Read Online The Living End by Craig Schaefer - Free Book Online Page A

had a reputation as a man who could be useful to know.
    One of those contacts was Laika. She was six foot one, wore her blond hair in cornrows, and said she was descended from Russian aristocracy. I thought the accent was a put-on. Three in the afternoon and she was already out on the stroll, poured into a purple PVC halter dress and smoking a cigarette on the corner of a dead-end street.
    Lots of tourists come to town thinking prostitution is legal in Nevada. They’re half-right: it’s legal in twelve counties, but not one of them is anywhere within a hundred miles of the Vegas city limits. You take a limo out to the ranches if you want a certified disease-free pro, assuming you’ve got the cash to afford her. In the city it’s the same old street game, all risk and barely any reward. Like chutes and ladders, but the chute probably looks like a pimp’s fist or a heroin needle.
    The ladders don’t go anywhere, either.
    I rumbled the Barracuda up to the corner and shifted into park. Laika came over and leaned in the open passenger-side window, shifting her body to draw my gaze toward her cleavage and away from the tracks on her arm. I picked a third option and looked her in the eye.
    “Moving up in the world,” she said, laying the Russian accent on thick. She dropped her cigarette to the street and snuffed it under a stiletto heel. “Where’d you get the car?”
    “Favor from a friend. Speaking of, you hear anything weird on the street lately? People dropping off the radar more than usual?”
    She flicked an uneasy glance back over her shoulder. “You’re asking me about weird stuff? You’re the magic man, everybody knows that. But yeah. Two of Half-Cap’s girls? They haven’t been around. I talked to Mindy, you know, the one with the teddy bear and the pigtails. She says they both split on the same night. Left their clothes behind and even a little bankroll they’d stashed that Half-Cap didn’t know about.”
    Which means they didn’t leave town voluntarily
, I thought. I tugged my phone out of my pocket and tapped my way to Pixie’s photos.
    “How about these guys? They might be squatting around here. Any of ’em look familiar?”
    While Laika took my phone and gave the screen a close look, I caught movement in the driver’s-side mirror. A sweaty slab of meat with fresh razor nicks decorating his bald scalp stormed toward the car like a bull on meth. He slapped his knuckles against my door, hard enough to make the metal jolt.
    “Hey!” he snapped. “You buying, or you
leaving
?”
    I fished a couple of tens out of my wallet and held them curled between my index and middle fingers, holding them up so he could see before I passed them over to Laika. She made the bills disappear.
    “Buying,” I said. “Now piss off.”
    He leaned in, squinting at me. “The fuck you just say to me?”
    I slouched back. “You pay twenty percent in rent to Nicky Agnelli to let your girls work this stroll. Two years ago, you were paying twenty-five to Carl DuQueene. That’s a five percent improvement in profits.”
    His brow furrowed.
    “You remember how they found Carl DuQueene’s body?” I said casually.
    Now he nodded, real slow. His left eye twitched, just a little. Like he was remembering a nightmare.
    “Well,” I said, “I’m the reason why. So I want you to look me in the eye and say, ‘Thank you, sir, for the five percent.’ And don’t ever touch my fucking car again.”
    He backed away, looking at me like he’d just met the devil. I smiled, nice and easy, until he’d scurried off back to his rathole.
    Laika handed my phone back.
    “Sorry,” she said. “I got nothing to tell you. No familiar faces.”
    “Thanks for trying. Keep the twenty. Hey, how about the other way around? Any strangers hanging out, people who don’t fit in?”
    “We’re all strangers out here,” she said, then held up an acrylic fingernail painted in eggshell blue. “Wait a second. There was a guy last week, going up