“Hard to say. Maybe twenty, twenty-five regulars. But you could have double that before a strike. Their territory’s shrunk, and they’re clinging to what they’ve got, pushing to take back what they lost. A lot of them would die for it. Some do.”
Eve stepped to the opening. Across a wide living area on a ten-foot screen, numerous people in masks engaged in various acts of sex in some sort of fancy ballroom. The music, provided by an onstage band, hit heavy on the bass.
She judged the living space owed its size to the removal of walls to combine a couple of flops into one. Most of the furniture ran to low-rise gel sofas in shiny red and black, and most were currently occupied by couples—or threesomes—trying to mimic the action on-screen.
In the single oversize sleep chair, two women—obviously stoned—pawed and crawled lugubriously over a male. He gave tits and ass absent strokes with one hand, worked his PPC with the other.
Zoner smoke, with a chaser of Erotica, hung in the air like dreamy fog.
A dozen people, Eve counted, with most too naked to conceal any weapon. Still, she kept a hand on her own when she rapped a fist against the jamb.
“NYPSD.”
The few people not completely dazed with drugs or sex, scrambled. The man in the chair just shoved one of the women to the floor, waved away the second. And with a half smile, adjusted his erection back in his pants.
Mixed race, with skin the color of Peabody’s coffee regular, he had hard dark eyes and a long, thin scar down his left cheek, a tat of a blade dripping blood on the other.
He wore his hair in tight black-and-red braids that rained down his back from a band at his nape. The black long-sleeved tee didn’t quite hide another slicing scar down the side of his throat.
She saw one of the naked guys start to reach under the gel couch, then freeze when both air rifles gave their cocking snicks.
“Yo now, everybody just chill it, all right?” Slice spoke in a gravelly baritone, kept that half smile in place. “We got us some company. I know you.” He pointed a long finger, bumpy at the knuckles, at Eve. “Sure I do. Seen you right up there.”
He gestured to the screen and a close-up of swollen genitalia hard at work.
“Y’all bring me a famous cop and her rich man. We need some refreshments! Bulge, get some clothes on and go on down there and pull Toro off the door. Mofo doesn’t have the sense to tell us we got company.”
“Everybody’s fine right where they are,” Eve said. “We’re looking for Dinnie Duff.”
“What you want with that little ho?”
“I’ll talk to her about that.”
“Now, she’s a ho for sure, but she’s my ho. We look after our own, don’t we?” he said to the room at large. “You here to give her trouble?”
“Is she in the house?”
Slice bared his teeth at her, a grin and a challenge all at once. “Got your hard-ass on tonight, do you?”
“It’s always on. Is she worth a raid? There’s enough Zoner hanging in the air for me to haul every one of you in.”
“We be out again in a flash.”
“Yeah, maybe, but considering I’d have probable cause to look for more?” She scanned the room, noted that more than a couple of people in the room knew that flash wouldn’t work for them. “Maybe not. Dinnie Duff.”
“Fuck all.” He shrugged it off, shoved the second woman to the floor. “Likely she’s working under at Wet Dreams. I ain’t seen her.”
“How about we look?”
“How about I see a warrant?”
Now Eve smiled. “I can get one in under five minutes. I doubt that’d give you time to move out all the illegals and weapons, and anybody underage in here. But we can play it out and see.”
“Fuck all and you with it.” No longer smiling, he got to his feet. “Bolt, you’ve been banging that bitch most recently. Where’s she at?”
“Work, she said. She needs the scratch.”
The one called Bolt took his time pulling on pants, scratching his naked belly. The look in his eyes, Eve thought, was fierce despite the lazy movements.