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The music changed again, as did the dancer, but Charlie didn’t catch which stage name she’d taken out of the shallow pool of creativity all strippers seemed to draw from. He was otherwise distracted by what he was pretty sure would be a decent end to what had been a really long road trip across the Midwest.

“So, Charlie, where are you staying?” Dee Dee asked.

Charlie grabbed the top of his hat and readjusted it on his head. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet, and I’m not real sure how long I’ll be in town. I’m just here to take care of some business, and then I s’pose I’ll be moving on.” The waitress finally brought over his Coke and he looked over at Dee Dee before he told the waitress he’d changed his mind and didn’t need it anymore. He gave her a five for her trouble and caught Dee Dee sharing a little insider glance with the server before she walked away.

Dee Dee turned back to Charlie and smiled again, the way all women did when Charlie spoke in that slow, matter-of-fact way. More often, he spoke to women in countries that didn’t use his native language and not so often in clubs, but in spite of her career choice, Charlie liked the view, and the girl had small-town-girl charm hidden beneath all that make-up and glitter. He was pretty sure Dee Dee wouldn’t pry into his business, as he was in the club surrounded by plenty of other guys with fat rolls in their pockets. Dee Dee probably assumed he had money, and that was good, because he didn’t like to have to lie. Letting her assume things about him and the condition of his wallet was much easier than explaining how he’d worked his way halfway across the country to find the bastard who’d gotten Kay strung out on meth and turning tricks.

The next morning, Charlie felt that familiar finger tracing up his forearm again. He opened his eyes slowly and prayed that the girl would have a cigarette, or—better yet—one of his cigarillos waiting. She didn’t, but her smile would do in lieu of a nic-fix. She was a nice girl, but her lovemaking was like that of a beautiful woman; she overacted and underperformed. Regardless, she was a nice girl so when it was over, Charlie kissed her sweetly on the forehead, and that made her smile.

“You wanna get some breakfast?” Dee Dee asked, her naked body chest down on bed.

Charlie looked over at the clock on the table; it was 12:26 p.m. “Breakfast? Sure you don’t mean lunch?”

“I like to have breakfast when I wake up. Do you like waffles? I know a really good place just down the street that makes them fresh all day,” Dee Dee said as she stood, naked as the day she was born, and walked to the bathroom of the double-wide trailer. Dee Dee—who’d mentioned that her real name was Deandra, but she actually preferred Dee Dee—had told Charlie the night before, “It isn’t exactly The Palms,  but there aren’t a whole lot of options for lodging in the area because of all the Mud Men,” what she called the oil drillers. 

Charlie leaned over the side of the bed and reached for his pants, which were lying in a pile under his shirt and hat to dug out one of his Al Capone cigarillos. As he rolled onto his back again, the faint taste of the rum-dipped tip on his lips when he noticed the “No Smoking” sign on the table. He wondered what kind of foot traffic a person needed to have in their place to find the need for one of those signs. Charlie let the thought pass and nestled the cigarillo behind his ear. He reached down again and grabbed his wallet.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dee Dee said from the bathroom door, still naked, her chest very much embodying her stage name, blonde hair hanging loose and flowing over her shoulders. She had a toothbrush in her mouth, so the words game out a bit garbled and Charlie couldn’t quite make out what she said.

“What?” he asked.

“What’s with the wallet, Charlie?”

Charlie cocked his head in confusion.

“Either you’re checking to see if I stole from you or you’re getting money out to pay me, as if I’m some fucking whore.” She stomped back into the bathroom, slammed her toothbrush back onto the counter, and spat into the sink with a wet
splat
.

Charlie just sat up in the full-size bed, covered in less than discreet black sheets and watched Dee Dee in the bathroom. She was still naked, which made the whole thing pretty funny looking; he had seen quite a share of things in his time, but he’d never seen a naked girl throw a tantrum. Her nudity aside, she looked like an entirely different person from the night before. After she’d left the club with him, they’d gone out for a drink at a bar Dee Dee selected. Charlie hadn’t said much, content to let Dee Dee go on and on about her family and aspirations. Charlie liked listening to her; she’d sounded excited, as if no one had ever asked her about herself. She told Charlie about high school and not fitting in, about her deadbeat father, about how scary it had been to move out to California, but being even more scared to move back to North Dakota.

Upon their arrival at her trailer, Dee Dee was a little friskier than Charlie. He had tried to take things slow, which seemed to confuse her. He led her to the shower and tenderly kissed her lips and neck, wiping away the layers of makeup, effectively stripping away the person she had to be onstage. Those green eyes of hers had looked so vulnerable, so wanting. 

Her eyes were anything but vulnerable as she stomped around the trailer; rather, her emeralds were replaced by burning gasoline. Charlie figured it best just to wait and let it play out. Charlie knew a thing or two about burning oils and force was almost never the way to let it burn out.

“Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself or not?” Dee Dee asked as she stomped back into the room and tossed things around, looking for her underwear and pants. For a trailer, Dee Dee lived pretty well in the double-wide, four bedroom, two bathroom model. It was a heck of a lot bigger than the trailers Charlie grew up in. Though for all the space, there was barely a personal item in the place. No pictures, wall-hangings were straight out of the Walmart “art” section, the furniture was leather, but looked out of place. Dee Dee clearly made good money and had no idea what to do with it.

“It’s not what you think,” Charlie said.

“I can’t believe this. I thought you were different, but you’re just like all the other assholes around here. You talk some big game and act like some out-of-town smooth-talker, but as soon as you get in my pants, you toss me aside like I’m a fucking piece of shit.” In the throes of her discontent, Dee Dee looked to be having a hell of a time getting her shirt straight.

In an effort to defuse things before Dee Dee stomped out without giving him a chance to explain, Charlie slid forward to the foot of the bed as Dee Dee stomped back and forth between he and the master bathroom, arm still not fully through her shirt sleeve. He still had his wallet in hand. “Dee,” he said, and pulled a picture out of his wallet, “have you ever seen this girl before?”

Dee Dee stopped and stared at Charlie, then cocked her head like a confused puppy, her tantrum derailed. It seemed she was trying to figure out if she should still be mad or if Charlie was playing some kind of a mind game. Her hand reached forward toward Charlie’s wallet, and she snatched the picture of the young brunette, wearing a big grin and hugging an oversized teddy bear. The girl in the photo was very pretty, and it looked like she’d been laughing just before the photo was snapped. “Hmm. I don’t recognize her,” Dee Dee said. “She’s cute. Is that why you came into the club? Are you looking for a dancer you know or something?”

Charlie stood up and pulled his pants on. “Honestly? I really can’t say what she’s doing nowadays. Last I heard she was in the area. I haven’t seen her in a while and figured it was about time we caught up.”

Dee Dee looked him over, and her eyes dropped in shameful reproach. “Oh my God… I’m so, so sorry, Charlie. I just—”

Charlie stepped close to her and put a finger to her lips, before laying a gentle kiss on the forehead. “Don’t worry about it.” He smiled and waited for Dee Dee’s face to lighten. “Just lead me to those waffles you were telling me about.”

Chapter 3

Sergeant Perez preferred to eat at the Daily Diner around noon or one in the afternoon, the least busy time of day, when the first-shifters were already busy at work and the third-shifters were fast asleep in their beds or passed out. Bluff Falls was more or less dead from noon to five, and Perez liked to take advantage of that, forgoing his usual lunch and dinner of gas station food for a hamburger or maybe breakfast for lunch. While he still ate his morning breakfast there on occasion, he wasn’t a fan. It wasn’t so much that the roughnecks were bad company, as most of the guys in the diner for breakfast were either on their way to work or to bed, but they were always so dirty; the whole town seemed to be constantly covered in a thin layer of filth, beneath the surface and always there. Perez hated that the oil and mud lingered under everyone’s nails, even if the rest of them looked presentable. He felt the grime in his bones.

Perez sat alone at the counter and read through the local paper, assuming someone would break through his peace and quiet any minute. As usual, that unpardonable interruption came in the form of his partner, the ever-present Sergeant Nikki Hamill, sunglasses still on indoors. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun on the back of her head, she wore a powder blue button up shirt for a change, and she had a bounce in her step. She was a morning, noon and nighttime person, if there was such a thing. Her energy annoyed Perez, particularly since she was always telling him that he needed to exercise more or that they should go on a run together in the mornings. He generally looked at his partner, fifteen years his junior, with a patient stare, and chose his comments well.

Nikki bounced onto the stool next to Perez. “Hi, Boss. What’s the scuttlebutt?”

Perez looked into the kitchen and wondered what could possibly be taking so long for them to grill his burger. He rubbed his hand against his jaw and felt a stray hair he’d missed shaving, it would irritate him all day thinking about it. “You’re an Army brat, aren‘t ya?”

“Yeah. So?” she said, setting her sunglasses on the counter, her grey eyes always scanning what was around her.

“Isn’t ‘scuttlebutt’ a Navy term?”

Nikki drummed her fingers on the counter and asked for a coffee from the waitress. “Mom was Army, Dad was Air Force.”

This was information Perez already knew, but he still liked to prod her whenever he got the chance. She was a good partner, and while he didn’t feel the particular need to inflate her ego, he was grateful for her father’s time served in the Air Force; had it not been for that, she wouldn’t have been relocated to the Midwest while he was off guarding missile silos.

“Besides,” Nikki said, “I just like the way it sounds.”

Finally, a hamburger and fries were half-dropped, half-set in front of Perez by the waitress, who always gave off the air that she was far too busy, even when the diner wasn’t full.

“Not a whole lot to say. I heard there was some kind of scuffle out at Shirley’s Bar last night, but nothing was reported. Probably the Wheelers getting their panties in a wad about something. You know how those boys are after a few rounds of liquor. They’re just about the only ones dumb enough to start anything around Betty anyway.” Perez tucked his tie into his shirt before pouring ketchup onto his plate in a heap. He took a bite of his hamburger and realized that not one cook in town was capable of understanding “medium”; the thing tasted like beef jerky on a bun, and he had to add more ketchup and some Tabasco just so he wouldn’t choke on the sawdust-like monstrosity. Somehow, it was horribly dry and greasy all at once.

“Wanna go check it out?” Nikki asked as she added four packets of sugar to her coffee.

Perez, with a mouthful of alleged hamburger, simply shook his head. It took him a few extra chomps and some water to get the bite down, and he finally answered, “Probably a waste of time. If there’d been an actual fight or anything Marty or Betty and the sight of her sawed-off couldn’t handle, they would’ve called us.”

“A waste of time, huh? Why? You got some other big plans for the day, Boss?” Hamill asked. “The way I see it, we’ve got nothing better to do. Court docket is clear until we have that hit-and-run deposition. Larson and Williams took over the investigation of the assault on that dealer over on Elm. Tox and autopsy on that dead girl we found last week were supposed to come in this morning, we could always go check on that.”

Perez took another bite of burger. The thing about living in North Dakota was that they seldom ever had too much—or enough—on their docket. Sure, on a day-to-day basis, there were a few rowdy oil workers getting a little out of control, and there was an occasional drug bust or warrant, but besides that, they had little to do. Everything else could be handled by the patrol officers who walked the beat, dealing with misdemeanors and status offenses. 

The bell on the front door of the diner jingled, and Perez looked over his shoulder to see a woman walking in the door; from the looks of her, she had to be a stripper. She had full makeup on, and her hair looked as if she’d taken time to style it, at least to some degree. She wasn’t exactly wearing anything as ostentatious as six-inch stilettos, but in Bluff Falls, she fit the stripper profile. The guy who was with her held the door for her as she walked in, and she smiled at his chivalry. Perez had to admit that it wasn’t the most common thing for a man to hold a door open for a lady anymore, especially one his age, early thirties, unshaven with a scruffy, lazy look to him. Perez wondered if the stripper’s companion was just there to buy her a hard-earned lunch after a roll or two in the hay or if it was his version of dinner before hauling her off to some shitty trailer for a little flesh-for-cash exchange.

The waitress walked over to their booth. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, handing the menus to them and acting breathless, as if she were overwhelmed by the three or four diners in the place.

The man tipped his hat to her. What a funny thing to do.

A second later, Perez turned his attention back to the remaining half of his burger, but he set it down with dismay, no longer feeling as hungry as he had when he’d ordered it. “I suppose we could always take a swing by Shirley’s on the way to the medical examiner and see if there was anything more to the scuffle. Maybe something went down that nobody wants to talk about.”