Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (4 page)

The cook slid two plates of burgers and fries down the bar in the other direction, wiped sweat off his shaved head with a large red kerchief, and turned back to his grill. The bartender poured my beer. Domestic. On tap. No political overtones of any kind.

A man who’d been sitting a couple of stools down was watching me. I nodded to him.

He was about thirty-five, maybe an inch or two taller than my five-eleven. He was wearing boots, jeans, and a black T-shirt with a white skull on the chest. He had a black crew cut, wide-open pale eyes, and— there it was— a toothbrush mustache, straight and thick across his lip.

He ran a large hand over the dark stubble on his head and nodded back at me. “Friend of Royal’s, huh?”

“Cousin. Name’s Jase. Jason Dormeister.” Was that Aryan enough? Did it just sound stupid?

Apparently not to him. He didn’t smile.

“Floyd Burke.” He nodded again, this time in the direction of my feet. “Nice Docs. Ten-hole smooth. Like the greasies, myself.” He waved one of his feet at me. He was wearing black Docs too— I could just make out the “Dr. Martens” stamp in the leather above his ankle. Same smooth, rounded toe, same macho combination of work and combat boot. But his had a matte finish. I had tried on a pair of those “greasies.” They’d felt oily and looked grungy to me. I’d decided to go with the smooth.

“Floyd’s a good friend of mine, Jase.” I thought Royal might be trying to tell me this guy was a member of the Nazi club, but we hadn’t set up any codes for the evening. I wasn’t sure Royal would have remembered them anyway.

“Any friend of Royal’s…” A half dozen other idiotic phrases ran through my head, including, Hot enough for you? I didn’t say any of them out loud. I had to save something for later.

Floyd slid off his stool and leaned on the bar next to me. He clapped me on the shoulder, grinning, his mouth wide and shark-like under the clipped face fur. “How about you and me pick out some music on the jukebox? Something a little more grown-up?”

“Sounds like a good idea, Floyd.” The heavy metal was giving me a headache, so I meant it. But he was being too friendly. Checking out the stranger. Was he in charge of that? I’d have to watch myself with this guy.

He led the way, weaving through the growing crowd. I wouldn’t say the place was packed, but it did a good enough business. The jukebox was newer than half the music it offered. Along with the heavy metal, and some groups I’d never heard of— Curb Stompers?— there was some good Fifties stuff and a bunch of male crooners.

“What do you think of the selection?”

“Looks okay.”

“Notice anything unusual about it?”

Was this some kind of test? He was smiling, but his fishy eyes were narrowed. Yep. This was a test.

I studied the titles. No “Horst Wessel Song,” no “Deutschland Über Alles.” What was I supposed to be looking for?

“Hey, Floyd, gimme a hint.” I was trying for a macho whine, and I think I achieved it.

He laughed smugly. “Don’t see no Whitney Houston.”

“No…”

“Don’t see no Hammer. No Nat King Cole.”

There was definitely a pattern there. I decided to keep looking dumb, because he seemed to appreciate stupidity.

“No Ink Spots, either.” He grinned at me. “Not an ink spot anywhere.”

“Oh, I get it…”

“This is a jukebox for white men. What do you think about that?” He punched in a few numbers.

I think you’re a dickhead, I thought, but out loud, I guffawed. “Hyuck hyuck.” A sound guys like Floyd make when they’re trying to bond with each other. “I think that’s just fine with me.”

“Yeah?” He punched me on the shoulder. A little too hard. “Go ahead, there’s two left. You pick.”

I chose “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” and “I Did It My Way.” I knew he wouldn’t get the message.

“You like The King?”

I nodded enthusiastically, but the truth was that my Elvis knowledge was pretty limited, and I didn’t want to get into a deep discussion of “Don’t Be Cruel.” Then, of course, there were those friendly punches on the arm. I couldn’t stand there bonding forever. I had people to meet and plots to overhear.

Excusing myself from Floyd’s presence to go to the john, I strolled slowly through the bar taking mental notes. Another underage girl, this one with very short hair. She was saying something snide to a bald young man about someone being a “freshcut.” I’d have to make a vocabulary list. Since she had some hair, was she still a skinhead? Or was she some other kind of neo-Nazi? Did the women count? She must have noticed me looking at her; she gave me a sullen stare that was probably meant to be flirtatious.

Some of the men looked like blue-collar neighborhood guys. One was dressed in business clothes, a cheap gray suit. I counted four in fatigues, half a dozen in jeans and boots and buzz cuts, a few with shaved heads. Lots of suspenders on the younger people. Lots of patrons in black and two guys wearing, I swear, brown shirts. They all looked mean as hell, but any jerk can look dangerous if he dresses for the part and sneers a lot. At least that was what I kept trying to tell myself.

As I squeezed between two beer bellies in fatigues, I noticed a tattoo on the hand of one of them. A double lightning flash. Kind of like a disassembled swastika. I’d have to find out what that meant. Mental note: I was going to need vocabulary lists and tattoo translations. The same guy also had a buck knife in a sheath snapped over his belt. Now that made me nervous.

A little skinny guy, forty, forty-five, and dressed all in black, was talking softly on the pay phone near the toilets. He stopped talking when I came near and watched me, deadpan, as I passed. He didn’t start talking again until I pushed open the men’s room door.

By the time I got to the toilet, my skin was crawling and I felt slightly sick to my stomach. Every drop of my non-Aryan blood was chilled, and my only friend in the place, Royal, was too dumb and weird to trust. Second thoughts were crowding out all the reasons I’d taken the job, including my concern for Deeanne, loyalty to Artie, and curiosity about the affiliations of Deeanne’s latest boyfriend. A cop-shy turncoat skinhead with altruist pretensions and a wild story about murder and a race war conspiracy. I was pretty sure the altruism, and maybe even the conspiracy, was a crock. His fear was personal. Getting a good look at the customers in Thor’s made it understandable too.

I washed my hands and glanced in the mirror, gingerly. The man who looked back at me was an aging punk, a hoodlum. A Nordic god gone to trash. The hair didn’t quite match my coloring. The clothes, well… The disguise seemed to work on Floyd, which goes to show.

When I returned to sit beside Royal again, he was talking to another young guy, this one with a short brush of dark brown head-bristles. Royal was saying something about being “knee-deep in shit”— I figured he was probably talking about his job, not his private worries— and his friend laughed loudly.

I interrupted their merriment to ask, “What’s a freshcut?” and that made them laugh even louder.

“A brand-new skin,” Royal said.

“Yeah,” his friend grunted. “Someone who really doesn’t know the scene.”

Like me. “I’m Royal’s cousin, Jase.”

“I’m Zack. Pleased to meet you.” Maybe he was, but he immediately began talking to Royal about his boots, or some boots he was buying, and shut me out. I took the hint and turned away.

Floyd was deep in conversation at a table across the room with one of the men in fatigue pants, the one with the double-lightning tattoo and the knife. They were both eating burgers, probably bloody ones. As I watched, the skinny man who’d been having the very private phone conversation walked over to join them. He had a stiff kind of walk that could have been a limp or just a funny way of moving.

The bartender asked me if I wanted another draft.

“Sure.”

He was thickset, heavy with muscle and a roll of fat around his middle. His wavy hair was gray and carefully combed. I was guessing he was a member of the group. If he wasn’t, why would he let all these underage kids in the bar?

He drew the beer with a practiced efficiency. No flourishes. Scraped the foam off the top with a mother-of-pearl-handled double-edged knife that looked like a letter opener. There were no tattoos on his hands, and his long-sleeved shirt concealed any messages he might be conveying on his arms.

This man looked a lot older than most of the others in the bar, maybe sixty or sixty-five. The rest of them ranged from sixteen to fifty, I thought.

Just as I was reaching for my beer, a woman came up to the bar and ordered a red wine. The newcomer was someone I hadn’t seen in my earlier surveys. She moved lightly, her slender body graceful as she swung himself up onto a stool a few away from me. She glanced at me, her eyelids drooping in a second’s speculation. Her hair was shoulder-length. Warm gold. Or maybe it was just the light from the neon beer signs that made it look that way. I guessed her to be somewhere in her thirties. As I kept on looking, she smiled and turned away. I needed to get a grip on myself. Gorgeous she might be, but she was hanging out in a Nazi bar. Not exactly my perfect mate.

Floyd, I noticed, was watching me again. Either he thought I was beautiful or he was trying to make me nervous, challenging me, running some kind of alpha-dog game. I didn’t think he thought I was beautiful.

Only one way to deal with it, then. Turn it back on him. Put him on the defensive. I interrupted Royal and Zack, whose conversation had turned from boots to jackets.

“Hey, Royal, can I ask you something?”

He looked startled. “Sure.”

“Excuse us, Zack.” Zack shrugged at me.

Squinting speculatively at Floyd, I pulled Royal into an empty corner of the room and spoke softly.

“Tell me about Floyd. He’s in the group, right?”

I nodded in Floyd’s direction. Floyd caught the nod. He looked confused and self-conscious. Good.

“Yeah. He sure is. He’s almost Inner Circle.”

“Inner Circle, huh? What does that mean, one of the bosses?”

“Yeah.”

“But only almost? Not really one of the bosses?”

“Yeah. Right. But he will be soon. That’s how it works. You move up.”

I’d have to find out more about that later. “Glance at Floyd now,” I told Royal.

“Huh? What for?”

“Just for-Christ’s-sake do it.”

Royal’s head jerked around toward the object of my questions. I looked too. Floyd squirmed, glared, and looked away. That’ll teach him.

I punched Royal’s arm, Floyd-style, and wandered back to my beer. Zack wasn’t sitting at the bar anymore. Neither was the gorgeous woman.

“Nice place,” I told the bartender.

“Thanks.”

“Are you Thor?”

He didn’t laugh or even smile. “Steve. And you’re Jason.”

He’d been paying attention.

“Nice clientele.”

This time he smiled, with half his mouth like a movie villain, and went to the other end of the bar to take care of an order.

Even though Thor’s was their home away from home, Royal’s friends weren’t exactly cutting loose. One of the beer bellies was grumbling about “driving long-haul,” and the little skinny guy was throwing around words like “upgrade” and “hard drive.” I overheard a few nasty references to various groups of people. I heard some bragging about expertise with firearms. But I didn’t see any actual guns, and nobody stood up in the middle of the room and announced he was going to torch a synagogue or toss a bomb into the Supreme Court. Nobody said anything that any stray G-man could really use.

They were probably always careful in public. I wondered if there was a back room where they cut loose, where they planned their vandalism and mayhem. That’s what I’d been told about a string of IRA bars around the country: the theoretical politics were obvious in the public rooms, but if anyone had any action in mind, lips were not loose with strangers around.

I didn’t know what other groups with secrets congregated in saloons. I guessed the Islamic Jihad didn’t. Coffee bars, maybe.

But for a bunch of Nazis, a beer garden seemed appropriate.

Floyd was watching me again. I considered going over to join him and his friends but I didn’t want to look too eager. Casual interest, yeah. Gee-whiz, no. This was not a gee-whiz kind of club.

I found Royal near the jukebox and told him I was taking off, but I’d meet him there again the next night.

The day didn’t start out too well.

I’d made plans with my realtor, Jim, to look at a couple of properties, one with a cottage, one a duplex. When I called to confirm a meeting time, the woman who answered the phone told me that Jim had suddenly moved to L.A.

“What do you mean, suddenly?”

“Yesterday. His ex-wife called, said she wanted him back. He went. Can I help you with something?”

I felt bad for me and bad for Jim. It’s not easy to find a realtor who understands, not for me, anyway. And he’d told me a little about his marriage. She’d left him to find some space or some damned thing. He was young, good-looking— he was making a big mistake. And probably missing a really great sale too.

I told the woman about the houses we’d been planning to look at and she said she’d take me to see them. Her name, she said, was Sally Roskov. Did I want to meet her at the one in San Anselmo?

I did, and when I got to the duplex, I pulled into the driveway behind a blue Saturn with a tall, red-haired woman leaning against it.

“Jake?”

I nodded. Normally at this stage of things I’d have been looking the house over, but she was walking toward me and she was wearing tan hiking shorts and boots and a gauzy-looking, reddish-brown shirt that matched her hair— it was short, like Sharon Stone’s at the ’98 Oscars— and she walked like a cougar. I know because I saw one once on Mount Tamalpais, just above Mill Valley, the day before my wife did to me what Jim’s wife had done to him. Except mine never wanted me back.

Anyway, she handed me a card that said
SALLY ROSKOV, REALTOR AND TRAIL GUIDE
and showed a silhouette of Mount Tam in back of the printing. She couldn’t have been more Marin County if she’d been driving an SUV or a ’65 Mustang.