The door opened and Frank Moran came in wearing an expensive-looking black sport coat and tie. He looked at O'Clair, and said, "Are you out of your mind? Next time wait till he walks outside. You can't hold up our customers in the casino. It's bad for business." Now he grinned.
O'Clair said, "Frank, how you doing?"
"Not bad," Moran said.
"Seen Sparkle lately?" O'Clair said.
"Funny you should say that," Moran said. "I was just thinking about her the other day."
Frank Moran was a former robbery-homicide investigator O'Clair had worked a case with ten years earlier. The body of a woman was found in a motel Dumpster on the Ferndale side of Eight Mile Road, just outside the Detroit city limits. She'd been strangled with a piece of electrical cord. Two more bodies-strangled the same way-had been found a mile and a half away in Detroit near Palmer Park. O'Clair worked the case for the Detroit police department, Moran for the Ferndale PD. They had a rough description of the killer and a plausible motive. The women were known prostitutes and the killer had an appetite for crack cocaine.
O'Clair and Moran hung out around Palmer Park for a couple of weeks, giving money to, and making friends with, every transvestite, homosexual, pimp, prostitute and freak they came in contact with. They broke the case when the killer attacked a streetwalker named Sparkle Jones. Sparkle fought him off and got away and called the police. O'Clair and Moran questioned her at Henry Ford Hospital where she was admitted for stab wounds in both hands and her right shoulder. Sparkle gave them a description of her assailant and his probable motive.
"He was a tall, skinny, cracked-out homeless motherfucker lookin' for money for his next fix."
O'Clair said, "Sparkle, that's a good name. Did you make it up?"
"No sir, it's my given name, Sparkle Tiffany Jones. Was a sparkle in my mom's eye when she have me."
O'Clair remembered, glanced at Moran, both of them trying not to smile or laugh.
Moran took him up to his office that was open and spacious and had a big desk. "What do you think of the place?"
"I like it," O'Clair said. "You've done well for yourself." Thinking he'd come a long way from his days as a robbery-homicide detective in Ferndale.
"It's the largest casino in the state-ninety table games. You can play craps, roulette, baccarat, two-way monte, Spanish 21, you name it. We've got 4,500 of the latest slots and video poker games, Detroit's premier poker room, a four-hundred-room hotel with nine rooftop VIP suites and the only full-service spa in southeast Michigan. There's even a dance club, Oak. I know how you like to shake your booty." He smiled now.
There was excitement in his voice. He was fifty but looked ten years younger-his hair was full and didn't look like it had a speck of gray.
Moran said, "Still working for the Chaldean?"
"Got to do what you've got to do," O'Clair said. It sounded lame, and at the moment he felt like a loser, seeing Moran doing so well.
"Who's Robert Gal?" Moran said. "Wait, let me guess. He borrowed money and can't pay it back."
"How do you know his name?"
"He's downstairs," Moran said. "I wanted to detain him, see what was going on till I talked to you."
"He's up to sixty grand," O'Clair said.
"They never learn, do they?" Moran said. "Well he cashed out with $7,500. That's a start. Come in the other room let's see what we can find out." Moran took him in the surveillance room. There was a wall of monitors showing different parts of the casino and a team of security techs sitting at a long desk under the monitors, zooming and tilting and panning the hidden cameras. O'Clair saw Bobby mouthing off at a blackjack table in one of the screens, Bobby standing in front of a cashier's cage in another one, and Bobby flirting with a cute little blond cashier in the third one.
"What're you doing after your shift?" Bobby said to the blonde.
"Sir, we're not allowed to fraternize with casino guests," she said giving him the company line.
"Is that what you think I want to do," Bobby said, "fraternize?" He winked and the girl smiled.
"Who is she?" O'Clair said.
"Megan Freels, "Moran said. "Been with us since we opened. Good worker, reliable, dependable."
To O'Clair it seemed like there was something there, something going on between them.
One of the techs glanced at Frank and said, "Mr. Moran, I found this too."
There were shots of Bobby from previous visits, Bobby playing blackjack and craps and roulette.
"He's something of a regular," Moran said. "Been here seven times in two months."
"When are you going to let him go?" O'Clair said.
Moran said, "You tell me."
He hung back on the expressway, following Bobby, but giving him plenty of room. It was ten to four and the highway already packed with shift workers on their way home. Bobby got off at Eight Mile, the road that separated Detroit from the suburbs, and pulled into a gas station. There was a party store next door. It had bars over the windows and a big neon LOTTO sign. Bobby got out went inside. O'Clair parked in the alley behind the place and waited for him.
K-nine was walking past the Robin Hood Bar. Dude with a bow, string pulled back ready to shoot an arrow on the back door, green paint faded now. He saw the old Seville parked up ahead at the gas station. K-nine considered it a blessing from God the way his feets hurt from walking. He'd just been thinking about jackin' something, ride downtown to the Ethnic Festival, rip off some Grosse Point chickenhead wore those outfits all pink and green and yellow, look like tropical birds come to the inner city, sample exotic African favorites like spare ribs.
Pac and Skinny were trailing behind him carrying quarts of Mickey's, niggas going at it about who was the baddest rapper on the street, Lil Wayne or 50 Cent.
Pac Man said, "Wayne's the man. You hear his new one Tha Carter IIP Sixteen cuts, they all good. Not one of 'em bootsy."
Skinny Pimp said, "Fifty's the bigga nigga. Boy got some knock. Check out 'Fat Bitch.' That motherfucker's bumpin'."
Pac said, "Who done 'Perfect Bitch'? Know that one?"
"Ain't no such thing," Skinny said.
"You missin' it, dawg," Pac said. "She not real. Perfect bitch got Janet's titties, booty of Tyra-like that."
"Should call it 'Impossible Dream Bitch,'" Skinny said.
There was a big white dude standing next to the Seville parked in the alley, leaning against it now. What the fuck he doin'? Chickenhead motherfucker look lost or something.
O'Clair saw a black dude with cornrows coming toward him and two more dudes behind him. One wore a sweatshirt with a hood, reminding O'Clair of a guy he'd fought twenty years before in Golden Gloves. It was the city championship, light heavyweight division. The third one dressed like a farmer in blue overalls. Both wore ball caps on backwards, bling swinging from their necks. They had green beer bottles in their hands, big ones, quarts or GIQs.
O'Clair was more concerned about Cornrow, who was closing in on him, only twenty feet away now. He wore long shorts low on his skinny hips showing three inches of plaid boxer above his waist, his white tank tucked into the shorts. There was a tattoo just below his right shoulder that appeared to be a miniature version of himself, his face but without the rows. He had something on his mind as he walked up to O'Clair, measuring him. Cornrow was O'Clair's height, about six feet maybe a little taller. He was muscular but lean. O'Clair didn't think he was coming to ask him for directions or a donation to his church.
Cornrow said, "Yo, Cap'n, we goin' take the boat. Give me the motherfuckin' keys."
O'Clair said, "You talkin' to me?"
Farmer and Sweatshirt moved up next to Cornrow, standing in a half circle in front of O'Clair now, the Seville behind him.
"You see any other chickenhead motherfucker standing here?" Cornrow said.
O'Clair said, "You must have me confused with someone else."
Cornrow grinned, flashing two rows of teeth, the front two displaying a diamond pattern. "Think so, huh? Who we got you confuse with?"
"Somebody that's going to let you take my car."
All three of them grinned now. Cornrow made the first move-came at O'Clair and O'Clair went to the body-nailed him in the gut. Cornrow grunted and bent over, holding his side like he'd been hit with a sledgehammer, and O'Clair threw a sweeping right hand and broke his jaw. Cornrow went down, and O'Clair juked and weaved and stepped in and hit Farmer, flattening his nose against his face, crushing it. He dropped and didn't move.
Now O'Clair turned ready for Sweatshirt, and a beer bottle crashed into his forehead and shattered. O'Clair took a step back against the Seville, dazed, leaning on the driver's door, blood running from a gash in his forehead into his left eye.
Bobby came out of the party store, scratching ink off an instant lottery card with a dime. He had a bottle of iced tea wedged in his armpit. He heard glass break. He glanced up and saw the big white guy from the casino, blood on his face, beating the shit out of a black guy in a hooded sweatshirt. Two more black guys were on the concrete parking lot.
He finished scratching the card, a game called Joker's Wild, and dropped it on the oil-stained asphalt littered with Day-Glo wrappers. Bobby unscrewed the top off the iced tea, took a drink and got in his car, thinking he'd better get the hell out of there while he could.
It took six stitches to close the cut on his forehead. O'Clair had gone to Providence Hospital Emergency. The waiting room was full of people that were bleeding and moaning. The admitting nurse took one look at him and put him in a wheelchair headed for Triage.
O'Clair peeled back the bandage and studied it in the rearview mirror, felt the red swollen skin and the prickly ends of the nylon stitches, while he talked to Stu Karp and found out Bobby's cell phone bills went to a PO box in Troy. O'Clair said, you got an address?