Inside Sheila's we were greeted by the sickly sweet smell of perfume mixed with too much incense… We were also greeted by a smiling woman in a purple kimono who did not seem the least bit surprised or put out by the idea of a couple coming into the brothel. Her mouth drew into an edge as straight and sharp as a guillotine's when she saw the FBI credentials Rachel flipped open.
"That's nice," she said with a falsely pleasant note in her voice. "Now let me see the warrant."
"No warrant today," Rachel replied evenly. "We would just like to ask a few questions."
"I don't have to speak with you unless you have a court order telling me to. I run a legal and fully licensed business here."
I noticed two women dressed in a page from Victoria 's Secret sitting on a couch nearby. They were watching a television soap opera and seemingly uninterested in the verbal skirmish brewing at the front door. They were both attractive in a certain way but worn down around the eyes and mouths. The scene suddenly reminded me of my mother and some of her friends. The way they looked to me when I was a boy and I watched them getting ready to go out at night and work. I suddenly felt completely ill at ease in this place and wanted to go. I even hoped the woman in the kimono would succeed in sending us out.
"No one is doubting the legality of your operation," Rachel said. "We simply need to ask a few questions of you and… your staff and then we'll be gone."
"Get the court order and we'll be happy to oblige."
"Are you Sheila?"
"You can call me that. You can call me anything you want as long as you're saying good-bye when you do it."
Rachel raised the ante by going to her don't-fuck-with-me voice.
"If I go for that court order, I'm going to first call for a sheriff's unit and I will have that car sit out in front of this trailer until I get back. You might run a legal operation here, Sheila, but which one of these places are all the guys going to pick when they see the sheriff sitting on this one? I figure two hours back to Vegas, a few hours waiting to get in to see the judge and then two hours back. I'm off at five so I probably won't be back till tomorrow. That okay with you?"
Sheila came back hard and swift.
"If you call the sheriff, ask him to send out Dennis or Tommy. They know the place real well and they're also customers."
She smirked at Rachel and held firm. She'd called her bluff and Rachel had nothing left. They just stared at each other as the moments went by. I was about to step in and say something when one of the women on the couch beat me to the punch.
"She?" the one closest to us offered. "Let's just get it over with."
Sheila broke her stare from Rachel and looked at the woman on the couch. She then backed down but her anger remained barely below the surface. I'm not sure there was any other way to handle it once Sheila jumped on us like that, but it was clear to me that all the posturing and threatening was going to end up getting us nothing.
We set up in Sheila's small office and interviewed the women one by one, starting with Sheila and ending with two women who were working when we first entered the establishment. Rachel never introduced me to anyone, so the problem of my standing in the investigation never came up. Uniformly the women could not or would not identify any of the missing men who ended up in the ground in Zzyzx and the same went for the photographs of Shandy on McCaleb's boat.
At the end of a half hour we were out of there with nothing to show for it but an incense intoxication headache for me and stress fractures in Rachel's outlook.
"Disgusting," she said as we walked down the pink sidewalk toward my car.
"What?"
"That place. I don't know how anyone could do that."
"I thought you said they were slaves."
"Look, it's not your job to throw things back at me."
"Right."
"What are you so upset about? I didn't see you in there saying anything to her. You were a big help." "That's because I wouldn't have done it that way. Two minutes into that place I knew we wouldn't get anything."
"Oh, and you would have."
"No, I'm not saying that. I told you, these places are like rocks. It's hard to get water. And bringing up the sheriff was definitely the wrong way to go. I told you, half his pay probably comes from the brothels in his territory."
"So you just want to criticize and not offer any solution."
"Look, Rachel, point your gun at somebody else. I'm not the one you're angry with, all right? If you want to try something different in this next place I'll give it a shot."
"Go right ahead."
"All right then, give me the photos and you wait in the car."
"What are you talking about? I'm going in."
"This is not the place for the pomp and circumstance, Rachel. I should've realized that when I invited you. But I didn't think you'd be shoving your badge down people's throats as soon as you walked in."
"So you're going to go in there and finesse it"
"I'm not sure I'd call it finesse. I'm just going to do it the old-fashioned way."
"Does that mean taking off your clothes?"
"No, it means taking out my wallet."
"The FBI doesn't buy information from potential witnesses."
"That's right. I'm not the FBI. If I find a witness this way, the FBI won't have to pay a thing."
I put my hand on her back and gently directed her to the Mercedes. I opened the door for her and ushered her in. I gave her the keys.
"Turn on the air conditioner. Either way, this shouldn't take too long."
I rolled the file up with the photos and put it into my back pocket under my jacket.
The sidewalk leading to the door of Tawny's High Five was also made of pink cement and I was beginning to see the appropriateness of that. The women we had encountered in Sheila's were hard cases with pink lining. And so was Rachel. I was beginning to feel like my feet were in buckets of pink cement.
I buzzed the door and was let in by a woman who was dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a halter top that barely contained her apparently surgically enhanced breasts.
"Come on in. I'm Tammy."
"Thanks."
I stepped into the front room of the trailer, where there were two couches facing each other on opposite walls. Three women sat on the couches and looked at me with practiced smiles.
"This is Georgette and Gloria and Mecca," Tammy said. "And I'm Tammy. You can choose one of us now or wait for Tawny. She's in the back with a customer."
I looked at Tammy. She seemed the most eager. She was very small and top heavy and had short brown hair. She would be considered attractive to some men but not to me. I told her she would do just fine and she led me back through a hallway that turned to the right and into another trailer. There were three private rooms on the left and she went to the third one and used a key to open it. We went in and she closed the door but didn't lock it. There was barely enough room to stand because a king-size bed took up most of the space.
Tammy sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to her. I sat and she reached to a shelf full of well-thumbed mystery novels and pulled down what looked like a restaurant menu and gave it to me. It was a thin folder with a caricature drawing on the front. It showed a naked woman on her hands and knees and bent over, turning to look back at and wink at the man who was entering her from the rear. The man was naked, too, except for a cowboy hat and the holstered six-shooters on his hips. One hand was up in the air and holding a lasso. The rope rose above the couple and formed the words Tawny's High Five.
"You can get a T-shirt with that on it," Tammy informed me. 'Twenty bucks."
"Great," I said, as I opened the folder.
It turned out that it was a menu of sorts. It was personalized to Tammy. It contained a single sheet of paper with two columns on it. One listed the sexual acts she was willing to perform and the lengths of individual sessions, and the other.listed the prices these services would cost the customer. After two of the listed sexual acts were asterisks. At the bottom it was explained that an asterisk denoted a personal specialty.
"So," I said, staring at the columns. "I think I might need a translator for some of these."
"I'll help you. Which ones?"
"How much is it just to talk?"
"What do you mean, like talk dirty to you? Or you talk dirty to me?"
"No, just talk. I want to ask you about a guy I'm looking for. He's from around here." Her posture changed. She sat up straighter and in doing so put a couple inches of space between us, which was fine because her perfume was searing my already incense-burned nasal plates.
"I think you better talk to Tawny when she's finished."
"I want to talk to you, Tammy. I've got a hundred bucks for five minutes. I'll double it if you give me a line on this guy."
She hesitated as she thought about it. Two hundred bucks wouldn't even cover an hour's work, according to the menu. But I had a feeling the menu prices were negotiable and, besides, there was nobody lined up on the pink cement to get in here.
"Somebody's going to take my money here," I said. "It might as well be you."
"Okay, but it has to be quick. If Tawny finds out you ain't a paying customer she's going to kick you out and put me at the back of the line."
Now I understood. She had answered the door because she was up. I could have picked from any of the women on the couches but Tammy got the first shot at me.
I reached into my pocket for my money and gave her the hundred. I kept the rest in my hand as I pulled out the file and opened it. Rachel had made a mistake asking the women at Sheila's if they recognized any of the men in the photos. That was because she didn't have the confidence I had. I was more certain of my theory and I didn't make that mistake with Tammy.
The first photo I showed her was the front shot of Shandy on Terry McCaleb's boat. "When was the last time you saw him around here?" I asked.
Tammy looked at the photo for a long moment. She didn't take it from me, though I would have given it to her to hold. After what seemed like an interminable moment, when I thought the door would swing open and the woman named Tawny would order me out, she finally spoke.
"I don't know… at least a month, maybe more. He hasn't been around."
I felt like climbing on the bed and bouncing, but I kept my cool. I wanted her to believe I knew everything she was telling me. She would feel more comfortable that way and be more forthcoming.
"Do you remember where it was you saw him?"
"Just out front. I walked a customer out and Tom was there waiting."
"Uh-huh. Did he say anything to you?"
"No, he never does. He doesn't even know me really."
"Then what happened?"
"Nothing happened. My guy got in the car and they drove away."
I was beginning to get a picture. Tom had a car. He was a driver.
"Who called him? Was it you or had the client already done that?"
"It was Tawny probably. I don't really remember."
"Because it happened all the time."
"Yeah."
"But he hasn't been around in, what, a month?"
"Yeah. Maybe more. Is that enough of a lead? I mean, what do you want?" She was looking at the second hundred in my hand.
'Two things. You know Tom's last name?"
"No."
"Okay, how does somebody get a hold of him if they need a ride?"
"Call him, I guess."
"Can you get me the number?"
"Just go over to the sports bar, that's where we call him. I don't know the number offhand. It's up there next to the phone in front."
"The sports bar, okay."
I didn't give her the money.
"One last thing."
"You keep saying that."
"I know but I mean it this time."
I showed her the six-pack of photos Rachel had brought of the missing men. These were better and much clearer than the photos that had run with the newspaper article. These were full-color candids given to Vegas Metro by their families and then turned over as a courtesy to the FBI.
"Any of these guys your customers?"
"Look, mister, we don't talk about customers. We're very discreet and don't give out that kind of information."
"They're dead, Tammy. It doesn't matter."
Her eyes widened and then lowered to the photos in my hand. These she took and she looked through them tike they made up a hand of cards. I could tell by the way her eyes flared that she'd been dealt an ace.
"What?"
"Well, this one guy looks like a guy that was here. He was with Mecca, I think. You could ask her." I heard a horn honk twice. I knew it was from my car. Rachel was getting impatient.
"Go get Mecca and bring her back here. I'll give you the rest of the money then. Tell her I've got some money for her, too. Don't tell her what I want. Tell her I just want two girls at once."
"All right, but that's it. You pay me."
"I will."
She left the room and I sat on the bed looking around while I waited. The walls were paneled with fake cherry wood. There was one window with a frilly curtain. I leaned across the bed and pulled the curtain open. The view was of nothing but barren desert. The bed and the trailer might as well be sitting on the moon.
The door opened and I turned back, ready to give Tammy the rest of her money and to dive into my pocket for Mecca 's share. But there weren't two women in the doorway. There were two men. They were big-one larger than the other-and their arms below their black T-shirts were completely carved up with jailhouse ink. On the bigger man's bulging biceps was a skull with a halo above it and that told me who they were.
"What's up, Doc?" said the bigger one.
"You must be Tawny," I said.
Without a word he reached down and grabbed two fistfuls of my jacket. He pulled me up off the bed and tossed me out into the hallway to the waiting arms of his partner. The new one shoved me down the hallway in the opposite direction I had come into the trailer from. I realized that the horn honk from Rachel had been a warning, not a sign of impatience. I was wishing I had read that right when Big and Little Steroid shoved me through a back door and onto the rocky terrain of the desert.
I went down to my hands and knees and was gathering myself and getting up when one of them put his boot on my hip and shoved me down again. I tried to get up again and this time they let me.
"I said, what's up, Doc? You got business here?"
"I was just asking questions and I was willing to pay for the answers. I didn't think that was a problem."
"Well, pal, that is a problem."
They were advancing on me, the big man first. He was so big I couldn't even see his little brother behind him. I was taking a step backward for every one they took forward. And I had a bad feeling that that was what they wanted. They were backing me toward something, maybe a hole in the ground out there in the sand and rock.
"Who are you, boy?"
"I'm a private detective from L.A. I'm just looking for a missing man, that's all."
"Yeah, well, people who come here don't want to be looked for."
"I understand that now. I'll just clear out of here and you won't-"
"Excuse me."
We all stopped. It was Rachel's voice. The bigger man turned back toward the trailer and his shoulder lowered a few inches. I could see Rachel coming out the back door of the trailer. Her hands were at her sides.
"What's this, you bring your mother?" Big Steroid said.
"Something like that."
While he was looking at Rachel I clasped my hands together and swung a sledgehammer into the back of his neck. He went forward and into his partner. But the blow was nothing more than a surprise attack. He didn't go down. He wheeled on me and started coming at me, balling his fists into twin sledgehammers. I saw Rachel move her arm under her blazer and flip it back to get to her gun. But her hand caught momentarily in the material and she was late getting to her weapon.
"Hold it!" she yelled.
But the Steroid boys didn't stop. I ducked under the bigger man's first punch but when I came up behind him I was right in front of little brother. He grabbed me in a bear hug and lifted me off the ground. For some reason at this point I noticed that there were women watching from the three back windows of the rear trailer. I had drawn an audience to my own destruction.
My arms were trapped inside of my attacker's embrace and I was feeling severe pressure building on my spine at the same time the air was crushed out of my lungs. Just then Rachel finally freed her weapon and fired two shots into the air.
I was dropped to the ground and I watched as Rachel crab-walked away from the trailer to make sure no one could get up behind her.
"FBI," she shouted. "On the ground. Both of you on the ground."
The big men complied. As soon as I got some air back into my lungs I got back up. I tried to dust some of the dirt off my clothes but all that did was spread it around. I looked at Rachel and nodded. She kept her distance from the men on the ground and signaled me over with her finger. "What happened?"
"I was interviewing one of the women and asked her to bring in another. But then these guys showed up and dragged me out here. Thanks for the warning."
"I did try to warn you. I honked."
"I know, Rachel. Take it easy. That's what I'm thanking you for. I just misread it."
"So what do we do?"
"I don't care about these guys. Cut ' em loose. But there are two women inside, Tammy and Mecca, we need to take them. One knows Shandy and the other I think can ID one of the missing men as being a customer."
Rachel computed this and slowly nodded.
"Good. Is Shandy a customer?"
"No, he's some sort of driver. We need to get over to the sports bar and ask around there."
"Then we can't just cut these two loose. They might just come meet us again over there. Besides there were four bikes out front. Where are the other two?"
"I don't know."
"Hey, come on!" Big Steroid yelled. "We're breathing sand over here."
Rachel approached the two men on the ground.
"Okay, get up."
She waited until they were up and staring at her with malevolent eyes. She dropped her gun down to her side and spoke calmly to them, as if this was the way she normally got to know people. "Where are you guys from?" "Why?"
"Why? Because I'm trying to get to know you. I'm deciding whether to arrest you." "For what? He started it."
"Not what I saw. I saw two big men assaulting a smaller man."
"He was trespassing."
"Last I checked, trespassing was not a valid defense of assault. If you want to see if I'm wrong then keep-"
"Pahrump."
"What?"
"Pahrump."
"And do you own these three operations?"
"No, we're just security."
"I see. Well, I'll tell you what. If you two find the other two whose bikes are out front and go back to Pahrump, then we'll let bygones be bygones here."
"That's not fair. He was in there asking-"
"I'm the FBI. I'm not interested in what's fair. Take it or leave it."
After a moment the bigger man broke from his stance and started walking toward the trailer. The smaller big man followed.
"Where are you going?" Rachel barked.
"We're leaving. Like you told us."
"Good. Make sure you put on your helmets, gentlemen."
Without looking back the bigger man raised a brawny arm and shot us a bird as he walked. The smaller big man saw this and did the same.
Rachel looked at me and said, "I hope this works."