Page 29 of Backtrack

“Go for 62.”

“Six-Two, call or come by the Sheriff’s Office at your earliest convenience. I have something I need to pass along reference your recent request.”

It must have been sensitive information if she didn’t want to give it out over the air. Scanners were not hard to come by at RadioShack. Everyone and their dog had one these days.

“We’re still in the hospital parking lot,” Cutter said. “I’ll run back inside and call you. Give me two minutes.”

“Ten-four.”

“What’s that about?” Johnson asked.

“Nikki’s running down relatives and associates of the armored car personnel for me, along with everything she can find on Vincent Millner. Sounds like she found something workable.”

“A thread we can pull,” Johnson said.

“Hope so.” Cutter grabbed his hat and got out.

Johnson opened his door to follow, but Cutter raised a hand.

“You write up the notes from our interview with Foster. I shall return.”

Cutter was back behind the wheel of his Caprice five minutes later.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “We know Vince Millner did a five-year hitch in Huntsville. Nikki hasn’t found a connection to any of our armored car guards yet, but prison logs at the Eastham Unit show dozens of visits from a woman named Gloria Blaisdell. Her criminal history shows multiple arrests for prostitution and narcotics. The most recent was a week ago during the day at a place called the Show Pony, a strip joint off I-20 just over the line in Tarrant County. Looks like she works there.”

Cutter looked at his watch. “It’s still early, so we’ll take our time—run out to my place and grab my personal rig, then stop in at the office before we head to the county line. I want to check in with Morton and Garza, see if they’ve turned up anything useful.”

“The Show Pony? You mean, we’re actually gonna go to a titty bar?”

“That’s the plan,” Cutter said. “We might get lucky. Blaisdell was working dayshift when Ft. Worth Vice got her last week. It’s not like we can call ahead and make an appointment.”

“A titty bar,” Johnson said again, blushing.

“I imagine you think this will be exciting,” Cutter said. “I’ll admit it likely will be at first. If you told me when I was twenty-one that I’d get tired of the sight of a naked woman, I’d have called you a liar—”

“But you are?” Johnson said, incredulous. “Tired of it, I mean.”

“I’m as red-blooded as the next man,” Cutter said. “But the kind of naked gal we’re about to run into—they’re … I don’t know …nothing short of tragic.” Cutter gave a slow shake of his head. “And all that tragedy, well, yeah, that makes me tired.”

“I’m just fine looking at naked women.” Johnson grinned. “And we’ll be getting paid for it, too.”

Cutter sighed, wondering if the kid had heard a word he said. He pulled out of the hospital lot to head down Santa Fe Drive, following it across the Fort Worth Highway where it turned into Spring Street before curving around to pop out on North Main beside Carter Ivy Hardware.

Johnson broke the silence again when they’d passed Sixth going up the long hill at the north end of town.

“What’s the point of going to get your personal car?” Johnson asked. “Why not just use the Caprice and let the county pay for the gasoline?”

“Two things are bound to happen if we leave a marked patrol car out front of a place like the Show Pony. One, we’d probably get a beer bottle through the windshield, and two, we’d hurt their business.”

“But my mother would say hurtin’ a strip joint’s business would be our spiritual duty.” Johnson gazed out the side window. “Norris and me arrested a lot of whores when I was on field training. He made me fingerprint every last one of them. Told me he didn’t want to catch the mgambo or some such. I’m fine to look at naked girls, but those whores were pretty damned gross.”

Cutter shook his head. “Mgambo is a kind of tree in Africa, not a disease.”

Johnson turned and looked at him, slack-jawed. “How in the world would you know something like that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cutter said. Most of his Special Forces operations were classified, and he wasn’t enough of a storyteller to want to expound on the things that weren’t. He glanced at Johnson to be sure he was paying attention. “You need to adjust your windage and elevation, kid.”

“Huh?”