Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (29 page)

There was also too much foresight in terms of covering his own ass.

Around the time I set up the original sting, Irene and I were pretty sure he was already lining up his next victim, even as he continued to harass and threaten Christy in his free time. His new target was another young lawyer who worked downtown, so Evers seemed to have a real bug up his ass about powerful women.

Whatever his issues, clearly Evers wasn’t losing any sleep over what he’d done.

Then again, Christy told me Evers bragged to her about it at the time, crowing about how he “always got away with it”...while he punched her repeatedly in the face.

That job didn’t come to me through Gantry, or even from one of my cop pals working vice. Christy came to me personally. She’d heard what I did for a living through friends of hers in law enforcement, but really, she told me, she came to me because I went to high school with her sister, and she thought I might believe her.

I even vaguely remembered her.

She was a few years older than me, but high up on the homecoming queen and pretty girl food chain, so I couldn’t help but remember her face. When I saw her this time, over ten years later, she’d been a different person. She’d been pissed, understandably, and pretty traumatized, sure...but even with all she went through, she hadn’t been irrational, or out for blood.

Her request to me was surprisingly lucid.

She wanted Evers busted by the police, she told me calmly, right after her suit-clad butt hit my office chair. She wanted him busted in a way that would stick. She wanted him put in jail for, as she termed it, “a reasonable stretch of time.” Maybe long enough for Christy to get a few prison psychiatrists to talk to him, and see him for what he was.

So yeah, no broken kneecaps or ominous messages whispered while Gantry stuck a gun in the guy’s mouth in his bedroom in the middle of the night. No hiring someone to castrate him, or ruin his career or even beat him up. Not much of a revenge gig at all, really.

Christy came across more like a concerned citizen.

And, well, a lawyer.

The thing was, after seeing his behavior on their one and only “date,” and Evers’ attitude during the trial, Christy was pretty sure he was a psychopath. She wanted the police to know that, too, hopefully before he went full-fledged serial killer and people, women in particular, started disappearing for real.

And yeah, I’m a sucker for cases like that. Meaning ones more about getting a dangerous predator off the streets, versus settling a score.

More than that, I liked Christy.

Homecoming queen or sorority girl or law school student or whatever else she might be, we had pretty much zero in common on the surface, but she had guts, and she seemed determined not to let that monster ruin her life. She must have known there was a chance Evers would still walk, even if I set him up...and that our little sting operation could get exposed. I even warned her that if Evers caught on that he was being followed, he might be smart enough to trace me back to her, and come after her again.

She did it anyway.

So yeah, it felt like a case I couldn’t turn down.

Therefore, a few weeks after I agreed to take her money, it was in the parking lot of that same club, which now had the unfortunate name of Misty’s Boom-Boom Room, where I got attacked by Evers in his car. The attack started pretty much the instant I refused to give him a blow job after I’d known him for a total of about fifty-eight seconds.

“You know this place?” Nik said, obviously picking up on some fraction of my thoughts through the lock. “You have been here before?”

“Yeah.” I sighed, combing my fingers through my hair before I glanced over my shoulder, giving him a grim smile. “I have. And it looks like I’m about to go back.”

12

Misty’s Boom-Boom Room

Nik insisted on coming with me, of course.

That time, I didn’t even argue.

Truthfully, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, I didn’t relish the idea of going to Misty’s Boom-Boom Room without back-up, not given Jo’s words and what happened the last time I visited this place.

That was true even apart from the whole sex-trade angle.

Going back to Misty’s had me thinking about Evers again, too.

I’d already deduced that maybe Michael Evers, aka, young Ted, had probably been the guy peering in at Irene while she slept that night. I hadn’t really wanted to raise that possibility to Irene herself, given that she was already freaked out. I gave Gantry a call the morning after the incident, however, while I was waiting for the bus downtown and drinking tepid coffee out of Irene’s one and only travel mug, and he more or less agreed with me.

I didn’t voice the concern to Nik directly, but he seemed to pick up on my suspicion, or else simply deduced the same thing as me and Gantry.

Gantry still had someone watching Irene’s house day and night, in addition to me and Nik sleeping in Irene’s room. They both seemed to think Evers was likely to make himself
more
of a pain in my ass, rather than less, at least in the near future.

Personally, that was one contract I still wanted to fulfill.

Putting Evers behind bars, that is.

I wasn’t sure how to go about tackling that head on, though...at least right now.

Meaning, while I still had a shape-shifting alien living in my friend’s house, and with both me and Nik trying to lay low until we knew who was gunning for me apart from Evers.
 

Also with me trying to find those missing girls for their parents.

“Are we going inside?” Nik asked me, gazing up at the same green neon sign that I’d been staring at for the last few seconds.

Sighing, I met his gaze. “Yeah. I guess we are.”

Nik followed close behind me as I approached the heavy front door.

Inside, the place was just as tacky and horrible and faintly reeking of
Girls Gone Wild
as I expected, even with the recent facelift and the new name.

Maybe especially with those two things.

Misty’s Boom-Boom Room was definitely one of those made for guys kind of places.
 

Right by the door, before I’d even left the swath of sunlight left by the hanging dark plastic Nik held apart to let me through, I saw a bunch of neon pink and yellow flyers tacked to the inside wall, most of them advertising free drink nights “for the ladies” and wet T-shirt contests. I also saw “Bring a Hot BFF” night and “Jello Wrestling” night, which pretty much summed up what I remembered of the vibe of this place from before.

The bar’s promotions seemed to be solely focused on anything and everything to get as many hot and depressingly insecure young girls/women inside the doors as possible, vying for male attention. Or male wallets, at least.

The new, giant, padded door had a bit of an S&M vibe to it, too.

I couldn’t tell if that was intentional or not.

They’d gone a bit more openly masculine with the new look than I remembered from before. If memory served, previously it was more of a generic sports bar, with a dark pub vibe mixed with the dance floor and small stage for bands.
 

In the facelift, they’d ripped the pool tables and flat-screen wall televisions out, replacing them with a DJ station in one corner and what looked like cocktail tables to supplement the new leather booths. The wall opposite the bar, which I remembered being a dingy white covered in sports posters and framed photos before, now consisted of a long, floor to ceiling mirror, at least where it wasn’t broken by those same leather booths.

It made the place look bigger, especially with the mirror on the back of the bar, but it didn’t exactly add that element of class the club had been lacking before.

Mostly, the club evoked a slightly disco version of a man cave, one that reminded me of bachelor pads depicted in movies from the early eighties.

Meaning, a lot of leather and chrome and mirrors and black furniture and black sheets and black whatever else...with a number of pieces of bland but tacky art, much of which depicted nude and semi-nude women in various poses.

Unfortunately, it smelled like a man cave, too.

I really hated that stale beer smell.

I had friends who loved it, who associated that whole bar reek with partying and having a good time, but I guess I’d worked the other side of those counters a few too many times. I associated the smell with cleaning up after those jokers at three o’clock in the morning...usually after watching a least one bar fight over baseball or politics or a girl who didn’t like either of the guys involved. Those arguments generally grew more guttural as the night wore on, devolving into swinging pool cues or fists or something equally stupid.
 

Then again, I’d worked bars mainly in New York.

Everyone told me the Seattle crowd was different, but I was pretty skeptical.

Drunken stupidity struck me as a pretty universal thing.

Those years in New York had been rough, anyway. That was when our mother took off with Alejandro, and me and Jake got shipped to the East Coast and our father. Dear old dad, needless to say, hadn’t exactly been thrilled to see us at his apartment door in Queens.

I’m sure he did his best for us––once it sank in that he couldn’t get rid of us, at least not in the short term––but kids generally know when they’re not wanted, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. I was pretty sure that was when Jake started hustling, too, probably from watching me bar-back illegally and our father work a bank job he hated just so he could play piano in clubs at night for peanuts in the Upper West Side and Brooklyn.

In some ways, I can’t say I even blame him...Jake, that is.
 

It’s not like women and men hadn’t been throwing money at Jake from day one, even without him looking for it.

“What are we here for, precisely?” Nik said from next to me.

His words jerked my mind back to the present.

I refocused on the dimly-lit room, taking in the leather booths that receded into darkness, the mirrored wall, the scattered cocktail tables around the low stage, where presumably the jello wrestling and the wet T-shirt contests took place. The dance floor itself wasn’t currently switched on, meaning with its squares of color that lit up where people stood while they boogied down. The disco ball wasn’t rotating either, although a single white bulb shone on it.
 

A lot of the bells and whistles were dormant right now.

Even so, and despite the fact that it wasn’t much past noon, more than half of the booths were full. I wondered briefly if Misty’s was an out-and-out strip club during the day, and Nik and I had just walked in between sets. The music was certainly a mixture of bad house music and seventies porn. But I knew my attitude wasn’t helping me get a good look at the place, so I tried to strip my feelings from the whole thing, get a sense of the crowd.

Nik was right.
 

What was I looking for exactly?
 

A sign that read:
To buy newly-kidnapped girls as sex slaves, talk to this guy...you’ll know him from the furred Russian KGB hat and the mirrored shades...?

“What are we looking for?” Nik asked me again.

I sighed, shaking my hair out of my face and shoving my hands into the pockets of my beat up leather jacket.

“Let’s get a drink,” I told him.