"Sweetland, Nancy - The Black Leather Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sweetland Nancy)

THE BLACK LEATHER CAPER
By Nancy Sweetland

I hesitated, my hand on the smudged and corroded brass plate on the biker bar door, uncomfortable in tight leather pants and jacket. My costume was a rental, like the Harley I'd parked next to the others outside the building. Private eyes have to blend in with the terrain.

I had to find out what had happened to Stoney.

I took a deep breath and plunged into the dreary tavern that was dark even now in broad daylight. All the black leather jackets at the bar swiveled to stare at me. Their nameless pale faces, startling in the dusk, were a time-stopped flash freeze of a black and white mime show--except the music didn't fit. What pulsed throughout the room was heavy metal, a beat, noise. They stared at me. Why wouldn't they? I was an unfamiliar clone.

I took an uncertain step, feeling my leather pants squeak as I walked, like maybe the animal they were made from was complaining about its fate.

Time can't stop altogether. At my move the frozen black and white mosaic broke into motion, turning their backs, except for one stick-thin, white-faced man who walked toward me, thrust his gaunt face next to mine and spoke in a guttural whine. "He ain't here."

"Where is he, then?"

The man squinted at me, his mouth twisting. "Dead. Didn't you know?"

In spite of my determination to stay cool no matter what, I gasped. This had all been for nothing, then, thecostume, the subterfuge. I needn't have come.

But it was my father we were talking about.

My father, Stoney Wall, who meant everything to me now. A good cop--until he'd been accused of taking off the top. Drugs and drug money, piles of it, confiscated right here in this tacky tavern, in a bust he'd shepherded. The powers that be down at headquarters said fifty thousand dollars had disappeared between the bust and checking in downtown. Stoney said it wasn't true. And then he disappeared, right out of my life, when he'd only been back in it for a little over a year...and I'd just begun to get to know him. Well enough to know that no matter what, no matter how easy, he wouldn't take. Not Stoney Wall.

Quentin Wall, really. That's where I'd got my middle name and my nickname, Suzie Q. He'd earned the moniker 'Stoney' from his hard-nosed detective work, and it fit everything I'd learned about him. Solid, strong, capable of protecting. Take? Not Stoney.

"When? Where?" I choked out.

"Can't say. Doesn't matter--thing is, there's nothin' you can do about it." He narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice to a whisper I could hardly hear over the heavy beat. "My God, girl, what are you doing down here? Stoney would kill you himself!" His voice went back to the loud guttural whine. "Looks like you could use a drink. C'mon."

I stared.

"Com'ere, I said." He grabbed my elbow and steered me toward a beer-smeared booth at the back of the room. "Sit."

I sat, stunned into submissiveness.

The man got a couple of beers at the bar. In the bottle, thank God; looked like you could catch almost anything in this place. The bikers at the bar had lost interest in me. I felt as though I'd fallen into the twilight zone. Stoney dead?

"What happened? Where is he, then? His...body?" I had a hard time getting it out.

"Drink." He handed me the beer, then said in a low-pitched, normal voice, "Sorry I had to scare you. Of course he's not dead, but I don't want that bunch--" he tilted his head toward the others at the bar--"to know that. He's laying low until I find out who the hell tried to set him up." He went back to his bar voice and complained, "Stoney owed me some buckos, girl. If you're part of him maybe you'll pay up."

"Who are you?" Stoney dead, Stoney not dead. Was this a game? My voice rose. "What money?"

"Aw, you know he took cash that belonged to some of us here. We want it back." His voice was pitched to reach the bar, but his eyes held mine with a clear blue insistence. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Meet me at nine by the old blocked-off underpass at Eighteenth. Trust me. I've been Stoney's partner for five years."

"I'm getting out of here," I said, for the benefit of the bar's patrons. "Keep your damn beer." My thighs squeaked as I went outside where I was temporarily blinded by the afternoon sun. I threw one booted leg over my rented Harley. I could almost pass for a biker. Almost.

The damn thing wouldn't start on the first try, but I got it going before anybody came out. Evidently they were all going to stay put. I was glad of that. Somebody in this biker crowd was connected to Stoney's disappearance, but just how I didn't know. Yet. I roared out of the graveled parking lot and then slowed down to a safe pace. I'd come here on an anonymous telephone tip about Stoney, and I hadn't learned a thing, except that the thin, white-faced man, was probably undercover. What would I find out at the underpass? I knew the place. The highway had been moved, the road left in disrepair, and it wasn't anywhere you'd really like to be after dark.

But of course, I had to go. If I could help Stoney-- My mind backtracked. He had disappeared out of my life when I was about two weeks old and my mother decided that the wife of a cop wasn't for her. She took me to Los Angeles - as far away as she could get from New Jersey - and told me he was dead when I was old enough to ask questions. To make a long story short, she got cancer and conscience at about the same time and told me the truth, that he was my only living relative. With mixed feelings, I stayed with her until she was gone, and then I came to find my father.