[center][b]Jock Sturgeon Part IV: Clip Joint[/b] [/center] [b]The Pepper Mill 9:04 PM[/b] I walked through the loud music and flashing lights of the strip club with something approaching envy. Not envy towards the men and the beautiful women in their laps, but to the women sitting on the men's laps. Flashing a little bit of their flesh got these men to empty their wallets on dances were they could not touch them, a rule that was violently enforced in the club, and pay for watered down drinks that cost twenty dollars a pop. There's a con that you can run out of these places called the clip joint, but it just involves jacking up prices on dances and drinks and making up fees to charge marks. It was a needlessly greedy con in my opinion. These places were licences to print money if you could work them right. I found the Ambulance Chaser in the back of the club, mid-motorboat in a private booth. The Stafford Twins sat off to the side of the booth, both of them on their phones so they wouldn't have spotted me even if I had come in leading a marching band. The stripper spotted me, though. She paused in the middle of grinding on Fitzwaller's lap to star at me. I liked to say that I kept eye contact with her... but that would be a lie. "If you're gonna watch, it's gonna you twenty bucks," said the stripper. "No free previews, hun." "What are you doing here, Sturgeon?" Fitzwaller asked. "Looking for the future ex-Mrs. Sturgeon," I said before smiling at the stripper. "Hi, I'm Jock. I have a lot of money, very weak impulse control, and I don't like pre-nups." The twins were back on the job before she could respond. Two sets of arms, one strong and the other not so much, found themselves wrapped around my arms and were pushing me away from the booth. "I just got a few questions," I tried to yell over the music. "Stop," said Fitzwaller. He nudged the stripper off his lap and started to stand, until he realized he was in no physical position to stand and not show off his -- what's a good legal pun? -- gavel, there we go. Yeah, standing would show me and the rest of the club his gavel. "Be brief, Sturgeon." The twins let me go and I looked at them with the smuggest look I was capable of before turning back to their boss. "When you set up a... asset liquidation." "What?" asked Johnny Stafford. "What's that mean?" "He's talking in code, dumbass," said Jimmy Stafford. "When the boss sets up a hit." "Way to crack the code," I said with a sigh. "Fitzwaller, how many go-betweens deep is the chain when you... set up a hit." "Five or six deep," said Fitzwaller. "Well insulated." "Okay," I said with a nod. "And one more thing, did you take pictures of the burglary?" "Yes, with my phone. Why couldn't this wait until the morning, Sturgeon?" "Because I have an idea. Just... text me those photos and I think I'll have an answer by the morning." I started to leave, but pulled up short. "On more thing," I said as I produced a card and handed it to the stripper. "If you ever want to make real money, give me a call." --- [b]Chinatown 11:40 AM[/b] Back to the scene of the crime. I mean that in the most technical sense since there is in fact crime scene tape on Fat Ricky Fat's apartment door. The door was unlocked, but a large red piece of tape ran down the door as a seal. I cut it with a box knife I always carried and slipped inside. The smell of blood and death were still heavy in the apartment and the clutter from the ransack was a little more tidy. I assumed the cops had cleaned up after processing the scene. It was in the middle of the apartment that I tried to put the puzzle pieces together. Fat Ricky Fat breaks into the Ambulance Chaser's office. A sloppy job from the pictures Fitzwaller sent me. Door was left open, the safe was wide open. He takes off with all of Fitzwaller's incriminating documents and... ends up dead. He was tortured so it seems that he wasn't prepared to give the papers up to whoever was the torturing him. Soon after Ricky Fat's death, our handsome hero Jock Sturgeon breaks in and finds Ricky Fat dead just as the possible killer returns to look through the apartment. The lack of time they spent here in the second time meant that they either found what they were looking for quickly, or they knew someone had been here and high-tailed it. I decided to bet on the latter assumption and go through the apartment to see what I could find. It's highly unlikely Ricky kept his burglar stash in the apartment, but I look in all the conventional places like bookcases and under mattresses. I found a couple grand in hidden money and some very weird porn that I'm sure Ricky would have destroyed before he died. Nothing in the living room worth mentioning. The kitchen had a sink full of dirty dishes and a fridge filled with old takeout containers. The cabinets were stocked with snacks and sodas and, I guess for the hell of it, a box of granola bars. I started to close the cabinet door before I stopped suddenly. Wait. Granola bars? Fat Ricky Fat's nickname wasn't one of the ironic ones. He was a four hundred pounder, the textbook definition of morbidly obese. Why in the hell would a guy who inhaled Little Debbie cakes have a box or health food? I reached up and plucked the box from the cabinet. It was crudely opened and heavy, heavier than a box should be. I flipped it open and found pay dirt inside. Paper rolled up tightly with a rubber band and stuffed inside the box. I took the papers out of the box and unrolled them. On top was the network Fitzwaller used in his most recent job. He was right, there were six cut-outs between himself and Irish Tom at the very bottom. The client nor the victim were listed on the paper. But that didn't matter. Because there were two names in the middle of the chain that told me all I needed to know. It all clicked into place and just like that, I knew who Fat Ricky Fat had stolen the documents for, and who had killed him. I sighed and rolled them back up and stuffed them into my pocket. It would all have to wait until tomorrow afternoon. I had an appointment bright and early tomorrow morning to steal half a million dollars from out under Sean Dunmoore's nose.