by Tom Clancy
She drilled a cold stare into him and he snapped his eyes away.
“Did you get a load of him?” she said, looking aghast at Julia.
Julia chewed a mouthful of pizza, swallowed.
“That’s amore,” she said.
Megan made a face. “What?” she said. “Getting ogled by a high school kid with acne on his cheeks?”
Julia shrugged.
“At least he didn’t hold the bun,” she said with a sly grin.
Devon’s nightly set at Club Forreál would begin with a shadow dance.
A minute or two before she made her entrance, the DJ would key up something with a heavy beat and a smooth walking bass, and the lights would pulse in rhythm over and around the empty stage. Then she would step from the wings in a slight, clingy bikini top and sarong that gave her an illusion of nakedness in silhouette.
She was limber and acrobatic getting into her dance. As the men around the stage watched her slink out in front of the screen, they would realize she wasn’t all skin, and that would build on the tease while her movements became more explicitly sexual. The stage was large, with a couple of runways, and she was skillful at using every inch of it.
Most nights Devon’s set went two songs. The opening song would be the longer of them, giving her a chance to warm up the crowd with her bit behind the screen, and then come out and strip off her bikini top while dancing in the swell of lights and music. She called that her first reveal. At the pole Devon would work her flesh hard, sliding, pumping, swinging her body.
The second number in her set would have a quickened tempo, and midway through she would peel away the sarong.
Club Forreál had booze on its menu. This meant the house dancers could go topless but not nude. Under California law, nightclubs that entertained with full nudity were restricted to serving nonalcoholic drinks. The men who came to watch Devon and the other girls weren’t happy about it, but the alcohol loosened them up for a good time, and Devon, when she writhed free of her sarong, would leave little to the imagination in a G-string that was almost invisible, and that made for an easy tradeoff.
At his table in the third row from the stage, Tom Ricci finished his Chivas and water, caught the eye of his waitress, and made a pouring gesture over the glass, holding his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate he wanted his next one heavier on the scotch. She smiled her understanding and waggled toward the bar in her racer shorts.
Ricci turned to watch Devon emerge from behind the screen.
He had seen her dance perhaps twice since the night they had met here, when her name was still Carolina to him. Carolina was her professional alias. It was posted on the schedule outside the club’s entrance, and above her gallery photos on its elaborate Web site, and announced from the DJ booth as the music got cranked for her set. It was also the name that customers used when they tapped the maître d’s shoulder to request a private dance with her. Ricci had once asked how she had chosen it, and she’d told him it was borrowed from the state where she had grown up. She did not specify whether that was North or South Carolina, and he hadn’t pursued the subject. Their involvement was a fair give-and-take that sometimes relieved the emptiness inside each of them. But she gave away nothing extra, and neither did Ricci.
Now the waitress came over with his fresh drink. Ricci paid, tipped, noticed her lingering by the table. He raised the glass to his lips and swallowed. The scotch was warm in his mouth and then going down his throat. She’d done okay with the proportions, he thought, and nodded.
She smiled at him and left and he turned back toward the stage and watched Devon heat up her set.
The sarong in which she was costumed tonight was a dash of metallic fabric with black and blue horizontal bands and long, shiny fringes that would flap over her left thigh. In her bellybutton was a silver serpent pin, its tiny jewel-eyed head dangling downward. Ricci guessed between sixty and a hundred other men had their eyes on her as she slowly untied and shed the wrap. That didn’t bother him much. The woman up there in the colored lights almost could have been anybody. She seemed unsolid, a projected image. Only in glimpses could Ricci see Devon in her. Something she did on stage would remind him of something she had done when they were in bed together—a toss of her head, a contortion of her waist, a wanton curl of her lips—and Ricci would wonder whether it had been practiced even during their sex, and if it came from the inside out or the outside in.
Mostly that was the extent of his feelings as he watched. A curiosity rather than jealousy or possessiveness. It was an emotional remove not so different from what he felt toward Devon when they were together. The stage just seemed to frame and accentuate things for him.
He sat and drank more of his scotch.
Club Forreál was a garish island of neon and stucco outside Santa Clara on Highway 101, El Camino Real. For real, Ricci thought, and found himself having to smile a little at that. He had the sense that nothing in the place was what it seemed. Or if it was, that it wasn’t what he ought to be going out of his way to seek. He neither liked nor disliked watching Devon perform, and she seemed to pretty well match his indifference. He had no idea whether she had noticed him at his table, but he hadn’t intended to make a secret of it, or surprise her for any reason. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come. He’d simply gotten into his car and driven here intending to sit awhile, and it was all the same to him if she knew about it or didn’t. Either way, he would probably leave before she was ready to head out with him.
It was a working night for Devon, and the place was packed; she would want to stay on shift for several hours yet.
Ricci wondered if A.J. ever popped in without letting her know beforehand. He held onto the thought a minute, tried to picture what A.J. looked like, and glanced randomly at some of the men around him, their faces turned toward the stage, staring at Devon as they were swept by the crayon colors of the disco strobes. Any one of them might be A.J. All Ricci knew about him was that he had a wife and kids and a high credit line and, Devon had once casually mentioned, a boat that he liked to launch out of Monterey. It was a waste of time trying to figure out who was the strongest candidate, but so was a lot else.
Ricci played the game with himself awhile longer, grew tired of it, and drank. Then he heard a loud squall of laughter from a nearby table and turned to see what had provoked it. There were four men at the table. They were young, maybe in their early twenties. A look of hang-jawed arousal on his features, one of them had pushed himself back from the table’s edge and was getting a chair dance from a blonde who had finished her set right before Devon. His friends seemed boisterously amused and elated by the whole thing.
Ricci watched her bump and grind between his outspread legs, bare-breasted, wearing only a red sequined thong and high heels. Here again the law would have something to say about how far she could go. But while it prohibited physical contact between performer and client, and house rules declared they could come no closer to each other than six inches, nobody was holding a tape measure between the blonde and the guy at the table, and she seemed more than open to some occasional rubbing up against him.
The good money for dancers at Club Forreál was in chairs. Elsewhere in a room its owners called the VIP Lounge, the better money was in couches. Their maroon velvet cushions lined two of its walls, and the men who sat on them could get a private dance that was supposed to have the same restrictions on touching as the dances in the main hall. But the doors of the VIP Lounge were kept closed, and watched from the main room by security guards on the lookout for vice cops, and the girls inside the lounge, who would start out a couch dance straddling a customer’s lap, would bend the hell out of both legal and house regulations if the price was right.
Devon had told Ricci she preferred doing chairs to couches. They didn’t bring in nearly the same cash but let her stay within eyeshot of the bouncers at the front entrance, who would step in when guys got too touchy. She had told him she followed the six-inches-of-separation rule to the letter i
n the main room and, on the rare instances she worked the VIP, gave the rule just enough slack for her customer to feel “nice” about his experience. She had said that she could identify the ones who would be trouble and was careful to steer away from them. She claimed to likewise recognize the ones who were okay, and she looked at every situation from the perspective of whether it would let her stay in control.
Ricci hadn’t been certain if she honestly believed that. He knew the power of female sexuality but also understood the power of men with money. And he always gave an edge to the men when they kept their clothes on and paid women not to for their pleasure.
Once he had asked Devon exactly what she meant by control, and by a customer feeling nice, and she had remained quiet for a long while.
“Do you really want to know?” she’d said at last.
He’d told her he did.
“I’ll come down as low as they want, for as long as they want,” she’d said, her hesitation suddenly gone. “But their hands stay off me.”
Three rows from where Devon was deftly bending herself around a pole, Ricci took a deep breath and lowered his empty glass to the tabletop. He felt a kind of soft grayness settling over his thoughts and guessed he was a little drunk. Not too drunk to drive, but he could see how that might be a biased opinion. If he went for another refill, he might have to dispute it himself.
He stood up and pushed in his chair. Devon was almost through with her set and he’d decided to leave before she got off stage. He didn’t want to know if she’d spotted him. He didn’t want to know if A.J. was in the house. He didn’t want to see her go one-on-one with any of the customers who’d watched her dance, or make her feel as if she shouldn’t because he was here. He wanted nothing except to leave.
He turned and strode between the tables in the main room, and past the cashier’s counter, and then past the hulking bouncers in black pants and T-shirts at the door, giving them a nod as he walked outside.
The night was cool and breezy with mist that carried the salt smell of the bay across the parking lot. Ricci stood on the neon-splashed sidewalk before the entrance and took it in for a moment. He felt steady enough on his feet and told himself he’d be okay behind the wheel.
He stepped off the sidewalk into the parking lot and went around back toward his Jetta. The lot was illuminated by high overhead sodiums, but the club’s rear wall largely blocked his aisle from the glow of the lights. Though he had a decent recollection of where he’d left the car in the solid row of vehicles, he had to pause and search the darkness for a minute or two to locate it.
Ricci finally saw it about a dozen cars up ahead and moved on.
That was when he noticed a shadowy figure crossing the lot from its perimeter fence opposite the club. The man cut through several aisles of vehicles, momentarily slipped out of sight between two cars, and then emerged into Ricci’s aisle three or four yards in front of him. He wore a raincoat—a trench—belted at the waist and flowing well down below his knees.
Ricci’s guard raised itself a notch. You were alone in a dark place and saw somebody appear out of nowhere, you would be a fool in general not to be alert. He had met some dangerous people in his time at UpLink. And before that, and after—if his life as it was proved to be after.
And there was the coat. And the smooth, almost gliding way the man moved in it.
Ricci couldn’t dismiss the association they brought to mind.
He suddenly felt the absence of his weapon under his sport jacket. His suspension had not up until now cost him his carry permit, but the bouncers who wanded everybody who passed through the club’s door didn’t worry about permits, they worried about men with too much testosterone and alcohol in their bloodstreams acting like they were in some Dodge City saloon, and thinking they would get into it over the dance hall girls. Coming here tonight, he’d had to leave his apartment without his FiveSeven.
Ricci walked a little further through the aisle, stopped. The man approached to within a couple of feet of him and did the same, hands in the pockets of his coat.
They studied one another with quiet recognition in the darkness and fog.
“Lathrop,” Ricci said.
“Surprise, surprise.”
Ricci stood there watching him. Lathrop’s hands being out of sight in his coat pockets made him more acutely conscious of his own lack of a weapon.
“How’d you find me here?”
“Doesn’t matter.” A shrug. “I’ve managed to find you in all kinds of places.”
“Super,” Ricci said. “Now lose me.”
Lathrop was quiet, seeming to notice where Ricci’s gaze had fallen, his lips parting in a kind of smile.
“You think I came to take you out,” he said.
Ricci shrugged.
“I don’t know why you came,” he said. “Wouldn’t waste my time worrying about it.”
Lathrop slowly slid his hands out of his pockets and let them drop to his sides.
“This better?” he said.
Ricci just looked at him and shrugged again.
“Seems to me,” Lathrop said, “you could use a cup of strong coffee.”
Ricci remained silent. The breeze had picked up strength and he could feel the drifting mist on his cheeks.
“What the hell do you want?” he said after a while.
“My car’s back near the fence.” Lathrop nodded slightly in that direction. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“No, thanks.”
“We need to talk.”
“No,” Ricci said, edging past Lathrop and up the aisle.
“Ricci,” Lathrop said in a calm voice. “Not so fast.”
He kept walking.
“You owe me, remember?” Lathrop said from behind him. Again calmly, softly. “Big time.”
Ricci took another couple of steps forward, slowed, and finally halted. He stood there for almost a full minute, his back to Lathrop in the deserted parking lot. Then he turned around to look at him.
“Damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”
Lathrop smiled his enigmatic smile.
“I’ll buy the coffee,” he said, his long coat ruffling around him as he led the way off into the deeper shadows.
FOUR
VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 2006
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA
THE WATERFRONT AT ALVISO WAS NOT MUCH more than a drainage slough for the Guadalupe River, but then the Guadalupe itself amounted to little more than a glorified creek as it snailed through downtown SanJo, and then out of the city to deposit its sewage overflow between Alviso’s dirt levees and reeded banks before wearily petering off into San Francisco Bay.
From where Lathrop had parked at the end of Gold Street, Ricci could see nothing in the fog and distance besides some aircraft warning lights on the power transmission towers across the slough. Pale beacons under the best conditions, they gave the illusion of flickering on and off now as the high, slow mist dragging past them over the marshes began to gradually mix with light rain.
Behind the wheel of his Dodge coupe, Lathrop reached into the 7-Eleven bag he’d stuffed into a molded plastic storage compartment on his right side, produced a Styrofoam coffee cup, and handed it across the seat to Ricci. Then he got out a second cup for himself, peeled open the sip hole on the plastic lid, and raised it to his lips.
The two men sat quietly, as they had throughout the entire ride on the freeway to the extreme northern edge of San Jose, their silence uninterrupted even when Lathrop had pulled up to the gas station convenience store for their coffees.
“So here we are,” Lathrop said. “Like a couple of old friends.”
Ricci drank from his cup.
“No,” he said.
Lathrop shrugged.
“Here we are, anyway,” he said.
They sat looking out across the ugly mud flats. Lathrop had driven from the club with his wipers set on intermittent, and now that they’d been turned off, the windshield was smeary with an accumulation
of moisture.
“Too bad about what happened to you,” Lathrop said. “Enforced leave . . . I might have figured.”
Ricci’s remote stare didn’t move from the windshield. “How do you know they’re calling it that?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged again.
“They can call it anything they want, doesn’t matter,” he said. “Somebody phones the switchboard operator at UpLink to ask for you these past few weeks, she connects him or her to your voice mail. Somebody asks the operator why you aren’t returning messages, her answer’s that you’re on leave of absence. Somebody asks how long you’ll be gone, she just says indefinitely.”
Ricci sat watching the inconstant tower lights through the haze. “Could be that’s my own choice,” he said.
Lathrop shook his head.
“There are newspaper stories about an incident at that chemical factory outside Manhattan, and UpLink security being involved, and how the Feds are crying foul because they didn’t get invited to the party,” he said. “Knowing you called the party, it’s easy to dope out the rest.”
Ricci still hadn’t turned from the windshield.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“I heard you the first time in that parking lot,” Lathrop said.
“Then get to it,” Ricci said.
Lathrop nodded.
“In a minute,” he said. “First we need to finish up with New York.”
Ricci didn’t say anything.
“I tipped you about the Dragonfly laser,” Lathrop said. “I know what was supposed to go down at the plant. There wouldn’t be an available grave plot in the city today if it was up to the people who want your head on a pole, and they’d have swallowed that a lot easier than you doing what you did. It’s all about control for them, and they hate losing their hold on it to a guy like you.”
“Good that you’re so sure,” Ricci said.
“Don’t let yourself believe anything else,” Lathrop said. “I’d love to hear them talk about it behind closed doors. Seriously, Ricci. I would love it.”
