The Contractors Page 6

But that was before Costco Barnett and the Night of a Thousand Lap Dances.

  Costco was my partner, a functional alcoholic nicknamed after the discount retailer because he once killed a suspected rapist late at night in the produce section. Costco, florid faced and thirty pounds overweight, had nearly three decades on the force and didn’t give a damn about much of anything except doing the job the best way he knew how. And strippers.

  Good gravy, did Costco Barnett love him some strippers. Something about the concept—money for nakedness—twisted up his sense of reason like Elvis’s colon on the day he died.

  Which is how we came to be in a topless joint named the Pussycat Lounge on the Night of a Thousand Lap Dances.

  In Dallas, a prominent hole in the Bible Belt, the law required dancers to wear pasties. Specifically, the regulation read that the “whole of the performer’s nipple shall be covered,” a vaguely worded clause open to all sorts of interpretations.

  And therein lay the problem. Nipples only? Or the surrounding flesh, the areolas as well? Weighty topics, these legal issues.

  Costco Barnett, in no way authorized to conduct such investigations, took it upon himself to be the arbitrator of what was legal nipple coverage. By measuring the pasties with a tiny ruler he carried in the back pocket of his uniform.

  On the Night of a Thousand Lap Dances, a promotion the manager of the Pussycat Lounge dreamed up, Costco downed two boilermakers at the bar while I sipped a Diet Coke. We were both in full uniform. Then he dragged me past the DO NOT ENTER sign and into the dressing area backstage, a long room full of mirrors and half-naked women, the air thick with cigarette smoke and estrogen.

  Costco, a blissful look on his face, whipped out his ruler.

  The manager followed us, hopping from one leg to the other.

  “Why you jacking with me?” he said. “Tonight of all nights?”

  “The law’s the law.” Costco licked his lips.

  The dancers groaned, made catcalls. Their first rodeo with Costco, this was not.

  “Here’s a couple C-notes.” The manager pulled out some bills. “For you and your guy.”

  “Buzz off.” Costco pointed to a platinum blond wearing only a G-string and some flowery perfume. “You first.”

  The woman’s chest was so big it needed its own census tract number.

  A closed door was at the back of the dressing room, and I drifted that way. Never did like unopened things since that time in Fallujah.

  “Sure, Costco.” The blond stood and chuckled, a hand under each enormous breast. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Ohhh, yeah.” My partner slid the ruler under one nipple and grabbed a handful of the woman’s buttocks.

  “Jesus, Costco. You’re a pig.” The manager shook his head. “Copping a feel and not paying—” He looked my way. “Hey, get the hell away from there.”

  I put my hand on the knob of the closed door, and the dressing room got quiet except for the pulse of the music from the club. About half the girls decided it was time to get on the floor and hustle one of the thousand lap dances. The other half busied themselves with their makeup and costumes, clearly not wanting any part of the door.

  “Take the cash, willya. Get a BJ on the house. Whatever.” The manager rushed across the room to me. “But you ain’t getting in there.”

  Costco pushed the blond away and dropped his ruler.

  The manager stopped, wiped a tiny layer of sweat from his upper lip, a nervous look in his eyes.

  I kept my hand on the knob but didn’t turn, waiting to see what my partner did.

  Managers of strip clubs did not ever tell police officers what they could or could not do, even if one of them was pawing a dancer.

  “What did you say?” Costco lumbered over to him, hands on his hips.

  “N-n-not tonight, Costco.” The manager gulped, then turned to me. “Don’t go in there. Please.”

  My partner nodded at me.

  I opened the door and stepped inside a dim area about the size of a motel room. I smelled the smell, saw the child. A baby in diapers and nothing else.

  Would I take it back? Never open the door? That’s a question that has no answer.

  The child was about a year old. Hard to tell precisely since he was in a car seat on the floor. His eyes tracked my movements as I stepped in, hand on my gun. He didn’t cry or gurgle. Just watched.

  It was a storage room. A single fluorescent light flickered overhead, the ballast going bad, keeping the space in gloom. Stacks of boxes. A leather sofa with a torn cushion. Two card tables covered with beer mugs, pitchers, rolls of toilet paper.

  And the smell. Metallic and sulfur. Menthol on top of urine.

  “What do you got, partner?” Costco stood in the dressing room, just on the other side of the door.

  “Stay outside. Don’t let anybody in.” I pulled my service weapon and scanned the rest of the room.

  The woman was easy to miss at first glance, huddled in the corner, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs.

  She was older than your average stripper, maybe thirty-five. Her eyes were closed. Stringy blond hair with a couple inches of dark roots showing. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, her skinny arms and legs at odds with the obviously enhanced breasts pressing against her legs.

  “Ma’am.” I lowered the gun. “Are you okay?”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me without speaking. She just stared, much like the infant. My initial impression: a couple of bump-and-grinds short of a full table dance.

  “That your baby?” I nodded toward the car seat.

  She blinked and licked her lips but didn’t say anything. Her features were coming more into focus as my vision adjusted to the dimness.

  Stoned or stupid, hard to tell. Her eyes were glassy, as empty as a church on Monday morning.

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  She licked her lips again and swallowed. “A-a-are you here for the key?”

  “No, ma’am.” I holstered my gun. “I’m a police officer. Is that your child?”

  “I’ll give you the key.” She closed her eyes, head tilting to one side. “Just don’t hurt my baby.”

  Noise at the door. Costco eased himself into the room.

  “What the hell’s going on in here?” He squinted at the woman and then the baby.

  “We need an ambulance.” I touched my two-way radio.

  “No.” The manager stood in the doorway. He held a cell phone in one hand.

  Costco turned to him. “Again telling us what to do?” He tapped the manager on the chest. “How about you step back and let us do our job?”

  “I’m trying to do you a solid.” The manager didn’t budge. “Don’t call this one in. Take a powder; am-scray, you hear me?”

  I walked to the car seat, knelt down. The smell was stronger, the light weaker. The child’s diaper obviously needed to be changed. But there was something more.

  I turned on my flashlight.

  “How about I call vice?” Costco shoved the guy back. “And you can expl—”

  The sound of his voice disappeared as the door shut, leaving me alone with the woman and her child.

  “Please, don’t hurt my baby.” She tried to stand but couldn’t.

  The child’s legs were greasy from the knees down, like he’d been dipped in suntan oil. Underneath the substance, the skin looked funny, warped or bubbled, a trick of the lighting.

  “What the heck?” I leaned closer.

  Anyone who’s ever been in a war zone or worked as a cop knows how deep the darkness reaches, the bottomless void that allows for actions that have no meaning in the sane world.

  Cruelties, both deliberate and not, banal and repugnant at the same time.

  The trick for the so-called sane one who desires to avoid sinking into the morass was humor, usually that of the gallows variety. And the trick to the humor was to have your head in the right place when the bad stuff confronts you.

  That nig
ht, at the Pussycat Lounge, my head was not in the right place.

  “Holy crap.” I picked up a jar on the floor beside the car seat. Over-the-counter blister cream. “He’s been burned.”

  “I d-d-didn’t mean to.” The woman stood, finally, and wobbled over. “I was trying to give him a bath but the water was too hot.”

  I grabbed my walkie-talkie, requested an ambulance and a supervisor, my sergeant. I gave my unit number.

  “They cut off my electricity.” She began to cry. “But the stove had gas.”

  The child closed his eyes. His breathing was shallow, a long, slow count between each rise and fall of his chest.

  “What’s he on?” I touched the baby’s throat. The pulse was weak.

  “I’m supposed to be in a program.” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Methadone. It’s so hard, you know. Getting all the junk out of your system.”

  “What the hell did you give him?” I pulled her up. “He’s stoned off his ass.”

  “I-I-I just want to get straight,” she said. “That make me a bad person?”

  “He’s a baby, for God’s sake.” I shoved her against the wall.

  She looked at me through a tangle of hair, a sly smile on her lips. “You like it rough, do you?” She giggled, words slurred. “Me too.”

  The dispatcher called on my radio, loud in the small room: An ambulance was on its way.

  “I dig the uniform.” She touched my arm. “Maybe you and I could have a little party? Then I’ll give you the key.”

  “The child.” I slapped her hand away. “What’s he on?”

  “Hey, it’s all good.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “He’s been a whiner since day one. Just watered down some of the stuff I take, you know. Mellow him out.”

  I backhanded her in the mouth. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.

  Her head whipped back, skull bouncing off the sheet rock. Her teeth bloodied my knuckles.

  Costco stepped back in the room.

  “You called an ambulance.” He shut the door. “I heard it on my radio.”

  His tone was soft, out of character.

  “She boiled the kid like he was a lobster.” I wiped my hand with a handkerchief.

  The woman groaned.

  “You shouldn’t a called it in.” Costco shook his head. “I think we got a situation here.”

  “She doped the kid, too.” I picked up the car seat. “Little guy’s barely breathing.”

  “You gotta trust me on this.” Costco took the carrier from my grip. “We were never here.”

  “This child has second-degree burns,” I said. “He needs to be in a hospital, not a strip joint.”

  “Ay-yi-yi. What a mess.” Costco examined the baby’s legs. “All right. We’ll let the call stand. But we need to get the hell out of here.”

  Both of our radios sounded. The ambulance was out front. The dispatcher used my badge number as well as Costco’s.

  The manager came in the room followed by a uniformed officer around Costco’s age, a heavyset man with dyed hair who I knew by reputation but had never met, Captain Sinclair.

  “You two stepped in it now.” The manager looked at the woman crumpled on the floor, bleeding from her mouth. “This kid’s not supposed to exist.”

  Captain Sinclair’s face was blank, but his eyes narrowed as if a great deal of thinking was going on inside his head, various permutations and calculations. He looked at me for a moment before staring at Costco. His cell phone rang, and he left the narrow room to take the call. The manager shook his head and left, too.

  Another man entered, sliding into his space. The new arrival was in his late thirties and wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red-striped tie, his hair a buzz cut.

  He ignored the woman and child.

  “My name’s Hollis.” He held up an FBI badge. “Which one of you fuckers has the key?”

  - CHAPTER ELEVEN -

  Piper was in the kitchen making coffee when I woke the next day, a scant few hours after dropping off the girl with her mother and Sinclair at the poker house on Tranquilla.

  I yawned and stretched and padded into the living room of our borrowed apartment at the Cheyenne. My sleep had been fitful, filled with images of the injured infant at the strip club years before, the FBI agent Hollis, and half-remembered snippets of my father when he’d been a lawman.

  The Dallas skyline was a dull gleam in the morning sun. There were no rain clouds on the horizon, just a pale, blue-gray swath of smog wrapped around the skyscrapers like a dirty river.

  Piper poured me a cup and then disappeared into the bathroom.

  Two items were on our agenda for that day. One was to interview a CI, a confidential informant we called Rich Dude, our main lead to the warehouse and the money it represented. The other was a personal errand, which I decided to do first. At nine, Piper and I left the apartment and headed south.

  Dallas, in all its concrete glory, had grown north, the black gumbo prairies leading to the Red River dotted with strip centers, subdivisions, and the occasional clump of office towers that jutted from the clay soil like glass stalagmites.

  The south part of the county, especially to the east, hadn’t changed much since the first European settlers had arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, looking to upsell the natives on cholera and a utopian society called La Réunion.

  The terrain was marshy, covered with the post oaks and swamp maples that grew along the Trinity River floodplain, land that was good for crushing spirits and hiding bodies, and not much else.

  Twenty minutes later, I turned off a gravel road and maneuvered the Tahoe over the ruts on the packed-dirt driveway that led to a rented double-wide trailer. The home sat under an old bitternut hickory tree that had lost half its limbs during a thunderstorm the year before.

  “Damn cell.” Piper tossed her phone on the console. “Can’t get a signal and we’re, what, like only a mile from downtown?”

  The five-acre tract was in fact nearly a dozen miles from the city center, just off of South Belt Line Road near the unincorporated town of Kleberg. A dry creek, lined with cottonwoods, ran to one side of the double-wide, the rest of the place overgrown with weeds and brush.

  I parked behind a Ford pickup truck that had been new during the last years of the Reagan administration. The rear window was plastered with Police Benevolent Association decals.

  Piper and I got out.

  The air smelled faintly of river water and dead fish, combined with the pleasant aroma of cut hay from the pasture next door. The place on the other side sold used tires and goats.

  I navigated the rickety stairs, Piper right behind me.

  A screen door hung by two of its three hinges, large chunks of the screen part missing. TV noise from inside.

  I knocked. Odd-sounding footsteps grew louder, metal and flesh. Clink-step-clink.

  A woman in her late twenties appeared. She wore a print sundress, hair back in a ponytail, a dishrag over one shoulder.

  She stepped into the doorway, crutches first. Her left leg was bone white, foot encased in a black Chuck Taylor sneaker. Her right leg was missing.

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “It’s you.”

  “Guess who brought money.” I held up a wad of currency, half my take from last night.

  “Doesn’t look like much.” Tanya was her name, my half sister. “Thought you had a big haul coming in.”

  “We’re working on that later.” I opened the door and stepped inside, forcing her to hobble backward. “Probably gonna come together this week.”

  “Hey, Tanya.” Piper followed me in. “How’s it going?”

  “Cable was screwed up all last night.” My sister headed to the kitchen. “And I’m almost out of tampons. So I’ve had better weeks.”

  Piper looked at me and mouthed the word, “Ouch.”

  Tanya and Piper were from the same generation, shared many of the same cultural touchstones. They both had law enforcement backgrounds. They were as
close to friends as either one got.

  The trailer was wood paneled. Harvest-green, shag carpeting.

  The space that served as a kitchen had orange Formica countertops. For some reason, it always smelled like boiled cabbage and onions, no matter what time of day or season.

  “The starter on the Ford is going bad.” Tanya grabbed a pill bottle from the counter.

  I dropped the cash on a pile of bills by the toaster. The top invoice, marked PAST DUE, was from the electric company. I slid another couple of hundreds from my wallet.

  Piper opened the refrigerator and pulled out a Snapple.

  “And the lady from Medicaid won’t call me back.” Tanya dumped some pills into a highball glass with the logo for the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas on one side.

  Her hands were red and scaly, like they’d been rubbed too much.

  “I’ll stop by her office tomorrow,” I said.

  Jockeying for the meager resources provided by insurance and disability was often a two-person job.

  Piper twisted off the top and took a drink. She pulled out her cell phone and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “How long since you’ve left the house?” I said.

  “I went to the store last week.” Tanya filled a Diet Coke bottle with water, screwed on the top.

  “You know what I mean.” I picked up the tumbler of pills. “How long since you’ve really left.”

  “Get off my ass, willya.” She put the bottle in a canvas sack hanging around her neck.

  She’d been a patrol officer and then a homicide investigator with the Fort Worth police department until her mental health and OCD had gotten the better of her. The leg was a recent situation.

  I followed her out of the kitchen and into the living room where our father, Frank Cantrell, sat in a recliner in front of the television.

  This part of the trailer had a faint odor of decay mingled with the stench of rubbing alcohol and an old man’s body too long unwashed.

  “Damn carpet-munchers.” Dad shook his fist at the television where two women on a daytime talk show were slugging each other.

  “Time for your medicine.” Tanya placed the bottle of water on a TV tray.

  “What happened to your leg?” Frank cocked his head.