Truman looked at me like I had asked a stupid question. “Weren’t you listening? I’m a detective. Noticing things is kinda my wheelhouse.”
Truman reached over, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a holstered handgun. He pulled his shirt up and shoved the gun down his pants so the gun rested in the small of his back.
“Why do you carry a gun, anyway?” I asked. “You have superpowers.”
“Why does a carpenter carry a toolbox? You never know what tool you’ll need when. It’s better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it. Besides, you can’t wave your superpowers threateningly in someone’s face. Sometimes the threat of violence is more effective than actual violence.” Truman glanced at the strip club. “Besides, we’re about to go into a building full of naked women. I’m in a committed relationship. I’ve got to keep the girls inside from mobbing me somehow.”
“Where’s my gun, then? How am I going to keep them off me?”
Truman made a big show of looking me up and down. His eyes came back to mine. They twinkled.
“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Come on, let’s go.” He opened his door, got out, made sure his untucked shirt covered his gun, and started to cross the street toward where the bouncers guarded the door to the strip club.
I reluctantly followed him. Though Truman was in my employ, he did not seem to have a problem making fun of me. What they said was true:
It really was hard to find good help these days.
13
Truman and I joined the line to get into Areola 51. Music thumped faintly from inside the building. Though the area immediately around the building was clean, beyond that the sidewalks and street were littered with trash. Maybe even the city’s street sweepers were afraid to venture into Dog Cellar.
On either side of Areola 51 were dilapidated buildings that looked like they belonged on the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. Despite the fact it was the dead of the night, scary-looking guys swaggered in and out of view as they ambled along, many in the middle of the street, some holding up their baggy jeans with one hand. They were going God knew where to do God knew what. Maybe they were going to their late-night chess clubs or hoping to catch the last few minutes of midnight mass. I doubted it.
“Here we are,” I murmured to Truman in a low voice so the guys ahead of us in line wouldn’t hear me, “standing in front of a hot pink building in the wee hours of the morning in the worst neighborhood I’ve ever seen to consult with a stripper-cum-clairvoyant. And who said big city life wasn’t bewitching?”
Truman snickered. “You said cum.” I didn’t lower myself by responding. I felt low enough just standing here.
Wielding penlights, the big bouncers checked people’s IDs before letting them in. Actually, I should say they checked each man’s ID because everyone in line was male. They were of various races, ranging in age from around my age to elderly. They looked normal enough, the kinds of guys you might see shopping at the grocery store or waiting at the doctor’s office. They didn’t look like degenerates. I for one felt like a degenerate. Nobody had ever told me there was anything wrong with going to a strip club, but the bishop who had presided over my confirmation into the Catholic church hadn’t encouraged me to rush out and start stuffing bills into a stripper’s G-string, either. I had been taught that objectifying women and reducing them to their sexuality was wrong. If a strip club wasn’t a shrine to such reduction and objectification, I didn’t know what was.
The line surged forward. I got close enough to the front door to read the sign posted there. I nudged Truman.
“The sign on the door says no one under twenty-one is allowed inside,” I whispered.
“Yeah, so?” Truman whispered back.
“I’m only twenty. I don’t turn twenty-one for a few more weeks.” I felt a surge of relief at the fact I wasn’t old enough to go inside. Surely there was another way to figure out what I wanted to know about Mechano than to consult an unclothed clairvoyant called Cassandra. Maybe Truman also knew a slut with a sixth sense named Sylvia. I would not have been surprised.
Truman sighed. “Now you tell me,” Truman murmured back. “Add twenty-one and up to the list of things you ought to be before the Guild gives you a license.” He eyed the two bouncers. One was white, the other Hispanic. Though they looked dim-witted, what they lacked in apparent smarts they made up for in size. They peered carefully at people’s IDs, seeming serious about checking dates of birth rather than simply going through the motions. “If I’d known about this sooner, I could’ve gotten you a fake ID. Now I’ll just improvise something. If I can’t get you past these two lunkheads, I should retire, surrender my superhero secret decoder ring, and take up knitting. Wait, what are you doing?”
“Improvising,” I said. Inspired by Truman’s fake ID remark, I had pulled out my Maryland driver’s license. Though I hadn’t had my own car since leaving South Carolina, I had gotten a Maryland license when I lived with Amazing Man in Chevy Chase as he let his Apprentices use his cars. “Stand in front of me so they can’t see what I’m doing.”
With Truman’s big body in front of me to block my movements from the view of the bouncers and the other guys in line, I looked critically at the hard substance that comprised the license. I looked not only with my eyes but, more importantly, with my powers. I immediately discerned that the license was made of a polycarbonate plastic with a thin laminate coating on top. My photo, date of birth, and name were etched into the plastic with a laser. I had dealt with polycarbonate lots of times before. Plenty of things in our modern society were made of those plastics, such as eyeglass lenses, DVDs, smartphones, and automotive components.
What most people don’t realize is that everything around us is made of atoms and molecules that are constantly moving. Generally speaking, the molecules of a solid move less than the molecules of the liquid form of that solid, which in turn move less than the gas form of that liquid. The more the molecules moved, the more heat there was. That was why steam was hot, but if you cooled it, it became liquid water; if you cooled it further still, it became solid ice.
I hovered a hand over the license to help me concentrate my powers on it and, more specifically, the year of my birth. I focused on the six that was the last digit of my birth year. I shrank down in my mind’s eye, down to the barely moving lattice structure of the polycarbonate molecules that comprised the “6” on the license. With my powers, I forced those molecules to vibrate slightly more, making the polycarbonate more pliable. I simultaneously kept the molecules of the laminate above the six rigid to keep the now hot plastic underneath from burning a hole through the thin coating.
I gently nudged the now pliable plastic of the digit, lengthening its top and reshaping its bottom, so that it looked like a “5” rather than the “6” it had started off as. Once it looked as good as I could make it, I slowed down the molecules of the plastic again, cooling and re-hardening what had been semi-liquid moments before.
I released my powers’ hold on the plastic. My heart pounded with exertion. Though the whole process had only taken a few seconds, for some reason manipulating matter on a molecular level took a lot out of me, far more so than picking up something massively heavy did.
According to my license, I was now a year older than I had been seconds before. Time sure flew when you were having fun waiting outside of a strip club. I ran a finger over the year of my birth. Though the once perfectly flat laminate covering the license was now a tiny bit raised over the newly formed “5,” it was barely noticeable and not visible to the naked eye.
Truman took the license out of my hand. He looked at with a critical eye before handing it back. “Not bad,” he murmured.
Once we got to the front of the line, Truman and I handed our IDs to the large bouncers. My doctored one passed their inspection without so much as a raised eyebrow. One of them held the door open for us. The music from inside blared louder. Truman and I stepped inside. The door closed, plungin
g us into relative darkness. The inside was ill-lit compared to the bright area right outside the club. I blinked, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dimness.
“You have a bright future as a counterfeiter ahead of you,” Truman said. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the thumping music. The loudness of it made my insides vibrate.
“Something to look forward to,” I said, suppressing a smile. I still wasn’t happy about being in a strip club, but was pleased that I had gotten past the bouncers without Truman’s help. I had screwed up the situation with Antonio and Hannah so royally that it felt good to know I wasn’t completely incompetent.
There was a bar near the front door. Truman and I lingered near it. The song that had been playing when we came in went off, replaced by a rap song that was equally loud. I didn’t recognize it, but based on its oft-repeated refrain, it was titled Twerk Dat Booty. Nothing compares to the classics.
My eyes had adjusted to the dim light. I peered around. This floor of the club was one giant room. It was crowded despite its size. Smoke swirled like thin fog, a violation of the city ordinance prohibiting smoking inside of businesses. Though some was cigarette smoke, much of it was marijuana. The acrid smell of the drug was one I knew all too well. Though marijuana was illegal in Maryland, there were parts of the city, including my neighborhood, where smoking a joint on the street was as common as littering. Police didn’t bother arresting people for weed. They had bigger fish to fry in a place like Astor City.
The inside of the club was a huge rectangle. The door we had just come in from was in the middle of one of the long sides of the rectangle. Directly across from us on the far side of the club were two brightly lit stages. Each had two brass poles running from the stage to the high ceiling. The stage on the left featured two women who could have been photographic negatives of one another: a very dark-skinned black woman, and a very pale, redheaded white woman. Both were thin, long-haired, attractive in a hardened way, and as naked as the day they were born. Assuming they had been born. I couldn’t imagine either of these improbably busty woman as babies. Maybe they had been manufactured fully formed by some mad scientist with a breast fetish and a surplus supply of silicone. Using the brass poles as props, both women danced, shimmied, and shook in rhythm to the song that blared from the club’s overhead speakers.
The stage to the right featured four or five nude and semi-nude women. They writhed together so closely that it was hard to tell exactly how many there were, where one of them ended, and where another began. My face got hot as I realized what they were doing to each other. It was probably illegal in private; it was definitely illegal in public. Watching them reminded me of the time I had almost tripped over a snake ball when picking peas back on the farm. The mass of entangled, wet-looking, mating reptiles had simultaneously been both obscenely fascinating and disgusting. The mound of women was like that snake ball, only without a ball in sight. There were strap-ons, though. One out of three pieces of masculinity wasn’t bad.
To the left of the stages was a closed doorway with a lit-up sign reading “Private Dances” above it. In front of the two stages stood dozens of men, with more in front of the stage on the right than on the left. They looked almost transfixed, like television junkies watching their favorite show. From time to time they flung bills onto the stages. The stages’ floors looked like they were carpeted with giant green and white confetti.
Scattered around the room were several smaller, circular stages. They rose out of the club’s floor like stalagmites. Each had a brass pole extending from its center to the ceiling. There were strippers on each of these stages in various stages of undress. These smaller stages were also surrounded by men who looked up at the women hungrily. The looks on their faces reminded me of how a pack of dogs looked up at you when they were about to be fed. The large woman featured on the small stage closest to me had climbed to the top of the pole high above, and hung upside down with the pole gripped between one leg’s calf and thigh. My first thought was that I hoped she didn’t fall and break her neck; my second thought was that her oversized breasts and ample derriere would likely cushion the impact.
In addition to the women on stage, scantily clad women were scattered throughout the club. Tray-laden waitresses, all topless and wearing only silver-colored thong bikini bottoms, flitted among the throng of men, serving drinks and being ogled. The woman mixing drinks behind the bar we stood near was, like the waitresses, topless. Unlike them, she was very obviously pregnant. Her pendulous, veiny breasts hung down, resting on the swell of her pregnant belly. Several men were clustered around the bar, eying the pregnant woman hungrily, which struck me as being like wanting to eat a piece of cake that had already been chewed and swallowed by someone else.
Some of the strippers had on more clothes than the waitresses did. The ones who weren’t dancing on one of the stages sat next to or in the laps of men, flirting so aggressively that I wondered if the guys who were the subjects of the flirtation would need to take a cold shower afterward. I felt like I needed one, and those women where nowhere near me. From time to time one of those women would stand, pulling a guy behind her as she walked toward the private dance doorway. The men always looked eager; the strippers, once their faces were out of view of the men they had in tow, always looked either bored or disgusted, even though they had looked like cats in heat moments before. The strippers who weren’t flirting with the customers waited for the women on the stages and poles to finish so they could take their place.
Looking around, the number of women I’d seen naked in my life went from one to dozens of all ethnicities, colors, sizes, and body types in the span of just a few seconds. As I was enthusiastically heterosexual, the sight was more than just a little overwhelming. It was like being a starving man who had just walked into the world’s biggest all-you-can-eat buffet. But, as someone who had been raised Catholic and taught that sexuality was sacred and not something crass and vulgar to be commercialized, watching these women shimmy, shake, and objectify themselves was as morally repulsive as it was viscerally exciting. The half-naked pregnant bartender was particularly shocking.
Like a decaying fish on the shore glittering with reflected moonlight, this place was at once both rotten and beautiful. My heart raced. My mouth was dry. It was difficult to get air in. I was torn between bolting back outside and grabbing the closest strippers and taking them to the private area.
“First time in a strip club?”
Startled, I realized it was Truman who had spoken, and not for the first time. I had been too transfixed with all the flesh on display to notice before. He looked at me with amusement. I flushed, this time with embarrassment instead of arousal mixed with repulsion. Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded in answer to his question.
“Can I interest you gentlemen in a private dance?” came a voice from my right, startling me again. I turned to see a young woman with vampire white skin and long, golden blonde hair standing next to me. She wore toweringly high heels that were made of clear plastic, bringing her almost up to eye level with me. There was a large tattoo of a red apple with a bite taken out of it on the side of her neck. Her dark red lipstick matched the color of the apple. Her electric blue dress looked like it had been painted on. Though it covered her from the bottom of her neck to right above her knees, it was so tight it revealed more than it concealed. It made her look more indecent than if she wasn’t wearing anything at all.
“No thanks,” Truman said. “If you try to dance in that outfit you’re liable to cut off your blood flow. I won’t have your death on my hands. Or my lap.”
If the woman heard any of that other than the word “no,” she gave no indication. She leaned toward me. I got a glimpse of milky-white cleavage. “How about you, big boy? My name’s Lilith. I’ll show you a good time.” Her voice was low, breathy, and slightly slurred. Her perfume, strong and cheap, hit me like a hammer. The cheeks of her otherwise white face were almost as red as her lips and tattoo. It wasn’t the flush of
health or even rouge. It was an unhealthy, mottled red. The pupils of her eyes were unfocused and unnaturally huge; her irises were but narrow blue halos around them. I wondered what drugs she was on to make her sound and look like this. All of them, maybe.
Lilith’s braless chest pressed against my arm. Her body radiated heat like an oven. I opened my mouth to respond. Nothing came out. I had been struck dumb by her body’s proximity and blatant sexuality. She wasn’t my usual type, but it had been so long since I’d been touched by a woman that anyone with a vagina would have been my type at that moment. My body responded strongly to her. Lilith looked down, smiled hazily, and reached down and grabbed my crotch. My throat tightened, like I was having an allergic reaction. In my wildest dreams, I never would have predicted that the second person ever to touch me like this and the first person since Neha would be a stripper. Part of me wanted to pull the woman’s hand off me. The rest of me called that other part a killjoy and didn’t move. Not that I could have, anyway. I was frozen in place, like a mouse transfixed by an approaching snake.
“What’s the matter, baby? Cat got your tongue?” Lilith purred. She stroked and tugged on me through my pants. Primal need tugged at me even more insistently. My blood pounded in my ears like a jungle drum.
“Yeah, a pussy cat,” Truman said. If I could do more than struggle to breathe, I likely would have used my powers to fling him across the room. Him speaking, though, just feet from where this stranger fondled me, was enough to snap me out of my paralysis.
“I’m not interested in a dance either,” I croaked.
“Your mouth says no, but this says yes,” Lilith said, giving me another squeeze. It almost made me moan. Her lips brushed against my ear, sending chills up and down my spine. “If you pay a little extra, I’ll do more than just dance for you.”
I shocked myself by being tempted. It had been so long since I had touched and been touched. Cassandra could wait. If I had put off dealing with Mechano this long, surely he could wait an hour or so more. Lilith’s breasts pressed harder against me. Sexual need bubbled up inside of me, like a volcano about to explode. Oh, who was I kidding? Cassandra and Mechano wouldn’t be put off for an hour. My carnal desires had been pent up for too long. It would be a few minutes at the most. If that long.
Omega Superhero Box Set Page 61
