Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Or watching for him to come out of the club.
Cleo wasn’t watching. Cleo was flat-out in my back seat, snoozing.
Along with watching, I was thinking.
I had no idea what to do about the feeling I had about this guy. That feeling being something that cautioned me not to get close, absolutely not get caught watching him, and one hundred percent not to do something stupid, like follow him.
However, to move this forward and maybe find out what the hell was going on, I had to do something.
That something could not be in Tweety. In fact, I shouldn’t even be there in Tweety.
They had cameras outside the club, and I parked at the very edges, as far away from lights as I could manage, so maybe those cameras wouldn’t catch me. Even so, Tweety gleamed bright and cheerful like a beacon. I also never went inside the club. But someone would eventually notice me hanging out there yet not patronizing the establishment, if they hadn’t already.
And women were going missing.
They were strippers and sex workers, so, as per historical protocol, the powers that be didn’t feel inclined to knock themselves out figuring out where they’d gone.
But I scoured the Arizona Republic on the daily, and these police bulletins garnered attention in the form of short articles about the women who’d disappeared.
Sure, the info shared was minimal, and the news was treated almost as an aside. And it didn’t happen daily, weekly or even monthly.
But by my estimation, seven strippers or sex workers had vanished in a little over two years (those being the ones who were reported missing, considering the occupations, there might be others who were not), and that seemed like a lot to me.
I was about to give up, go home and pour myself a glass of wine while I considered for the millionth time dismantling the wall I’d painstakingly crafted, and thus at long last abandoning this mission, when he came out.
Not tall, not short. Not young, not old. Not handsome, not ugly.
But he was bad to the core. I felt it, even in a car a parking lot away, staring at him through my windshield.
He gave me the shivers.
He was talking to the bouncer just outside the front door, and I knew it was time to leave.
“Ready to roll?” I asked Cleo.
Her response was a snore.
I took that as a yes.
I started up and headed out and didn’t look in the direction of the club as I rolled out of the parking lot onto Van Buren.
I headed toward the city.
I headed home.
I parked in the only spot my unit guaranteed me, which was covered, thankfully, and noted, per usual, the three visitor spots were taken.
My apartment complex didn’t offer a lot, but I loved it anyway.
Cleo and I got out and headed to the gate. I punched in the code, pulled open the gate and walked by the bank of mailboxes (to the left) and the bike rack (to the right) to the inner courtyard common space.
The pool for our complex was there, because this was Phoenix. If you didn’t have a pool, you wanted one, and if you did, and you had to maintain it yourself, you wished you didn’t have it.
Since I didn’t have to maintain it myself, I loved our pool.
It wasn’t big, but it was always cool, because that square set of apartments with its inner courtyard had been there since the seventies. So the trees around it had plenty of time to grow high and shade the space. It was a bitch for Mark, our pool cleaner, because of the leaves, but it was heaven on a summer day in the Valley.
It could be a hundred and ten outside that space, but it was ninety in the courtyard and it was eighty in the pool.
Perfect.
I couldn’t say our landlord gave much of a shit about the place, but he wasn’t a total loser. He kept it clean and safe.
No, it was the tenants who gave it its personality.
Inner walkways led to the doors of the units on two levels, and most of us had decided to use these walkways as our own personal patios. So they were all adorned with an eclectic mix of planters, lawn chairs, lights and outside décor.
The pool furniture was relatively nice, but it was Patsy, the resident green thumb, who kept the planters peppering the courtyard bursting with color and greenery. And it was Bill and Zach, one of our gay couples, who’d strung the lights that went from the railing of the upper balcony down to ornamental poles they’d planted in the grass that surrounded the pool deck.
All of this, with the trees and the aqua waters of the pool, now illuminated with a light that was timed to turn off at ten, gave that space a cheerful, tranquil feel that smacked a hearty Welcome Home every time I hit it.