by Dave Stanton
“What, you think I might start something if we run into one of Sal Tuma’s old buddies?”
“Tuma’s long gone. So is his crew. The Nevada Gaming Commission forced him to sell out.”
“Who’s the new owner?”
“Beats me. What does it matter?”
“I’m gonna play a few hands of blackjack,” Cody said. “Call my cell if you can’t find me.” He walked away, and I began searching for the security desk, without luck, until a janitor guided me to the opposite side of the casino, to an unattended counter near the sports book. I waited there for another few minutes before spotting a uniformed guard with a walkie-talkie.
“Can I talk to your head of security?” I said.
He looked at his watch. “He’s probably gone home for the day.”
“Anyone on duty I can talk to?”
“Try him.” He pointed at a fellow in a short-sleeved shirt coming out of the adjacent bar.
“Excuse me,” I said, walking over to intercept the man as he strode into the maw of the casino floor.
“Yes?”
His bald head shone under the lights, and the wrinkles on his face were those of a man in his fifties, but his flat stomach and the thick veins that ran up his forearms and oversized biceps belonged to someone younger. Steroids and human growth hormone were now being marketed as the fountain of youth. It looked like he’d bought into the dream.
I handed him a picture of Jason Loohan. “We think he’s in the area. He’s jumped bail and is considered armed and dangerous.”
He looked up from the picture, the lines across his forehead like rows of dry riverbeds. “Are you Nevada PD?”
“No. Private investigations.” I hesitated for a second, trying to place his accent, before handing him a business card. “If you see him, would you call me?”
I waited while he studied my card. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “No problem.” His eyes met mine, and there was a hint of levity there, as if we were sharing a joke.
“Thanks,” I said, and was about to walk away when I paused. “Your accent reminds me of someone I used to know. New York, right?”
He smiled thinly, his teeth barely visible. “No, I’m from Detroit. Born and raised.”
“Go Red Wings.”
He blinked, and I could almost hear the file cards shuffling in his head. He looked away for a second before his eyes came back to me, no longer amused.
“I was always more of a Tigers fan,” he said. Then he slid my card into his pocket and walked away, the picture of Loohan rolled up in his hand like a length of pipe.
• • •
As I moved toward the card tables, I considered the possible meaning of a continuing mob presence at Pistol Pete’s. An indirect consequence of the case I handled a year ago was the arrest of Sal Tuma’s son, Jake, for his role in a drug ring. The enterprise had fattened a lot of wallets, including those of some former South Lake Tahoe cops. When Jake Tuma went down, I imagine it created a void, a situation where demand was greater than supply, a business opportunity. It looked like the Mexicans operating out of the Pinewood Apartments had moved in to take advantage.
When I spotted Cody, he wasn’t playing cards, but instead was sitting at an inactive roulette table, highball glass in hand, chatting with a dark-haired cocktail waitress. For a second I hoped it wasn’t Teresa Perez, but then she turned, and though I still couldn’t see her face, her bust line gave her away.
“Hi, Teresa.”
“Oh, Mr. Reno. Hi.”
“Dan, Teresa tells me she’ll be singing at the show here next week,” Cody said. “Can you believe this girl?”
“I didn’t know you were a singer,” I said.
“I’ve always sang. But this is the first time I’ll be doing so professionally.”
“Well, congratulations, Teresa. That sounds wonderful.”
“I told her we’d be there,” Cody said, beaming. “We can buy tickets tonight.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Cody just asked me to dinner,” Teresa said. “I’d like to invite you both to my place tomorrow night. Juan and I will cook you a real Mexican meal.”
Cody’s mouth fell open, but he recovered quickly. “Why, that sounds splendid,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m working a case and I might be over in Reno…”
“Juan and I would be really disappointed if you can’t make it,” Teresa said, looking up at me with her brown eyes.
“He’ll be there,” Cody said, slapping me on the back. “We have to go now, dear, we have work to do. But we’ll see you tomorrow.”
We headed toward the exit, and once we were out of earshot, Cody said, “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I got designs on her for a piece of ass.”
“What is it, then?”
He didn’t speak until we were outside. The sun had fallen, and the thirty-foot cowboy above Pistol Pete’s main entrance was alive with neon light against the darkening sky, the six-shooter flashing orange and red at the end of the barrel.
“You remember when I told you I got Stacy Hicks pregnant, right before we graduated from Oakbrook?”
“Vaguely.”
“So, she didn’t want to get an abortion.”
“And?”
“About a year ago she wrote me a letter, out of the blue. Said I have a sixteen-year-old daughter. She included a picture.”
“Wow. Is she looking for child support?”
“No, I don’t think so. She just asked if I was interested in meeting her.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing, yet. I mean, I haven’t responded.”
“I’m not sure what this has to do with Teresa Perez, Cody.”
“What I’m saying is, I have a daughter that’s not much younger than her, all right? So maybe I feel a little guilty about it.”
“So now you’ve sworn off younger women?”
“No—listen, my point is, Teresa seems vulnerable. Maybe she could use someone around to help out, if needed.”
“And it’s just a coincidence she’s beautiful with a body that walked off the pages of Playboy?”
“Christ, get your mind out of the gutter, would you, Dirt?”
We stopped at the corner to wait for the light to change, and when I looked at Cody, the confident, cavalier expression he usually wore had collapsed, replaced by an uncertain grimace.
In law enforcement circles, Cody Gibbons was seen as a larger-than-life, quick-to-violence cartoon character, a grim sight indeed for criminals unfortunate enough to cross his path. He treated legal convention as a mere suggestion, much in the way traffic lights are viewed in some third world countries. His reputation as an out-of-control confrontation junkie hiding behind a bounty hunter’s license was no doubt warranted to a large degree, but Cody could always justify his actions by pointing to the end result. He’d been officially fired from the San Jose police force for shooting a PCP-crazed suspect, but he had done so to stop the man from beating a fellow officer to death. In another episode, he shot dead a Latino gangbanger holding a rifle to the head of a naked and battered woman. And two winters ago, he’d saved my life by blowing away a hired assassin who was trying to kill me.
As for his personal life, he never spoke much about his divorce from a woman I considered a normal, mainstream type. Since then, his relationships consisted of strippers who moved into his apartment for a couple weeks then vanished, drunken one-nighters, and a brief affair with the wife of the SJPD lieutenant who was behind his firing.
Not a man drawn to introspection, at least that he let on, Cody seemed mostly oblivious to his public persona. If it was suggested to him that he was an emotionally shallow womanizer who no respectable lady would have, or, perhaps, a drunken bear happily frolicking among and waging war against society’s worst criminal elements, Cody would probably shrug and say, “What’s your point?”
But there was an
other side of Cody Gibbons few knew of. I’d met Cody when he was a fifteen-year-old kid, abandoned by an alcoholic father and left to forge his way on the streets. I remember him at our high school in middle class suburbia, wearing the same pair of pants and shirt for the entire semester. We’d become friends on the football team and worked together on weekends at odd jobs, mostly physical labor. There were times he’d come to work with no lunch and pull an eight hour shift hauling rubbish at a construction site, a job so back breaking everyone they hired quit except us. Cody often worked without a break, and though I always offered to split my lunch with him, he never accepted.
In our senior year, Cody’s play on the defensive line won him a scholarship to Utah State, which he almost lost after tossing our head coach into a garbage bin. On the last day of high school, he proposed marriage to a cheerleader he’d been dating, and when she declined, he left town on the spot and hitchhiked to Salt Lake City.
Five years later he landed back in San Jose as a rookie patrolman. It was during that time my marriage was dissolving, due in part to my inability to deal with my emotions after killing a man. I’d woke up one morning in the parking lot of a seedy wino bar, my life unhinged, my job lost, my wife gone. Cody was there for me then, lending me enough to make my rent, and helping me land employment at a local bail bonds company. Since then, I learned I could always rely on Cody in the darkest of times. He’d put his life on the line for my cause more than once, and I had no doubt he’d do it again if need be. Loyalty was as much part of his nature as his more debatable traits.
The light turned green and Cody stepped into the crosswalk, but I stopped him. “We forgot to pick up the tickets for Teresa’s debut,” I said, and started walking back to Pistol Pete’s. “Come on, man.”
He looked at me like a vindicated soul.
• • •
Afterward we drove to Sam’s place, a small tavern off 50, for tacos, beers, and french fries, then proceeded around the lake until turning where the road forked east toward Spooner Pass. Within a minute or two, the forest was replaced by treeless hills dotted with sagebrush. Above us a sky splattered with stars illuminated the colorless terrain, which looked as forlorn and cold as a moonscape.
“I figure I’ll give this two more days,” I said. “I’ll cover Carson City tonight and Reno tomorrow. If I don’t come up with anything solid on Loohan, I’ll cut my losses.”
“You ever consider maybe Loohan might like to catch up with you and get some payback for what you did to his best buddy?”
I watched Cody light a cigarette, then turned my eyes back to the road. “Sounds farfetched,” I said. “He’s running from the law, not looking for it.”
“Never know. Let me ask you a question: What would you do if you skipped bail?”
“Get a fake ID and keep a low profile, maybe leave the country.”
“And how many bail jumps actually do that?”
I steered deftly to avoid a jackrabbit bounding across the road. “Not many.”
“Right. Because most of these douchebags couldn’t logic their way out of a wet paper bag if their lives depended on it. You try to apply logic to their behavior, next thing you know they do something completely opposite.”
“Contrarian theory, huh?”
“Call it a fancy name if you want, but it happens.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We came around a bend and over the pass and watched a brightly lit roadway appear in the dark valley below. We glided off the grade and hung a left when we reached the lights, onto Highway 395, Carson’s main drag.
Carson City is an armpit of a town, exactly the kind of place you don’t want to wake with a hangover. If not for being the Nevada state capital, I suspect it would be no more than an anonymous blip on the map. But the city employed large numbers of government workers, and the storefronts serving them were lined up for miles on Highway 395, like a testament to cheap consumerism. Fast food restaurants, car dealerships, furniture outlets, gas stations, minimarts, RV centers, and cut-rate hotels for as far as the eye could see. Like a long, oversized strip mall. The effect was broken briefly by a couple blocks that passed for a downtown, consisting of ancient bars, a trio of run-down casinos, and the capitol building, a brown, domed structure that looked like it needed a good washing.
The single notable attraction of Carson City, and in truth the main reason most visitors ever came here, was a smattering of legal brothels outside the city limits. That was the extent of Carson City’s Old West charm—a few whorehouses relegated to the outskirts of town.
We stopped at every pool hall and bar on 395, and not a single bartender or patron claimed to have ever seen Jason Loohan. We left the last bar, a depressing dump that reeked of rotten teeth and vomit, and stood outside my truck in the cold shadows. My eyes burned with weariness, and the muscles between my shoulder blades were in a knot. I rolled my head and flexed my arms behind me.
“It’s past ten, Dirt. You ready to head back?”
“No. Not yet.”
Five minutes later I turned off 395 at the intersection where Highway 50 reconvened, heading east across hundreds of miles of barren Nevada desert.
“Here we are again, the loneliest road in America,” Cody said.
“Don’t sweat it, we’re just heading to the cathouses.”
“That’s what I figured, but with you I never know.”
I drove for eight miles into the emptiness until the low, faded billboard for Darla’s Ranch, The Velvet Parlor, and Tumbleweeds flashed in my headlights. The half-paved road we turned onto was dark and narrow. We rumbled over a short bridge and around a tight corner before pulling into a large, well-lit gravel parking lot.
Four chain link-fenced trailer homes arranged in a horseshoe surrounded us. One was a strip club that replaced a brothel that burnt to the ground some years back. The others were places where men went to tear off a piece of ass that would cost them nothing more than money.
We started at Darla’s, a no-frills ranch for the budget conscious. Inside was a small lobby crowded by a cigarette machine and a jukebox, and further in a weathered madam stood behind a four-stool bar.
“Company,” she rasped, and a half-dozen whores filed out from of an adjoining room where they’d been smoking and watching TV. They stood in a lineup for us.
Carla, a frizzy blonde with cottage cheese thighs and deflated breasts, smiled big, hoping to win us over with her personality. Her friend Zelda was a pretty brunette with an inviting cleavage, but her lower body looked borrowed from a circus fat lady. Beside her, a dour American Indian woman built like a skinny man stared us down as if plotting revenge for the massacre of her people. Next, a frail, bikinied thing mumbled her name, her blurred tattoos from a different era. Standing a head above her was a short-haired girl who reminded me of Alfalfa from the Lil’ Rascals. She may have been the cutest of the bunch, especially compared to the last in line, a female version of ex-Packers linebacker Ray Nitzke.
I produced one of my last remaining pictures of Jason Loohan, but before I could say anything, Cody stepped forward.
“Okay, ladies, who wants to pay me fifty bucks to get laid?”
Fortunately no one took great offense, especially after I bought a round for the house. But none of them recognized Loohan.
After that it was off to The Velvet, a more upscale brothel with at least a few ladies I wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crackers. We had a couple drinks at their bar, and I let my head fall forward, the alcohol melting away the fatigue of the day’s work, my purpose slipping behind me. But the day wasn’t over yet, I reminded myself. I chugged a caffeinated drink and pulled Cody out of there, not an easy task after he’d become enamored with a stunning redhead who saw him as a hot prospect.
The remaining bordello was Tumbleweeds, a sprawling building with a fifty-foot mahogany bar overlooking a garish red parlor sectioned by circular couches.
“Whoever did this interior decorating should be shot,” Cody said.
At the corner of the bar stood a gangly man in a security guard uniform. He had a bit of a gut and a mustache that looked silly, but I’d seen him in action once, and he was quite competent with a billy club. I decided to steer clear of him. The jolt from the energy drink had already faded, and it was past midnight. I wanted to rid myself of my remaining pictures of Loohan and head home.
Cody seemed to have other ideas, though. We’d only been at the bar for a minute before he was on his second drink and had a slinky blonde perched on his lap. I handed her a sheet of paper and asked if she recognized Loohan. She whispered something in Cody’s ear, and they broke into giggles.
“Get a room,” I sighed.
“Don’t look now, but here comes Blackula,” she said, looking over Cody’s shoulder. I turned and watched a tall Negress with a beehive hairdo and cowabunga breasts approach us. Her lipstick was Christmas red and she wore black lingerie that brushed her ankles.
“You two look rough and ready,” she said. “Y’all ready to party?”
I handed her my last, crumpled picture of Loohan. “Ever see this guy?”
She looked at the picture and back at me. “You messin’ wit’ me?”
“No, why?”
“This chump offered me twenty dollars for a blow job.”
“When?”
“My rates start at three hundred, honey buns.”
“And I’m sure you’re worth every penny. When was he here?”
“Maybe half hour ago. I told him, he on a budget, head across the way to Darla’s.”
At that moment my cell rang. Cody looked at my phone, his eyes narrowed.
“That man whose picture you’re passing around,” a female voice said. “He’s out front, getting on a motorcycle.”
Cody lifted the girl from his lap and set her on the bar, and we raced out the front door. About fifty feet from us a man in blue jeans and a black leather jacket kick-started a blue Yamaha, a street legal dirt bike. His face was clearly visible under the lights attached to the chain link gate in front of Darla’s.
I handed Cody my keys. “Start my truck,” I said. Then I walked across the gravel to where Jason Loohan sat on the idling bike, his black hair hanging low over his forehead. He pulled his helmet on as I grew near.
