J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (13 page)

I didn’t buy for a minute that Nya would be home safe tomorrow, or that she was out screwing her friends on some beach in Capitola, but I didn’t have any evidence of a crime—well, not a real crime, certainly nothing I could take to the cops. I didn’t count the vacation pics and the drugs. Kids will be kids, no matter what you do.

With nothing to report to the boys in blue, and a client that had just called me off the case, I had no more legal right to snoop.

There was something going on at the house on Ackerman, and it wasn’t a party. But without more to go on my hands were tied.

My phone beeped. I picked it up—Facebook alert. Gina to Stephanie and Bridget—the two remaining girls in the group.

“Getting ready to go down to SOMA for BAGG. You in?”

SOMA—San Francisco’s South of Market Area. A quick Google for BAGG in San Francisco turned up a club in SOMA called Bondage-a-Go-Go, a fetish dance club with a quirky website—the one Nya had mentioned in her diary? Probably. Over 18s only, no photography without prior arrangement with the clubs owners.

The phone binged again. Bridget saying “We’re in. Pick us up at Steph’s.”

“Already in the city with G. Meet me there?” came Gina’s reply.

“On our way.”

Twelve-thirty. They were in Danville.

It would take them forty minutes to get into the City. It would take me fifteen.

12:45 AM, Monday

Third street, south of 80. The kind of neighborhood where you didn’t used to be able to walk alone at night, it had managed to hang on to the air of an impending mugging as it gentrified.

The entry took me up to the second story bar in the club, a stadium box affair with comfortable diner-style seating and some couches arrayed in a large L stretching its arms down the north and east walls of the club. The elbow of the L had a woman suspended in a rope harness from the ceiling and a man tied to a cross, being flogged.

Long bay windows looked down onto a choked dance floor below. With an hour left till the bar closed, people of all shapes and sizes were lined up to get their last drops.

I shoved my way through to the west end of the club and took up a spot between a couple other voyeurs (of the strictly amateur variety) on the west gantry.

If the girls didn’t stop on the way here, I should have beaten them by about fifteen minutes.

The press of flesh below me moved in time with the heavy industrial sounds deafening me even through my ear plugs. The spontaneous choreography was directed by a twentysomething kid in dreds spinning in the DJ’s nest below the bondage arena.

From my position, I could see all three entrances to the dance floor, so I switched between them every few seconds, watching for three girls wearing faces that looked like they came off the same assembly line.

But something kept me coming back to the DJ. He was sixty feet away and under red light, so I couldn’t see very well, but something about him was damn familiar.

By my watch I had maybe ten minutes before the girls got here. I left my place on the gantry, scuttled down the stairs and weaved my way over to the DJ booth.

The DJ was queuing up a pair of vinyl platters while the current track played out. I leaned over the partition and waved a twenty to get the his attention. “Hey!”

“Yo!” He pulled the headphones off and leaned over to me.

“Head Like a Hole?”

“You got it.” The guy took the twenty from my hand and gave me a wink, then went back to his vinyl.

I knew that face. I’d been seeing it all weekend. But the voice sounded creepy-familiar too. Shouting over the din I couldn’t be sure if I was right. I had to be sure.

“Hey!”

“Another track?”

“Nah. Putting together an event, need a DJ. You do swing?”

“Sure. I’ll spin anything. When and where?”

“Next month, Alameda.”

“Grab a card.” He pointed to a stack of cards at the other end of the partition. “I might be booked up already. Email me with a date. See what we can do.” There it was, that easy authority. The rich baritone. I suppressed a shudder.

“Great, thanks!” I slid along the partition and grabbed a card. Mr. Gravity, Disc Jockey and Event Producer. And he had the same voice as the guy in the shed.

While I was pocketing the card and scanning the crowd a couple girls came up and leaned over the partition next to me.

“Hey G! You seen Gina?” I risked a peripheral glance. Bridget and Stephanie, the last two girls. The last two of four?

“Yeah, she forgot her tape so went out to get some more.”

“We told her we were coming!”

“Go dance, I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

The girls leaned over the partition and kissed him, each in turn, then flounced across the floor to the stage kitty-corner from the DJ’s booth.

A few seconds later, I got a tap on the shoulder. Gravity. I leaned back. “Yeah?”

“You’re new here right?” He was leaning closer, so didn’t have to shout as much.

“Yeah.”

He stretched a long-fingered hand past my face. “Check it out.”

The girls mounted the stage and started shucking their street clothes, then applied electrical tape to their nipples to stay legal. As I watched, the two of them began weaving together to the music in a complex dance. It couldn’t have been rehearsed, but they moved around each other, coupling up and splitting apart like a pair of courting swans.

Those faces. Heavy brows, sloping foreheads, elongated, downturned mouths, scrunched noses. Even from this distance, it was impossible to mistake them for anyone else.

I stalked around the edges of the floor to get a better view, wound up sitting with a half dozen other over-thirties taking a breather.

The club flashed and pounded, the pills were out and the people were lost in the noise, like everyone had crawled into a shared game of Pac-Man. At the next song change I got up to make room for a few more people at the table and went to get a Coke in the downstairs lobby.

What the hell was I doing here? I should be home, or at least at the office, satisfied with a couple days pay and an exciting chase, and who cared if it came to nothing?

All I had to go on the was a panicky mother of an adult girl who ran off for the weekend with her boyfriend and got into a fight with him.

The girls here seemed to be safe. Rawles was in jail for the moment—and damn well deserved it for assaulting Nya, even if that wasn’t the charge.

Gravity was relaxed too. Not a care in the world. Whatever he’d been worked up about in the shed—finding a way to squeeze Rawles out of whatever they were doing, I figured—wasn’t bothering him now.

I came here to see if the girls would actually show—and if Nya would be with them.

Two girls showed, but no Nya. Maybe she really was on the way to the beach like her Mom said—but who with, if her nearest and dearest were all here?

And where the hell was Gina? Gina who sent the invite out on Facebook in the first place?

Their absences screamed like a toddler with an infected tooth. I might have nothing I could report to the cops, and I might be off the case, but the notion that the girls were safe?

I didn’t buy it for a second.

I said you don’t survive long in this line without a good nose—mine was ready to jump off my face for how badly this stank of a set-up. But who was being set up? And why? And who the hell was doing it?

One-thirty in the morning. My cup was as dry as the case. The girls on the stage had been going at it—not
quite
that way
—for over half an hour, and they weren’t slowing down. Fast beat or slow, it was a frenzy up there—their own little tribal dance.

I climbed halfway up the east stairs to the landing and leaned back against the railing. My holster dug into my tailbone. It occurred to me that nobody would hear a shot in here over the music.

Two-thirty. Girls still on the stage. Couldn’t see them very well, just the skin and the thongs flashing between the heads of the onlookers surrounding them.

The dance floor was thinner now. With the alcohol drying up people were gravitating to the shows—the bondage area upstairs, the go-go cages, and the stage.

My caffeine pills had started to wear off around two—caught myself micro-napping. Hypnotic beat, hypnotic floor show…

I wasn’t going to get anything more here, whatever was going on. Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation was the best one. Teenagers runaway. Teenagers do drugs. Teenagers fight with their boyfriends. Teenagers cut themselves and each other just to see what it feels like. Teenagers have parents who freak out.

Dora was full of shit, maybe paranoid—Nya was at the Ackerman house, probably getting wasted with whoever else was there. Friends of Rawles who were also partying at the house.

Gina was here somewhere and I hadn’t seen her yet. Had to be. A few hundred people in a club this size and me napping on the stairs, no surprise I hadn’t spotted her.

I didn’t care anymore—I technically shouldn’t have even been on the job since I’d been fired.

Cops and PIs are creatures of habit—most of them annoying even to us. Trained to the bones in methods that are only useful when on a case or a crime scene, they kick in when, for example, you just want to leave the damn night club and go back to the office to sleep.

The main exit was just to my right, but the habits kicked in. I did the numbskull’s shuffle across the dance floor, looking like just another drunk who’d lost the beat. Taking the long way out, back the way I came in, meant I’d get one last sweep over the club.

Like I said. Annoying habits. The scenery wasn’t bad either.

Halfway across I checked my right. The floor was clear between me and the DJ’s box.

I checked back in front of me, and stopped in my tracks. I looked right again.

Gravity was gone. A blonde woman was spinning the discs.

I couldn’t see anyone on the stage through the press of flesh. I ran up the west stairs to the gantry and peered over the heads.

There were girls up there all right. Three of them.

But none of them had those trademark faces. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes they’d swapped out and skedaddled.

“Dammit!” I looked up and peered through the windows. Not in the viewing gallery. Not in the bondage arena. Not on the far staircase. Not at the go-go cages.

I ran back downstairs and checked the tables. Nothing. The lobby? Nothing there either.

Anywhere else?

The side room. I hadn’t yet checked the side room.

I waded back through the real-life video game to the quieter play room on the other side of the club. Lights were bright in there, and the wall and window cut the sound from jet engine levels to Harley muffler levels.

They were gone. The whole sweep took me maybe three minutes. That was three minutes I didn’t have.

I barreled back across the floor and out the front door, stopped in the cloud of tobacco and pot smoke under the awning. Two blocks north on Fourth, 80 cut across the landscape. Nothing up that way—not much parking either. Looking south, the street was clear for four blocks. No group of two young women with a twentysomething man.

Flip a coin, Lantham.
Head north and take a gamble that they parked on the one available side street that hardly had any spots to fight over, or head south and maybe catch up to them. I knew they had at least one car here—the girls hadn’t come in a cab all the way from Danville, and they got here too quick to come on BART, if the trains even ran this late.

South it was. I ran the length of the block flat out, zipping past the handful of cars, casting quick glances down Welsh at the half-block mark—nobody to be seen in either direction—then slowing to a walk just before the corner exposed me to view from Brennan. The empty buildings in the still summer night bounced the sounds of my footsteps like an echo chamber.

I stepped slowly out of the shelter of the buildings, glancing right as much as I could without obviously moving my head. Still nothing. A Muni bus pulled up next to me and blocked my view to the left—I hurried around it, but saw nothing there either.

I stepped out to cross the street when I heard something else under the rumbling of the Muni’s methane engine. A scraping sound—like casters being dragged fast over concrete echoing dimly from the right. Then a woman’s yelp—surprise, not alarm.

Gravity was DJ’ing. He’d have his album case with him.

Turning right, I ran again, quietly as I could. Past my own rented Malibu, a classic Camaro, a black BMW, and the dozens of other vehicles packing the curb. A few cars zipping by helped hide my steps a little bit, but if they were listening for pursuit, they’d know it was coming.

At the end of the block I slowed again and listened.

“Phil!” A woman’s voice from the right. Around the corner, maybe half a block up. I hugged the stone wall and leaned around the corner.

There they were. Two girls in overcoats standing next to a green minivan with dealer plates. The one from the house on Ackerman. Gravity and another man loading the disc case into the back of the vehicle. The men finished the loading. Gravity headed to the passenger side. The other man’s back was to me, but he wore a tweed jacket against the cold San Francisco night.

Nya’s father.

I pulled out my phone—I’d hacked it so it didn’t flash or make a sound—and started snapping pictures.

“Heya, sweetheart,” he turned to one of the girls and embraced her in a very unfatherly fashion. His hand snaked up inside her coat to grope her, and they kissed in a nauseatingly familiar manner.

That might explain why he’d been at the Ackerman house earlier tonight. But if it did, I didn’t want to think about what it said about his qualities as a father.

They were whispering something. She tittered, but shook her head at him.

“Come on,” he said, just barely loud enough for me to hear, “We can come get your car tomorrow.”

When he let the girl go, she said “I can’t. My parents will kill me.”

“Okay, I’ll ride with you.” Nya’s father—Phil, evidently—smacked the side of the minivan twice. Gravity stuck his head out of the driver’s window.