The way the guy said “perturbed” made me think the woman was going to start lopping off vital parts the next time she saw him.
“Already taken care of. When she called last night, and we finally put you and her together, I had the front desk tell her half our phone system was on the fritz, that you were indeed in your room, but you were sleeping and they didn’t want to disturb you. I think she bought it; I haven’t heard otherwise. If I were you, I’d give her a call. Maybe apologize for not being able to call out. Do you have a cell?”
He shook his head.
“You’re probably the only man on the face of the planet who doesn’t, but the story should hold water then.”
“I owe you one. How can I repay you?”
I ushered him out the door, stuffing my card in his hand as he was leaving.
“We’ll think of something.”
I turned to Miss Patterson. “Got anything for me?”
She adjusted her glasses on the end of her nose and consulted a notepad, which she still had to hold at arm’s length to read. “Three suites with appropriate welcome gifts are prepared for your friends from Hollywood. The menu is set for their awards dinner—you are Mr. Jones’s date, by the way. CNBC has been given the Golden Fleece Room. They are setting up their equipment as we speak. You have a meeting with the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock at two. The Trend-makers are coming by bus this afternoon around four. We will have refreshments for them in Delilah’s.”
“Another day at the zoo.” I blew at a strand of hair tickling my left eye. “Call Bert at the dealership, ask him if he could lend me something fast. I’ll have it back by two.”
I stepped around the wall that separated the reception area from a small coffee bar and opened the fridge. Raising my voice to be heard, I continued. “Call Human Resources. Tell them I need a couple of copies of our file photos of Felicia Reilly and the Weasel. On second thought, get me a couple of Paxton Dane also.” I grabbed two bottles of water, shutting the fridge with my foot. I rounded the corner just as the front door opened and Paxton Dane himself stepped through. I was glad he hadn’t arrived a few seconds earlier.
“I caught you. Good,” he said. “I have some news, and you’re not going to like it.”
“I knew this day was going too well.” I stuffed the water bottles in my Birkin and slung it over my shoulder. My baseball cap hung on the hat rack in the corner. I grabbed it and slapped it on my head as I handed my Nextel to Miss Patterson. “You know the drill,” I said to her.
“Don’t call you unless someone has a gun pointed to my head.”
“Right.” I turned my attention back to Dane, who was waiting not so patiently. “Now, what’s got your knickers in a twist?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. I wish he’d quit doing that.
“You know those security tapes from last night you requested? The ones of the elevators and tenth floor?”
“Of course.”
“Well, they’re missing.”
“Missing?”
“We looked everywhere. They’re gone.”
“I see.” It seemed I’d been saying that a lot lately when in fact I didn’t see at all.
Finally Dane noticed the hat on my head and the bag on my shoulder. “Going somewhere?”
“For a drive. Want to come?” The Big Boss had said to keep him close. Besides we needed to talk.
“You’re leaving so early in the duty day?” he said with a smile. This time the smile reached his eyes.
“Call me irresponsible.”
“I have a security briefing in a few minutes,” Dane said, looking a bit torn.
“You can miss it. I’ll fill you in.”
The phone rang and Miss Patterson picked up. She listened for a bit, then said, “That was Bert. He said, and I quote, ‘Your chariot awaits.’ ”
I grabbed another hat off the hat rack and handed it to Dane. “Here. If you’re going to play hooky with me, you’ll need this.”
MY chariot turned out to be a bright red Ferrari F-430 Spider with the roof retracted. I slipped behind the wheel. “You’re riding shotgun.”
Dane whistled low. “Some ride. Apparently your salary has a few more zeros than mine.”
“There are some perks to working for The Big Boss.”
“You must do more for him than I do.”
“No, I’ve just been at it longer.” I looked at Dane trying to determine whether he meant the implied insult or not.
Apparently oblivious to his faux pas, he was consumed by the car. His eyes shone with lust as he ran his fingers over the wood accents and the fine leather. Whoever said the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach had never watched a grown man with a Ferrari.
We climbed in, pulled the seat belts tight. I hit the start button and the engine caught with a low growl. “I’ve got a stop to make on our way out of town. Hope you don’t mind.”
I threw it into gear and gunned the engine, drowning out his reply.
SMOKIN’ Joes XXX adult video parlor and sex emporium occupied a warehouse that encompassed an entire city block on Tropicana just west of Interstate 15. Las Vegans referred to the interstate, which bisected the town north to south, as “the 15,” and those who lived on one side rarely ventured to the other, for reasons I never understood.
Several women leaned against the building as I pulled into the parking lot. They were dressed in boots, tiny tubes of spandex—one for the bottom half and one for the top—heavy makeup, and hollow stares. The car did seem to pique their interest a bit. Or maybe it was the combination of the car and the male sitting beside me. “This’ll only take a minute.”
“This was the stop you needed to make?” Dane asked, unable to keep a straight face.
“Just sit. I’ll be back.” I maneuvered the car into a space and killed the engine.
“Want me to come in with you?” he said as he flashed me a wicked grin. “I don’t mind sharing a booth.”
“Perhaps another time.” I couldn’t believe I said that. I pushed myself up and out of the low-riding car.
“I’ll look forward to it, but in the interest of time today, I could help you shop.”
The hookers had left their wall and were sidling over to the car.
“Or maybe,” he continued with a leer. “I can do my shopping out here.”
“Suit yourself,” I shot back. “But I’ll only be a few minutes and, unless you’re Superman, you won’t get your money’s worth.”
As I passed the women I said, “Ladies, the car is off limits. Anything else that interests you is fair game.”
Smokin’ Joe himself was behind the counter when I walked in. Native American, rail thin, Joe had soulful brown eyes, thin lips that never curled into a smile, and tattoos that covered almost every inch of his exposed forearms. He even had “MOM” tattooed on the three middle fingers of his left hand, one letter on each finger. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his mouth. I suspected he’d done more than a little hard time. For some reason Smokin’ Joe seemed to like me. I tried not to be bothered by that.
He cocked his head toward the rear of the store. “New stuff’s in back.” He rooted through some papers on his counter and extracted one, which he extended toward me. “Here’s a list of the good ones. Didn’t pull them cuz I didn’t know you was comin’.”
I took the proffered list. “No problem. I’ll get them myself. Thanks.”
The back of the store was a city block away. I took the outside aisle, the one that separated the row of private viewing booths that lined the exterior wall from racks and racks of dildos of all shapes and sizes, vibrators and other foreign objects. For a small fee, on top of the normal movie rental charge, you could rent one of the viewing booths by the hour to watch the movie of your choice and do whatever, out of sight of the other patrons.
Out of sight, but not out of hearing—a fact I discovered as I walked past the third booth where a woman dressed in scrubs waited outside. Moans and groans and an occasional scream emanated fr
om the booth. My cheeks flushed as I walked past and stepped around the waiting woman.
I’d made it a few steps before I stopped and turned around. My mother always told me my curiosity would get the better of me someday. “I know I’m going to be sorry I asked this, but why is there a line for this booth?”
“Oh, I’m not waiting to go inside,” the woman said. “I’m a midwife, and my client is two weeks past her due date. It’s an old trick of my trade. Sexual arousal seems to stimulate the birthing process. She was miserable, so we thought we’d give it a try.”
“I had no idea.” I listened to the moans coming from the booth. They were coming quicker now. “Seems to be working.” I turned to go, then stopped. “What movie is she watching?” The woman gave me the name. I checked my list for it as I hurried toward the back of the store. Bingo.
When I passed her again, my arms laden with DVDs, a male voice tinged with panic shouted, “The baby’s coming!” Better the baby than his wife at this point, I guess. The midwife disappeared inside the booth. A man stepped out as she went in. Pale and shaken, he took her place as sentry.
All I could think of was the story that kid was going to have when he or she grew up. Being born in an adult video store had a certain panache, a je ne sais quoi, if you will. I wondered if the parents would actually share the story.
I deposited my choices on the counter in front of Smokin’ Joe. “Put it on my account, okay?” I was the only person I knew who ran a tab at an adult video store.
Outside the building, the hookers were again leaning against the wall. “That boy’s got a bite,” one of them hissed at me as I passed.
“You scared the locals,” I said to Dane as I nodded toward the hookers.
“I was in the Navy. Hookers, I can handle.”
I dropped my bag with XXX in big red lettering on the side in Paxton Dane’s lap as I got into the car.
He took a peek inside then shut the bag and looked at me with a thinly disguised leer. “You are a surprise.”
“Those aren’t for me.” I started the car, gunned the engine and piloted us out of the parking lot. “Those are for my mother.”
Chapter
FIVE
Your mother?” Paxton Dane shouted to be heard above the wind.
“Contrary to popular opinion, I was not hatched from an egg,” I said.
“Did you spring fully formed from The Big Boss’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus?”
“No, although I like that analogy. Unfortunately, I do indeed have a mother.” Driving a bit too fast, I darted in and out of traffic on the 15. I noticed Dane’s white-knuckled grip on the armrest, but I didn’t slow down.
“Miracles never cease,” Dane remarked. “But I wasn’t really commenting on whether you have a mother or not but on the fact that you buy porno movies for her. Most people I know spend half their lives hiding smut from their mothers, not buying it for them.”
“My mother is unique.” And a good thing, too—the world would never survive more than one Mona.
I slowed, but not much, took the off-ramp for the Blue Diamond highway, then hung a right, heading west out of town.
The Blue Diamond highway is another Las Vegas exaggeration. A four-lane with traffic signals every few hundred yards, at the edge of town it shrinks into a two-lane blacktop that bears little resemblance to a highway and has nothing to do with blue diamonds. Stretching across the Mojave Desert, it snakes through the Spring Mountains (another bit of wishful thinking) before dropping into the desert again.
We said nothing as we inched through traffic and around seemingly endless road construction. The heat of the beating sun radiated off every surface, smothering, suffocating, turning the convertible into an oven of stagnant, superheated air almost impossible to breathe. Thirst, a mere discomfort anywhere else, triggered a survival instinct impossible to ignore in the desert. I pulled the two bottles of water out of my bag, handing one of them to Dane. We both drank deeply.
Finally we reached the edge of town. The transition from city to abject desert startled me each time I ventured out of civilization. Without water, the desert quickly reclaimed all that man abandoned, and the land reverted to uncovered sand, dotted with patches of low grasses and prickly cacti. Everything about the desert was inhospitable, if not downright dangerous, including some of the flora and most of the fauna—a lesson I learned at an early age when I decided to run away from home.
Most of the traffic had filtered away when the highway narrowed, and I found myself faced with an open stretch of blacktop. A slight pressure on the accelerator and, like a horse ready to run, the car surged forward. The speed climbed. The dry desert air raced past, bringing tears to my eyes.
The fast car was my sin, Mother, my penance.
“You going to tell me where we’re going?”
I glanced at Dane. He still gripped the armrest, but his knuckles weren’t as white as before.
At first blush, I’d pegged him as a fast-car, fast-woman kind of guy. The look in his eye told me I was right about the fast-car part. “Pahrump. It’s a small town just across the county line. Mother is expecting us for lunch.”
“I hope she’s not going to make us watch videos.”
“First lunch, then a movie? You never know with Mother. She does like to shake things up.”
“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree then,” Dane said through clenched teeth as we reached the mountains and I threw the car into the curves.
Too soon we dropped down to the desert floor again and, thinking of the looming meeting with my mother, I eased up on the throttle.
“Tell me about this mother of yours.”
“She can’t be described. She has to be experienced.”
Dane released his grip on the handles, then, like a kid, stretched his arms up into the flow of air. “Okay, she likes porn, and she defies description. Does she work?”
“She’s owns a business called Mona’s Place.”
His head whipped around, his eyes big as saucers. “You’re shittin’ me. The Mona’s Place?”
“Guess you’ve heard of it.” I refused to ask him if he’d been there—I didn’t want to know.
“Heard of it, who hasn’t? It’s the best whorehouse in Nevada.” Incredulousness crept into his voice as the light dawned. “Your mother is Mona? I’ll be damned.”
“You and me both.” I eased off the accelerator as we approached the outskirts of Pahrump. “And, if you value your manhood, I wouldn’t refer to her place as a whorehouse.”
Dane made a rude noise. “What does she prefer? Bordello? Pleasure Palace? Fuck for a Fee? The Bang Barn?”
My fingers worked the paddle shifters dropping the car through the gears until I hit second, holding the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. “You know, you’ve got a real bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.”
“Sorry, it’s a gift,” Dane said, not looking the least bit sorry.
“That’s not exactly what I would call it. She is my mother—remember that. And bordello will do.”
“While I extract my foot from my mouth, why don’t you tell me a bit about Mona?”
“She’s a businesswoman running a legitimate, legal business and she expects to be treated as such.”
“You make running a bordello sound like owning a Jiffy Lube.”
“It’s closer than you think. The bordellos pay licensing fees and purchase business permits. The girls all must be registered with the sheriff’s office, and they too buy business licenses. In fact, the survival of many of the rural counties in Nevada depends on revenue from the bordellos.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Dane squirming in his seat. An often uncomfortable topic, prostitution polarized everyone.
“Mona’s Place is the most successful house in Nevada, and she’s proud of that,” I said.
“If you believe the papers, the bordellos are all jails where the girls are trapped and forced to do things they don’t want to do.”
“
I’ve never seen one like that, and Mother would rather walk stark naked down the Strip than have people thinking that’s the kind of place she runs. In fact, she believes she’s running a halfway house for hookers. She takes in girls off the streets, cleans them up, gives them a safe place to live and work. In addition, she makes them go to school, so those who want out can get out and not end up back on the streets.”
“They have a school for hookers?”
I shot him a warning look.
He held up his hands. “Sorry.”
“The girls who are in school work at night to pay for their room and board. Believe it or not, most of them earn their GEDs, then enroll in either a trade school or job program. Some have even made it through college.”
“A madam who helps her ladies get out of the trade—that’s an interesting business model.”
“She keeps the ones who want to stay, and she feels good about the ones who leave.”
“And it works?”
“More or less.” Lyda Sue had me feeling a little less confident about Mother’s exit strategy.
“A halfway house for hookers?” Dane shook his head. “Is everyone in this town one bead out of true?”
“Just a bunch of square pegs. Mother’s latest project is to become classified as a charity. Income taxes really cut into her bottom line.”
“I can’t tell if you’re feeding me a line or not.”
“Ask her yourself. She got this whole charity idea after reading a story about a guy who personally ‘donated’ his sperm to interested females. Apparently the guy felt his services were of a charitable nature—I guess he screwed only women who couldn’t get any anywhere else, I don’t know. Anyway, I have no idea how all of that turned out, but it got Mother started and once she gets the bit in her teeth, she can’t be stopped.”
Dane stared at me. “Do you ever feel like you have been transported to a parallel universe?”
“All the time.”
Pahrump had been a small town when I lived here. Now, fueled by the recent double-digit annual price escalation in Vegas, houses were sprouting like weeds on the outskirts of town and extending across the desert. Like a new Detroit, Vegas real estate had outpriced its workforce. Pahrump, and a few other outlying towns, gratefully absorbed the overflow. The town had certainly changed, with new schools, a championship golf course, brand-name fast-food joints—the streets had even been paved. The locals were all atwitter over the arrival of a Walmart Supercenter. A long time coming, civilization had found my hometown, and I’m not sure that was a good thing.
Wanna Get Lucky? Page 7
