Night of the Living Deb Read online

  Or would that make me paranoid?

  “I’ve got no allegiance to either one of ’em, sweet cakes, so you can break their knees for all I care.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the stage, and I knew he meant the doors beyond it. “Lu’s in back, on a break. I saw Cricket pop in a few minutes ago and head for the back.

  Looked like he had a bag packed.”

  Oh, yeah, he had a bag packed, all right. And I knew precisely what was in it.

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “Maybe he’s gonna take a trip.”

  “I do believe you may be right about that,” I said.

  It’d be a one-way ticket to the pokey, if I had anything to do with it.

  “Good ol’ Crick let it slip earlier that he was coming into some dough, an inheritance or something. Said he wanted me to cover for him if he took off for a while.

  Can’t imagine who’d leave him squat. Unless one of his, um, buddies from his motorcycle club from Brokeback Mountain went boots up.”

  So Cricket had invented a cover story for the money?

  How very enlightening.

  I felt my innards tighten, like spaghetti that’s cooked too long and sticks together in a big clump.

  “Thanks for your help,” I told him, and if I’d had any bills left in my back pocket, I would’ve tipped him large, because he could easily have made it hard for me, or called Security because I smelled like trouble, or rather, reeked like the Dumpster behind the neighboring IHOP.

  I skirted the stage where the dancer was engaged in such heavy shimmying I wanted to shout, “Shake it, don’t break it!” But I restrained myself and ducked into the same door through which Lu had led Allie and me once before.

  I sidestepped a pair of heavily made-up women who lounged in the hallway, wearing nothing but the highest of heels, the skimpiest of thongs, and the tiniest sparkly pasties.

  Though my gait wasn’t quite as steady as it usually was—thanks to the whiff of solvents—I was feeling extremely sure-footed, and the flood of adrenaline shooting through my veins propelled me forward; straight back toward the room where Lu had taken me the day before.

  I had a feeling that’s where she and Cricket would be examining their loot. I couldn’t imagine Lu letting him take the cash anywhere without giving her a gander first, and that seemed the perfect spot. Empty and with a door that locked. Being near the rear exit surely didn’t hurt. If Cricket had had an ounce of brain cells, he would’ve slipped in that way instead of parading through the club with the bag in hand, although it sounded like he’d been bragging about the money already.

  I figured he’d end up on one of those “Stupid Criminal” Web sites someday after passing a robbery note to a bank teller on the back of his business card.

  Genius.

  The noise of the pulsating music dimmed the farther I walked, until I was there, outside Trayla’s old dressing room with the handmade star on the door.

  I put my palms on the surface, leaned my ear against the wood and heard mumbled voices, unmistakably those of a man and a woman. When I heard a burst of laughter, it was all I could do not to rush in kicking and screaming.

  But I couldn’t.

  I had to do this right.

  Emotion bubbled inside me, anger like I hadn’t felt since I can’t remember when, and I stood back for a moment, gritting my teeth and getting ahold of myself.

  Then I reached for the knob and twisted.

  The door didn’t budge.

  I gnawed the inside of my cheek, wondering what to do next, how best to approach this. But that hesitation was short-lived.

  I snapped.

  I was mad as hell and I wasn’t gonna take it anymore!

  With both fists, I started beating on the door.

  “Lu and Cricket! I know you’re in there,” I shouted, my forehead pressed against the wood. “It’s Andrea Kendricks, you lousy frauds. Let me in, or I’ll have the cops on your tail in five seconds flat. You got that?”

  I turned around, breathing heavily, glancing right and left to see if anyone had heard my raised voice; but I didn’t spot any concerned parties racing in my direction. I was about to bang again when the door pulled in, and I fell inside with it.

  As I scrambled to stay upright, I heard the door click closed behind me, and I glanced back to see Lu in her red corset and black thigh-high boots leaning against it. She didn’t appear any too pleased to see me there.

  The feeling was mutual.

  “What the hell are you doing? You shouldn’t be here,” she hissed.

  “Is that so? Well, you know, I decided if I wanted to hunt a couple rats, I had to drop in on the nest. You counted your blood money yet?” I asked, and my gaze ping-ponged from her to Cricket, who sat on the floor with the satchel between his legs.

  He was all in black, and I realized such a color scheme was perfectly suited to both picking up a ransom drop and bartending.

  How convenient.

  He didn’t seem angry, not like Lu. Instead, beneath his cue-ball skull, his tough-guy features crumpled, and, resembling a recalcitrant puppy more than a Hell’s Angel, he cast his eyes down, staring sadly at his meaty fists, each one wrapped around a pack of bills.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say he looked positively remorseful.

  Or maybe he’d just run out of fresh gum. I didn’t know him well enough to decipher his moods.

  “Two hundred twelve thousand,” he said, his highpitched voice sounding doleful. “Did you know it’s a famous number?”

  “Yeah, yeah”—I brushed him off with a wave—“it was the ransom demand for the Paris Hilton pooch. Oh, and nice job filching the lines from Ransom and using those on me. You had me scared witless.”

  “Mel Gibson rocked in that one,” he chirped, perking up. “He was so handsome before he let himself go to pot and made The Passion. Although the dude who played Jesus?

  Jim Caviezal? Now, he’s extremely hot.”

  I blinked at him, wondering if the guy was soft in the head, though I knew he had to have brains enough to mix margaritas and martinis. Still, how much gray matter did that take?

  “Aren’t they pretty?” He offered up a pack of funny money, but I didn’t want to touch it; so I put my hands in my pockets, one on my cell phone and one on the sweet little device Stephen had entrusted to me. “I’ve never seen so much green, except when Julianne Moore’s on the red carpet. She looks best in emerald. It goes well with her pale skin and red hair.”

  Are you kidding me?

  Man, this guy was in La-La Land in more ways than one.

  “Don’t get too chummy with all those Benjamins,” I said, restraining myself mightily, taking in the tiny dressing room I’d visited so recently. It looked just the same, down to the snapshot stuck to the mirror and the gooey puddle of makeup. “Hope I don’t break your hearts when I say you won’t be keeping a penny. You’ll be lucky to stay out of jail, and you won’t”—I faced Lu again, fingering her as the ringleader, as Cricket didn’t seem to have the balls—“not unless you tell me everything about Oleksiy

  Petrenko and Trayla.”

  “How did you—” she started, but cut herself off. Still, her dark eyes had widened as I’d said the names, her mouth falling into an O.

  “And you’d better spill all you know about where his goons might’ve taken Malone. I’ve got backup outside, ready and willing to nail your asses to the wall,” I assured her, in case she thought I was stupid enough to come alone after that wild goose chase they’d led me on. “So don’t play games with me, girlfriend, I’m not in the mood.”

  Lu stood still a moment, biting her lower lip, doing a good job of acting like she was contemplating fiercely. It looked like it hurt.

  Then she took a step away from the door, nodded and said, “Okay, you win.”

  Well, all right then.

  I puffed out my chest a little. I couldn’t help it.

  It was about time
I had the upper hand.

  We were all wedged pretty close together in Trayla’s old digs, so Lu had to two-step around me to get to the vanity. Her dark-cropped hair and red-painted Clara Bow lips jumped out at me from her reflection, even in the dim lighting.

  She plucked the photo from where I’d left it wedged in the mirror’s frame, gazing at it as she said, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t straight with you, but I wanted some of what Trayla had. I thought you were my free ride.”

  “Trayla’s dead,” I reminded her.

  “I feel bad for her, but that’s all.” She fingered the picture, while Cricket remained on the floor, straddling the bag and fondling the money, oblivious to all else. “Trayla wasn’t all that nice, ya know. She was kind of an uppity bitch.”

  A woman who called herself “Trayla Trash” was uppity?

  I guess Lu meant in a gold digger sort of way.

  “She rubbed all our noses in it when she found herself a man with deep pockets,” Lu went on, and I remained quiet, afraid to interrupt. “She started showing up with new clothes and fancy jewelry, bragged about some posh condo he had her stashed in down in Turtle Creek. Told us she could ask for anything and get it, and all she had to do was play the slut between the sheets.” The barmaid

  released a throaty laugh. “Now that was something she could do in the dark with one hand tied behind her back.

  She had to be better at it than she was at pole dancing. She had two left feet, I swear.”

  So long as she had two breasts, I don’t think any of her audience had much cared about her lack of grace.

  “Was her sugar daddy Oleksiy Petrenko?” I dared to ask.

  Lu’s dark head bobbed up and down.

  “When did things turn sour?” I figured it was about the time Petrenko realized he was going to trial. Maybe he’d even whispered more than sweet nothings in bed, and he figured she knew too much.

  “She showed up here one night with a suitcase, looking like a wreck,” Lu said with a sigh. “She was cryin’ up a storm, acting afraid, telling me she was leaving town after she finished her set ’cuz she needed the paycheck. She figured she was okay sticking around for a few days, but no more than that, ’cuz Lexy—that’s what she called him— didn’t know she was working again. At least that’s what

  she thought. Only, she didn’t make it long enough to collect her check, did she?”

  So Oleksiy had found her.

  Couldn’t be too hard tracking down a wayward stripper-girlfriend if you had the resources. Dallas was

  big, but not that big.

  And I’m sure he’d been looking, ever since he realized she’d gone to the prosecution and turned on him.

  “She did manage to grab some things before the landlord locked her out of her posh pad a few weeks back, just what she could squeeze into a beat-up piece of luggage she borrowed off me.” The barmaid pushed the photo into my hands. “That’s when I saw the painting. She hung it up in here, but it disappeared the same night she snuck out the back door with your boyfriend. I have a feeling she ran into trouble before she got clear of here.”

  Well, duh, that was the understatement of the year, seeing as how she’d ended up naked and dead in the trunk of Malone’s Acura.

  I took the snapshot from her and stared hard at it, moving closer beneath the vanity lights to see better.

  I wished I’d had a magnifying glass, because I couldn’t make out much more than I had the first time. I could discern hues of deep pink and brown, a touch of green, and tiny images of people, as well as a rider on a horse.

  “Did she tell you anything about the painting, Lu?”

  “It came from the condo is all I know. Trayla said there were lots more of ’em, but most were too big to pinch easily.”

  The woman crossed her arms, rubbing them. “She said he gave it to her, so it was rightfully hers. But I’m sure she stole it. She said it was worth a fortune, and that it was her ticket out. I almost got the feeling she knew something she shouldn’t.”

  “About the painting? Or about Petrenko?”

  Lu shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I leaned even nearer one of the lightbulbs, staring at the tiny image of the artwork and thinking I’d seen it somewhere before.

  But where? And how?

  It wasn’t like I’d ever visited Trayla in her Turtle Creek penthouse.

  There was a tiny scratching at the back of my brain, plucking bits and pieces of things I’d tucked away, and I remembered something, a conversation I’d had with Allie in my kitchen earlier in the day.

  We’d been talking about Oleksiy Petrenko and money laundering, when she’d told me, Let’s just say that it’s a whole different ballgame in this brave new world. With the Patriot Act clamping down on banks, things like gift cards and stolen art are becoming the currency of choice.

  Stolen art.

  Trayla’s painting?

  The rattling in my head intensified, shaking out another piece of information I’d stowed away.

  The magazine I’d found in Brian’s apartment, several pages dog-eared, including a piece about an art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

  I looked up from the photograph to where Lu had settled on the floor beside Cricket, chunks of banded bills clutched in her hands—in both their hands—as if they were saying good-bye, knowing I wouldn’t let them have it.

  “Did Trayla tell you if she thought that painting was stolen?” I asked, and Lu didn’t take her dark eyes from the money as she answered.

  “It was cleaned and pressed, that’s what she said, which I thought was pretty odd at the time.”

  Cleaned and pressed.

  As in “laundered”?

  My mind shuffled like a deck of cards, bits that hadn’t fit before sliding together to form one solid mass.

  I stuck the photo in the back pocket of my jeans.

  “Do you know where Oleksiy took Brian?” I took a shot in the dark.

  “Maybe to his place,” Lu said, still playing with the cash. “Trayla mentioned one time that he had a cellar with soundproof walls. He told her he’d kept his wife down there for a week after he found out she’d been shagging his brother.”

  The brother that squealed on him to the police, I recalled.

  And didn’t Allie say the wife had taken off for parts unknown until the smoke had cleared? Sounded like a smart move, considering what I was learning about Petrenko.

  “Did Trayla say where her sugar daddy lives?”

  “Yeah.” She sniffed. “Same area where the squeaky-voiced billionaire with the big ears camps out. You know, the one who ran for president a billion years back.”

  “Preston Hollow?” I suggested, assuming the squeaky-voiced billionaire with the elephant ears was Ross Perot.

  “That’s it. In a big mansion, Tray said. He took her there a few times, after he split with his wife. Seems he doesn’t go out much. He’s kind of a hermit. Has that phobia of public spaces. Tray told me he’s got a couple armed thugs that hang around, and a security gate. You have to get buzzed through to make it to the door.”

  Oleksiy lived in Preston Hollow?

  That wasn’t far from Highland Park, which was Mother’s neck of the woods.

  Why hadn’t the online articles I’d read about him mentioned that? Or maybe it wasn’t public knowledge.

  Could be he’d done something tricky when he’d purchased the real estate, so it wasn’t even in his name.

  I wonder which street he called “home”?

  Although I was sure that finding out would be a piece of cake, faster and easier than Oleksiy tracking down which strip joint Trayla was shaking her bon-bons in after she’d skipped out on him with his painting.

  Surely Allie knew the address of her firm’s client, right?

  If not, Cissy could find out in a heartbeat. Her chatty friends were faster at gathering and sharing information than those guys from the Smoking Gun.r />
  “Okay, I’m done here,” I said aloud, and Cricket and Lu looked up in tandem.

  “You’re not calling the cops on us, are you?” Lu asked.

  “I helped you out, and you promised.”

  “No cops.” She’d given me what I wanted, and I’d given my word. I wouldn’t take it back.

  “Can’t we keep the money?” the tattooed bartender whined, sounding like a prepubescent boy whose voice would never change. “Just a couple of the packs?”

  I sighed. “Look, why don’t you hold onto those”—I indicated the ones in their hands, the topmost bundles from the stash—“and I’ll take the rest of the bag. But I’ll be back for those later, okay? They’re just on loan.”

  “Yeah, yeah, come back later,” Cricket said and rubbed a stack of bound bills against his cheek. “I just need to pretend for a while.”

  “You do that,” I said, stepping forward to retrieve the satchel from the floor and zip it up. I grabbed the handles tight and headed for the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Lu murmured, “for all the trouble.” She added grudgingly, “And thanks for not turning us in.”

  “No, thank you,” I told them, for putting me through hell, you ratfinks. What comes around goes around, I reminded myself. They’d get theirs. I was counting on it. I let myself out, pulling the door tightly closed, and then pausing briefly just outside. I slid my hand into the pocket of my jacket that held the remote control device Stephen had given me. I firmly pressed the button, sending out unseen radio waves.

  I held my breath and listened for what Stephen had assured me would come soon after.

  An audible pop!

  Lu and Cricket squealed.

  A puff of red smoke oozed from beneath the door.

  Nothing says “screw you” like a bright red aerosol dye pack.

  I smiled and started walking up the rear hallway, toward the glowing sign that said, exit.

  Ah, revenge really was quite sweet.

  The cell in my other pocket rang, and I answered.

  “Andy, you all right in there?” It was Stephen.