“Oh that! Yeah, sure.” He reached into his new “I heart Vegas” tote bag and pulled out a slip of paper. “Madonna said he lives near the airport. Above this little bar called FlyBoyz. I’ve got the address right here.” Marco handed me the paper.
“I take it there’s still no sign of him at the club?”
Marco shook his head. “Nope. Madonna said the last anyone had seen of him was a week ago. He actually left in the middle of a shift. Asked one of the other girls to cover for him and just took off.”
“Had he ever done that sort of thing before?”
Marco shook his head. “Never. Bobbi’s got two exwives and five kids. From what Madonna said, it sounded like he was always behind on child support. He never missed a shift.”
I didn’t have a very good feeling about this. Hank’s funeral wasn’t until two, which left us a good three hours to go check out Bobbi’s place.
After we’d thoroughly cleaned the room out of hotel stationery and complimentary mini-toiletries, the three of us hauled our luggage down to the Mustang and piled in. Only somehow Marco’s luggage had multiplied and there was just one teeny tiny space left in the backseat for me, wedged between his makeup bag and a lifesize cardboard cutout of Elvis he’d picked up at the Neon Museum. I tried not to think about riding with The King for the next four hours as Marco pulled out onto the Strip and followed the snail’s pace traffic toward the airport.
FlyBoyz took up the lower half of a faded stucco building located directly across the causeway from McCarran International Airport. A neon sign, dimmed now in the daylight, hovered over a dark wooden door. Two windows faced the street, though they were both covered in peeling black paint. A dozen Harley Davidsons lined the far side of the lot, sporting bumper stickers that read “Desert Demons.” The upper floors of the building held a series of apartments that would have been great for watching planes take off from the tarmac. Not so great for a peaceful night’s sleep. Even as we parked the car in the makeshift gravel lot, the sky above us filled with the underbelly of a 747 and the ground shook with a magnitude 6.4, rattling the blackened windows of the bar.
“Nice place,” Dana said, laying the sarcasm on double-stuffed.
Marco just scrunched his nose into an “ick” face.
Gravel crunching beneath our feet, we made our way around to the back of the building where a set of metal stairs, minus the railing, led to the upper level apartments. There were four mailboxes affixed to the wall at the bottom. Rusted letters on their faces read A, B, C, and D. D was bulging with mail. I gingerly pulled out an envelope. A bill from the water company addressed to Bob Hostetler. A.k.a. Bobbi.
“It looks like he hasn’t been here in a while,” Dana noted.
“Maybe he’s just on vacation?” I asked hopefully.
Dana gave me a “get real” look. “Who leaves for vacation in the middle of a shift?”
Someone on the run from the Mob, that’s who. I forced that thought down as a picture of Larry sprung to mind, and replaced the envelope in the mailbox.
“Let’s check upstairs.” Holding on to the wall for support, I gingerly took the first step. The staircase seemed to hold me, so I slowly worked my way up, gesturing for Marco and Dana to follow. Marco shimmied up the stairs sideways in something that was part James Bond and part audition for
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
He shrugged, palms up. “What?” he whispered back.
“That shimmy thing?”
“I was being sneaky.”
“You were being conspicuous,” Dana whispered. “Everyone knows the way to be the least suspicious is to act like you belong here.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
He had us there.
“Just come on,” I said, reverting to my normal voice.
I led the way up to the top of the stairs (as Marco continued his Broadway Bond routine behind me), where a little landing carpeted in fake plastic lawn opened up to four doors. A and B were on the right, C and D on the left. C had lost its letter; only a dark outline in contrast to the faded door remained. D’s letter had lost its top nail and was hanging upside down. Though, I noticed with a little lift, there didn’t seem to be any visible signs of a struggle or break-in.
I looked from Dana to Marco, then took a deep breath and knocked, hoping like anything a big hairy lady answered the door.
I waited two beats, then knocked again, shifting from foot to foot on the small landing. I could smell Indian food being prepared behind apartment A’s door, and from apartment C I could hear the faint base rhythms of a Black Eyed Peas song. But nothing from apartment D.
I knocked once more for good measure, though I knew deep down it was a lost cause. Either Bobbi was on the run or…Well, I didn’t want to think about the “or.” At least not while Larry was still out there in that “or” limbo land too. Instead, I said a silent prayer to the saint of men on the run that Bobbi and Larry where holed up somewhere together. Somewhere far, far away from Monaldo and his tweezers-challenged goon.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” Marco whispered, voicing my thoughts.
“You want me to pick the lock?” Dana asked.
I turned on her. “You know how to do that?”
She shrugged. “How hard could it be? I watch
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I muttered under my breath. But considering our combined experience in breaking and entering consisted of five episodes of a teenage detective and one mangled Visa, I persuaded Dana to leave the lock be.
“Well, maybe we could check his mail? Rico says you can tell a lot about a suspect by going through his mail.”
I shrugged. Might as well. Though I was pretty sure the Mob didn’t send death threats via US postal service.
We clanked back down the stairs and converged on box D again. With a quick look over our shoulders to make sure the local postmaster hadn’t suddenly appeared at our backs, we each took a stack of mail and began sorting through it.
Mine was mostly bills and a couple of envelopes from Clark County Child Services, no doubt wondering where little Bobbi junior’s monthly mac and cheese money was. Electric bill, credit card bills-two of them stamped past due. And a handful of catalogs for “hefty” women’s fashions. I took it Bobbi was not a slight man.
“Check out this dress,” Marco said, holding up a Big Lovely Ladies catalog featuring a pink-and-black polka dot off-the-shoulder number in size 3XL. “This ought to be outlawed.”
“Oh yeah, I’ll one up you,” Dana countered. She held out a catalog page featuring a teal green poncho with bright yellow daisies on it. “Why not just walk around in a shower curtain?”
I was quiet. As I was pretty sure my mom owned that same poncho.
Bobbi’s bad taste in clothes aside, there wasn’t anything terribly telling in his mail. No subscription to
“You want to check out the bar?” Dana suggested.
Marco and I eyed the blackened windows and row of Harleys.
“Nuh uh,” Marco said, shaking his head violently. “Do you know what they do to guys like me in places like that?”
“Don’t worry, princess. I’ll protect you,” Dana said, taking Marco’s arm and steering him toward the door.
The interior of FlyBoyz was just about as appealing as the outside, and I immediately wished I had Dana’s stun gun. The painted windows gave the place a cavelike feeling, not mitigated by the shadowy crowd gathered around scarred tables and an ancient jukebox playing a George Thorogood song. The men (and a couple of beefier ladies) were dressed in various versions of the leather chaps and biker vest look, some going with the grubby bandanna over the shaved head while others opted for the I-combed-it-last-week mullet look. All of them looked way overdue for their monthly bath, and smelled even worse. The air held the distinct odors of beer, sweat, and a cloyingly sweet scent that I wasn’t about to try to identify. Clearly this was not the Vegas advertised in flashy posters at your neighborhood travel agent.
