“So eager.” A lecherous grin curled his lips. “Maybe a man can give you what you want. I’d be happy to try.”
Her irritation grew. She propped her hands on her hips and drilled him with a glare. “I asked you a question. Do. You. Know. If. Lollie will be here tonight?”
The guy seemed to wither. “Take it easy, okay? Lollie’s here most nights. Sometimes she works somewhere else. You never know with a whore.” He flicked his unshaven chin toward the door. “You can ask Snoopy—the tall, skinny guy outside. He’s her pimp.”
The man she’d seen when they drove in. Had her sister been one of Snoopy’s women, too? It made her sick to think of it. But if it were true, he could be involved in her murder.
She paid for the Diet Coke then walked out the door, saw that Jase had pulled the Yukon away from the pumps and parked it in the lot. He was standing over by the wall, talking to the two men.
The big, dark-skinned man tipped his head in her direction as she approached, but spoke to Jase. “What you need with Lollipop when you got a white bitch looks like that?”
Kate answered for him. “I’m into women.” She flashed a phony smile. “Both of us are. Sometimes we like to share.”
She caught Jase’s flash of amusement before he turned back to the men. He pulled out a pair of twenties tucked into the pocket of his black T-shirt and handed them to Snoopy. “We’ll be back to see Lollie tomorrow night.”
“You sure it’s gotta be her?” Snoopy asked. “Here comes Kiki. She’s an even hotter bitch than Lollie. Take good care of you both.”
Jase just shook his head. “We’ll be back for Lollie.” Turning, he waved to the men over his shoulder as he led Kate back to the Yukon. Until that moment, she hadn’t noticed the outline of the small semiautomatic pistol shoved into his front jeans pocket, but she felt better knowing it was there.
Her college boyfriend had taught her how to shoot a gun. She’d thought it might be a useful thing to learn. As she climbed into the vehicle and cast a last glance around the seedy area, she figured she might have been right.
Across the lot, a couple of working girls approached the two men, one African American, short and overweight, with frizzy orange hair, the other a young Latina. From their gaudy, barely there skirts and low-cut blouses, clearly they were prostitutes.
“You don’t think one of those women could be Lollie?” Kate asked, her pulse picking up at the thought.
“Lollie’s a white girl. Snoopy says she’s working, pulling an all-nighter at the motel. She’ll be available tomorrow night at ten. I promised him triple her usual fee.”
Kate looked back at the women. The younger girl, so thin she looked anorexic, had to be on drugs. Kate thought of her sister and a soft pang moved through her.
Jase fired the engine and started to drive away, slowed before they reached the street, and Kate realized he was watching the bigger of the two men. The guy was shaking the Latina girl, slapping her again and again.
“He’s hitting her!” Kate said. “We have to help her.” She cracked the door, but Jase caught her arm and dragged her back inside.
“It’s part of the life and none of our business. If you want to find out what happened to your sister, you need to stay out of it. Besides, you’ll only make it worse for her after we’re gone.”
Anger had her trembling. She took a steadying breath, knowing Jason was right. If they made an enemy of Snoopy or one of his friends, they would never get the information they needed. And after they left, her pimp might hurt the girl even worse.
The two women were standing together now, the punishment over. Jase pulled out of the lot. Kate fastened her belt and glanced back out the window.
“That guy’s big and he’s strong,” she said. “We know Snoopy is Lollie’s pimp but maybe the big guy was Chrissy’s... I mean Tina’s. Maybe he beat her and ended up killing her.”
He nodded. “Zepeda’s definitely on the suspect list. But we can’t move too fast. Let’s talk to Lollie first, see what she knows, find out if Eli’s involved. We don’t want them all clamming up or disappearing before we get the info we need.”
“Eli. You sound like you know him.”
“I know him, didn’t recognize him at first. Elijah Zepeda is a real bad mother. He’s half Mexican, half black and hard as nails.”
Kate fell silent. They had a lot of murder suspects, and all of them were very bad news. Maybe tomorrow night, Lollie could help them narrow down the list.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jase picked Kate up the following morning, and they headed for the first stop on their suspect list—Terry McCollom. McCollom was just getting out of bed when they arrived at around ten thirty, his red hair sticking straight up, three or four days’ worth of rusty whiskers on his slack-jawed face.
“Who the hell are you and what do you want?” Terry asked, scratching his bony, naked chest. At least he’d had the sense to pull on a pair of baggy jeans.
“Name’s Jason Maddox. We’d like to talk to you about a girl named Tina Galen.” He flicked a glance at Kate. “The lady was her friend.”
“You a cop?”
