The Heartbreak Lounge (13 page)

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Authors: Wallace Stroby

BOOK: The Heartbreak Lounge
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“You still know people. You can ask.”
“John, I hardly remember her. I met her once or twice, but that's it. Tell the truth, I probably wouldn't know her now if I saw her. You might not either. Chicks get old fast in that business.”
“Do me that favor, though? Put the word out low-key. I don't want her to know I'm looking.”
“She worth the hassle? After all these years?”
Johnny didn't answer.
“Okay,” Joey said after a moment. “I think it's a waste of time, but if you want that, you got it. I'll have Lindell look into it. If she's around, he'll find her.”
Johnny stood up. He pulled his field jacket on, slipped the boxes of shells into his pockets.
“Lindell has my number,” he said. “Where I'm staying.”
He tucked the box with the Sig under his left arm, picked up the envelope.
“Thanks for this.”
“I wish I could do more for you, Johnny.”
“You said the money's a retainer.”
“Something like that.”
“You need some work, you need me to prove myself to you—”
“John, I don't need—”
“What I'm saying, you have some work for me, then you just tell me what it is. I'll take care of it.”
Joey nodded.
“We'll talk soon,” he said.
Johnny started for the door.
“And John …”
He stopped, turned.
“It's good to see you. Take care of yourself.”
“I will,” he said.
The face on the computer screen was older than the one in the photo, harder.
“That's him,” Harry said.
Ray scrolled.
“Harrow, John D.,” he read off. “DOC number 672775. Birth date 11/23/69. Release date, November 23, this year.”
“Can you print all that out?”
“I will. Let's see what else we've got here.”
They were at Ray's desk, chairs pulled close. Once they'd gotten onto the Florida Department of Corrections site, Ray had punched in the name and the page had come up immediately. At the top of it were three pictures of Harrow—left profile, right profile and front—taken the day he was booked into the Glades Correctional Institution.
“Tattoos,” Ray said. “‘Sacred Heart. Left chest.' What's a Sacred Heart?”
“It's Catholic. The heart of Jesus.” He traced a figure on his chest with a finger. “You've seen it. A heart with a crown of thorns around it.”
“Religious man then. Here's his sentence and offense history, but it's only Florida. Attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon. Convicted, sentenced to nine years. Out in seven.”
“Why?”
“Don't know. It's not in here. Seven years for attempted murder isn't bad, though. I know people have done less for first-degree in Jersey.”
Ray touched a button, pointed to a printer on the credenza next to the window. It began to chatter, spit paper.
Harry walked over, picked up the first sheet, the photos in color, looked at that face again.
“What about his New Jersey record?” he said.
“Had it faxed to me,” Ray said. “It's right here.”
He sat back, took a pair of faxes from a plastic “In” basket, put them on the edge of the desk. Harry went over, picked them up.
“Not a whole lot on there,” Ray said. “Did a juvenile stretch in Jamesburg. Not sure what for. Record's sealed. He was only nineteen when he went down for grand theft auto, did nine months at Southern State in Cumberland. Twenty-two when he shot a guy in a bar in Keans-burg. Gun charge and attempted murder, but the guy ended up refusing to testify. He got three years on the gun charge.”
Harry looked through the sheets.
“Three years in Rahway,” he said. “That's hard time. That's like ten somewhere else.”
“Yeah, you get old there quick.”
“So, guy's in his mid-thirties, most of his life has been spent behind walls in one way or another.”
“Old story,” Ray said. “You go into Jamesburg at fifteen, sixteen, you don't come out a Boy Scout. Your options are limited.”
Harry put the papers back on the desk.
“So here's how I read him,” he said. “Guy's in and out of stir his whole life. One of his brief periods out, he meets a girl, they get something going, she gets pregnant. Then he throws it all away by shooting some guy down in Florida, goes back to prison. Why?”
“You're trying to put normal logic to work here, Harry. This guy's a career felon. Do you think he even knows why he does what he does?”
“So he gets out finally, the girl's gone, the baby's gone. His youth is gone. And he's pissed off about it all. Hard to blame him.”
“No, it's not. You can play psychologist all you want, but he made his choices. You start feeling sorry for these guys,
you can feel sorry for everyone—Hitler, Bin Laden. Everybody has their reasons.”
“I'm just thinking. Putting myself in his place. Threat assessment.”
“Whether he's an actual threat to this woman or not, I think we have to deal with it as if he were. My gut feeling? We wait long enough, the situation will take care of itself. These kind of people chase their own destruction like they're on a game show. We protect the woman, wait for him to fuck up on his own, end up back in stir. Give him enough time, it'll happen.”
“If it was parole it would be different,” Harry said. “He could get violated just for leaving the state or on some bullshit ‘associating with known felons' charge. But if he maxed out in Florida—which is what it looks like—then he's free and clear. He'll have to do something, get caught at it.”
“He will. This guy is no citizen. You think he's going to take some factory job when he gets back here? No. He's going to go back to making a living the only way he knows how.”
“And someone else gets hurt in the meantime.”
“We can't protect everybody in the state of New Jersey—or Florida. We're protecting our client. She's writing the checks. Our job is to keep him away from her. Anything else is a little out of our realm of responsibility, don't you think?”
“So how do we deal with this guy?”
Ray leaned back in his chair.
“You know, you constantly amaze me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“A couple days ago, you didn't want anything to do with this situation, or this client. What happened?”
“I guess I'm looking at things a little differently. Anyway, we're in it now, right? You took her money.”
“I did.”
“So we look forward, not back. Think it through, check out the angles, the best way to handle the situation. Assess and eliminate the threat.”
“That's what I like about you, Har. Just when I think I
know where you're coming from, you switch directions. And somehow, in your mind, it all fits together. You don't see the conflict at all.”
Harry shrugged.
“We work with what's in front of us. When the situation changes, it changes.”
“Lieutenant Rane, the philosopher king of the MCU. Reborn. Good to have you back.”
“You know what I used to say back then.”
“You used to say a lot.”
“The only way to do it …”
“ … is through it. Yes, I remember.”
“And some things,” Harry said, “don't change.”
 
Harry laid the sheets of paper on the table in front of her. He'd made copies of the printouts, the fax.
“I want you,” he said, “to fill in the blanks.”
They were in a coffee shop in Ocean Grove, fashioned from the shell of an old drugstore. The decor was small-town 1930s, a half dozen tables, a lunch counter with stools along one wall, an ice cream and soda fountain with a walk-up window that opened onto the street. Christmas music played softly from ceiling speakers.
She moved her cup of coffee to the side, looked at the pages one by one, read through them, expressionless. She wore a sleeveless black sweater despite the cold, jeans. He could see the vaccination mark high on her left shoulder, the fine blonde hairs on her arms.
“There's more than what's here,” she said.
“I figured.”
“I'm not sure what you want.”
“All we really know about him is what's on those. I want you to tell me the rest. When did you meet him?”
She put the papers down, stirred more sugar into her coffee.
“I used to dance at the Heartbreak Lounge. Do you know where that is?”
“In Asbury? Yeah.”
“That's where I met him.”
She lifted the cup, sipped. He waited.
“I'd just turned twenty. A kid still. A friend of mine was dancing already, told me how much she was making—four, five hundred a night. So I gave it a shot. Went in for an audition and they hired me.”
“Tough way to make a living.”
“Not if you know how to draw boundaries. I would get on that stage and my brain would leave the building. It was like I was watching somebody else in the mirror, dancing. I'd count my money at the end of the night, but the rest of it would be a blur. It beat waiting tables, though, I can tell you that.”
“You ever wait tables?”
“Like I said, I've done a lot of things.”
She put the cup down.
“I worked the whole circuit, up and down Jersey, like everyone does. But the Heartbreak was where I danced most of the time. One night he came in, alone. He just sat at the bar, watched me. Never gave me a dime. He told me later it was because I was different, that giving me money would have been an insult. I was young and stupid. I believed him.”
“So he swept you off your feet?”
“You're making fun of me.”
“No,” he said. “Just curious.”
She sat back, ran a fingertip around the rim of her coffee cup, not looking at him. He could smell the faintest trace of her perfume.
“I got into some trouble there,” she said. “He helped me out.”
He drank coffee, let her take her time.
“One of the girls there,” she said finally, “convinced me to do a bachelor party. Said it was easy money, a guaranteed twelve-hundred-dollar take, just to do the same things I was doing at the Heartbreak. Like I said, I was young then, stupid.”
“What happened?”
She looked at him.
“You really want to hear it?”
“If it'll help.”
“I don't know that it will.”
“We'll find out.”
She tilted the cup, looked into it, swirled its contents.
“It went bad quick,” she said. “It started out in the basement of this firehouse. I was scared. I found out later that none of the girls ever do those gigs—for anybody—without bringing somebody along. So I guess I learned the hard way. I woke up the next morning in a motel room, naked, alone and sick, the cleaning lady banging on the door.”
“You don't remember what happened?”
“Not past a certain point. It occurred to me later that somebody must have put something in my drink. I remember wanting to get out of there. Then I just blacked out. I had only myself to blame, though, for getting into that situation.”
“Like you said, you were young, you didn't know any better.”
“I should have.”
“Did you tell anyone? Afterward?”
“Like the police? No. The definition of rape gets a little cloudy, don't you think, when it's a woman dancing half-naked in front of a bunch of drunk men?”
“No, it doesn't,” he said. “Not really.”
“That's easy for you to say. Luckily I was on the Pill. I don't know what I would have done if I'd gotten pregnant. I never knew how many of them took their turn.”
“I'm sorry.”
The waitress came over, filled their cups without being asked. He waited until she moved away.
“So you were on your own with it,” he said.
She nodded.
“I was young, but I was smart enough to know that making an issue out of it would only make things worse. My word against theirs, and I took their money. The last thing they needed at the Heartbreak was a prostitution beef. They would have fired me in a second.”
“So what's all this got to do with Harrow?”
“Two of the men from the party—the ones who hired me—started coming around the Heartbreak. I guess they were looking for a repeat performance. I was terrified of them. I'd get onstage, see them at the bar watching me and I'd just freeze up. And the way they looked at me … I'd see them talking to other men at the bar, laughing, and I knew they were talking about me.”
“What happened?”
“They kept showing up. It got to the point where I didn't even want to go into work, because I was terrified they'd be there. They'd say things to me, offer me money to go out to the parking lot with them.”
“You told Harrow all this?”
“Eventually. He cared, you know? And who else was I gonna tell?”
“What happened?”
“One night, closing time, I went out and they were waiting for me, drunk, waving cash. They wanted me to go to a motel with them. I got away, but I was shaking so bad I could hardly drive. I almost wrecked on the way home. The next time Johnny came by, I told him everything.”
“And?”
“At first, I was worried, you know, that he would get angry, angry at me. Some men are like that. But he just listened. And he told me the next time they came into the bar, I should call him.”
“And did you?”
“Yes.” She met his eyes. “I couldn't live like that anymore.”
He sat back, waiting for her to tell the rest.
“He came in, sat across the bar from them, didn't say a word. They were drinking a lot. After a while they got bored, left. He followed them to another bar, caught them in the parking lot. He knew if anything happened at the Heartbreak it would cause trouble for me.”

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