Red Star: Barrett Mason Book 6 by Stewart Matthews

Author:Stewart Matthews [Matthews, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Primrose Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Huff and I decided to go check out Halloway’s story. The note she’d handed me in her apartment listed an address in a junky part of Barcelona, where a strip club operated out of a building sandwiched between a drug store and a dry cleaner.

After renting a hotel room on the eastern edge of the city, and convincing Dr. Miles to stay there for a little while for her own safety, Huff and I went to the strip club.

We arrived at the strip club at 8, local time. The meeting with Nikos Katsoulis, the courier who had the other half of Halloway’s payment, was supposed to happen at 11 PM—or about three hours after we showed up.

The inside matched up exactly with the outside. It smelled of stale beer and fried food. It was almost too dark to see anything except the main stage, where a girl danced like she didn’t notice the dozen-or-so men sitting in chairs pushed right up to the stage’s edge.

“Well, Barrett, if we were going to kill three hours anywhere, this isn’t so bad of a spot, is it?” Huff clapped my back and laughed as we came around the corner of the bar nearest to the entrance. We followed it to the end and sat at a pair of rat-eaten barstools.

Soon as he sat down, Huff flagged down the bartender—a girl in a swoop-necked evening gown that looked like it came to her third-hand.

“I thought we had to keep a tight fist on our money,” I said as the bartender walked over to us.

“Well, yeah, sure. We are. But we have to look like we’re fitting in too, right?”

Why did I feel like that train of logic would have Huff sucking tequila shots out of a stripper’s belly button before the night was over?

When the bartender got down to us, Huff ordered the same as he had in the last bar: two scotches. I got a beer. Whatever was cheapest. I didn’t plan on drinking much, but I needed to look natural.

The next three hours carried on with some variation of that: the bartender would check on us. Huff ordered more scotch; sometimes I’d pick up a beer. We watched the girls on stage to pass the time, because two men can only stay focused on work for so long—Huff and I never claimed to be puritans.

Then it happened. At 11 o’clock on the dot, a round, Greek man with a long beard and an Armani suit came walking through the front door. He bee-lined for a table in the darkest corner of the place—the corner completely opposite from Huff and me.

We watched him order a water, take a peek at the girls, and pass the time. He was waiting for someone, no doubt about it. He kept checking his watch like he was counting down in his head to the second he’d get up and leave. He glanced at his phone three or four times.

Then, when 11:30 rolled around, he threw some money on the table, got up, and made for the door.

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