I got a foot out and blocked it. The edge of the door hit the outside sole of my Payless running shoes and rebounded.
Palakas wheeled on me. “Yo, asshole,” he growled. “The fuck you think you’re doing?”
“I told you,” I said mildly, smiling.
“Get your ass out of here before I have you—”
I shoved him. Quick and light, but it caught him off guard and sent him running backward into his office. His ass hit the edge of the desk, the impact spun him and he fell onto the floor, dragging a desk-light and a coffee cup full of pencils with him. He landed on his knees hard enough to make me wince. The lamp and coffee cup shattered.
I closed the door and leaned my back against it.
Palakas looked up at me. His knees had to hurt and his face was turning from a fake tan to brick red.
“You stupid motherfucker,” he whispered through teeth that ground together between curled lips. “I’m going to—”
“No,” I said, “you’re not. Stop trying to scare me to death.”
He cursed some more.
I kept smiling.
When Palakas paused for a breath I said, “You hired a fifteen-year-old girl to strip in your club. We could start there and see how fast I could get you shut down.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but suddenly his voice lacked emphasis.
“Right now that’s all that I know she did here. It’s enough for me not to want to take any shit from you.”
“Who’s she to you?” he asked as he got heavily to his feet.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m her father.”
He actually laughed. “Her old man’s a methed-out schizo up in Easton.”
“Then maybe I’m her brother.”
“She doesn’t have a brother.”
There was a pack of gum in my pocket. I took it out and popped a couple of pieces out of the aluminum blister pack, put them into my mouth, crunched through the candy coating and chewed the gum. Palakas watched me do all this.
I said, “Does it really matter who I am?”
“It’s going to matter when I—”
“I already told you, stop trying to scare me. I want to have a conversation with you and I really don’t want to have to wade through a bunch of lines cribbed from old Sopranos reruns. I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer my questions. If I’m satisfied with the answers then I’m done and you can forget I was ever here.”
“Why should I tell you a god damn thing?”
“Ah,” I said, “this is the part where I threaten you. You see, if you don’t tell me what I want, or if I don’t like what you tell me, then I will kick a two-by-four so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toothpicks.”
“Think you could?”
“We can find out,” I said mildly. “And afterward we can have this conversation while we’re waiting for the paramedics.”
Palakas tried a sneer on me. It was supposed to look fearless and defiant, but this wasn’t a movie and he knew that if I was telling him I could hurt him then that’s how it would play out. Even if he had my legs broken later on, it wouldn’t stop him from taking the full weight now and very few people want to play it that way. Besides, the door was closed and I think he was actually curious.
“The fuck you want to know?” he said, playing it out, though. That was okay. He could posture all he wanted as long as he talked. What he didn’t know was that I could smell his fear. Beneath the deodorant, the residual smell of his soap — Ivory, I think — and his cologne — Axe — I could smell the fear stink.
“Denise Sturbridge,” I reminded him.
“Bambi. Yeah, so what? What about her.” He stepped over the debris on the floor and sat down behind his desk. I came and stood close to him and we both knew that it was because I wanted to make sure he didn’t get cute and pull anything unfortunate from a desk drawer. Small office. Even with a loaded gun I could get to him before he could take a shot. We both knew that.
“I’m looking for her.”
“She’s not here.”
“I know that, numb-nuts. That’s what ‘looking for her’ means. If she was here I’d have already found her.” I tapped him on the forehead with my index finger. “I want you to tell me where she is.”
Palakas gave a half-hearted swipe at my hand. “How should I know?”
“She works for you?” I suggested.
“No, she don’t. She missed three shifts in a row. That’s her ass as far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re saying she’s missing?”
“I’m saying she ain’t here. I don’t know where she is and I couldn’t give a hairy rat’s ass. She stiffs me on three shifts, am I supposed to give a wet shit about her? Am I supposed to keep her on the schedule? Fuck no.”
“I need to find her.”
“Then go to her damn apartment. What are you bothering me for?”
I shrugged. “Last known whereabouts.”
“Look,” he said, taking a breath, “who are you? I mean really.”
“I’m nobody,” I said.
“You’re not a cop?”
“No.”
“You’re not with Vice?”
“I said I wasn’t a cop.”
“You look like a cop,” Palakas said. From the sour shape his mouth made you’d think the word ‘cop’ was smeared with dog shit.
“Used to be a cop.”
“What are you now?”
“Private.”
He stared at me. “You serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Bambi a bail skip or something?”
“No. She’s a kid who should be in school, not showing her boobs to a bunch of degenerate jerkoffs.”
Half a laugh burst from him before he could clamp it down. I edged closer.
“You want to tell me what’s so funny? Maybe we can both get a good laugh out of it.”
Fear flickered in Palakas’s eyes. I am not a big guy — pretty ordinary, really. Five nine, one-seventy; but I’ve been told I have a quality. Even people who don’t know what I have under the skin say that. A quality. When I wore the badge, it must have been there in my eyes. It made some pretty serious thugs back off and back down.
Palakas licked his lips for a moment.
“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “You want her home address? I can give you that.”
“I have that. Give me some names. She have a boyfriend?”
“She has a—.”
He almost said something smartass. Probably something like ‘she has a million boyfriends’. He stopped himself in time. Two or three more syllables and I’d have belted him, we both knew it.
“Do I need to repeat the question?” I asked quietly.
“She don’t have a boyfriend,” he said. “Actually I don’t think I ever heard of her going on a…um…on a real date.”
He didn’t have to explain what he meant.
“But…?” I prompted.
“But there was this kid she hung out with.”
“A girl?”
“No. A boy. Works in the kitchens. Black kid. Queer.”
“They hung out together?”
“Pretty much all the time. Name’s Donny Falk.”
“Is he working today?”
“No.”
“Know where I can find him?”
“Same place as Bambi. Windsor Apartments on Red Lion Road. Same building and floor. His apartment’s two doors down from hers.”
“You have a phone number for him?”
Palakas licked his lips again. “Yeah,” he said, and he very carefully opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a sheet of paper. I leaned over to look at it and saw that it was a list of employees — bar staff, bouncers, kitchen staff, cleaners, dancers — along with contact numbers and email addresses.
“You have a copy of that?” I asked.
“Yeah, but—.”
I plucked it out of his hand.
“Hey!”
I turned to him.
“Hey… what?”
Palakas gave me a long, disgusted look. “Hey, I guess help your fucking self to whatever you want. You got a P.I. license, which isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on, but sure, go ahead, knock around a guy who’s got a heart condition. You kick dogs, too?”