"I'll be your friend," the man said. He flashed a wad of bills about waist height, so you wouldn't see it from farther into the club. The bill that showed was a twenty, leaving the implication that it was a roll of twenties.
Micah shook his head.
The man peeled off two twenties.
"No," Micah said.
I was almost up to them, when the man peeled off two more twenties—eighty bucks—and held it up to Micah. "No one else is going to offer you more tonight."
"Oh, I don't know," I said, "I'm throwing in room and board, and sex with a girl." I put my arm around Micah's waist, and he did the same to me.
The man's eyes flicked to me, then back to Micah, then to me. "You're his friend?"
I nodded.
"You really were waiting for a friend," the man said.
"I did tell you that," Micah said.
The man frowned and started folding his money away. "I didn't think you meant this kind of friend."
"He did," I said, and gave him the smile that was bright and cheerful and never reached my eyes. I looked around for Nathaniel and found that I could barely see him around the backs of a couple that had him backed into a corner. He raised a hand, so I'd be sure to see him. Or maybe he was asking for help, like a drowning man.
I took Micah's hand and brought him with me. I think safety in numbers was our best bet. "Excuse me, boys and girls," I said.
The couple turned and looked at me. The man was tall and dark, the girl was a little taller than me and blond. She was wearing a halter dress that needed to be lined better. Her nipples were dark imprints against the pale fabric. I carefully kept my gaze above her waist, not even wanting to know if there were other dark imprints lower down. I don't mean to give the idea that they were cheap looking, they weren't. The girl was wearing a diamond in her engagement ring big enough to choke a puppy, and her bracelets were gold and more diamonds. Her makeup was artful, which meant she looked like she was wearing almost none but was actually wearing a lot. The man was dressed in a suit that had been tailored to his body and had probably come from the same shop that Micah and Nathaniel got theirs from. It had the look.
"I'm sorry, but we were talking to the gentleman first," the man said.
I took in a lot of air through my nose and let it out slow. The woman's perfume was powdery and expensive. "Actually, I was talking to him first, because I brought him here."
They gave each other surprised looks.
Nathaniel started trying to ease past them. "Sorry," he said, "I did tell you I came with somebody." When he was safely beside me, and I was holding both Micah's and Nathaniel's hands, I figured we were safe from any more propositions. Silly me.
The woman went up on tiptoe, and the man bent down so she could whisper. I didn't care anymore. I started trying to maneuver us back to Ronnie. The area was just a little narrow for three people to move easily.
"Wait," the woman said.
I turned back, because that's what you do when someone speaks to you.
"All three of you with us," she said.
I blinked at her, the long blink that gave me time to process information when I just didn't believe what I'd just heard. Once upon a time, I'd have asked her what she meant, but I'd grown up since then, and I knew the answer. "No," I said, and sort of pushed Micah in front of me and pulled Nathaniel behind. We came to an abrupt halt, because Nathaniel stopped moving.
I knew what I was going to see before I turned back. I was half right, the man had grabbed Nathaniel's arm. I'd thought it would be the woman. Again, silly me.
I moved up beside Nathaniel. "Let go of him, now," and I put a lot of force in the "now."
He dropped Nathaniel's arm. "My wife really likes your friend."
"I'm happy for her, but it's not my problem. Don't touch him again. Don't touch any of us again, is that clear?"
"You're here for the same thing we are," he said, "let's go back to our place. We've got a bathtub big enough for all of us." He stepped a little closer to us. "I just know that you'll look even better out of your clothes than you do in them."
I gave him the look, the one that makes bad guys flinch at twenty paces and the weaker ones run for their mommies.
His wife was smarter than he was, she pulled on his arm, and said, "Honey, I don't think they want to play."
"Listen to your wife, she's the smart one." I thought that was a nice parting shot, and we turned to go, and again, Nathaniel stopped moving. I turned back and found that the man had grabbed Nathaniel's braid. That was it, no more nice.
I brought my badge out and shoved it at his face. He had to back up to look at the badge, as if he should have been wearing glasses but wasn't. But it made him let go of Nathaniel's hair.
He laughed. "I've got one at home. If you want to play cops and robbers, we're into that."
I had the badge in my left hand, so I had to use just my fingertips of the same hand to spread my jacket wide enough that I showed him the gun in its shoulder holster. "You got one of these?" I asked.
The woman was pulling at his arm. "Don't, honey, I think she's for real."
He glared down at me. "Who are you?"
"Federal Marshal Anita Blake, asshole, back it up and leave us alone."
The look on his face said, clearly, he didn't believe me. Maybe he was one of those men who just didn't believe women in authority, or maybe he just wanted to see Nathaniel's hair spread all over his bed so badly, that he didn't want to believe it. I'd been willing to buy that it was his wife that liked Nathaniel, right up to the point where he'd been the one that grabbed his arm, touched his hair. His wife might like Nathaniel, who wouldn't? But it wasn't her who had a serious hard-on about it.
I let my jacket fall back into place and used my body to sort of push Nathaniel between Micah and me. No way was I leaving him at the end of the line by Mr. Touchie. I put the badge up and started moving us down the narrow hallway, but I moved sort of backward, so I could keep an eye on the couple. Alright, on one half of the couple.
The wife was pulling at his arm trying to get him to move away. He jerked away from her and just kept looking at me. It was not a friendly look. In fact, there was enough heat in his eyes to cross that line to hate. I hadn't done anything to make him hate me, except tell him no. There are men that see no as the ultimate insult, but usually it takes more than a rejection during a bar pickup attempt to get this level of reaction. I kept my attention on him until we were swallowed by one of the curtains that hid the deeper rooms.
"That was just creepy," I said.
"I know him," Nathaniel said in a small voice.
I looked at him. "How?"
He licked his lips, and his eyes looked haunted. "When I was on the streets. He used to pick up the older boys, the ones that were almost too old for the trade."
"Too old?" I asked.
"Most of the men that came down there weren't looking for men, Anita. They wanted boys. Once you looked too grown-up you had to move where you worked. A different clientele." He said the last with a bitter little twist of his mouth. "He's older now, and he didn't recognize me, but I remember him. I remember one of the older boys warned me about him."
"Warned you?"
Nathaniel nodded. "Yeah."
"Did he hurt them?"
"Not yet, but sometimes everyone gets a feeling about a customer. He can ask for really standard stuff, but after awhile everyone just gets creeped. It's like you can smell the sickness on them, like you just know that it's only a matter of time before they hurt someone."
I touched his face, and he looked at me, and his eyes held that sadness that he'd come to me with. That look that said he'd seen it all, done it all, and it had destroyed something inside him. I put my hands on either side of his face and kissed him gently. It helped chase some of that lostness away, but not all of it. Some of it clung around the edges.