Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(68)

I glanced at my watch. “I got it, Ryan. But it doesn’t hurt to poke around a little. Did Fadden take the same bus both times?”

“Number fifteen to and from East Colfax. He got on and off at the Tower Road stop.” Taft spoke slowly, like he was picking over his words. “If he’s our guy, and I mean if, there are a lot of places for him to hole up out there. Used to be the only things living that far east were prairie dogs. But there’s a bunch of subdivisions now. Tower Triangle. Friendly Village.”

I pulled up a mental image of Kane’s photo of the strip joint. There were a lot of clubs like that on Colfax. And a lot of them had gone under.

I thanked Taft and disconnected. My skin tingled, as if my bones were electrified. I whistled Clyde in.

Back inside, I collected my belongings and left cash on the desk to cover the food and drinks. Clyde and I found Paul in the bar setting up shots for a group of women about my age. The ladies were pimped out for a night on the town in short skirts and high heels, and one of them wore a shoulder-length bride’s veil. A Royer girl, enjoying her last night of freedom before her walk down the aisle.

Watching the bride-to-be’s giddy excitement, I experienced a strange twinge in my stomach. The woman was taking a lot of selfies, half of which involved holding up her engagement ring and blowing a kiss, presumably to her fiancé.

Another pang. I pressed a hand to my stomach. It had to be the chili.

I waited while Paul finished pouring and added the drinks to a tab.

He turned to me. “Still working?”

“I’m done. Thanks for the use of your office.”

“Anytime. I mean it.”

“See you later, then.” Clyde and I headed for the door.

“Hey, Sydney,” Paul called.

I turned. Something in his voice.

“You look tired,” he said. “You should give it a rest sometime.”

“I’ll—”

“I know. Sleep when you’re dead.” His face had slumped, lines and creases I’d never noticed carving new shadows on his skin in the dim light over the bar. He looked crushed, as if an anvil had dropped on him when he thought there was nothing overhead but blue sky.

Maybe men got pangs about engagement rings, too.

“Have a good night, Sydney Rose,” he said.

“You, too.”

I walked out the door with images of bridal veils and late-night whiskeys banging through my mind like doors on a deserted house.





CHAPTER 19

The only way you feel safe in a relationship is if you feel free to leave it.

—Effie “Grams” Parnell. Private conversation.

A full moon shone down on Denver as we exited the interstate and turned east onto Colfax Avenue. Silver light flooded the city; it was as if we moved through mercury. A yellow-and-black checkerboard—Denver’s downtown high-rises—patterned the sky. It was a flawlessly perfect night, the kind that invites contemplation over action, peace over vigilance. A perfect night to live and the wrong kind of night on which to die.

But I had murder on my mind.

And Kane’s photo of the strip club on the dash.

The man on the RTD recordings, Mark Fadden, had exited the Route 15 bus at Tower Road, the very last stop. From there, he’d presumably headed straight south on Tower—the cameras hadn’t picked him up on the sidewalk or crossing the street.

It was just this side of midnight, and traffic was light. I reached Tower Road in a few minutes, and after cruising along Colfax for another four blocks in search of the club, I decided to start my reconnaissance in the same direction Fadden had disappeared. I pulled a U-turn and went south on Tower Road. There wasn’t much. Storage facilities, the Colorado Department of Transportation offices. Further south, the buildings vanished, and the land flattened into a two-dimensional plane of pure black. My headlights picked out a rabbit as it darted across the road and disappeared into the grass.

I reversed course and drove along the northern stretch of Tower. On my left were a few scattered businesses, none of them dance bars. To the right, a sprawling residential area. If Fadden was renting a home or staying with a friend in one of those houses then, short of a door-to-door search, I’d never find him.

Working from the premise that Fadden was the Alpha’s hit man, I figured he’d still be in town—an assassin on retainer, waiting for his next job. My biggest worry was that Fadden wasn’t even our guy. That I was not only looking for a needle in a haystack, but it was the wrong needle and the wrong haystack.

I turned right and went another block east, drove down Himalaya Road, and worked my way back to Colfax, heading toward the bus stop. There was only one street between the RTD stop and Tower Road. Zeno ran south from Colfax, taking a straight shot through a run-down neighborhood of dilapidated businesses before making a ninety-degree turn east and relabeling itself 14TH STREET.

Fingers crossed, I went south.

Just before we reached the ninety-degree turn, the headlights picked out a strip joint on the right.

Wary of being watched, I drove by without slowing.

The club looked every bit as lonely as it did in Kane’s photograph. The sign said CLOSED. The front door was boarded up. Someone had taken a rock to the sign, partially destroying what had once been an artist’s rendering of a stylized woman clinging to a pole.