Chapter 12
“How sick is she? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Sick,” Cutter said, and left it at that.
Johnson fell silent again until through their short stop by the SO and then nearly to the county line. When he finally spoke it came out of nowhere, haltingly, as if he’d been trying to work out exactly what to say.
“Are you … I mean … Do you actually plan to stop and shoe horses after you work on this case all day?”
“This robbery homicide is the priority,” Cutter said matter-of-factly. “But yeah, if I have time, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Why?” What the kid lacked in guile, he made up for with sophomoric certitude.
Cutter was sorely tempted to tell him it wasn’t any of his business. Instead, he thought about what Lucy would want him to do and took a beat to ponder the question.
“You asked about my wife earlier,” Cutter said at length. “Turns out lung cancer has a hell of a price tag. I have to shoe a few horses every week to chip away at the bills.”
“I’m sorry to pry,” Johnson said.
Cutter rubbed his face and coughed, fighting the waves of emotion that threatened to drown him at any given moment. “Listen. We’re ten minutes out. I need to get my head in the game and so do you. A place like this can turn rodeo in a snap.”
The Show Pony gentleman’s club was a sad, windowless building tucked off the I-20 frontage road behind a drive-through liquor store and an adult movie arcade.
Three different bars crowded into this Goldilocks Zone on the east side of the county line—far enough away from Weatherford’s teetotaling crowd for city fathers to escape their jaundiced eyes, but mercifully close enough should any of those fathers need a drink.
In public forums, Parker County leaders reasoned that the downfall of civilization would come by way of social dance, liquor by the drink, and parimutuel betting.
Probably in that order. Parker County remained dry, but commissioners, clerks, and even a pastor or two could often be found a few hundred feet inside Tarrant County.
As long as their vehicles were spotted at the bar and not the Show Pony, no one said much about it.
The strip club’s parking lot was remarkably crowded for eleven in the morning. Cutter wondered how many folks at church would be giving his wife poor Lucy looks if they happened to see his El Camino parked out front.
He killed the engine.
“Reach under your seat,” he said. “There should be a Kel-Lite under there.”
Johnson pulled out the fourteen-inch flashlight. It was made of black aircraft aluminum and powered by five D cell batteries. Essentially, a metal club that happened to produce light.
Johnson slapped the heavy flashlight against his open palm as if testing the weight. “My academy instructor called these tonks,” he said. “On account of the sound they make if you have to smack somebody.”
“Hell, kid,” Cutter said. “Everybody calls ’em tonks.
But times are changing. We’re expected to be kinder and gentler than in days past. Not a bad thing, as long as the bandits comply.
Anyhow, you might want to figure out a different word besides tonk.
I’d hate for you to have to testify in court that you see that piece of equipment as anything other than a flashlight.
“Got it.” Johnson pushed the Kel-Lite toward Cutter.
“You hang on to it,” Cutter said. “It’ll come in handy if somebody needs tonking.”
Cutter eased his door shut out of habit and snugged down his hat against an oppressive sun.
“Which is your dominant eye?”
“My … what?”
“Your shooting eye,” Cutter said, walking across the parking lot. “The one you aim with.”
“My right, I guess.” Johnson hitched his belt as he trotted to keep up.
“Keep it closed until we get inside,” Cutter said over his shoulder. “The women who work here can be pretty desperate. Kind of hard-put, if you know what I mean.”
Johnson shook his head.
“They’re not getting modeling gigs for Cosmo,” Cutter said. “They keep the light low. Some use red lights, some black lights.
“Like Spencer Gifts in that new mall by Carswell?”
“I suppose.” Cutter had never been to a Spencer Gifts, but he had walked around Ridgmar Mall with Lucy shortly after it opened the year before—the same day the doctors told her she was terminal.
She’d chatted and laughed, like she’d not just gotten a death sentence.
He’d been too stunned to notice much of anything.
“Just keep a damned eye shut until we’re inside.”
Cutter realized there was a problem the moment he and Johnson stepped through the red double doors and into the small mantrap entry.
Someone inside the Show Pony was either rearranging the furniture or deep in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight.
A strangled half scream carried through the inner door.
At least one of the participants was female.
Johnson looked to Cutter, squinting in the scant light of the vestibule.
“Can I open my eye?”
“Go ahead.” He’d thought the kid would be better than nothing as backup. From the addled look on his face at the moment, losing him now would be like gaining two good men.
Hardwired to move toward violence, Cutter’s right hand dropped to his revolver while he yanked open the inner door with his left. “Stay close!” he snapped over his shoulder.
Whoofing base notes thumped Cutter in the chest the moment he opened the door. Another scream pulled his attention to his left and the tip-rail at the foot of the stage. He took a step inside and paused, giving himself just enough time to get a quick lay of the land.
The tight screams of AC/DC’s “Soul Stripper” gave way to the twelve-bar blues beat of “Call Me the Breeze” (JJ Cale’s original, not Skynyrd’s cover).
The music seemed an unlikely choice for working a stripper pole, but it was the perfect accompaniment to the slight woman in a baby-doll kimono robe to fly backward off the stage.
She landed on her butt with a loud grunt, sliding from the momentum across the scabby carpet by the bar, finally stopping almost at Cutter’s boot.
A mountain of a man in jeans and a denim vest vaulted the tip-rail and lumbered after her, yelling something unintelligible in a high-pitched whine that didn’t match his physique. The earlier scream had likely come from him, not the woman.
Behind Cutter, Lafayette Johnson gave an audible gasp, like he’d just seen a ghost. Cutter couldn’t blame him.
The big man’s hair and half his grizzled beard glowed blue, as if alive with Saint Elmo’s fire.
The woman’s lips formed a matching blue-green O against the shadows of her face as she sprang to her feet screaming insults at the man.
A glass on the bar—also glowing electric blue—gave Cutter a clue to what was going on.
“Blacklight,” he said under his breath.
The woman in the baby doll robe had likely dumped her gin and tonic all over the man. The quinine in the tonic water, like the phosphors in the woman’s lip gloss, glowed an eerie blue under the UV lighting.
“You got here quick,” a man said to Cutter’s right.
Cutter glanced sideways to find a heavyset guy with long sideburns sitting at a small table inside the door.
He wore a black shirt and matching slacks that, together with his white beard, gave him the appearance of a floating head under the blacklight.
If he was the bouncer, he was doing a poor job of it.
Cutter tapped the badge over his pocket. “Sheriff’s Office.”
“No shit.” Mr. Sideburns gave him a sullen nod. “We called you. Remember?”
“Sheriff’s Office!” Cutter said again, this time for the benefit of the glowing Mountain.
The big guy ignored him like he was a bothersome gnat and sprang toward the woman. Screaming, he grabbed a handful of hair and hauled backward, spinning to toss her onto the stage like an Olympic hammer throw.
“Mitzi, you bitch!”
She landed with a sickening clink-thud against the center of three steel dance poles, sliding to the stage floor in a crumpled heap of polyester and lace.
“Hey!” Cutter charged forward. “Asshole! Sheriff’s Office! Get on the ground! Now.”
The man ignored the order and leaned over the stage, cursing, clawing for Mitzi. He caught her by the foot and yanked her toward him.
Cutter pivoted sideways, driving the heel of his boot into the Mountain’s exposed calf. The kick would have put any normal man on the ground, but the Mountain simply dropped the woman in the red kimono and wheeled—directly into a slap across the ear from Cutter’s open hand.
The Mountain staggered but didn’t fall. Instead, he grabbed his knees with both hands and shook off the effects of the blow, panting heavily. He stared at Cutter like he was a piece of meat.
“What do you want?”
“Sheriff’s Office!” Cutter said for the third time. “Get your ass on the ground.”
The Mountain growled some threat Cutter couldn’t quite make out, fists up like a bare-knuckle boxer.
Shirtless under the denim vest, the man was made of ropy muscle.
Using muscle. The bad kind of muscle when it was on someone you had to fight.
Fortunately, the Mountain was drunk, swaying on his feet like a tree in the wind, and probably seeing two of everything.
He staggered forward in a loopy bum rush.
With any luck, he’d choose the wrong Cutter to hit.
“On the ground!” Cutter sidestepped, but the Mountain corrected course, proving himself surprisingly agile. Cutter stepped to the side again, rearing back to drive the flat of his hand into the Mountain’s windpipe.
Cutter’s elbow connected with something on the backswing. Johnson cried out in pain and surprise.
Cutter took another step offline to avoid a wild rush from the Mountain. He chanced a quick look over his shoulder to see Johnson pinching his nose together.
“You don’t have to stay that close!” Cutter snapped, turning again to catch a powerful left hook in the jaw.