The address Ria gave me turned out to be the Jacksonville Omni. It wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, but it was a damn sight too pricey for a Kisses stripper, even an exceptionally good one. Then again, stripping wasn’t all Ria was doing for Kisses.

I pulled into the lot and thought about giving my keys to the valet, then pulled out again and parked on a meter half a block down from the hotel. If Ria was in real trouble, I’d rather not have to wait for the valet to retrieve my car. And if it was police trouble, which I was sure it would be, I’d rather not come through the lobby with a smoking-hot redhead on my arm. Ria was the kind of woman people would remember later, even if they only passed her in the corridor.

I got out of my car and clipped my gun to my belt and pulled my shirttail down over it. I unpocketed my phone and called Ria as I walked toward the hotel. She picked up midway into the first ring.

"It’s Matt. I’m outside the hotel. What room are you in?"

"Twelve-seventeen. Hurry." She was calmer, but her voice still had jags around the edges.

"I’ll be right up. I’ll knock two short and two long. Don’t answer the door unless you hear that, and check the peephole even if you do."

I was at the lobby entrance now. The kid at the valet stand eyed my t-shirt and jeans with professionally concealed distaste and then wished me a good evening. "Back at ya," I said, and went on through to the lobby.

I ignored the perfunctory greetings from the lobby staff and headed toward the elevator banks. For once in my life, there was an elevator waiting when I pushed the button. I boarded and hit the door-close button before anyone else could show up wanting a ride. While the elevator was ascending to 12 I unholstered my .38 and flipped out the cylinder. They do that in the movies because it looks cool. I do it because when I’m in a tense situation I always get paranoid that maybe I forgot to load the damn thing. It was loaded this time, as it always is. The elevator was just passing the fourth floor. I stowed the gun and bounced on my feet and shook out my arms. This goddamn elevator was taking forever. I took deep breaths and let them out and tried not to be too terrified of what might be waiting for me in Twelve-seventeen. The elevator was passing the seventh floor. If Ria was still alive and making phone calls, whatever trouble she was in couldn’t be too dangerous. No reason to worry. Unless she was planning to brain me with a candlestick as soon as I walked in. She didn’t seem the type, but did I trust her? No way. The elevator crept past floor nine. Of course, she was awfully tiny. I could probably take her in a fight. Unless she’d called Sharky back to finish the job. I took a few more deep breaths. I was doing a bang-up job calming myself down. The elevator slid past the eleventh floor. I tried to shrug the tension out of my shoulders and only succeeded in making them even tighter. The muscles were vibrating. I suddenly had to piss very badly. The elevator chimed and the door opened on the twelfth floor.

###

Ria opened the door barely wide enough to show one wide, dark eye. She peered at me for a long moment, as if deciding whether I really was who I looked like. Then she opened the door another few inches and said "Come in" and stood aside.

I had to squeeze into the room sideways, and she immediately closed and locked the door behind me. She swung the security latch into place and turned around and looked at me. I looked back at her and didn’t like what I saw. Her skin, already naturally pale, had a nasty, chalky cast. Her eyes were wide and hollow. One side of her face was puffy and starting to swell, and I could tell she’d have some nasty bruising there before too long.

She was wearing a form-fitting black sheath dress so short it almost qualified as a shirt. Her feet were bare. She’d exchanged her pink toenail polish for blood red, I noticed.

"What happened?" I said.

"In here," she said.

The room was a suite. Ria led me through the living room and into the bedroom.

"Fuck," I said.

Sharky was here, all right, but I doubted he’d be finishing any jobs anytime soon. He lay splayed on the bed, his feet resting on the floor as if he’d been sitting on the foot of the bed and had fallen straight back. His pants were around his ankles. There was a Glock 9-millimeter on the floor by his right foot. A black leather purse lay by his left foot, its contents spilling out. His knees splayed outward obscenely. His hands were around his own throat, and for one crazy instant I thought maybe I’d walked in on some sort of autoerotic asphyxia session. But only for an instant. For one thing, I doubted even the most determined masturbator could manually strangle himself to death. And I’d noticed the wooden handle protruding from the underside of his jaw.

"He tried to make me suck his cock," Ria said. "Before--"

"Later," I said. I walked over to the bed and knelt down on my haunches and looked at Sharky. Sharky looked at the ceiling. The wooden handle, cylindrical and rounded at the end, jutted from the underside of his chin like some phallic goatee. Or maybe not. Maybe I was seeing so many people in various states of undress in this case that I was getting a little over-Freudian.

I leaned over Sharky and drew his lips back. He didn’t seem to mind. A cylinder of steel erupted from under his tongue and disappeared into his soft palate. I knew that cylinder terminated in a point that had probably come to rest somewhere in his midbrain.

I stood up and turned to Ria. "An icepick?" I said. "Very Basic Instinct of you."

"He was going to kill me," Ria said. Her voice was dull and she still had that wide, vacant look in her eyes. "He was..." She just stopped then, like she was wound down and needed a recharge.

I took her arm and led her into the living room and sat her down on the couch. "Look, we’ll worry about the details later," I said. "Right now I just need to know if you checked into this room under your own name."

"What? No. Didn’t check in. Jackie’s people set these things up. They just give me the key."

That’s what I’d been hoping. She was here as an escort -- or at least that’s what she’d been told -- and hadn’t checked into the room herself.

"Okay," I said. "I want you to sit right where you are. Don’t get up, not even to go to the bathroom. Don’t touch anything. Just sit. This’ll take a few minutes."

I went back into the bedroom and went through Sharky’s pockets. They yielded nothing of interest, not even a cell phone. There was a ticket stub for the valet, which struck me as foolish of him, considering the errand on which he had most likely come. I’d have liked to toss his car, but I didn’t want to take any more time than I had to. I tucked the valet ticket into my pocket and made a mental note to throw it away somewhere far from here. I couldn’t toss the car tonight, and tomorrow would be too late. Someone would have missed him by then, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to present a dead man’s ticket to the valet and hope for the best.

I spent the next several minutes wiping down the room. I was getting good at this. My week for covering up hotel murders, I guess. The last thing I wiped down was the handle protruding from Sharky’s chin. The icepick rotated slightly under my hand and a faint, gristly sound came from the inside of Sharky’s skull. My stomach lurched and I was afraid I would vomit. I moaned and took a few deep breaths and fought it back. I scooped up the purse and its contents and got out of there.

Then I wiped down all the surfaces in the bathroom, then went into the living room and continued the process there. Ria watched me with distant interest but didn’t say anything.

I finished wiping the room down. On the writing desk I found a hairbrush. A pair of tasteful black high heels sat by the chair. I put the brush in the purse and picked up the shoes and brought them to Ria. She took the bag and put on the shoes without comment.

"Did you bring anything else?" I asked. She shook her head. "Good," I said. "Let’s go."

I opened the door with my handkerchief and held it for Ria, then hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the outer handle, wiped that down, and let the door swing shut. We walked to the elevator bank and I hit the call button. Ria didn’t say anything or look at me while we waited for the elevator, and she didn’t say anything or look at me on the way down.

We got off at the second floor and I found a staircase that took us to a first-floor vending area far from the lobby. We went out a side door and I led Ria the half-block to my car. She walked beside me in silence the whole way. We got in and I started the engine and pulled into the light late-night traffic. Ria stared out her window and continued saying nothing.

I found an entrance ramp and got onto 95 North toward the island. Then I glanced over at Ria.

"So what the fuck was that all about?" I said.

Next Chapter: FOURTEEN