The Sexiest Man Alive (11 page)

“Yes, ma’am, me and stoves get along fine. I’ve been cooking for myself since I got divorced.”

How weird to have Johnny Hoolihan brushing up alongside her in the galley-size room instead of Labeck, Mazie thought; to feel the electric bristle of his arm hair, smell his aftershave, have his wide shoulders taking up too much room. She kept stealing sideways glances at him. His biceps bulged beneath a casual summer shirt with rolled sleeves, and his well-worn jeans clung very nicely to his butt.

“Are you thirsty?” Mazie asked.

Johnny nodded. “Dry as a desert.”

Her fridge was an ancient, round-shouldered Amana that hummed in the key of G and felt to Mazie like a large, companionable white cat. Mazie opened it, shoved aside orange juice and
milk, and found a single bottle of beer in the back—the last of a six-pack she’d bought for Labeck back when she was still the sappy little girlfriend who waited around for him to come over. Tough luck, Fish Boy. She handed the beer and a church key to Johnny.

“Heineken,” he said, lifting the bottle in a toast to her. “Living high on the hog, Mazie.” He took a long, thirsty pull, chugged a third of it, burped, punched his chest, and sighed contently. “Hey, where’s yours?” he asked.

“I don’t like beer.”

“A down-home Wisconsin girl like you—shame, shame.”

“I know. Uncool. But there’s only enough room on my thighs for beer or chocolate, and when the rubber meets the road, it’s chocolate by a mile.”

This made Johnny smile. He had one of the best male jaws she’d ever seen, strong, square, and perfectly balanced with his lean face. His eyes were long and narrow, the grayish blue of Lake Michigan in early spring. At the moment, they were lingering on the very thighs she’d mentioned. Reddening, Mazie quickly turned away, setting the bass fillets into the hot oil, because she had the dizzying sensation of standing on the lip of a cliff and teetering. And her with a fear of heights.

She’d gone to high school with Johnny, who was a year ahead of her and had a reputation for fighting, doping, and drinking—an all-around badass who drew girls to him like moths to a porch light. Johnny Hoolihan—mad, bad, and dangerous to know—had survived one scrape after another, charmed his way out of half of them, and was voted the kid most likely to end up in the state pen. Instead, he’d joined the navy after high school and had returned to Quail Hollow five years later and been hired onto the town’s police force.

He came and stood next to her at the stove, watching the fish cook. It wasn’t going to take long, maybe another three or four minutes. “Why are you here?” Mazie asked bluntly.

“Because we’re old high school buddies and I thought you might be able to help me,” Johnny said.

She turned to look at him, surprised. She had to look up because, even in her torture-device heels, he was a lot taller than she was, about the same height as Labeck. “Help with what?”

“You remember the Yatts?” Johnny asked.

“The Yatts? Sure. Criminals, hoods, very scary guys. Mothers used to make their kids
behave by telling them the Yatts would get them. Are they still around? I thought that lot had been scooped up and tossed in prison years ago.”

Johnny shook his head. “A lot of ’em are out now. There’s a huge tribe of ’em, all related, in southwest Wisconsin. The Yatts are the biggest drug distributors in the upper Midwest—coke, heroin, pot, meth—you name it, they sell it. But drugs are just part of their operation. They also extort protection money from small businesses, run teenage girls as prostitutes, and use their biker gang to terrorize towns out in the boonies. You’ve heard of the Skulls biker gang, haven’t you?”

“Sure.” Mazie tested the fish, decided that the fillets were cooked to exactly the right degree of flakiness, and removed the pan from the burner. Where had she heard the Skulls mentioned recently? Why, from her mom, of all people. “Didn’t they just kill somebody?”

Johnny nodded. “Two people were shot to death. Gang executions.”

Mazie stared at him, wide-eyed. “Gang executions in Quail Hollow!”

“Outside the town but in my jurisdiction. You got some plates?”

Mazie nodded toward a cupboard and Johnny got down plates and put them on her kitchen table. She set the fish on the plates and turned to take the fries out of the oven.

“Here, let me.” Johnny gently moved her aside. “You don’t want to get your pretty dress dirty.”

“My mom said the Skulls killed Ricky Lee Tatum. Is that true?” Mazie asked.

“You know him?”

“No, but I went to school with his older sisters.”

“Well, Ricky Lee did not grow up to be a nice guy. He’s been in a lot of nasty stuff—he beat up an old man for accidentally bumping his bike, he helped firebomb a bar, and he threw in with the Skulls a couple of years ago, became one of their drug runners.”

“Why haven’t you arrested him?”

“Oh, he’s been in and out of jail, but lately we’d just been keeping tabs on him undercover, hoping he’d lead us to even bigger fish—no pun intended.”

“Who’s
we
?” Mazie set out ketchup, tartar sauce, rye bread, and cheese. There was no more beer, so she poured out the remainder of a bottle of supermarket pinot grigio, now slightly flat, into two glasses. His stomach audibly rumbling, Johnny sat down across from her.

“
We
are the DEA guys, state cops, county cops, and the Quail Hollow PD—the low guys
on the totem pole, but they need us because we know the locals.”

He swallowed a bite of fish, rolled his eyes. “Mazie, this is incredible.”

“Thanks—but you helped.”

“I was always fascinated by the Yatts.” Johnny dipped a French fry in ketchup. “I was a pretend bad boy—you know, acting like a punk to impress the girls, but I still went home at night and did my school work. The Yatts, though—they’re dyed-in-the-wool baddies. They started out as moonshiners and bootleggers back in the 1920s, with stills all over the backwoods. Once Prohibition ended, the Yatts turned to bank robbery and livestock stealing. But they never made big money until the 1970s, when they started distributing drugs. By then a man named Reuben Yatt was running the business, connected with a crime syndicate on the Gulf Coast.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“It ought to,” Johnny said. “He runs his empire the way the old Mafia ran their organization—by bumping off his rivals and using the motorcycle gang he started to terrorize people.”

“The Skulls, you mean?”

“Yup. Reuben’s got a whole slew of sons and grandsons, all of them in the family business—they call him Papa Yatt. Looking at him, you’d think Reuben was a dirt farmer from back in the hills. Big belly, bushy beard, likes to thump the Bible and quote neo-Nazi propaganda. He runs a dozen legitimate businesses and buys up properties in the Coulee County area, but that’s all a cover—a way for him to conceal his illegal operations and launder his drug money.”

“I had no idea this stuff was going on. Can’t he be arrested and sent to prison?”

“We’re trying. We thought we were going to nail him for this murder. It happened in an old vegetable cannery just outside Quail Hollow. Someone—we think it might have been Papa Yatt himself—shot Ricky Lee Tatum and Cody Yatt to death there.”

“Cody
Yatt
?”

“The old man’s own grandson. Rubbed him out to send a message to any family members who were getting ideas about taking over the operation.”

Mazie shuddered, unable to believe that such horrible things could happen in the peaceful community where she’d grown up.

“There was only one non-gang witness to what happened in the cannery that night,”
Johnny went on. “Tatum’s girlfriend. Her name is Shayla Connelly, she’s just eighteen years old, and she ran away the night of the murder.”

“Connelly. Is she related to Sandy Connelly, the woman who works at the IGA store?”

“Shayla’s her daughter.”

“That’s a nice family. How did the girl get messed up in this?”

Johnny shook his head, suddenly looking tired. “Who knows? She’s just a kid. She was only sixteen when she started seeing that punk Tatum. She dropped out of high school so she could be with him.”

“You think Shayla saw Ricky get gunned down?”

“Gunned down makes it sound like a gunfight, but those boys were shot in the back of the head, execution style. A 911 call came in from that location that night, a girl’s voice pleading for an ambulance to be sent.”

“And that was Shayla? But wouldn’t they have killed her, too, if she witnessed—”

“She lit out. Drove Ricky Lee’s car as far as the outskirts of Milwaukee, where it ran out of gas. From there she just disappeared. We’ve had every law enforcement official in the state keeping an eye out for her, but no luck so far.”

“What does she look like?”

Johnny considered. “Skinny little thing, not much bigger than you, brown hair, green eyes—even looks a little like you. You’re not related, are you?”

“To the Connellys? Possibly. Maybe third or fourth cousins. Everybody in Quail Hollow is related to everybody else.”

He gazed at Mazie, a glint in his eyes. “We could be kissing cousins.”

She smiled. “That would explain a lot.”

“Anyway, I need to find Shayla before the Skulls do because if they find her, they’ll kill her.” Johnny got up, picked up their empty plates, and carried them to the sink. “Shayla’s mom told me she thought Shayla might be with her cousin Brandi, who lives in Milwaukee. She didn’t know an address, just that Brandi worked in a bar and it had something to do with pigs. Pigtown or something like that.”

“Not Piggsville?” Mazie asked.

Johnny shrugged. “Dunno. I’m just a hick from the sticks.”

“Well, there’s a place in the city called Piggsville. And there’s a bar there called the Hog
Wild.”

Johnny looked interested. “Yeah? Where is this Pigville?”

“
Piggsville
. It’s sort of under the Wisconsin Avenue viaduct—”

“Wait a sec.” Johnny fumbled in his pocket and took out a small notebook. “I better write this down.” He looked at her sheepishly. “Hate to admit this, but I got lost on the Milwaukee freeways. I was halfway to Sheboygan before I realized I was going the wrong way.” He looked at her expectantly, poised to write.

“You need to get back on the interstate and go west, but to get to the interstate from here, you’ve got to—oh, it’s too complicated to explain! I can show you instead, ride shotgun with you.”

“No. I can’t let you do that, Mazie. I’m sorry, but it’s against regulations.”

“Come on, Johnny—I’m really good at this kind of thing. I know how a fugitive thinks. After all, I was one myself.”

“No.” Johnny pulled on his cop face: hard, determined, official. “Absolutely not. And don’t try to sweet-talk me into it, Mazie Maguire, because it’s not going to work.”

Half an hour later Mazie and Johnny were in Piggsville. It was a tiny burg in the middle of Milwaukee’s industrial valley, shadowed by the enormous Wisconsin Avenue viaduct and squashed into about twenty square blocks between the towering silos of the Miller Brewery and a drainage canal. Its houses were mostly century-old brick bungalows, compact and sturdily built to withstand Midwest winters and the occasional car muffler that shot off the viaduct. Piggsville had a kind of land-that-time-forgot flavor, maybe because its streets all dead-ended at the canal and it was cut off from the rest of the city, accessible only by Forty-First Street.

Hog Wild was a two-story wooden building with neon beer signs winking in its windows and its doors wide open to the night air. Mazie and Johnny could hear the thump of its jukebox as soon as they stepped out of the car. Mazie figured they’d be in and out in five minutes. It was nearly midnight, the temperature had cooled into the low sixties, and Mazie was glad she’d changed into jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.

“Ready?” Johnny asked. He pulled on a baseball cap. Protective coloration. In blue-collar Milwaukee, no guy was ever seen without his cap, indoors or out. He slid an arm around Mazie’s waist and she looked at him, startled. “We’re a couple, right?” he said, winking. “We’ve got to blend in.”

Mazie didn’t object. Johnny’s arm felt good. She slung her own arm around his waist and they walked up the steps and into the bar. Inside, they were assaulted by country music from the jukebox: songs about women who left you, buddies who wrecked your truck, and dogs who died on you. The pool table was getting a workout, the bar was two-deep, and boilermakers were the drink of choice.

The bartender was a bald, heavyset man with drooping handlebar mustaches that appeared to have been dyed with shoe polish. Red-faced, he was hustling to keep up with his customers’ demands. Johnny found a spot at the bar, pulled Mazie in next to him, and draped his arm around her shoulder. The bartender came over, using the towel tied to his waist to mop his sweaty brow. “What’ll it be, folks?” he asked.

“Two drafts,” Johnny said.

“Comin’ right up.”

The bartender moved to the taps.

“How come you’re allowed to drink on duty?” Mazie asked Johnny.

“I’m not on duty,” Johnny said. “I’m doing this on my own time. Anyway, how would it look if I came in a bar and ordered a ginger ale?” He turned casually, resting his elbows on the bar and surveying the crowded room. “No sign of Shayla,” he muttered. “But I’d like to bust those kids in the corner for fake IDs.”

“How are you going to find out if this Brandi works here?”

“Cunning and—”

“Brandi,” the bartender yelled. “Where’s the ice? You were supposed to bring up a new bag an hour ago.”

“Hold your damn shirt on.” A young woman who’d been clearing off tables ambled up to the bar holding a tray loaded with dirty bottles and glasses. She was in her early twenties, Mazie guessed, with a skinny build, straggly blond hair, and a lot of eye makeup. She wore a bar apron over a T-shirt and leggings and clearly resented being yelled at in front of the customers.

“Could be her,” Johnny said. “She’s about the right age.”

The bartender brought their beers and Johnny paid for them. Mazie took a sip of her beer, trying not to make a face. Johnny reached over and ran his thumb along Mazie’s upper lip. “Foam,” he said, smiling. His touch left Mazie wanting more.