Middle Of Nowhere

   They turned right at the top of the stairs, Bobbie Gaynes looking stressed and tension ridden, her movements sharp and angular. They passed three closed doors before Gaynes raised her hand to stop them. She pointed across the hall to their target. Boldt signaled back an acknowledgment, and moved Gaynes to the side, her back to the wall immediately alongside the door.

   His gun aimed to the side and down to the floor, Boldt tried the doorknob and found the door locked. He rapped his knuckles loudly against the wood, stepped back and waited. When nothing happened, Gaynes reached around and pounded on the door.

   "Police!" she announced. "Open this door!"

   Shock waves reverberated down the hall: police! Through the closed doors behind them, they heard much shuffling, but the door before them remained quiet.

   Boldt reared back onto one leg and hammered on the door, kicking it hard, most of his weight behind the blow. His second attempt broke the door loose from the jamb. The door crashed loudly into the wall as it swung open.

   "Police!" he repeated, eyes darting to Gaynes, who confirmed she was ready. Boldt stepped inside and snugged his back against the near wall. Gaynes flowed in behind him, moving to the center of the small room. Boldt took the galley kitchen to her right.

   "Clear!" he announced.

   Gaynes rushed the tiny bedroom to the left. "Clear," she echoed.

   They lowered their guns, though kept them at the ready. Boldt shut the door as best as possible. "Need a pair?" he asked, indicating the latex gloves in his hand.

   "All set." She retrieved a pair from her pocket.

   They moved through the small area fluidly, two investigators accustomed to their work. The warrant called for a plain-sight search for any materials relating to the thefts, but Gaynes conveniently found drawers and cabinets surprisingly left open to where she could search them. Boldt made sure his back was turned.

   "Milk is dated next week," he announced. "So she's been living here recently." He wondered if kicking the apartment had been the right thing the do. They could have placed it under long-term surveillance, but Boldt's guess was that if Samway was hooked up to the Flek brothers, then she'd already been advised to avoid her own digs.

   "Couple of roaches left in the ashtray," Gaynes announced. "We could get her on that if we had to. She's on a year's probation following her parole."

   "We want her," Boldt reminded. He would worry about the technicalities later.

   "Here we go," Gaynes announced from the bedroom.

   Boldt approached her voice, but with his back to it, his attention mostly on the apartment's broken door. He glanced to his right—an unmade bed; cigarette butts piled high in an ashtray. Facing the bed was a 37inch Trinitron with a cable box on top. He said, "We should have checked the cable company. Maybe we'd have found her or Flek's name there."

   "Not that. This," Gaynes said, swinging the bathroom door open further. Bathing suit thongs and bikini tops the size of corn chips.

   "I guess she likes the pool?" Boldt said, the image not fitting with his vision of Courtney Samway.

   "This here is her work uniform," Gaynes corrected. "She's stripping, L.T. We're looking for matchbooks, coasters—"

   "Check stubs, T-shirts—" he interrupted. "Something with the name of the club on it," he said.

   Boldt walked through the small bedroom, carefully studying the place. He reached the side of the bed and a mound of cigarette butts in a plastic ashtray. He dumped the butts onto the floor without a second thought. His gloved fingers wiped away the ash and tobacco smudges, cleaning the bottom of the ashtray. He held it up then for Gaynes to read from across the small room.

   "Mike's Pleasure Palace," he said.

   "Table for two," Gaynes replied. "I shouldn't admit it, but I love strip joints."

* * *

"I like the female body," Gaynes told him from the Crown Vic's shotgun seat. "You guys fantasize about jumping their bones, but I fantasize about looking like that. They're gorgeous, these girls. On top of it they can really move. And they choose to be there, so don't give me that shit about it being exploitive. They rock their hips and some asshole stuffs a twenty into their Gstring, thinking he's some kind of big shot, when she's gonna take that thing off regardless. He's gonna pay her another twenty. And then she goes backstage and drinks for free and awaits her next performance."

   "And the lap dancing?" Boldt asked.

   "Hey, most of that is voluntary. Extra credit work. Sometimes not, sure. Sometimes management demands it. But it's a power trip for the girls—it's gotta be. Drag your crotch down some guy's thigh and cream him in his pants. Fifty bucks for five minutes' work? There's no kissing, no fluids exchanged. No harm, no foul."

   "I'm hearing this from a woman."