by B. V. Larson
“What if there’s something bad in there?”
She looked at me as if I was crazy. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I felt a chill. A creepy feeling, as if I had just invoked an unknown power. I didn’t like the sensation. It was exciting, but also frightening.
Sighing loudly, Holly placed her hands over mine and tried to force my hand to lift the door open. I resisted, and the door stayed closed. She wasn’t very strong. She made a sound of vexation and sat back on her haunches.
“What’s wrong now?” she asked.
“I wasn’t ready yet.”
She crossed her arms, waiting. After another few seconds, I faced my demons and yanked the door open.
Holly whooped. She shoved her hand deeply into the safe and pulled out three wads of money. They were thick packets of twenties, hundreds of them in each wad, folded over once and wrapped neatly with thick blue rubber bands.
I reached out and took one of the wads from her. She frowned, but then shrugged. I hefted the wad in my palm. Three thousand, I figured. Maybe four.
“For expenses, Tony,” I said aloud to no one. “We’ll call this full payment for investigating your death.”
“I’ll call it severance pay,” Holly added. She reached back into the safe with a grin on her face. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.
She gave an irritated squeak and slapped my hand away. I looked into the safe. There was more money in there. A lot of it. I slammed the safe closed and spun the dial.
“What the hell?” Holly exclaimed. She stood up and grabbed at my sleeve. “Are you crazy, Draith?”
“It’s not ours. Not all of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are other girls who need to get paid. Maybe Tony had heirs too.”
Holly shook her head. “I never figured you for a do-gooder.”
“I didn’t figure you for a thief either,” I lied.
She slapped at me, but I caught her wrist. I stood up, still holding her wrist so she couldn’t slap me again.
“Two wads of cash are all you’re getting. I’m sure that is more than you were owed.”
Holly seemed to get hold of herself then. She heaved a sigh. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just got a little carried away.”
“Sure. I understand.”
She shoved the cash into her purse and headed out. I followed. She pushed open the back door a fraction, then paused to look back at me.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find a hotel. I need some sleep.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. You could use some fresh clothes too. Say, you want to come to my place? I’ll let you get some sleep and borrow some of my ex-boyfriend’s clothes. He was about your size.”
I thought about it. Was this real consideration or something else? “I don’t know,” I said. “But thanks a lot for the offer.”
Her lips cinched tight. I wasn’t sure if it was because I wasn’t cooperating with a sneaky plan of hers, or if I had insulted her somehow.
“I’m not going to try to take them, you know,” she said hotly.
“What? The money?”
“The sunglasses.”
I eyed her for a second. Right then, it occurred to me that sunglasses that let you open vaults were quite valuable. Priceless, maybe.
“People are going to be looking for you,” Holly said. “Do you understand that? You can’t use Tony’s plastic. You shouldn’t even be in his clothes, or showing off those sunglasses.”
I nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Let’s go to your place.”
Holly twisted her lips and made a face at me. I pretended not to notice.
“You can tell me the story you promised while we walk,” I said.
Neither of us had a car, and it was a long walk. Holly began to talk. Somehow it turned into more than the story of the accident. She told me everything. At least, I thought she did.
When she was done, everything was a lot clearer.
Holly Jensen had started off her career in the city as a dealer. Her job mostly consisted of flipping out cards when smoking, vodka-drinking men said “hit me” at the blackjack table. She learned to charm them with her pretty smile and thus garner tips. The job had gone well for a year or so, until she’d been fired for palming a few extra chips that had not been intended as tips. Those cameras and mirrors and the assholes that sat behind them didn’t miss a trick, as she put it.
Fortunately, there were others on the casino strip who wanted her. She’d moved on down to the Lucky Seven, a big horseshoe-shaped building that flowed with twinkling green lights each night. The twin towers of the horseshoe were filled with hotel patrons while the base of the U-shaped building was a giant casino. Behind the casino was what they called a “show palace.” The palace had once hosted comedy acts and singers from both coasts and had been filled with high rollers who kept gold on their wrists and in their mouths. After the turn of the century, the show palace had decomposed into something that resembled a giant titty bar.
The bosses at the show palace wore too-tight suits and experienced leers. They gave her a job on the chorus line. She had a face they constantly referred to as “sweet” and legs that made them stare. She’d blushed hard when she had gone topless for the first time, feeling ridiculous in an outfit constructed of rhinestones, sequins, and feathers, all built upon a soft bedrock of black nylon. But she’d done it, and she’d kicked and strutted her way onto the stage.
Holly didn’t mind the dancing, after the initial shock of baring her breasts in public. She’d always kept in shape and found the job easier than dealing cards for hours on end. At least it went by faster.
But trouble quickly came again. This time, it was a murder that interrupted her life. There had been a growing number of strange killings in town. When they weren’t talking about boyfriends, bragging about big tips or snaking each other with gossip, the showgirls talked about little else. One rumor that made her a little sicker than the others was the story of a tourist from Boston. According to the coroner, he’d fallen from twenty stories up and pulverized every bone in his body—but somehow he’d landed in his own hotel room. They’d found him splattered on the bathroom floor. She’d discounted the story as too incredible to believe.
Then came the night Holly found Lavita, a showgirl who claimed to be from Jamaica, but who was rumored to really be from Houston. Holly found Lavita dressed in her sequins and feathers, facedown under the makeup table. Holly described her as resembling a roadkill pheasant, with her tail feathers pluming up from her head and butt.
Holly made the mistake of turning her over, thinking maybe she could help. There was blood everywhere, and Holly should have known Lavita was dead, but she had to check anyway.
It was horrible. Face smashed in, the front of her body flattened as if she’d been crushed in a trash compactor—but only the front of her. Holly let go of the body as if she’d been stung, but instead of flopping back down into the pool of blood, the corpse had rolled slowly over onto its back in a grotesque, boneless fashion.
By this time, Holly was screaming her head off. Cooling blood ran down her fingertips. She’d thought of the man from Boston who had apparently fallen from a great height onto a bathroom floor. This was similar, if not quite the same. People soon flooded the room and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. The police talked to her at length, but she had nothing useful for them. They stared at her with hard-eyed irritation. The killings were freaking them out, she thought. Like mean dogs, they had turned their fear into anger and suspicion.
The rest of the dancers had shunned Holly after that. Somehow, finding her there with blood on her face, having obviously disturbed the corpse, had put her into the untouchable category. She learned then what it must have been like to be declared the village witch when the crops failed.
When new girls came to audition, the bosses treated Holly like old
meat. She’d pushed away their grasping hands on many occasions and she thought they’d come to accept she wasn’t going to go for that kind of thing…but she was wrong. When the new girls were hired, no one had a kind word for the girl who had found Lavita. They dropped her off the list. After less than two months as a showgirl, she was back on the street again.
Her next job took longer to land. Money was tightening up around town as it headed into the cooling, windy period that passed for autumn in the desert. Her rent money came due and she found herself hiding in a dark apartment, listening to hammering and threats from outside her door until her landlord gave up and stomped away, muttering curses. She knew eviction was coming, as relentlessly as the desert winds.
Holly had headed down to the end of the Strip that night—to the seedy side—then walked a few blocks away from the boulevard. There she found bars with patrons who didn’t want to be identified. The streets were dimmer, as every other pale orange sodium-vapor streetlight had been knocked out. She walked into the first strip club she found, which turned out to be Tony’s place. She found the Pole Dance Palace discouraging, but she was desperate. The establishment specialized in something called “friction dancing,” and after a ten-minute audition followed by a five-minute training, she found herself out on the floor.
Friction dancing was just what it sounded like and she was having a hard time with it until another of the girls grabbed her by the arm on her break.
“Here,” the older girl had said, pushing a black ovoid pill into Holly’s palm. “Try this. It makes things easier.”
Holly dry-swallowed the pill without looking at it or thinking about it. She didn’t want to think at all. After that, the night slid by and at quitting time she had over a hundred in tips alone. Four nights later she paid up her rent. The future had brightened.
Before two months had passed, however, she was hooked on cocaine and pills and when the next month’s rent came due, she didn’t have it again. Her habits ate money like a hungry flame.
Tony Montoro had finally fired her on a Tuesday night.
“Come back if you clean up, doll,” he said with a serious face.
Holly understood they were kind words. In truth, perhaps the first ones she’d heard in a long time. Walking the streets again, she eyed the girls who walked there with her. They had glazed eyes and painted faces. No one had heels less than three inches high.
Holly opened her purse and sucked in all the special medications she had left inside it. When there was nothing left but makeup, she felt a little better and a little worse at the same time.
An hour later she was still wandering the streets. By this time, she had decided to turn things around—to go into business for herself. She needed more money, she needed it fast, and she needed it easy. She knew how attractive young ladies in Las Vegas made things like that happen. She had to turn a trick. She’d had a number of bad boyfriends that had made her feel like a hooker, but she’d never really been one. Maybe this was the night to take that last step.
Holly eyed the other streetwalkers, but didn’t want to try her first play with witnesses nearby. She didn’t want the pros to laugh at her. She stumbled down a street that was darker than the rest and waited until a big car came cruising along with two men in it. The car was weaving a bit, and she figured they were probably as high as she was. She glimpsed the passenger’s face. He didn’t look too old or too ugly. She flagged them down.
To her surprise, the car swerved toward her. After a stunned second in the headlights, she scrambled to move out of the way. The car’s engine revved high, as if the driver were flooring it. Did they want to kill her? Shock melted into fear.
The front tires twisted, throwing the car into a half spin. Sliding sideways, it hit the curb and flipped over. She threw herself out of the way, but what really saved her was a lamppost. The car plowed into it, sliding on its back.
It was then that Holly recognized the car. It was purple and black. Made long ago when cars were heavier and longer and full of thick steel. It was Tony’s Cadillac.
Holly got to her feet, shaking. She took quivering steps forward. Was Tony trying to kill her now?
The passenger had been ejected and was lying on the sidewalk, motionless. The driver caught her attention first, however. It was Tony himself, the man in the silver suit who had fired her only an hour ago. He crawled out of his window. The jagged safety glass cut his hands but he kept crawling slowly, relentlessly.
She walked close and stood over him. “Are you crazy, Tony?” she asked.
Tony rolled up his eyes to look at her, and she saw sand burbling from his mouth. She thought at first it was vomit, but then she realized it really was sand. Some of it was wet and dark, but as more gushed out, it turned dry and seemed endless. It gushed from him as he lay there at her feet shivering and dying.
The sand inside him was dry, she thought. Didn’t that mean there had to be an awful lot of it? Didn’t that mean it had to be fresh? It wasn’t possible. His eyes were open. They were bulging and every red capillary stood out on the round whites. He appeared to be just as surprised at his death as she was to witness it.
At this point, I touched her shoulder. We both stopped walking. I looked into her face, frowning. She didn’t have the look of a liar, which I found very disturbing considering the insane nature of her story. She had the look of someone who was remembering something traumatic. She was staring at the street, lost.
I told myself I shouldn’t doubt her. After all, hadn’t I just encountered some very strange people at the sanatorium? Wasn’t I using sunglasses as universal lock picks? How could I doubt Holly after what I’d seen?
“How could he have been filled with sand?” I asked.
She shrugged, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I just remember staring down in a daze. I didn’t even scream. Being mildly high helped.”
I started walking again. She joined me. “Am I in this story?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was getting to you.”
“Keep talking,” I said. “It’s just getting good.”
She went on.
Tony was so full of sand, she said, that his belly looked distended with it. She backed away from the bizarre sight. She wanted to comfort him, but she could not. She was so stunned and horrified by what she saw—something that could not be.
When Tony had finally stopped squirming and lay still, she remembered the second man and stepped around the car to where I lay.
“You were a crumpled lump on the concrete,” she told me. “Really, I can’t understand how you are walking next to me now. You were in worse shape than Tony—but you weren’t choking out sand. You had a lot of cuts and bruises and your leg was twisted at an impossible angle.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I made sure you were breathing,” she said. “After that, I thought I recognized you. I knelt beside you and realized who you were. It took me a minute or so, but I remembered your picture from your blog, which I’d spent some time reading when I was trying to understand Lavita’s murder.”
“Did you call the cops?”
Holly flicked her eyes downward, to the street. “I didn’t have to. Someone else did. There were others around, everyone had a phone. The cops showed up pretty fast. I’d say they were patrolling just a block or two away when they got the call.”
I nodded. It was the kind of territory cops liked to cruise through. “So,” I said, glancing at her. “You took off, right?”
Holly squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, look. I was high, trying to turn my first trick, and had just witnessed my second freaky murder of the season. Wouldn’t you be walking away fast?”
“I guess I might.”
“OK then. You have to understand, Draith, it wasn’t about you or Tony. The cops are edgy these days. They don’t like whatever it is that’s going on in this town. Out on these streets at two in the morning, nobody wants to meet up with the law.”
Holly suddenly stopped walking. “This
is the spot,” she said.
I halted in surprise. I looked around. There was the lamppost. It hadn’t been sheared off, but there was a big gouge in the paint and a dent at the base. I could see white lines scratched into the concrete where the metal roof of the sliding car had scarred it.
“You got away from the cops and walked home then?” I asked. I walked around the lamppost, but didn’t get any special memories from the location.
“No, it was already too late for that. There was a cruiser coming up behind me, I heard the engine purring. There were more cars behind that first one too. I could hear them, but I didn’t dare glance back. Flashing blue and red lights washed all over these walls.”
I looked at her, surprised. “More than one car, that fast?”
“Yeah. There were no sirens, just flashers, engines, and radios that buzzed with the voices of dispatchers. They always come in packs, you know?” Holly reflected. “Lately, they like to come in overwhelming numbers, like sharks scenting blood.”
“They questioned you?”
“They did more than that. They took me in. The cops in this town are bastards, Quentin. I think they’ve all gone bad.”
I nodded thoughtfully. I doubted I’d ever meet a stripper who was in love with the law. But I didn’t press her further, as I had heard enough. She had certainly kept up her part of the bargain.
All the rest of the way to her place, I thought about Holly’s incredible story. People inexplicably smashed to pulp. Tony Montoro’s body being filled with sand. She had found Tony and me on the sidewalk and watched Tony die. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I hadn’t just been transported across a building and opened a safe with what appeared to be a magical pair of sunglasses.
Eventually, Holly pointed at a sagging apartment complex from the middle of the last century. “My place is on the second floor,” she said.
As we walked up the cement steps, I asked, “Did you leave me a flower?”
Holly shrugged. “Yeah. I went to Memorial Hospital to find out if Tony made it after the police let me go. He didn’t. They said you were alive, but hadn’t had any visitors. I felt sorry for you.”
