“You met Crystal, mission accomplished. And there you sit, your fine ass still on my bar stool. What is a gal to make of that?” Jane said giving me a sideways over the shoulder smile that could melt the polar caps and drown Malibu. The DJ was spinning Robert Cray’s “Back Door Man”, and I don’t know who I figured I was cheating on but the song seemed to fit my mood just right.
“Don’t make nothing of it little girl, just a fool having a drink in a bar,” I said.
“There is nothing little about me,” she said, stopping to look into my eyes. “And I haven’t been a girl since I started to bleed. But you got one thing right. You are a fool, if you walk out that door without making a date to take me out later.”
“Have you ever been at a moment in your life when it’s all falling in, a tumbling shit storm and you can’t see up or down? Just struggling to keep moving forward and not step on a land mine. You ever feel like that?”
“Baby, I’m tending bar in a strip club, what do you think? This is not the career choice one makes when life is all peaches and cream,” she said ignoring a drunk pounding his beer mug at the other end of the bar. “But you have to learn to roll with it or it rolls over you.”
“This one’s bigger than that.”
“Bigger than what?”
“Bigger than whatever you were imagining,” I said. She looked at me, wide eyed. Rising up on straight arms she looked over the bar and down at my lap.
“Really, um, I was imagining pretty big,” she said with a smile that got me grinning. “First smile I’ve seen big guy, I like it.” With a wink she went down the bar to service the waiting drunks. While her back was turned I got up to go. I left a fifty for a tip. I was going through the dead greaseball’s cash like it was stolen, which it was. Maybe I thought when the cash was gone I would forget their decomposing bodies and their pals that were sure to come hunting us. Or maybe it was like the song says, you should spend it like you got it, drive like it’s stolen and love like they’ll love you back. Sometimes even country music has wisdom if you listen.
Cass was sleeping when I got back to the room. I sat up for another hour looking down at neon, blinking through the fog. I was running down a blind alley chasing a ghost who was always just out of my reach. I searched the phone book, but found no listing for Gino Torelli. His being Italian was one more nail in my coffin. I had found a way to piss off the mob. Once they caught wind of me, there would be no place safe to hide. No place in the world they couldn’t reach out and swat me. And here I was trying to find them. Maybe Gino wasn’t connected, maybe the boys in the desert being Italian was a coincidence. Maybe, but I doubted it.
CHAPTER 10
“It’s simple, hit search, type in stripper and bingo,” Cass said, we were in a cyber coffee shop called Java Enabler down in the Haight district. It was once the epicenter of the flower power explosion, full of hippies and junkies and free love. Now it was just another quaint gentrified neighborhood. Gone are the runaways whose lives were forever changed by that long cool summer. Gone, the valiant peaceniks who faced the riot police with flowers against batons and mace only to see their dreams crushed under the wheels of the coming corporate dream of a Coca-cola USA forever world. Gone, the hippies who tuned in and dropped out then discovered heroin and died… all reduced to a footnote in the cable-car-tour-bus ride, come see where it all happened, come see it from the comfort of your air-conditioned Trail-ways seat.
The kid behind the counter at Java Enabler told me that before the bottom dropped out of the dot com stocks, this place used to be packed twenty-four seven. A flick of the eyes and I saw the small shop was near empty. Along one wall, it had a row of iMacs with overstuffed chairs in front of them. While Cass started to bang away in a blur of meaningless clicks and clacks on the keyboard, I ordered her a latte and a black house coffee for me, say what you will about yuppie scum they have improved the quality of coffee for all of us and for that I bless them. Cass found 157,263 sites listing the key word “Stripper”. I had her add the word “Live” and that got us down to 42,637. She started clicking on addresses and a flurry of porn sites flashed on. I was flooded with embarrassment to be looking at these pictures in broad daylight with Cass at my side. It wasn’t like this was anything we hadn’t seen before. Hell, I reminded myself, her last place of employment was a brothel. Still it felt odd. After an hour of mind-numbing bad porn I had her add the word “Crystal” to the search. The top web site listed was called Hot-horny-strippers.com. When she clicked on the address I nearly spit out my coffee. There on the welcome page was a picture of Kelly. She was naked, on her hands and knees, ass to the camera. Her face stared back at me over her shoulder, it was animated so she winked at me. On her left butt cheek I noticed a tattoo of Tinkerbell or some other fairy who’s name I didn’t know. Fact is, all fairies look alike to me. It had never occurred to me that Kelly would have a tattoo, not that she should or shouldn’t have had one. It was just that I didn’t know she did. It was one more in the growing list of things I hadn’t known about Kelly. And there she was kneeling on the screen forming her crude, “come fuck me” wink.
“That bastard,” Cass said more to herself than me. We both stared at the picture for a long moment, as if we could make her real if we watched long enough. “Give me a credit card number.”
“Do I look like the kind of guy they give credit cards to?” Fact was I had one hidden in my car, but it was clean in John Stahl’s name and needed it to stay that way. It was my get out of jail, I’ll be in Paris ‘cause there are too many dead bodies in this room to cover up, security card.
“We need one to see more,” she said.
“I don’t need to see more, I need to see where this is coming from.” Looking around, the shop was now empty. The clerk was sitting at one of the iMacs tapping away on the keys. I decided to take a wild shot in the dark. I caught Cass’ attention and then looked over at the clerk. She smiled, this was her area of expertise. In the few steps it took for her to reach him she completely transformed herself. She stood up a hardened woman but by the time she reached him she was the girl next door. Meryl Streep had nothing on this girl.
She slid into a chair next to him and flashed the kind of smile that made you forget your troubles, your wife, even your car keys. Caught in her crosshairs he never had a chance.
“Hi,” she said.
“How’s it going,” he mumbled, unable to keep eye contact he looked down, then found himself staring at her breasts. He gulped and quickly looked up, a slight rosy tint forming on his cheeks. “You need something?”
“You’re good with computers, I can tell by the way you whip around the keyboard.” She let her fingertips brush against his hand resting on the keys.
“I know a thing or two,” he said with false modesty, still glowing from her briefest of touches. Yeah, she was that good.
“My uncle and I were trying to trace a web site.” She nodded at me. “It was pictures, bad pictures of his daughter, he wants to know how to find the server it’s on. I love computers but I’m in way over my head on this one. Could you, no I don’t want to bother you.”
“It’s no big deal, piece of cake really.” The clerk smiled, this was his turf, his moment to shine.
“Really?” She looked like she was in awe of his prowess.
“If you have the IP address, I can find out where the data is hosted.”
“IP address?” Unconsciously she ran her thumb over her lower lip acting confused.