by Matt Rass
Ray crooked his head.
“Was like ten years ago, I was just a lil nigga out the gym, you came and showed me and the boys some of that Brazilian jiu-jitsu.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ray said. “Y’all tried to knock each other out. I got some hell after that.”
“I never saw your name in the fight game. S’up with that?”
“Nah, I entered some tournaments, but now I just spar here and there.”
“Man, you coulda been huge. How old are you now?”
“Gonna be forty soon.”
“Wow, brother. You still look great, though.”
A crowd began to form behind Ray, and there was no squeezing past the two big dudes. DC bumped into Ray and he felt her small breast against his elbow.
“Sorry,” she said. “Can we go inside?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Dwight backed up and reached for a stamp to brand their hands. “No charge,” he said. After he pressed the stamp against the back of DC’s hand and not much was visible because of the black ink on a black hand, he muttered an apology. “Sorry, we don’t get much black folk in here.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Do I get a free drink with this?”
“No, but I’ll make sure the first one you order is on the house.”
She perked up. “You buying?”
He winked at her. “Sure, I’m buying.”
“Thanks, Dwight,” Ray said. He then pointed out an empty table near the stage to DC. “Go on and take a seat over there for us. Order me a Bud.”
DC wasn’t too happy about wading through the crowd on her own, but she loosened between the catcalls and “Hey baby’s,” gaining more confidence as she passed.
The club itself was surprisingly small. Like the size of a two-bedroom apartment. There was one stripper on the stage and another on a brass pole in the corner, whose silhouette cast against the papered street side window. Yet another girl floated among the crowd of mostly white twenty and thirty-somethings and took drink orders. She looked a half dozen years removed from the dancing, her face drained of its spirit, but her body still owning it. Everyone else in the place was male, red-faced, and drunk. Security cameras were positioned in each of the corners, spying on the crowd.
“Listen Dwight,” Ray said. “Whaddaya know about what happened to Sam?”
The big man’s whole body deflated. “I just heard the rumors, man, but I ain’t got no firsthand knowledge of my own. I’m sorry. I didn’t even know y’all were brothers till I heard Sam talkin’ ’bout you the one time.”
“Different mothers. He took his mama’s name.”
“Yeah. He showed me your picture, and I remembered you straight away. I was like, ‘Damn bro, I know that nigga.’”
“What was Sam’s job here?”
Dwight looked about the room to see if anyone was watching before he answered. “Officially? Like for real? He was the DJ.”
“And unofficially?”
“I don’t want to tell any stories, but I’m gonna tell you some stories… He was picking up girls for private parties.” Dwight paused to wave in a regular customer without charge. “Go on in, bro. Don’t have to wait for me.” He then turned back to Ray. “I did security for one of these parties and I didn’t like what I saw, and I know Sam was feeling the same way, too, but he couldn’t get hisself out of it. At first the girls were, like, real women and then they were askin’ for younger and younger girls, man. Like sixteen. If that. And I know Sam was strugglin’, you know what I’m sayin’? He didn’t want to have anythin’ to do with kids. And personally, I was comin’ up with different excuses of why I couldn’t work for ’em no more till finally they stopped asking me altogether.”
“Sex parties?” Ray asked.
“And then some. They were secretly filming people with these kids.”
“Blackmail.”
“Wasn’t home movies. I didn’t know who most these people were. Some of ’em gave ya the sense they ain’t from around here, you know what I’m sayin’? They wasn’t small town. And I know these mothahfukkas didn’t know they was being filmed.”
“Who put this whole thing together?”
“Cat named Alex Silver.”
“That Silver name belongs to a lotta people in this town.”
“They own all this shit,” Dwight said.
“And who’s this Dominique chick and what does she have to do with Sam?”
“Yeah, they was close. White bitch. She a lesbian, though. She was pullin’ chicks for him to bring to these parties.”
“Where’s she at?”
“She ain’t been in yet, but she’ll be here. Can’t miss her. Tall bitch. Big ol’ fake titties. She kinda looks like she had one too many plastic surgeries, ya know what I’m sayin’? Duck face.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for her.”
“You wanna keep both your eyes out. Believe me.”
Ray saw a greasy little man with dyed jet-black hair and a cheap suit approach DC at her table and grab her by the arm. “Do you know that dude?” Ray asked Dwight.
“That’s Tony Silver, the owner.”
Tony tried to lift DC out of her chair. “Hey!” Ray called out, but his voice was drowned by the music and drone of the crowd. DC tried to stay at her table, but Tony grabbed her other arm and pulled her up. Ray began to move toward them when Tony started escorting DC back to the entrance.
Tony’s cologne reached Ray before the greasy little man did. Ray tried to clear the air with a waving hand, but the stink stuck in his nostrils. “Hey,” Ray said to Tony. “What’re you doing grabbing her?”
Tony noticed Ray for the first time and looked him up and down. “What’s it to you?”
DC pulled her arm loose as Dwight stepped forward and introduced Ray as Sam’s brother.
“Go back to your seat, Dee,” Ray said.
“One second,” Tony said. “She’s with you?”
“Yes, I’m with him,” DC interrupted.
Ray nodded and DC turned and headed back to her table.
Tony extended his hand and introduced himself. Ray took the limp hand in his own. It was like shaking hands with a napkin. He hated limp hand-shakers. Had they all been taught how to shake hands by their grandmothers?
“Any news on where your brother is?” Tony asked.
“No,” Ray said. “I was just askin’ Dwight about what he thinks happened to Sam. You got any ideas?”
“Are you here on official police business, ’cos I—”
Ray interrupted him. “I’m here on big brother business. I wanna know what it was Sam did here and why that mighta resulted in him being missing,” Ray said.
“I don’t see how Sam’s disappearance has anything to do with this place,” Tony said.
“He recruited girls for you.”
“No, he didn’t. We deal with an agency out of Chicago. Most of the girls have a circuit between there and all the small towns round here. Sam was our DJ and MC. That’s it.”
“Whattabout the girls for the private parties? Young girls.”
Tony looked up at Dwight then shook his head. “I doubt you’re interested in rumors.”
“Try me.”
“I heard he was getting girls for these private parties, and I tried to tell him it was bad business, but he wouldn’t listen to me. And then I heard he stole seventy-five thousand dollars and split outta town.”
“Seventy-five thousand?”
“That’s what I heard.”
It was a bad attempt by the slick bastard to plant motive for Sam’s disappearance, Ray thought.
“Who’s Alex Silver?” Ray asked.
Again Tony looked up at Dwight then over to Ray. “Alex is my nephew and the assistant city attorney for this town.”
“You also own the Welcome Tavern, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Your son, Mike, does though, right?”
“He manages it.”
“But he doesn’t own it?”
“If you plan on sta
yin’, I’d like to offer you and your girlfriend complimentary bottle service,” Tony said.
Ray looked up at one of the cameras. “No, thanks. I buy my own drinks. But how ‘bout you give me Sam’s most recent address?”
“You don’t know your own brother’s address?” Tony asked.
“I misplaced it,” Ray said. “I’m sure you have something more current than the one I got?”
“Which one do you have?”
“I’ll be sitting over there if you want to send someone over with it,” Ray said and turned to shake Dwight’s hand. “Good seeing you again, Dwight.”
“Yeah, man. Likewise.”
DC turned in her chair to watch Ray get the waitress’s attention and point to her table as he moved through the crowd, leaving Tony and Dwight gawking after him. Ray moved like a shark through a school of fish, everyone giving him a wide berth before collapsing behind him as he passed.
He sat down as the waitress arrived.
“Two drink minimum,” she said.
“What would you like, Dee?”
“Watermelon martini,” she said.
“Two Buds in bottles,” Ray said.
The waitress wrote down the order on her notepad and smiled at Ray.
Ray put his arm behind the back of DC’s chair. “Makes ya nervous surrounded by all these white people, don’t it?”
“They look like they don’t got a care in the world.”
“Most of ’em don’t.” Ray looked around the club. “Why was he tryin’ to kick you out the club?”
“Why you think? He thinks I’m working.”
DC turned in her seat to watch the dancer stretch out on the stage, opening and closing her tanned legs with the precision of a pair of scissors.
“You think that’s s’pose to be sexy?” Ray asked her.
“Maybe she thinks it is.”
Ray laughed.
Smoke began to hiss from a machine at the side of the stage and Ray and DC wrinkled their noses at the suffocating smell of fake fog.
The stripper tried for Ray’s attention, her fingers first over her nipples, then hugging her boobs. She shook her cleavage at him and clubbed around the stage as if shot in the ass. DC looked disgusted. Even Ray could see a misplaced confidence in the stripper’s eyes. She was a brutal dancer, but she had a pretty face and great tits. A woman who’d been told how pretty she was her entire life, but no one told her she had the rhythm of a broken guitar with two strings missing.
“Come over here, baby,” a smartass kid shouted at her, waving twenty-dollar bills in the air.
She turned to the shouts and cartwheeled over to the raining dollar bills. Ray scanned the crowd again and spotted a tall, dark-haired beauty with big cans enter the room. Dominique.
FLASHBACK
Ray was the middle son in a family of three boys. Sam was the baby, Ray five years his senior and the eldest, Robert, was four years older than Ray. In the summer of 1987 Robert was a tall, slender fourteen, Ray was a short, chubby ten-year-old, and Sam—at five years old—was still the runt of the litter. It would be the last year the family lived as a whole. They were typical brothers, each trailing after their eldest hero: Ray glancing over at Robert walking erect and defiant; Sam mimicking big brother, Ray, with his chin up and shoulders back.
The summer was sticky hot, and the family, like most other black families in Benson Bridge, were enjoying a cookout at the beach in St. Andrews. Robert and Ray had met two white girls and shortly thereafter, found themselves on the dunes, surrounded by a group of white teenagers. Sam moved amongst the dunes above the beach like a junebug, far enough away from his brothers not to be yelled at to return to their parents, but close enough that they knew he was safe. Years later Ray would question if he and Robert had been purposely led to the group of teenagers by the two white girls. He would play the events over and over in his head up into his twenties before the memory lapsed and was clouded over with daily life and other miseries. The white kids were just like him and his brother, he would say. An accident. But the fact that the teenagers never received adequate justice in Ray’s mind was a motivating factor in his pursuing law enforcement. The belief that justice should fit the crime no matter who the perpetrator was Ray’s maxim.
He had grown up like most boys his age in front of the television watching cop shows like Magnum P.I., The A-Team, and wanting to be Hawk from Spenser: For Hire. But at ten years old he couldn’t do any of those things. One of the boys held Ray’s arms behind his back and he couldn’t protect his older brother when the teenagers started pushing him. Ray yelled for Sam to get their father, and Robert remained stoic, not responding to the racist name callings. When he was pushed down by the tallest of the teenagers, Robert stood defiantly back up. They grew frustrated. “Why dontcha fight back, ya wimp.” They taunted. Ray broke loose from the kid holding him and rushed at the tall leader, his arms swinging wildly. Robert tried to hold his younger brother back, grabbing Ray by his arms. The tall teen stepped in and punched Ray full force in the nose and it burst with blood. Robert released him and he fell face first into the sand. The mixing of the blood and sand in his nose and mouth, and the laughing boys was too much for Ray to handle. His face burned with rage. He whipped around and faced his older brother, incensed that Robert would render him defenseless like that. It was as though Robert had committed the bigger offence by holding his arms.
Seeing the younger Ray staring wildly at his older brother, the crowd of white boys tried to get the brothers to fight one another, but to no avail. One boy stepped out from the wall of others and held a knife as another positioned himself on all fours behind Robert. Ray shouted to watch out when his older brother was shoved. Robert collapsed back onto the boy holding the blade. Everyone laughed. But in court they would say it was meant only as a prank. The boy who had pushed Robert denied he knew the kid standing behind him was holding a knife. The kid with the knife said he had no intention of stabbing Robert. They were both given probation and community service. An unfortunate accident the judge had said. Robert was dead at 14. He remained a ghost in Ray’s life, reminding him of how easy it was to lose a life, and how a family felt doubly robbed when justice wasn’t served... How a family could be destroyed by the violent loss of one of them. How all would suffer as a result. How the kid lost respect for his father when he was told that his father had been found before the fatal stab and that the father had done nothing, saying simply, ‘let ‘em sort it out themselves’. And how the guilt of that moment drove a father to become an alcoholic.
Sam’s mother was a good woman and had treated Robert and Ray just as if they were her own. She, like a lot of women Ray would grow to know, deserved better than the men they ended up with. Ray’s estranged wife wasn’t any different. They’d been living apart for two years even though they slept under the same roof. And after Iraq and Afghanistan, Ray had had enough of fighting losing battles.
MEET DOMINIQUE
Dominique was a big girl, over six feet tall. Everything about her seemed exaggerated: her long legs a pedestal on which her hips, belly, bust, beauty, big hair, and lips were put on full display. Like an Amazonian Queen with the strut of an evil general, she marched directly to the stage as the club DJ announced her name to whoops and hollers from the crowd and dropped Ginuwine’s “Pony” on the sound system. This was her show and everyone knew it.
She pressed the shoulders of two men seated in “Pervs Row” as she stepped onto the stage. The bad-dancing stripper nervously swept up her blanket and Dominique kicked a couple of dollar bills that had been left behind toward her. The dancer stuffed them in her blanket and retreated through the curtain. Dominique stalked the stage like a tiger caught in her cage. She searched the faces in the crowd as if looking for the nigga who owed her money. The crowd was on its feet and applauding. This was high drama with the promise of naked flesh.
“Here’s Sam’s address,” the waitress hollered behind Ray, setting down his and DC’s drinks and slipping him t
he address on paper. “I hope you find out where he went.”
Ray thanked the waitress and then turned to see another six-foot-tall blonde woman enter the club wearing nothing but white panties and bra. Dwight lifted her in the air and Ray could see she had a tattoo of angel wings on the inside of her thighs and an accompanying halo above her pubic hair. Dwight set her down as the DJ’s voice came through the speakers, “Gentlemen, take your hands out of your pockets and put them together for the lovely, the gorgeous, the scintillating, Angelique!” She was nearly as tall as Dominique, but slimmer and with less of a frame. She spun toward the stage like a ballroom dancer. Ray mouthed the words, “What the hell.” How Sam had gotten mixed up with these two high-class bitches, Ray couldn’t have guessed. And rolling in a small town like this? Ray sat up to watch as DC slumped in her chair and finished her drink.
Angelique stood at the foot of the stage and Dominique towered over her on the stage. Both of them had wild, glassy eyes. Dominique whipped her dark hair and Angelique reacted to the strands striking her chest as if it tortured her. Dominique then grabbed a fistful of Angelique’s blonde hair, pulled her head back, and kissed her. The crowd went nuts, erupting into hoots and hollers. Dominique released the other woman’s face and then rubbed it into her chest. The men in the crowd shouted, “Me too! Me too!” and “I’m a lesbian.”
Dwight pushed through the crowd as some of the customers started clambering for the stage. It was a wild bunch. A pack of hyenas encroaching on a pair of drunk gazelles. Angelique joined her partner on the stage and the girls entwined as they lay in an act of heavy petting and simulated humping. One of the men slithered across the stage and grabbed Angelique by the ankle. He pulled her flat and then began to paw at her. Her fearful eyes met Ray’s. Both of the women had been in a trance and it looked as though they were coming out of a hole.
Ginuwine sang: “If we gonna get nasty baby, first we’ll show, then tell ’til I reach your ponytail. Lurk all over and through you baby...”
Dominique moved in a skew of contortions as she became aware of the crowd at her feet. Her friend on the floor began to blanch as she covered her ears against the hollering of the crowd. Ray watched Angelique's skin slacken and take on a grotesque green-colored sickness. She looked as if she was beginning to bloat with fever. She was too high. She put a hand to her mouth and Ray saw her cheeks fill, then through her fingers, she sprayed the stage with vomit.
