But he’d dealt with this before, too. He picked her up from the side the knot was forming on and leaned all of her weight on that side. He then dragged her down the stairs with one arm around her waist, her feet dragging uselessly behind her. With his other hand, he brought the dead phone up to his other ear just in case they passed someone in the fifteen feet or so that separated them from his car. He had his lines prepared just in case that happened: I don’t know what to tell you, man. She’s drunk – like passed out drunk. I figured it was best to take her back to her house.
But the late hour didn’t necessitate that bit of acting. The stairs and the parking lot were absolutely dead. He got her into his car without incident, never seeing anyone.
He cranked his car and pulled out of the parking lot, heading east.
Ten minutes later, as her head knocked softly against the passenger window, she muttered something that he could not understand.
He reached over and patted her hand.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all going to be okay.”
CHAPTER NINE
Mackenzie was reading over the final report on Clive Traylor, wondering where she went wrong, when Porter stepped into her office. He still looked a little disgruntled from the morning. Mackenzie knew he’d been sure Traylor had been their guy and he hated being wrong. But his constant irritable mood was something Mackenzie had gotten used to a long time ago.
“Nancy said you were looking for me,” Porter said.
“Yes,” she said. “I think we need to pay a visit to the strip club that Hailey Lizbrook worked at.”
“Why?”
“To speak with her boss.”
“We’ve already spoken to him on the phone,” Porter said.
“No, you spoke to him on the phone,” Mackenzie pointed out. “For a grand total of about three minutes, I might add.”
Porter nodded slowly. He stepped fully into the office, closing the door behind him. “Look,” he said, “I was wrong about Traylor this morning. And you impressed the hell out of me with that takedown. It’s clear that I haven’t been showing you enough respect. But that still doesn’t give you the right to talk down to me.”
“I’m not talking down to you,” Mackenzie said. “I’m simply pointing out that in a case where our leads are next to zero, we need to exhaust every possible avenue.”
“And you think this strip club owner might be the murderer?”
“Probably not,” Mackenzie said. “But I think it’s worth talking to him to see if he can lead us to anything. Besides that, have you checked the guy’s rap sheet?”
“No,” Porter said. The grimace on his face made it clear that he hated to admit this.
“He has a history of domestic abuse. Also, six years ago, he was involved with a case where he supposedly had a seventeen-year-old working for him. She came out later on and said she only managed to get the job by performing sexual favors for him. The case was thrown out, though, because the girl was a runaway and no one could prove her age.”
Porter sighed. “White, do you know the last time I stepped foot in a strip club?”
“I’d rather not know,” Mackenzie said. And by God, did she get an actual smile out of him?
“It’s been a long time,” he said with a roll of his eyes.
“Well, this is business, not pleasure.”
Porter chuckled. “When you get to be my age, the line between the two sometimes blurs. Now come on. Let’s go. I imagine strip clubs haven’t changed that much in the last thirty years.”
Mackenzie had only seen strip clubs in movies and although she hadn’t dared tell Porter, she hadn’t been sure what to expect. When they walked inside, it was just after six o’clock in the evening. The parking lot was starting to fill with stressed out men coming off of their work shifts. A few of these men gave Mackenzie a little too much attention as she and Porter walked through the lobby and toward the bar area.
Mackenzie took the place in as best she could. The lighting was dim, like a permanent twilight, and the music was loud. Currently, two women were on a runway-like stage, dancing with a pole between them. Wearing only a pair of thin panties each, they were trying their best to dance in a sexy manner to a Rob Zombie song.
“So,” Mackenzie said as they waited for the bartender, “has it changed?”
“Nothing except the music,” Porter said. “This music is terrible.”
She had to give it to him; he wasn’t watching the stage. Porter was a married man, going on twenty-five years. Seeing how he was focused on the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar rather than the topless women onstage made her respect for him go up a notch. It was hard to peg Porter as a man who respected his wife that much and on such an account, she was happy to be proven wrong.
The bartender finally came over to them and his face went slack right away. While neither Porter nor Mackenzie wore any sort of police uniform, their attire still presented them as people that were there on business – and probably not business of the positive kind.
“Can I help you?” the bartender asked.
Can I help you? Mackenzie thought. He didn’t ask us what he could get us to drink. He asked if he could help us. He’s seen our kind in here before. Strike one for the owner.
“We’d like to speak to Mr. Avery, please,” Porter said. “And I’ll have a rum and Coke.”
“He’s busy at the moment,” the bartender said.
“I’m sure he is,” Porter said. “But we need to speak with him.” He then took his badge out of his interior coat pocket and flashed it, returning it back as if he had just pulled off a magic trick. “But he needs to speak to us or I can make some calls and make it really official. It’s his call.”
“One second,” the bartender said, not wasting another minute. He walked to the other side of the bar and went through double doors that reminded Mackenzie of the kind she’d seen in saloons in those cheesy Western movies.
She looked back to the stage where there was now only one woman, dancing to Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil.” There was something about the way the woman moved that made Mackenzie wonder if strippers lacked dignity and therefore did not care about exposing their bodies, or if they were just that confident. She knew there was no way in hell she could ever do something like that. While she was confident in many things, her body was not one of them, despite the many lewd glances she received from random men from time to time.
“You look a little out of place,” someone beside her said.
She looked to her right and saw a man approaching her. He looked to be about thirty years old and as if he had been sitting at the bar for a while. He had that sort of gleam to his eyes that she’d seen in many a drunken altercation.
“There’s a reason for that,” Mackenzie said.
“I’m just saying,” the man said. “You don’t see many women in places like this. And when they are here, they’re usually here with a husband or boyfriend. And quite frankly, I don’t see the two of you,” he said, pointing to Porter, “as being an item.”
Mackenzie heard Porter chuckle at this. She wasn’t sure what annoyed her more: the fact that this man had gotten brave enough to sit beside her or that Porter was enjoying every minute of it.
“We’re not an item,” Mackenzie said. “We work together.”
“Just here for the after-work drinks, huh?” he asked. He was leaning in closer – close enough for Mackenzie to smell the tequila on his breath. “Why don’t you let me buy you one?”
“Look,” Mackenzie said, still not looking at him. “I’m not interested. So just move along to the next unwitting victim.”
The man leaned in closer and stared at her for a moment. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”