Free Thread of Fear by Jeff Shelby Page A

were gentlemen's clubs and entertainment venues instead.
    The ledgers showed daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly revenue and expenditure numbers. All of them were doing extremely well, based on the numbers I'd read. The gentlemen's club business was thriving in Las Vegas, as one might expect. But there wasn't a single file on his entire computer that said a word about real estate development or tenant rates or property purchases. Because Patrick Dennison wasn't a real estate developer.
    It looked to me like he was an accountant.
    I hadn't called Anchor yet to verify my conclusion because I wanted to stay as far away from him as I could until I didn't have a choice. However, based on what I'd found, I was fairly certain that Dennison was doing the books for properties that Anchor's organization owned. It all felt very stereotypical and clichéd – the Mob running strip clubs in Vegas – but sometimes stereotypes and clichés existed for a reason.
    So I wondered if Dennison was hitting those clubs on a daily basis, either to run their numbers or even collect money. If so, the people who worked in them would be pretty familiar with him. And if he was spending most of his workday in those clubs, I wondered if Carina Armstrong was an employee or a regular customer at one of them.
    The first five I hit confirmed that Dennison did spend some time there, as they all acknowledged one way or another that they knew him. No, they hadn't seen him for a few days and, no, they didn't know who Carina Armstrong was, either.
    But when I showed my driver's license to the big guy working the door at Ted's, a sizable club with valet parking and a ten dollar cover in the middle of the day on the south side of the city, I also asked if Carina was around that day.
    “Like always,” he said, flashing a small penlight at my license before holding it up to the sunlight, just outside of the canopy we were standing under. He handed it back to me. “If she's not behind the bar, she's around somewhere.”
    I thanked him, tipped him five bucks, and he unhooked the velvet rope that blocked off the entrance. A dark-haired woman wearing a long-sleeved white blouse that glowed pink in the black light of the hallway greeted me from behind a podium.
    “Ten dollar cover,” she told me, her teeth glowing an unnatural shade of white. “And fifteen dollar drink minimum once you're inside.”
    I handed her a ten and asked about Carina.
    “Oh, yeah, she's here,” she said, nodding and tucking the money somewhere down below the podium. “Check with Cindy at the bar.”
    A heavy bass beat thumped through the walls and I continued down the black-lit hall until I was in a small foyer. Another woman in a white blouse and black mini-skirt greeted me, wanting to know if I needed to check my coat. Since I wasn't wearing one, I told her I was fine. She smiled and pulled back the heavy black drape and told me to have a good time.
    My eyes adjusted to the neon lights as soon as I stepped past the curtain. A huge rectangular stage stood in the middle of the room, a half-naked blond gyrating against the pole as some song I didn't recognize blasted from the speakers. It was more crowded than I'd expected. Most of the tables near the stage were taken up by guys in ties and sport coats, alternately glancing at the blond and talking to their colleagues. Behind the stage, I saw a bar that ran the length of the back wall and I made my down to it.
    As soon as I sat, another girl in a white blouse, this one with short dark hair, hustled over to me from behind the bar. “Good afternoon. What can I get you?”
    “Something on tap,” I said, looking behind her at the tap handles. “Stella's good.”
    She nodded, fetched a pint glass from beneath the bar and expertly filled it, angling it to the side, minimizing the head. She set it on the bar in front of me. “You wanna run a tab?”
    I pulled out a twenty and slid it across to her. “Nah, I'm good for now. All yours.”
    She