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  “I poured it out,” she said, shooting him a sharp look. “I’m not as bombed as you think.”

  They went to a Friday’s and ordered cheeseburgers. García had a beer. Erin drank coffee. They were conducting a perfectly amiable conversation until the detective asked if she had a boyfriend.

  She said, “Shit, don’t do this.”

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  García chewed thoughtfully. “My interest is purely professional. I need to cover all the angles.”

  “You’re not trying to ask me out?”

  “Nope.” He raised his right hand, cheeseburger and all. “I swear to God.”

  “You sure?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Erin, I took you to meet my wife.”

  She apologized, sheepishly. She felt like the queen bitch of all time. “It’s not that I’ve got such a red-hot opinion of myself—”

  “I understand,” García said, “believe me.”

  “It’s the damn job.” She was so accustomed to being propositioned that she was automatically suspicious of any man who didn’t try. It made for a relentlessly cynical view of the opposite sex. Having Darrell Grant in one’s past contributed to Erin’s attitude.

  She said, “The answer is no, there’s no boyfriend. But you knew that, right?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “At the end of the night, I don’t have much energy left for men. Or much interest, for that matter.”

  “Occupational hazard,” said García, attacking a pile of french fries. “Is there any man you trust completely?”

  “Don’t laugh,” Erin said. “I trust Shad.”

  Al García grinned. “Me, too.”

  After lunch, he drove out to the ocean. Erin said that she wanted to stand in the sunshine and bleach out the gin. The detective parked at Bahia Mar, and they walked across the overpass to the beach. García wished he’d taken off his coat and tie; people were giving him odd looks.

  Erin walked down far enough to get her toes wet. The detective stopped a few feet from the waves. He lit the cigar and blew the smoke over his right shoulder, safely downwind from Erin.

  She said, “You think I’m a whore?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Erin stepped back from the water. “But you wouldn’t want your daughter doing what I do.”

  “My daughter,” said García, “is not leaving the house until she’s thirty years old.”

  Erin smiled. “Angie is fascinated by Mommy’s costumes.”

  The detective said, “The time comes, she’ll understand.”

  Erin stretched. The sun felt glorious on her face and arms. She said, “I tell myself it’s just dancing.”

  “And I tell myself I’m an ace crime fighter. So what?”

  Erin had an urge to jump in the ocean. She got a running start and dove in. She swam fifty yards and stopped. Floating on her back, she blinked the salty sting from her eyes. The swells lifted the T-shirt, billowing around her breasts. Seagulls kited above the surf and cawed raucously. Silver mullet jumped and skittered toward deeper water. She heard the whoosh of a windsurfer and a lewd whistle from the teenager riding the board. Erin serenely flipped him the finger.

  When she waded from the water, Al García offered his coat. Erin thought: How can you not like this guy? She said, “I guess you don’t go for the wet look.”

  “Please.” He cloaked the jacket around her shoulders. “Be kind to a shy old fart.”

  In the parking lot, García searched the Caprice for a clean towel. Erin spotted the Igloo cooler and said she hoped there was a cold six-pack inside. The detective said the ice chest was used for human body parts, not refreshments.

  “Yum,” said Erin. She picked up a clear bag of blue hospital masks. “I bet you looky snazzy in one of these.”

  García said they came in handy. He tossed her a striped beach towel that belonged to Donna.

  Erin said, “I’ll ask you what you’ve been dying to ask me: How in the world can you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Your job. Dead bodies day after day—I couldn’t take it,”

  The detective said, “Hey, it’s a growth industry. The state could sell fucking bonds.”

  On the drive home, they talked about Erin’s date with the congressman. She had plenty of questions. Would he be alone? How long did she need to stay? What should she do if he went crazy again? Some of García’s answers were more comforting than others.

  The detective’s car phone beeped. He spoke for less than a minute and hung up, frowning.

  Erin said, “Duty calls.”

  “Trunk job,” García muttered. “Miami International.”

  “That’s ninety minutes away.”

  “No hurry. The guy’s been there since Labor Day.” He said the stink wasn’t so bad if you dabbed Old Spice inside your hospital mask, before popping the trunk. To Erin, it was the stuff of nightmares.

  Back at the apartment, she waited by the front door while Al García checked for signs of intruders. He came back out and told her it was safe. He didn’t tell her that he’d emptied her bottle of Beefeater’s down the bathtub drain.

  At the door, the detective told her to think some more about meeting David Dilbeck alone. If she wanted to change her mind, he’d understand. It was a risky deal.

  “I won’t change my mind,” she said.

  “Then be ready for the worst. For two grand, he’ll want more than a peek.”

  “Oh, he’ll definitely get more than a peek,” Erin said. “Just one thing: can I bring my own music?”

  Al García said sure, absolutely.

  24

  Orly asked Shad where he got the scorpion. Shad said he bought it off a guy at Dania jai-alai.

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Alive,” Shad said.

  Orly leaned in for a closer look. “Is it sick or what?”

  Shad said, “No, I drowned it.”

  “How?”

  “Johnnie Walker.”

  Orly laughed, sucking air through his teeth. “Red or black?”

  “Red,” Shad said. He used his tweezers to lift the dead scorpion from the jar.

  “Big fucker,” Orly observed. “So the idea is to make it look like the company’s fault?”

  “Sure.” Shad placed the dead scorpion in an eight-ounce carton of cottage cheese. He spooned curds over the soggy corpse except for the stinger, which he purposely left exposed.

  Orly said, “And they’ll pay off? The company, I mean.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Shad placed the lid on the container and pressed firmly on the edges. He hadn’t yet decided whether to sue the cottage-cheese manufacturer or the national supermarket chain that carried the product.

  “The guy who sold you the scorpion, is he the same one that sold you the snake?”

  “No,” Shad said.

  “Because Lorelei ain’t thrilled with the snake.”

  “I heard.”

  On short notice, Shad had located a half-blind boa constrictor for two hundred bucks. The seven-foot reptile was mean, restless and extremely difficult to handle on the dance floor. Even with its mouth taped, the boa intimidated Lorelei.

  “She’s scared to hang it around her neck,” Orly said.

  “So tell her don’t hang it on her neck.”

  “Then where? She’s buck naked, man.”

  Shad gave a shrug. “You wanted a new snake. I got one.”

  “It peed on her,” said Orly.

  “I heard.”

  “Now she’s threatening to quit on me. Go back to the Flesh Farm.”

  Shad said, “What the hell, Mr. Orly. Snakes pee.” It felt like a chainsaw was cropping the top of his skull. He placed the cottage cheese in the refrigerator and wrote a note in block letters warning the dancers not to touch it. Orly watched quietly, his back to the mirror. Monique Jr. limped into the dressing room with a broken heel, which Shad fixed with Krazy Glue. A new hire named Danielle dashed in for
a cosmetic emergency; a sharp-eyed customer had spotted the incision marks from her recent surgery. While the dancer lifted her round new breasts, Shad applied Maybelline powder to the scars.

  When they were alone again, Orly said: “The Lings don’t know who they’re dealin’ with.”

  “I sure told them.”

  “About Fat Tony? Nicky Scarfo?”

  “The works,” Shad said. “They don’t particularly give a shit. By the way, Fat Tony croaked. The Lings saw it in The Herald.”

  Orly planted his elbows on the vanity. “America’s going down the shitter, that’s my theory. Why? Because these goddamn foreigners don’t respect our national institutions—not Detroit, not Wall Street, not even the Mafia.”

  Shad didn’t like the direction of the conversation. Soon Orly would ask him to sabotage the Flesh Farm; the subject had arisen often.

  “I’d like to help,” Shad said, “but I can’t.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “I just can’t.” He was hesitant to tell Mr. Orly about his rap sheet, as the liquor commission frowned on the practice of hiring convicted felons. “Call up North,” Shad said. “Get a real torch artist.” Of course the phone call would never be made; Orly didn’t know a soul in the mob.

  The club owner picked up a hairbrush and tapped a beat on the dressing table. “Those Lings,” he said. “I can’t believe they’d hack up a perfectly good snake.”

  Shad said they were definitely making a statement.

  “They broke the girl’s heart,” Orly said. “Hey, see if there’s a cold drink in the fridge.”

  Shad found him a cream soda.

  “I was thinking,” said Orly, lapping the rim of the can. “Remember when the business was mainly bikers? Back when we were The Booby Hatch and The Pleasure Palace? Biker girls, biker clientele, biker fights. Those days you knew the rules.”

  “It was a pit,” Shad said, unsentimentally.

  “Yeah, but we knew what was what. The strippers hooked. The customers dealt dope. Everybody carried a knife or a piece.”

  Shad said, “The good old days. I might just cry.”

  “Bottom line, yes, it was a dive. Yes, it was a sewer. But there was a logical fucking order to things.” Orly took a gulp of soda, sloshed it around both cheeks and swallowed. “Those days I never had to worry about crooks like the Lings. Competition? There wasn’t none. DJs. Play lists. Wind machines. Trained fucking pythons, forget it! Back then, the girls couldn’t dance worth a lick, and I’ll also say they were in no danger of getting hired off by Playboy. You remember Thin Lizzie?”

  Shad couldn’t help but chuckle. Lizzie was a biker dancer who stood five-foot-four, weighed a hundred and seventy-seven pounds and had a stock car tattooed on her back. Who could forget? A red-and-blue Dodge, Number 43. King Richard Petty hisself.

  “Remember?” Orly said, glowing. “So maybe she did suck off half of Fort Lauderdale in my parking lot. The lady was no trouble to me. No trouble at all. I tell her to dance fast, she danced fast. I tell her to dance slow, she goes slow. That was long before this wrestling thing caught on, but lemme say—if I’d told Lizzie to wrestle in transmission fluid, she’d by God wrestle. The girl was a trouper and she understood the rules.”

  Shad opened a bottle of Bayer aspirins and chewed up five. Orly offered a swig of cream soda, which Shad declined.

  “Now look how the business is changed,” Orly went on. “My dancers are practically unionized, thanks to your friend Erin. They pick their own songs, pick their own hours. Meanwhile my liability premiums are tripled on account of all the bankers and lawyers and CPAs hanging out at the joint. Every time there’s a fight I nearly have a fucking coronary, wondering which yuppie asshole’s gonna sue me next.”

  Shad said, “One thing about the bikers. They don’t sue.”

  “Damn right.”

  “On the other hand, you’re makin’ real good money now. We’re selling four, five times the booze.”

  Orly crumpled the soda can and pinged it off the wall. “Prosperity,” he said, “ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Shad was disillusioned, too, but for other reasons. He knew better than to share his innermost feelings with the boss.

  Orly said, “I had a chance to get into a Taco Bell franchise up in Orlando. Fifteen minutes from fucking Disney World—did I tell you? This was October last year.”

  “You told me,” Shad said. Orly’s wife had vetoed the deal because Mexican food aggravated her colon.

  “So there goes my best chance to get out,” Orly said, “all because Lily gets the runs from fajitas.”

  “She’d rather have you runnin’ a strip joint?”

  “It’s crazy, I know, but she’s never said a word.” Orly lowered his voice. “Between you and me and the four walls, I’m so tired of naked poon I can’t stand it. It’s been years since I had a serious boner, I swear to God.”

  Shad agreed it was a draining job. Lord, didn’t he know!

  Orly said, “I’ll ask straight up: What happens you hit it big on this scorpion deal? Say the cottage-cheese company comes through with a couple hundred grand. I guess I’ll be needing a new bouncer.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I like you all right, Mr. Orly.”

  “Hey, you could even buy a piece a this joint. We could be goddamn partners!”

  “To be honest,” Shad said, “I don’t like you that much.”

  “Whatever. That’s okay, too.”

  In eleven years it was the longest conversation that the two men had ever had. Orly was plainly overwrought about something. Shad asked what had happened to put him in such a mood.

  “Not a damn thing,” he snapped.

  “Moldowsky called again, right? About Erin.”

  “On top of everything else, yeah.” Orly became subdued. “He’s looking for a picture of this horny congressman. A picture from right here at the club. I’m sure you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Nope,” said Shad. “What else?”

  “He had a message for Erin.” Orly pulled a shred of paper from his damp breast pocket and gave it to Shad. “Ten o’clock tomorrow night down at Turnberry. Here’s the name of the yacht.”

  Shad struggled to decipher Orly’s scribble; his sweat had made the ink run. “Sweetheart something,” Shad said. He didn’t like the idea of Erin meeting Dilbeck on a boat.

  Orly said, “So I suppose she’s gonna screw this guy.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause he’s a politician, for God’s sake.”

  Shad said, “You know her better than that.”

  “A United States congressman, you’re telling me it’s just a private dance party? No sex is what you’re telling me?”

  “I’d be very surprised.”

  Orly did a poor job of masking his disappointment. Shad did an equally poor job of masking his anger; the stare he leveled at Orly was harrowing.

  “Fuck the liquor license,” he said.

  Orly stiffened. “But the guy’s busting my balls.”

  “Then you sleep with him.”

  “Take it easy, take it easy.” Nervously Orly chucked Shad on the forearm. “See, this is what I mean. This is my exact point. In the old days we never worried about evil shit like this. Rednecks, bikers and whores—that was the tittie business. Now look out there, you see beepers and cell phones at every fucking table. Blow-dried dorks in designer suspenders, honest to Christ! The parking lot’s full Beemers and Blazers but, shit, I can’t sleep nights. No, you keep your fucking upscale clientele.”

  “And politicians,” Shad said. The impulse to choke Mr. Orly had ebbed slightly.

  “Bikers are better customers,” said Orly. “I swear to God, Shad, I’d rather have a barful of bikers than one shitfaced congressman. The fights we could handle, remember? Hell, I’d take a stabbing every night over evil shit like this. Some guy I never met, busting my balls about the license.”

  In five minutes Urbana Sprawl was due to wrestle in a vat
of cooked linguini. Shad planned to supervise. He stood up and said, “What’s done is done. We’ll fix things right.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Orly.”

  They walked through the main lounge together. Rap music pounded pneumatically from the walls. On stage, Lorelei was struggling with the new snake, which had coiled itself the full length of her right leg. Even the most drunken customers realized it was not part of the act.

  Orly cupped a hand to Shad’s ear and shouted: “Maybe I’ll put a sign at the door: No politicians allowed! Ax murderers and perverts welcome, but no goddamn politicians!”

  Shad faked a smile. He was grumpy enough to bite the head off a kitten.

  “Give me bikers any day,” Orly was saying. “No more congressmen in my joint….”

  On stage, Lorelei gimped stoically out of the spotlight. She yelled something about her leg turning blue.

  Shad thought: I’ve got to get out soon. Before I do some damage.

  Malcolm J. Moldowsky knew that the congressman couldn’t be blackmailed by a geek bouncer with a felony rap sheet. More problematic was the young stockbroker, Paul Guber, but he had abruptly left town. It was the third person in the scandalous bachelor-party photograph who most worried Moldy: the stripper.

  If so inclined, Erin Grant could singlehandedly destroy the congressman’s fragile reputation. Which is precisely why Moldowsky had arranged for the two of them to meet.

  Moldy spent the morning of October fourth in a high-level strategy session, by himself. He neither needed nor sought the counsel of others. Silence bred clarity of thinking, and solitude restored one’s perspective. It was important to set aside his personal contempt for David Dilbeck and concentrate on the mission for which he was being paid. Many fires burned out of control. It was time to focus.

  He needed ammunition, but there wasn’t much in Erin’s past. The custody file was loaded with juicy accusations, but Moldowsky was skeptical of the ex-husband’s veracity; Darrell Grant came off as a despicable creep. No sense opening that particular can of worms.

  Moldy decided to treat Mrs. Grant very gently indeed. Look but don’t touch, he’d warned the congressman. Do nothing to frighten or anger this woman. If she says no, don’t argue. If all else fails, try to make friends.