Last Stop by Lou Harper

Author:Lou Harper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Gay-Lesbian Romance, Red Hots!
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

NT: How's Florida?

SR: Humid. Got nothing so far. I'm telling you, this lead smells fishy.

NT: Keep looking.

Las Vegas was a jumble of billboards and lights. From a distance The Strip, where all the fancy hotels and casinos were, looked like Disneyland on crack. Past Vegas, the landscape grew monotonous. After an hour or so of it, Jay dozed off. He must have been out for hours, because when he next opened his eyes they were navigating the streets of Los Angeles. They stopped on what looked like an inner-city street—it was narrow, full of stocky buildings pressing against each other shoulder to shoulder, like football players at a huddle.

"Where are we?" Jay asked.

"Downtown, somewhere close to Little Tokyo."

Sam double-parked in front of a two-story red-brick building. There were no windows, only a narrow steel door and a corrugated metal garage door a few feet apart from each other. Most of it was covered in graffiti. Sam got out of the car, pulled a bundle of keys out of his pocket and let himself in through the small door. A minute later the garage door rolled up and they drove inside.

"What the hell is this place?" Jay wondered out loud, looking around. A large open space stretched all the way up to the roof. There were stairs along one wall going up to what appeared to be a loft. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, as if nobody had been in there in years. The lights were on though, so at least there was electricity.

"It used to be a sweatshop, before it got converted into a living space," Sam replied.

"What are we doing here? I mean, how do you have the keys?"

"I told you about my uncle Frank, right?"

"Yeah, he was in the Mob too."

"No. He was connected. Frank was connected to a lot of things. He was an entrepreneur," Sam said with a smile in his voice.

"Were any of his enterprises legal?" Jay asked, as a picture of this "Uncle Frank" started forming in his head.

"Hardly."

"So he had a sweatshop here?"

"For a while. And other enterprises. When he died he left this place to me."

"But then it's not safe. They can find us here."

"Well, that's another thing about my uncle—he was as sly as he was paranoid. This building had never been in his name to begin with, and it's not in mine either. It's owned by some fictitious company."

It still wasn't adding up. "Wouldn't his Mob connections know about it anyway?"

"Nah. Frank had good reasons to keep his various business ventures well separated from each other, and all of it hidden from the IRS."

Jay got the sudden impression Sam was a puzzle with all those jaggy edges and pieces that didn't seem to go together but did anyway. If he just asked the right questions more of them might drop into place.

"So you had this place all this time, like you had the car and those fake IDs?" he asked.

"As Frank would say—a wise man always has a Plan B, C and D ready.

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