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 Forreal 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 in 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.
