by John Everson
“A guy’s gotta rest between milkings,” I said, trying to keep my lips serious. My face betrayed me.
“It’s not funny,” she said. “If you can’t get him out of there, I’ll never see my husband alive again.”
I slapped myself mentally, scribbled a note, and then told her my price. She didn’t blink, and handed me my upfront money—$500—in five crisp Benjamin Franklins. She provided photos of her husband, the address of her kinky friends, and the knowledge that invitations seemed to come mid-month and usually midweek. Since it was a Monday and the thirteenth of the month, I figured I should start a stakeout at the friends’ house in about thirty minutes. They may already have gotten an invite…but chances were, it would be turning up over the next couple nights. I was already mentally making a list of things I’d need to keep me occupied in the car for the next few evenings, as I watched their mailbox. I had a Victoria’s Secret catalogue already stashed in my glove box, but I had a feeling that this case was going to need something stronger. A bag of Doritos and a stack of Busty Babes In Naked Peril magazine (I was a lifetime subscriber) was going to be more like it.
The invitation came on Thursday. I almost missed it—though I’m not sure how that happened (although I have to admit, the Busty Babe on page 134 did hold my undivided attention for several ecstatic minutes)—I never saw who delivered it. It was around 5:30 p.m. and I knew that within the next thirty minutes, one of the two would get home from work, so just to be safe, I got out of the car (parked halfway down the block) and took a walk to wake myself up for the next couple hours of stakeout. If they didn’t receive an invite by 8 p.m., Mrs. D had said, there wouldn’t be one.
As I was passing their house, on a whim, I reached out to unobtrusively open the mailbox. I’d checked earlier, after the post office truck had swung by, and all they’d had was an advertising circular for a chimney sweep and what looked to be a credit card bill. I hadn’t seen anybody walking on the block for the last couple hours since.
Still…
My impatience was rewarded, because on top of the junk mail, was a bright red envelope. I slipped a finger between the loose end of the back flap and slit it open. An invitation was inside, as I suspected. It said very little, though every letter appeared to have been fingerpainted in bloody red on white paper. The text was obscure, but I knew what it meant.
You asked for it.
You have this chance to get it.
Come to 69 Angle Ave. in Riverside tonight at 9 p.m.
Be there.
—NightWhere.
I folded and pocketed it after making sure nobody was out and about and watching. Then I got the hell out of Dodge.
More clichés. Sorry. I watch a lot of old movies when I’m not watching philanderers, perves and perps.
What does a guy wear to a sex club? Especially when he doesn’t intend to have sex? I pondered that quandary for several minutes, and finally decided on a pair of faded blue jeans that looked weathered but not ragged, and a black button-down shirt. Part of me considered opening the shirt buttons extra low and donning a gold necklace, but honestly, I don’t have the thick black chest hair to pull off the disco-stud gimmick and I hadn’t been able to stomach Saturday Night Fever even when it was hip. I couldn’t mimic it even with irony implied now.
I pulled on my favorite pair of leather boots, and slipped my secret weapon into the custom scabbard on the top of the left one. I didn’t know what I was walking into, and I sure wasn’t going to go there unarmed. Since I wore my black shirt untucked, I was easily able to hide my little Kimber Solo in the back pocket of my jeans. If they patted me down at the door, they might find the little handgun, but I was betting on not.
Booted and armed, I stood and looked in the bathroom mirror for a moment. I didn’t hate what I saw. A little weathered maybe, but I hadn’t let too much beer go to the gut. And there was still a feathering of dark hair across the dome. The furrows that hundreds of nights on stakeout had helped carve gave me a man-of-the-world look, I thought.
I’d probably get hit on tonight, I mused. Although, from what Mrs. D had told me, I wasn’t sure I wanted the attention. Whips and chains looked great in glossy, tawdry magazine photoshoots, but I had no desire to feel the reality of their painful welts on my couch-conditioned skin.
Still, before I left the bedroom, I stopped at my nightstand and pulled out a square foil pouch with a rubber raincoat inside. I slipped it into my right front pocket.
Be prepared, the Boy Scouts had taught me.
I had a gun, a knife and a condom. What else could I possibly need?
I had a pretty good idea of where my destination was based on the address. Angle Ave. ran along the railroad tracks on the outside of town. There was a long stretch of small businesses, from auto mechanics to glass shops to lumberyards there. I had a pretty good guess that 69 Angle (I had to give them credit for their sense of numerical irony) was on the far side of the lake on the seediest outskirts of Riverside. That would certainly make the most sense. And Google Maps agreed with me. I backed out of my drive at 8 p.m. It was going to take me close to forty-five minutes to get over there, and I didn’t want to be a latecomer.
Not that I expected (despite my right pocket preparation) to be a comer at all, in club parlance.
But I didn’t want to be noticed as the guy who walked in last. I planned to get there on time, stake out my place on the wall, and then watch the flowers shuffle in. I’d do a little reconnoitering, get some hints as to the location of the Field of Flesh, and then slip out of the main club in the direction of that hidden room when the festivities were getting, shall we say, boisterous.
I noticed I was being followed about a half hour into the trip.
The headlights had been following me for some time…maybe all the way back to my apartment.
I realized after three or four turns that the same lights had consistently sat there in my rearview mirror.
I was being followed? Wasn’t that supposed to be my job?
Just to prove that I wasn’t being paranoid thanks to my profession, I pulled off on an abrupt right turn into a small subdivision of beat-up old ranch homes. At the first stop sign, I turned left, circled the block and then exited back to the highway at the same spot I’d entered.
The lights stayed with me through every turn…though I noticed they faded back quite a bit.
When I pulled back onto the main road, it was only a few seconds later when the beams of my pursuer’s headlights flipped out of the subdivision and resumed their path behind me.
Hmmm.
Who would follow me? Well…I supposed there were any number of potential “who’s” out there. Open any file in my wide three-drawer file tower and you could find a couple people in every manila folder who had a reason to stalk me back.
Strange thing was…none of them ever had before now.
Hmmm, indeed. I decided the only course of action was to maintain my course of action.
The highway turned left and began to follow the edge of the bay. The businesses and buildings along the route dropped away until there was only a business sign every thirty seconds or so.
I watched the address signs though, as they slowly slipped down from 1500 Angle to 900, to 330, to 102 and then, just ahead, on the Bay side of the road, I saw a lone outpost.
The mailbox at the edge of its driveway read 69. Luckily, I’d already slowed down, anticipating that.
The lights behind me did as well.
Interesting. I shifted on the seat to feel the hard shape of the concealed handgun in my back pocket. Had the owners of the invitation witnessed my theft? Had the inviters?
I pulled into a long gravel drive that led back to a Quonset hut. It looked as if a giant coffee can had fallen on its side in the middle of an overgrown prairie. But despite the remote location, I was definitely not alone. There were at least three dozen ca
rs scattered around the building.
My intent was to be unobtrusive, so I turned left before reaching the front of the metallic structure, and drove past several parked cars before pulling mine into an impromptu parking space. The tall grass scratched against my already tortured muffler as I slowed to a halt. I felt a twinge of concern over the beating my car was taking on gravel roads and weedy parking lots, but it was the lights in my rearview mirror that held my attention. My follower hadn’t slowed when I pulled into the drive on 69 Angle. If anything, my pursuer pulled closer, and followed me right down the weedy path to pull in alongside. A silver Lexus. Nice—quietly confident money on wheels.
I popped my door open and stepped out; I wasn’t going to be caught sitting down.
The door to the other car sprung almost before I was on my feet, and I saw the black lace of fancy, impractical headgear rise above the silver roof. And a cascade of equally impractical black locks flowed around it.
The head turned and I knew those dark eyes, even at three yards away in the dark.
“Patricia Delacroix,” I said. “You are following me?”
“Shhhh!” she implored, a finger to her lips. She darted around the car, and I saw that she was very definitely dressed for the occasion. Black silk dress slit up past her hip, it seemed, thin shoulder straps that only got thinner on their way down, leaving plenty of room for her more than adequate, um, assets, to be displayed.
Her legs were spidered in fishnet, and as she moved closer, I realized that her heels had to have been six inches long. She was looking down on me, the moon shining cold over her right ear.
She slipped an arm around my shoulder and leaned in to whisper. “If anyone sees us, we’re together,” she said.
“I thought you can’t go in?”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not through the front door.”
She reached into her tiny leopard-skin handbag and pulled out a small business card. “But when you find him…I want you to call me. You might be able to let me in through a back entrance or something. And if not, I’ll be out here, waiting for him.”
“You followed me,” I noted again. This time, she acknowledged it with a curt nod. “You might need me,” she said. “I had to be here.”
“I keep thinking that you don’t really need me. You could handle this all on your own,” I said. But Patricia Delacroix only pulled me close, pressing my face into the soft crook of her neck and forcing my eyes into the open invite of her cleavage.
“No,” she whispered, pressing my face lower into that softness. As if smothering me with the thing she knew I wanted. “I absolutely do need you for this.”
With that, she pushed me away, and put a finger under my chin, forcing me to look up into her eyes, not down the line of her neck and into her…
“Call me when you find Lucas. If you can find a way to let me in, I’ll be out here waiting. Now…just…get in there,” she said, pointing at the steel door of the Quonset hut. “Go find my husband.” She sniffed, and closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. As if steeling herself, forcing the emotion at bay. “I want my Lucas back.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told her. “But from what you’ve described, it’s going to be tough picking him out in a ‘field’ of people.”
“Field of Flesh,” she corrected. “And you have his picture. Plus, they will likely have stripped him, so you’ll be able to see his tattoo. I’m pretty sure that nobody else is going to have a tattoo of a man in chains stretched across his chest. It might take you a while, but you’ll find him.”
She had given me a photo of Lucas’s tattoo in my office. I had to agree with her. The tattoo of the chained man on his chest was striking. Especially since the detail work put the droop of the tattoo man’s penis right onto the O of Lucas’s bellybutton. I’m sure it looked better when he was younger, but now? That bellybutton was sagging. I guess that worked in the favor of the man in chains, but…
“Stay out of sight,” I warned and stepped back from her. And then I walked towards the front of the giant steel coffee can. My fingers stroked the invitation in my pocket and I felt increasingly nervous that they would identify me as an imposter as soon as I presented it.
When I reached the door, it was closed. A steel rectangle set in a steel half-oval…it was easy to think at first that it was not even an entrance. But I knocked; I could see the outline of the opening, even if there was no handle.
And a moment later my confidence was rewarded. The door cracked open. “Invitation?” a low male voice said from the slit of darkness beyond.
I held my red slip of paper out, and it disappeared inside the chasm.
The door opened, and a pale face peered out. “Come in, and sin,” the man said.
I had no intention of the latter, but I was happy to hear the invitation of the former. I’m sure I grinned a sappy grin and nodded, as I wholeheartedly, and yet falsely agreed, “Yes, I will!”
But I had no intention of indulging. I was here for one reason. And one reason only. To discover the room where Mrs. D’s husband was being held naked, captive and presumably without his wishes (though I, frankly, had begun to doubt the latter point). All I wanted was for this job to be over and my payment to be propping up the balance in my checkbook.
At least, that’s what I wanted until I stepped into what was known as The Blue Room of a club called NightWhere. Then I have to admit, I began to want the job to last a while.
The first thing that struck me once I was inside was the music.
It was pulsing throughout the black-walled rooms. I mean pulsing. I could feel the low end of the bass shivering the cuffs of my pants. I think my thighs shook. Not an altogether bad sensation…but weird. A band played some kind of dirgey, throbbing anthem up on the dark stage, and all around the room along the ceiling, tiny lights blasted blue glare onto the floor and walls of the place. But it wasn’t the light or the sound that held my attention, I’ll be honest.
It was the breasts.
Lots of them.
Without any attempt at concealment.
Beautiful, bouncing breasts. There were women all around the main lounge area of the club dancing and disrobing…or disrobing and dancing… And I couldn’t look away. I was here to find a man, but all I could do was look at…
Mentally, I slapped myself.
Boobs wouldn’t pay the bills. Even really bouncy ones with tattoos of flowers or skulls or Betty Boop. Though I saw those. And I certainly enjoyed watching them.
I walked past the bar and the dance floor and found myself in the super kinky zone, where a dozen men and women brandished whips upon people bound in chains, laid back on racks. I watched one woman, clad only in a black leather corset, twirl a wand with a half dozen leather straps on its end. She brought the tips of those straps in contact with an overweight balding guy’s painfully white ass again and again, just barely lingering before pulling the straps away. With each stroke of the leather, he moaned as if in ecstasy instead of pain, though I saw the rising red trails on his pale flesh from her attentions. Her hand moved in an easy figure eight in the air, bringing the pain, then quickly teasing away before returning to slap again with six separate tongues a second later.
I leaned back against a black pillar and smiled. The air around me reverberated with the techno sounds of the darkwave band (they were playing on a small stage near the bar) but was also colored by the moans of dozens of people in the throes of various carnal pursuits. I felt as if I were standing on the set of a really dark, kinky porn film. In fact, I would never have guessed that a place like this existed outside of a prefabricated, calculated movie set. But this was inarguably real. A full frontal assault on sight, sound, smell and libido.
As titillating as the show was, I couldn’t spend too much time enjoying it. The night was short, and somehow, I needed to strike up a conversation with someone who would know
what and where this “Field of Flesh” was. But Mrs. D. had warned me to be careful. The Field was not something that the general populace of the club had any knowledge of, and those that did might be suspicious of some newbie asking about it.
It was like a poker game where I had some cards but they had not been dealt in an easy straight. More like an almost full house that needed the Jack of Hearts in the next deal or I’d have to fold and go home penniless.
There I go with the bad analogies again.
Anyway, I forced myself to look away from the woman wearing a Saran Wrap bikini (the plastic made her nipples stretch unnaturally wide, like a pair of lips pressed hard to a window). She was kneeling and bobbing her head at the waist of a man in pinstriped suit (who wears Armani to a sex club?). I walked back towards the bar. A good investigator listens, before talking. Observes before diving into action.
I needed to hear some of the patrons—and I don’t mean their moans of passion. The bar seemed the most likely place to pick up some easy information without having to probe too obviously. People talk at bars. Though I had to wonder why anyone in a place like this would be sitting at the bar for very long. There were definitely more interesting places to be in at this club.
“Well, hello stranger!” The bartender was on me before I’d fully gotten my ass on the stool. I looked up and saw two astonishingly round but proud breasts jutting over the bar in my direction. Twin Xs of masking tape covered her nipples, but aside from that, all the woman was wearing was a cascade of startlingly blonde hair and a skirt made solely of threaded beads. She tantalized the male eye with what showed briefly behind those beads with every step or bend she made.
“My name’s Sin-D,” she continued. “I’ll be your server for the evening. What can I get for you? Cock-tail, or cock-tease?”
“Are they mutually exclusive?” I asked.
That brought a smile from between two cherry-red lips. Sin-D nodded. “We’re going to get along just fine.”
I ordered a whiskey on the rocks and when she returned with the glass, her lips were swollen in an exaggerated pout. She set the glass down, ice clinking and threatening to slosh over at the top. Then she pointed at a trail of liquid that was dripping down the side of one creamy, perfectly complected breast. Her skin looked smooth and unblemished as freshly fallen snow. “I spilled some of your booze on my boob,” she complained. “Could you lick it off? I hate to waste good liquor. Or the chance for a good licker.”
