The Filthy Few: A Steve Nastos Mystery Read Online Free Page B

boss.”
    Hopkins’ face brightened up. “Business, great.”
    â€œDon’t get too excited. She’s not a paying customer, she’s a friend.”
    Hopkins was unfazed. “You need all the friends you can get, Nasty.”
    Karen made an offer. “My boss might pay a little. We hire PI ’s from time to time, but it’s rare.”
    From the office Carscadden shouted, “Okay, I’m good.”
    Nastos turned to Karen. “Hear that? He admits it. As far as lawyers go, he’s only good.”

    Nastos, Carscadden, Hopkins and Grant sat in the office in a semicircle around the TV. Grant opened her wallet and took out the jump drive, plugging it into the DVD player. With the remote she moved around the menu to Chapter Five. “I’ll move past the background interviews that I did with Ann Falconer.” Before pressing Play she said, “Here’s the run-down. She’s from Czechoslovakia. Spoke a little English when she immigrated here. The accent takes time to get used to.
    â€œShe comes here eighteen years old, thinking she’s going to be a nanny. They take her passport, ID and money and force her to strip in clubs to get it back. Stripping becomes massages, becomes a forced drug problem, becomes prostitution.”
    Hopkins remarked, “I can’t believe this still happens.”
    â€œYeah, it does.” Grant flipped ahead a few chapters. “You watch her tell the whole story, you know no one can make this stuff up. But she has a heck of an accent. I’m cueing it up to the shooting. Oh, and she met Rob Walker at the motel. He lived there too.”
    Nastos knew that like most crime journalists, Grant was always looking for the story that would make for a compelling breakout book. The Toronto news market, even the Canadian market, was small. A book deal might get her closer to the American job market or help out when she renegotiated her contract here. Maybe Ann Falconer looked like a contender.
    Nastos saw that Chapter Five started at the three-hour mark. Karen pressed Play and the screen went momentarily black.
    It began with the woman in a dark room, the background draped with black sheets, her face illuminated by a small lamp on the table beside her. She was thin with wavy hair held back in a ponytail. The frame jostled and there was the sense of movement off camera. The floor creaked and the woman’s eyes tracked to a new place. She lit a cigarette. Karen spoke from off camera, “Tell me about the night that eventually brought you to me.”

    Ann Falconer glanced at the digital clock on the end table. The red LED display was extra-large and could be read from the most encrusted and tired sliver of an eye. It said exactly midnight. The first thought to cross her mind was, welcome to a brand-new day. Walker hadn’t heard the alarm. His breathing was still regular, rattling in his throat. He only stopped snoring when she pushed him off of her. Since they had come together, he always had to be touching her to sleep properly. It didn’t make her feel crowded even though she would have imagined that such a thing would. It was just different. She was used to them leaving right away, after the sex. She had never had a real boyfriend. Her parents wouldn’t have approved.
    As he lay next to her, still grinding through sleep, still touching her, if only with a lazy leg resting on hers, it felt comfortable in a way. It had been three weeks of this and it was beginning to feel too much like hope.
    She sat up and took a long sip of water from an orange plastic child’s cup from the bedside table. As she returned the empty cup to its resting place she thought to herself,
Tonight is going to change everything for us
.
    She woke him, shaking him more aggressively than she had intended. “It’s time.” She shook him again more gently.
    His eyes clenched hard and he stretched out slowly, vibrating like a cat does,