“You know this place?” Nik said, obviously picking up on some fraction of my thoughts through the lock. “You have been here before?”
“Yeah.” I sighed, combing my fingers through my hair before I glanced over my shoulder, giving him a grim smile. “I have. And it looks like I’m about to go back.”
12
Misty’s Boom-Boom Room
Nik insisted on coming with me, of course.
That time, I didn’t even argue.
Truthfully, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, I didn’t relish the idea of going to Misty’s Boom-Boom Room without back-up, not given Jo’s words and what happened the last time I visited this place.
That was true even apart from the whole sex-trade angle.
Going back to Misty’s had me thinking about Evers again, too.
I’d already deduced that maybe Michael Evers, aka, young Ted, had probably been the guy peering in at Irene while she slept that night. I hadn’t really wanted to raise that possibility to Irene herself, given that she was already freaked out. I gave Gantry a call the morning after the incident, however, while I was waiting for the bus downtown and drinking tepid coffee out of Irene’s one and only travel mug, and he more or less agreed with me.
I didn’t voice the concern to Nik directly, but he seemed to pick up on my suspicion, or else simply deduced the same thing as me and Gantry.
Gantry still had someone watching Irene’s house day and night, in addition to me and Nik sleeping in Irene’s room. They both seemed to think Evers was likely to make himself more of a pain in my ass, rather than less, at least in the near future.
Personally, that was one contract I still wanted to fulfill.
Putting Evers behind bars, that is.
I wasn’t sure how to go about tackling that head on, though...at least right now.
Meaning, while I still had a shape-shifting alien living in my friend’s house, and with both me and Nik trying to lay low until we knew who was gunning for me apart from Evers.
Also with me trying to find those missing girls for their parents.
“Are we going inside?” Nik asked me, gazing up at the same green neon sign that I’d been staring at for the last few seconds.
Sighing, I met his gaze. “Yeah. I guess we are.”
Nik followed close behind me as I approached the heavy front door.
Inside, the place was just as tacky and horrible and faintly reeking of Girls Gone Wild as I expected, even with the recent facelift and the new name.
Maybe especially with those two things.
Misty’s Boom-Boom Room was definitely one of those made for guys kind of places.
Right by the door, before I’d even left the swath of sunlight left by the hanging dark plastic Nik held apart to let me through, I saw a bunch of neon pink and yellow flyers tacked to the inside wall, most of them advertising free drink nights “for the ladies” and wet T-shirt contests. I also saw “Bring a Hot BFF” night and “Jello Wrestling” night, which pretty much summed up what I remembered of the vibe of this place from before.
The bar’s promotions seemed to be solely focused on anything and everything to get as many hot and depressingly insecure young girls/women inside the doors as possible, vying for male attention. Or male wallets, at least.
The new, giant, padded door had a bit of an S&M vibe to it, too.
I couldn’t tell if that was intentional or not.
They’d gone a bit more openly masculine with the new look than I remembered from before. If memory served, previously it was more of a generic sports bar, with a dark pub vibe mixed with the dance floor and small stage for bands.
In the facelift, they’d ripped the pool tables and flat-screen wall televisions out, replacing them with a DJ station in one corner and what looked like cocktail tables to supplement the new leather booths. The wall opposite the bar, which I remembered being a dingy white covered in sports posters and framed photos before, now consisted of a long, floor to ceiling mirror, at least where it wasn’t broken by those same leather booths.
It made the place look bigger, especially with the mirror on the back of the bar, but it didn’t exactly add that element of class the club had been lacking before.
Mostly, the club evoked a slightly disco version of a man cave, one that reminded me of bachelor pads depicted in movies from the early eighties.
Meaning, a lot of leather and chrome and mirrors and black furniture and black sheets and black whatever else...with a number of pieces of bland but tacky art, much of which depicted nude and semi-nude women in various poses.
Unfortunately, it smelled like a man cave, too.
I really hated that stale beer smell.
I had friends who loved it, who associated that whole bar reek with partying and having a good time, but I guess I’d worked the other side of those counters a few too many times. I associated the smell with cleaning up after those jokers at three o’clock in the morning...usually after watching a least one bar fight over baseball or politics or a girl who didn’t like either of the guys involved. Those arguments generally grew more guttural as the night wore on, devolving into swinging pool cues or fists or something equally stupid.
Then again, I’d worked bars mainly in New York.
Everyone told me the Seattle crowd was different, but I was pretty skeptical.
Drunken stupidity struck me as a pretty universal thing.
Those years in New York had been rough, anyway. That was when our mother took off with Alejandro, and me and Jake got shipped to the East Coast and our father. Dear old dad, needless to say, hadn’t exactly been thrilled to see us at his apartment door in Queens.
I’m sure he did his best for us––once it sank in that he couldn’t get rid of us, at least not in the short term––but kids generally know when they’re not wanted, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. I was pretty sure that was when Jake started hustling, too, probably from watching me bar-back illegally and our father work a bank job he hated just so he could play piano in clubs at night for peanuts in the Upper West Side and Brooklyn.
In some ways, I can’t say I even blame him...Jake, that is.
It’s not like women and men hadn’t been throwing money at Jake from day one, even without him looking for it.
“What are we here for, precisely?” Nik said from next to me.
His words jerked my mind back to the present.
I refocused on the dimly-lit room, taking in the leather booths that receded into darkness, the mirrored wall, the scattered cocktail tables around the low stage, where presumably the jello wrestling and the wet T-shirt contests took place. The dance floor itself wasn’t currently switched on, meaning with its squares of color that lit up where people stood while they boogied down. The disco ball wasn’t rotating either, although a single white bulb shone on it.
A lot of the bells and whistles were dormant right now.
Even so, and despite the fact that it wasn’t much past noon, more than half of the booths were full. I wondered briefly if Misty’s was an out-and-out strip club during the day, and Nik and I had just walked in between sets. The music was certainly a mixture of bad house music and seventies porn. But I knew my attitude wasn’t helping me get a good look at the place, so I tried to strip my feelings from the whole thing, get a sense of the crowd.
Nik was right.
What was I looking for exactly?
A sign that read: To buy newly-kidnapped girls as sex slaves, talk to this guy...you’ll know him from the furred Russian KGB hat and the mirrored shades...?
“What are we looking for?” Nik asked me again.
I sighed, shaking my hair out of my face and shoving my hands into the pockets of my beat up leather jacket.
“Let’s get a drink,” I told him.
“A drink.” Nik turned his eyes on me, and I saw they were a dark green, edging into fight territory for him. “You are thirsty?”
I smiled; I couldn’t help it. “Nik, you got
ta learn to either blend, or stop talking when we’re in public...okay?”
He frowned, but only nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
I walked over to the bar. I pulled off my jacket once I got there, mostly because it was hot in there. Draping it over the leather cushion of a high, chrome-legged barstool, I slid on top of it, propping my boot heels on the low railing under the bar itself.
Nik followed, and did essentially the same thing to my right.
He left his jacket on, however.
I found myself looking around the club again as I waited for the bartender to notice us.
Everyone in there had gone back to ignoring us, probably because they figured me and Nik were a couple. I got a few stares from some of the men, but not enough interest for it to be much of a concern. Dressed like I was, I definitely didn’t look like the girls they advertised on their flyers, so I probably wasn’t a huge draw, anyway.
Nik got more looks than me, mostly from the handful of women I could see sitting at the other end of the bar. A number of them looked at more than just his face, which caused me to give him a once-over, too, noting again that he looked pretty damned good in Jake’s clothes. The leather jacket fit his broad shoulders perfectly, as did the jeans, and while the t-shirt was a little small, it didn’t exactly make Nik harder to look at, if you know what I mean.
Nik was becoming more of a distraction for me every day, I’d noticed.
Pushing the memory of that morning out of my head, I tried to decide what I thought I could accomplish here...if anything at all.
The first booth I looked at, the one closest to the front door, held a pair of businessmen in outdated suits, each of them clutching beers. One of the two, the guy with bloodshot eyes and rumpled brown hair, appeared to be doing most of the talking.
Guy going through a divorce, my mind interpreted, seeing the empty ring finger he kept touching. His friend obviously came along for a sympathy binge, which was a pretty good friend since it wasn’t even two o’clock yet on a weekday.
The booth nearest to me, directly across from the bar, held five guys wearing what I would categorize as “newly-Western” chic.
Meaning, they probably weren’t from the United States and probably hadn’t lived here all that long, but they really, really wanted to look like it.
I could only see three of their faces––one in the mirror and two because I had direct line of sight. A fourth sat backwards on a black chair, his reflected face in shadow, his leather jacket clad back to me. The fifth sat facing away from me in the booth, his profile blocked in the mirror by the guy sitting to his left and closer to the mirror.
All five appeared to be wearing roughly the same clothes––black designer jeans with black leather belts and tucked in black t-shirts, cheesy leather jackets with bright slogans on them and leather shoes that looked like Italian knock-offs but might have been the real deal. They also wore large, gold men’s watches, a fair bit of hair product, gold chains and pulled-up black socks.
They could be Eastern European, I guessed. Or Italian. Maybe German...although Germans didn’t tend to go as much for the all-black look.
All three of them drank clear liquor on ice––probably vodka––which added credence to the Eastern European theory. From working bars in Queens, I happened to know the vodka-Russia-Eastern-Europe stereotype wasn’t just a stereotype. A lot of them really did drink that stuff like water, especially the more recent immigrants. Maresh, a pal of mine in New York, told me that in Russia, you rarely saw actual drinks in people’s hands in working-class bars. You just saw people (men, usually) talking and smoking.
If you were paying attention, however, you would occasionally see waitresses make the rounds, carrying trays covered in shot glasses. The bar patrons would down the shots on the spot, pay her, then go right back to talking and smoking.
That image always stuck with me for some reason.
The third occupied booth I saw looked to be filled with a bunch of guys from India, or maybe Pakistan. They also had that recent immigrant look, but seemed less self-conscious about it for some reason. Maybe they just weren’t trying so hard to look like they were from here.
Either way, they smiled a lot more and drank mostly beer.
The impression I got from watching them was that they were thrilled just being in a place where they could drink and look at pictures of naked girls in the middle of the day.
The fourth booth housed an actual male-female couple, but my cynical mind wondered immediately if she was a working girl, especially when I noted the age difference. The guy just looked like a run-of-the-mill businessman, like one of the suits I saw at the black office building earlier that day. Nothing overly sinister there.
Glancing around at the two older guys on the other end of the bar and the three women who’d been checking out Nik, and a few more couples sitting at smaller tables closer to the door, it struck me that the clientele was pretty mundane for a day crowd.
It was also pretty different than what I remembered from that night I’d been sent here to set up Evers. That could have been a result of the new look and new name, but I doubted it. I suspected it had a lot more to do with the time of day. Any place that remained open for as close to 24 hours as they could pull off legally had different crowds. The day crowd sometimes bled into the night crowd, sure, but they got buried under the louder clamor of the generally younger and more affluent party crowd.
Regulars existed in both crowds, of course, but they were a lot more common and consistent among the drinking-during-working-hours types.
The true daytime regulars were usually full-blown alcoholics, with the occasional drug dealer and prostitute thrown in, as well as walk-ins like divorce guy (situational drunk) and the business lunch drinkers who might also be alcoholics, just slightly higher functioning ones.
This bar, being a new immigrant haunt of sorts, was different than your average Seattle bar in that they also had the we-aren’t-yet-legal-to-work-here crowd (or possibly the we-just-got-here-and-don’t-have-jobs-yet crowd) from India or Pakistan or Yemen or wherever they were from. I did see a few of the low-functioning alcoholic-types at the bar itself.
My eyes got pulled off the tables a second time when the bartender reached our end of the black lacquer, chrome and leather masterpiece of a man-bar, and plopped down two cocktail napkins with thick fingers. He barely grunted a reply when I ordered two beers and he set them down without telling us how much they cost. I guess people normally ran up tabs in there, or handed him credit cards, but I did neither, slapping down a twenty and hoping for the best.
He gave me change, which was a relief, really.
I spent a few more minutes sipping the beer and watching the people in the various booths via the mirror behind the bar. Using mirrors was another trick I learned from my bar-backing days––one used by every bartender I knew.
I heard a faint choking sound next to me and turned.
Nik was staring at his pint of beer, an odd expression on his face.
It struck me suddenly that maybe alcohol and the ability to shape-shift weren’t such a great combination.
“You don’t have to drink it,” I told him sympathetically. “Tastes pretty bad, eh?”
He gave me a wan smile, then followed my eyes to the mirror.
Again, I saw him take in every aspect of our surroundings carefully.
He’d already observed how I was using the mirrors, I noticed.
Before he looked at the humans in the booths, Nik’s eyes paused carefully on each specimen in the assortment of tall and squat bottles and glasses standing in neat rows directly across from us, as well as their different labels, liquid levels and colors. It struck me for the second time that Nik likely noticed a great deal more than me, and not only because he was observant. Being new here, he was a lot less likely to dismiss a good percentage of the details I brushed past from sheer familiarity. I was thinking about how I might use that, when Nik nudged me with his arm.
<
br /> “Something is happening,” he told me.
I glanced towards the spot of mirror where he focused and saw one of the Eastern Europeans on his phone.
I wondered at first, what Nik meant.
Then I realized two things. One, the guy wasn’t speaking English. Instead, he spoke some kind of Slavic-sounding language, which told me I’d been right in pegging their basic stats. Two, the Slav on the phone sounded pissed off. Possibly he was pissed at whoever was on the other end of the line, or possibly he was just mad about whatever they were telling him.
I found myself wishing the translation function of the implant worked on Earth languages. Nik had already told me that it should, but he’d first need to update the wetware. I hadn’t asked him what that meant, exactly, but I got the gist from hearing him talk. Apparently, because none of the humans were implanted here, the device in me had no way to “talk” to the mind of the people here speaking another language.
Yet another conversation that went somewhat over my head.
Bottom line, no translation function. Not yet, anyway.
So I listened to the guy grumble and snarl through the line, not understanding a word. Occasionally, I glanced at Nik, trying to read him as much as the guy on the phone. I had to think that Nik probably paid more attention to tone and body language than I did, just from specializing in surveys of foreign worlds, but I couldn’t absorb any of it through him.
I wondered what he’d picked up that got his ears so pricked.
So far, I wasn’t seeing it. Just a grumpy Slav on the phone.
I noticed he happened to be one of the ones whose faces I couldn’t see.
I leaned deeper over the bar, and against Nik’s shoulder. Sliding my hand over his thigh without thinking about it much, I paused when I felt him tense.
“Just playing the part,” I joked quietly near his ear.
“You are distracting me, Dakota,” Nik told me, equally quiet.
“Maybe you were distracting me.”
Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Page 19
