollipop is off tonight. Dirty Dancer was supposed to be here and didn’t show. She’s not answering her phone.”

  “Give me the numbers for both of them.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Big Jim did so. Ruby thanked him and took a look around the bar. The Ufologist, almost invisible in the shadowy recesses of a booth, made a little motion for her to come over.

  Uncertain what he wanted, she went over and sat down, taking care to sit as far away from him as the booth would allow. While he had never made any trouble at The Pirate’s Cove, seeing him in this context made Ruby edgy.

  “What’s up?” she asked, then immediately regretted her phrasing. A lot of men would turn that into a crude joke.

  “You’re investigating another murder, aren’t you?” the Ufologist said in such a low voice Ruby could barely hear him above the music.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The last time you came in here you were investigating that guy who ended up in the dumpster. You wouldn’t come in here otherwise. You don’t belong in here. You don’t belong in The Pirate’s Cove either, but we’re sure glad to have you.”

  Ruby felt touched. The thing that made her keep on working at a low-paid and annoying job was the people, even weirdoes like this guy.

  That and the urgent need to hide out from certain elements of the American government, and perhaps the Saudi government.

  Ruby pulled out her phone and showed him the photo of Helen and Bridget. “Have you seen these two?”

  The Ufologist nodded. “They came in last night. Danced on stage. I was surprised about that. The blonde woman didn’t seem the type. The Deros must have got her.”

  “The Deros?”

  “Detrimental Robots. They live in the hollow earth and send mind control rays to—”

  “What else did they do?”

  The Ufologist shrugged. “They went into the back for a bit and when they came out, they were even crazier. They really got zapped by that ray. The Deros can’t get me, though. I have protection.”

  Ruby didn’t ask what that protection entailed. He didn’t wear a tin foil hat, but it was probably something similar.

  “So what happened after they came out?”

  “They were with Lolliop and Dirty Dancer. They sat for a drink, but they got so fidgety from the underground ray they couldn’t finish it. I went over to warn them but Big Jim told me to scram. I did hear they were going to Caribbean Dreams, though.”

  Ruby nodded. Caribbean Dreams was a high-end strip club in another part of town, a place none of the dancers here could aspire to work in, or if they had, it hadn’t been for a decade. She’d heard about how dancers, when they were young, would start at good places and as the ravages of time and drugs set in, would work in cheaper and cheaper clubs until they reached the end of the line.

  The end of the line in Nassau was a neighborhood called the Maze. She’d met some of the people who got sucked into that place.

  Which reminded her, she needed to get over there tomorrow. She had some unfinished business. In fact, she had a lot of unfinished business in that hellhole.

  But first she needed to talk with Helen and get some straight answers this time. She hadn’t mentioned picking up a pair of low-end prostitutes, and she hadn’t mentioned going to another club.

  If she couldn’t get honesty from the woman who had asked for her help, there wasn’t much she could do to save Bridget.

  And it sounded like she needed a lot of saving.

  Ruby got the hell out of The Tropical Twerker and texted Helen from the parking lot.

  Like the first time, Helen replied to her text almost immediately even though it was now 3:00 in the morning. Apparently, she wasn’t getting any sleep that night.

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow at 7 for breakfast,” she wrote. “I don’t know about this Caribbean Dreams place you mentioned.”

  Ruby frowned at the phone. Could she really not remember going to another strip club with a pair of prostitutes, or was Helen trying to play her?

  She texted back that she’d be there, and Helen gave her the name of her hotel. Then Ruby walked to the bus stop. Buses ran late in Nassau, because so much of the workforce had to get to bars and resorts to serve the tourists at all hours. Ruby grimaced. It looked like she was becoming the same.

  As she waited for her bus, she looked up Caribbean Dreams on her phone and found that it would close in half an hour. No point going over there now. She decided to go home and get some sleep. It was going to be a long day tomorrow.

  All the way home on the bus, she kept thinking of an all-night liquor store in her neighborhood. Mostly it sold cheap booze to the professional drinkers, not the high-end brands that Ruby drank. She had always figured that if she only drank the good stuff, then she wasn’t really a drunk. That had never really come off as believable to her. The good stuff left less of a hangover, though.

  That store did have some halfway decent rum and vodka. She’d found some when she’d been too hard up to get the good stuff. Maybe she could nip on down and get a fifth, just enough to ease her to sleep. She deserved it after all she’d been through today.

  No, damn it! Where’s your self-discipline?

  Ruby shook her head and looked out at the quiet nighttime streets. She used to have tons of self-discipline. Ever since she had been a kid, she’d taken martial arts. Discipline had been a part of her life, and once she had gone into MMA fighting, it had become essential to her career.

  Dad had always been proud of her discipline.

  “You’ll go far, kiddo,” he used to say even when she was in high school. “You have that drive, that determination. It sets you apart.”r />
  It did set her apart. When kids her age had been babbling to their friends in the mall or staring at the television, she had been working out in the dojo. Sure, she had done all the usual things teens had done—dates, dances, parties, school—but she had always had something else, something more.

  And she had wasted very little of her time. Far less than the usual teenager.

  Now all she seemed to do was to waste time.

  “No drinking,” she whispered to herself. “You got a case to crack. Make yourself useful for a change.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Helen Pierce did not look like she had gotten much sleep. She had black circles around bloodshot eyes, and her movements were listless, her shoulders hunched. They met in the breakfast room of her hotel, a mid-priced place where, if you were lucky, your room had a distant view of the beach. Still, they offered a decent breakfast buffet and since Helen was paying, Ruby tucked into a hearty meal of fruit, cereal, and bacon. No bread. A fighter needs protein but has to be careful with carbs.

  Helen picked at a piece of toast and let out a long, slow exhalation. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about that other place? Yeah, we were there. I remember now. We were pretty blotto already and I’d forgotten.”

  Forgotten or too ashamed to tell me?

  “What about those girls you left with?” Ruby asked, not really expecting honesty but curious as to how Helen would answer.

  Helen reddened. When she replied after a moment’s pause, she kept her voice low. “They … um … were going to buy us drugs.”

  “The bouncer and one other witness say you snorted coke in the back room.”

  “Yeah, well, they were going to score more for us.”

  Ruby frowned and sat back, crossing her arms. “Look. If you’re not honest with me, I can’t help you. Bridget is still missing, and every moment counts. If you don’t tell me everything, that will slow down the investigation and seriously reduce the chances of your friend getting out of this alive.”

  Helen made a face and shifted awkwardly in her chair. She took a deep breath before saying, “Well, we picked them up not just for the hookup, but to hook up. You know what I mean?”