the trunk. The Olds's license plate hung off the bumper on Wire loops.
'Good-looking place,' Sloan said, as they got out of the Porsche.
'Ah, if I were seventeen…'
'And stupid…'
THE SALOON WAS COOL INSIDE, smelling of beer and fried hamburger. A woman bartender in a white blouse, black vest, and ribbon tie was wiping down the bar. A couple of guys were shooting pool in the back, nine ball, and three more watching, all of them with long-necks in their hands. Everybody turned their heads when Lucas and Sloan stepped inside. Sloan muttered, looking at the bartender, 'That doesn't look like a Booger.'
'C'mon,' Lucas said; he'd been checking faces in the back.
They went on to the bar, and the bartender asked, 'Gentlemen? What can I do you for?' She was a sturdy dark-haired woman, about fifty, with too-red lipstick and too much rouge. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to the cash register.
'Carl around?' Lucas asked.
'Can I tell him who's calling?'
'Yeah, the cops,' Lucas said. He held out his ID. 'We need a little help.'
She looked at Lucas, then at Sloan, and asked, 'Is he in trouble?'
'Can't tell yet,' Lucas said.
'I'll see if I can find him,' she said. She walked down behind the bar and out, and into a back room. The pool watchers were now all watching Lucas and Sloan, and Lucas smiled at them. Ten seconds later, the bartender reappeared. A fat man, with hair like a haystack, and who might have described himself as muscular, shambled along behind.
'Hi, I'm Carl,' he said. 'You're police officers? Is there a problem?'
'You know a guy named Adam Rice?' Lucas asked.
Carl blinked rapidly, then said, 'Jesus. He was the guy. We weren't sure.'
'Yeah, he was,' Lucas said. Everybody in the bar was listening now. 'You gotta place where we can go talk?'
CARL HAD A SMALL OFFICE, a cherry-laminate desk with a swivel chair, and two formed-plastic chairs for visitors. The desk was piled with paper, a well-used desk calculator to one side. Carl leane back in the chair, which squealed under the load, and said, 'I know the guy. He'd come in, have a few beers, cry a little, listen to music. He was a sad guy. How'd you know he came in here?'
'Heck, everybody's been calling us,' Sloan said. 'You ever see him with a guy…'
Carl's eyes got thin: 'The way you said that-you mean, a gay guy?'
'Yeah.'
Carl snorted and leaned farther back in the chair. 'A gay guy would not come in here. Or if he did, he'd sure as shit not let anybody know he was gay. I only saw Rice talking with a couple of guys, and then it was just random guy-shit, sitting at the bar, drinking beer.'
'What about the girls?' Lucas asked.
Carl's eyes involuntarily wandered.'He'd come in alone…' he began.
'Don't bullshit us, Booger,' Lucas said, scuffing his chair an inch toward the fat man. 'We know about the girls, we know you introduced them. We need your help, and we're gonna get it one way or another. Now… was there one girl, or more than one? And where could we find them?'
After a moment of silence, Carl said, 'They're gonna give me a ton of shit about this.'
'We're talking about a serial torture killer. If there's any hint that he somehow met Rice here, through the girls, they'd want to know about it,' Lucas said.
Carl sighed, put his hands over his belly, twiddled, then said, 'He'd try to get Dove, a blondie. If she was busy, he'd take one or the other. But he'd usually ask if anybody had seen Dove.'
'But he hooked up with some of the others, too.'
'Yeah, he did,' Carl said. 'They'd go over next door, the girls got rooms. He'd get his blow job, and he'd come back here all weepy, have another beer then go on home.'
'How often?' Sloan asked.
'Twice a week, maybe,' Carl said. 'How much?'
'For a blow job? Fifty if you wear a rubber, or seventy without,' Carl said. 'The extra twenty is, like, AIDS insurance.'
'That's a good idea,' Sloan said. 'Nothin' like AIDS insurance.'
'Hey, it's not me, the girls don't work for me,' Carl protested. 'They come in here, but what am I gonna do? I'm not a cop. I'm not their guardian. They don't do any business on the premises, and some of the guys… like to have them around.'
Lucas: 'Their names are Dove and…?'
'Andi and Aix, right now. The one girl's name is pronounced X, but it's spelled A-I-X, as she'll tell you every chance she gets. She thinks she's speaking French because she once went there with her boyfriend. There were a couple more girls, but they moved away, I couldn't tell you where. They come and they go.'
'Dove is still here?'
'Should be right next door, unless they're shopping.' He looked at his watch. 'Mornings, lots of times, they run up to the Mall of America, but they're usually back by two-guys get off work a couple hours early, they like to stop by for an afternooner. You know, before supper.'
'Wouldn't want a blow job on a full stomach,' Sloan said.
'What rooms?' Lucas asked.
'Usually twenty-three, twenty-five, and twenty-seven, down at the end of the hall. Close enough that they can scream for help.'
'They ever scream for help?' Sloan asked.
'Not lately, but who knows?'
'We may come back and talk to you some more,' Lucas said, standing up. 'Don't call the girls, huh?'
THE Y'ALL BUCK INN'S parking lot was separated from the Rockyard's lot by a fringe of grass. A shabby two- story building, it showed two long rows of gray-green doors facing the highway, with a small window next to each door. The parking lot was gravel, the stairs and walkways were concrete and outside in the weather: a fifteen- dollar-a-night motel used as a crash pad by truckers and refugees from the Rock-yard who were too drunk to drive home.
They didn't bother with the office; they climbed the stairs and walked south until they got to twenty-five and knocked. They were lucky the first time: Dove answered.
She probably looked good in a bar, in the evening, Lucas thought. During the day, and outside, she wasn't quite pretty. Twenty years old, maybe, with a pasty face that didn't like the light, and hips that already ran to wobbly fat. She answered the door wearing a yellow halter top, white shorts, three-inch-thick platform flip-flops, and too much makeup; she was chewing gum.
She saw Lucas first, and a frown flitted across her face: 'You don't, uh…' Then she saw Sloan and blurted out, 'Jesus Christ, don't arrest me. My mother doesn't know I do this.'
'Your mother,' Sloan said.
Lucas stepped toward her, and Dove backed into the motel room, and Lucas stepped in after her. Sloan followed and pushed the door shut. A soap opera was playing on the TV. A furry moose doll with crooked velvet horns sat on top of the TV. Lucas found the remote control, pushed the power button, and the noise went away. 'Do you know Adam Rice?'
'Ohmagod,' she said. She looked from Lucas to Sloan, chewed once on her gum. 'I wasn't sure it was him.' She sat on the bed, picked up a pillow, and squeezed it around her chest, looking up at them, eyes big.
'We're running down everything we can find,' Lucas said. 'We understand you were his favorite date.'
She stared slack mouthed into the open bathroom. 'We were wondering today if it was him in the newspaper.'
'Anything unusual about him?'Lucas asked. 'Strange sex stuff…'
