"Let's take Delilah's last," I said. "Maybe we'll get lucky before we need to go there."

"The bikes?" "Yeah, the bikes. They're Road Saints. I say let sleeping dogs lie."

"Good enough for me."

Leading the way, Rachel marched toward the front door of Sheila's. She didn't wait for me because she knew I would be following in her wake.

Inside Sheila's we were greeted by the sickly sweet smell of perfume mixed with too much incense… We were also greeted by a smiling woman in a purple kimono who did not seem the least bit surprised or put out by the idea of a couple coming into the brothel. Her mouth drew into an edge as straight and sharp as a guillotine's when she saw the FBI credentials Rachel flipped open.

"That's nice," she said with a falsely pleasant note in her voice. "Now let me see the warrant."

"No warrant today," Rachel replied evenly. "We would just like to ask a few questions."

"I don't have to speak with you unless you have a court order telling me to. I run a legal and fully licensed business here."

I noticed two women dressed in a page from Victoria 's Secret sitting on a couch nearby. They were watching a television soap opera and seemingly uninterested in the verbal skirmish brewing at the front door. They were both attractive in a certain way but worn down around the eyes and mouths. The scene suddenly reminded me of my mother and some of her friends. The way they looked to me when I was a boy and I watched them getting ready to go out at night and work. I suddenly felt completely ill at ease in this place and wanted to go. I even hoped the woman in the kimono would succeed in sending us out.

"No one is doubting the legality of your operation," Rachel said. "We simply need to ask a few questions of you and… your staff and then we'll be gone."

"Get the court order and we'll be happy to oblige."

"Are you Sheila?"

"You can call me that. You can call me anything you want as long as you're saying good-bye when you do it."

Rachel raised the ante by going to her don't-fuck-with-me voice.

"If I go for that court order, I'm going to first call for a sheriff's unit and I will have that car sit out in front of this trailer until I get back. You might run a legal operation here, Sheila, but which one of these places are all the guys going to pick when they see the sheriff sitting on this one? I figure two hours back to Vegas, a few hours waiting to get in to see the judge and then two hours back. I'm off at five so I probably won't be back till tomorrow. That okay with you?"

Sheila came back hard and swift.

"If you call the sheriff, ask him to send out Dennis or Tommy. They know the place real well and they're also customers."

She smirked at Rachel and held firm. She'd called her bluff and Rachel had nothing left. They just stared at each other as the moments went by. I was about to step in and say something when one of the women on the couch beat me to the punch.

"She?" the one closest to us offered. "Let's just get it over with."

Sheila broke her stare from Rachel and looked at the woman on the couch. She then backed down but her anger remained barely below the surface. I'm not sure there was any other way to handle it once Sheila jumped on us like that, but it was clear to me that all the posturing and threatening was going to end up getting us nothing.

We set up in Sheila's small office and interviewed the women one by one, starting with Sheila and ending with two women who were working when we first entered the establishment. Rachel never introduced me to anyone, so the problem of my standing in the investigation never came up. Uniformly the women could not or would not identify any of the missing men who ended up in the ground in Zzyzx and the same went for the photographs of Shandy on McCaleb's boat.

At the end of a half hour we were out of there with nothing to show for it but an incense intoxication headache for me and stress fractures in Rachel's outlook.

"Disgusting," she said as we walked down the pink sidewalk toward my car.

"What?"

"That place. I don't know how anyone could do that."

"I thought you said they were slaves."

"Look, it's not your job to throw things back at me."

"Right."

"What are you so upset about? I didn't see you in there saying anything to her. You were a big help." "That's because I wouldn't have done it that way. Two minutes into that place I knew we wouldn't get anything."

"Oh, and you would have."

"No, I'm not saying that. I told you, these places are like rocks. It's hard to get water. And bringing up the sheriff was definitely the wrong way to go. I told you, half his pay probably comes from the brothels in his territory."

"So you just want to criticize and not offer any solution."

"Look, Rachel, point your gun at somebody else. I'm not the one you're angry with, all right? If you want to try something different in this next place I'll give it a shot."

"Go right ahead."

"All right then, give me the photos and you wait in the car."

"What are you talking about? I'm going in."

"This is not the place for the pomp and circumstance, Rachel. I should've realized that when I invited you. But I didn't think you'd be shoving your badge down people's throats as soon as you walked in."

"So you're going to go in there and finesse it"

"I'm not sure I'd call it finesse. I'm just going to do it the old-fashioned way."

"Does that mean taking off your clothes?"

"No, it means taking out my wallet."

"The FBI doesn't buy information from potential witnesses."

"That's right. I'm not the FBI. If I find a witness this way, the FBI won't have to pay a thing."

I put my hand on her back and gently directed her to the Mercedes. I opened the door for her and ushered her in. I gave her the keys.

"Turn on the air conditioner. Either way, this shouldn't take too long."

I rolled the file up with the photos and put it into my back pocket under my jacket.

The sidewalk leading to the door of Tawny's High Five was also made of pink cement and I was beginning to see the appropriateness of that. The women we had encountered in Sheila's were hard cases with pink lining. And so was Rachel. I was beginning to feel like my feet were in buckets of pink cement.

I buzzed the door and was let in by a woman who was dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a halter top that barely contained her apparently surgically enhanced breasts.

"Come on in. I'm Tammy."

"Thanks."

I stepped into the front room of the trailer, where there were two couches facing each other on opposite walls. Three women sat on the couches and looked at me with practiced smiles.

"This is Georgette and Gloria and Mecca," Tammy said. "And I'm Tammy. You can choose one of us now or wait for Tawny. She's in the back with a customer."

I looked at Tammy. She seemed the most eager. She was very small and top heavy and had short brown hair. She would be considered attractive to some men but not to me. I told her she would do just fine and she led me back through a hallway that turned to the right and into another trailer. There were three private rooms on the left and she went to the third one and used a key to open it. We went in and she closed the door but didn't lock it. There was barely enough room to stand because a king-size bed took up most of the space.

Tammy sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to her. I sat and she reached to a shelf full of well-thumbed mystery novels and pulled down what looked like a restaurant menu and gave it to me. It was a thin folder with a caricature drawing on the front. It showed a naked woman on her hands and knees and bent over, turning to look back at and wink at the man who was entering her from the rear. The man was naked, too, except for a cowboy hat and the holstered six-shooters on his hips. One hand was up in the air and holding a lasso. The rope rose above the couple and formed the words Tawny's High Five.