Nash had good taste in music, but he blasted it a little too loud. He pulled a half-roasted joint from the ashtray, lit it, and took a deep drag before offering it to me.
“No thanks,” I said. “Have to keep my wits sharp when I’m on a case, you know.”
“Probably all for the best,” he said, then passed the joint back to Holt.
This was unexpected. Somehow you just don’t figure on a rich-kid wide receiver also being a stoner.
“You know,” I said as the weed smoke billowed around me, “I would’ve thought the cops would question you—you being one of the ex-boyfriends and all.”
“Who says they didn’t?”
“This weed has an evergreen-like, almost sweet taste to it,” Holt said. “Not too sweet and not too harsh. A decent pre-party blend.” He sounded like a wine connoisseur.
“You mean the cops did talk to you?” I asked Nash.
“Sure. They talked to a lot of people.”
“What’d they ask?”
“Oh, you know, the usual—Why did you and Ashton break up? Did she have any enemies? Where were you when she went missing? That kind of thing.”
Of course, I’d thought of asking him where he was when Ashton disappeared, but I didn’t want to come across as so obvious. My theory was you don’t want people thinking you suspect them of anything. That way they’re likely to be less guarded. But now that he’d mentioned it, I had my opening.
“So, what did you tell them about where you were?”
“The truth—I was at football practice.”
That sounded like a strong alibi to me. Which was a relief. I was starting to really like Nash. I’d never had a cool friend like him, and I didn’t want anything to spoil that—like him being guilty of kidnapping or murder.
A little east of the heart of downtown and north of the entertainment district, we turned down an alley next to what looked like an abandoned warehouse. You wouldn’t expect an alley like this to be lined by high-dollar luxury cars, but there they were. And more were parked in the small lot by the loading dock at the back of the warehouse. One spot was left open and Nash pulled into it. I mentioned that he was lucky to get the spot, but he said luck had nothing to do with it. The spot was reserved for him. Too bad there was no reserved parking for Audrey and Randy. They had to park a block away and hoof it back to where we waited next to the Lexus.
The warehouse was a solid squat thing made out of red brick. The few small windows had been sealed and painted black, and the metal sliding door on the loading dock was shut. As we stepped onto the dock, Randy’s like, “What the hell are we doing here?”
And Nash goes, “This is it, brother. This is Gangland.”
Next to the big sliding door was a smaller one, also made of metal. Nash banged on it a couple of times and a narrow slot, about at eye level, clicked to the side. A second later the door opened. Nash looked back at us with a smile. “Après vous,” he said, which I figured meant something like “Go on in.”
Unlike the pool hall, the inside of the warehouse was way different from the outside. Yes, the inside walls were also red brick, but they’d been polished to a shine. Gold-framed movie posters hung on one wall, all of them from one gangster movie or another—Juice, Scarface, The Godfather, GoodFellas, American Gangster, even some from old black-and-white movies like ones I used to watch with my dad—White Heat, The Roaring Twenties, and Little Caesar. On the opposite wall hung posters of all the great gangsta rappers like Ice-T, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Insidious, and on and on.
The glow of red neon lights hung over everything like the atmosphere of some foreign planet. A mirrored disco ball swayed above a stage at the far end of the spacious warehouse, and on the stage sat a drum kit, keyboards, and a couple of racks with electric guitars in them. No band yet, though. The rest of the room was filled with teenagers, mingling, talking, laughing, apparently from Hollister and maybe some of the other hoity-toity schools in the area. And the biggest difference between Gangland and Trang’s? Loads of girls.
Randy’s like, “Wow, this place has more perfect female bodies than a mannequin factory.”
“You can put your tongue back in your mouth now,” Audrey told him. “You’re starting to drool.”
As we made our way along the gangster-movie wall, Nash goes, “Pretty cool place, huh?”
And I’m like, “Yeah, this is the greatest. Who owns it?”
“Rowan Adams and I. Well, we don’t actually own it—we just run it. Rowan’s dad owns the warehouse. He owns property all over the city, but real estate being what it is these days, he’s just holding on to it till he can get a better price. Meantime, he let us fix it up for our extracurricular activities.”
“Must be nice,” I said. “What’s with the name Gangland?”
“Just a little game we have going. Over the summer Rowan and I were kicking around ideas about how to make our senior year monumental, and we decided to start our own gangs.”
“Your own gangs?”
“Yeah. He’s the godfather of one and I’m the godfather of the other. Only instead of having turf battles and drug wars and whatnot, we have these different contests, and the gang that loses the most by the end of the school year has to pay for the biggest graduation party in the history of graduation parties.”
“And Gangland is your headquarters?”
“Something like that. We call it our ‘rec hall.’ That’s what we tell our parents, anyway.”