Rick nodded and took a twenty and a ten out of his wallet and set it down on the bar. The price of admission had gone up.
“I’ll have a Dirty Shirley,” Emerald told the bartender. He went to work filling a tall glass with ice and some kind of soda from the bar and vodka from a Grey Goose bottle and grenadine. Rick assumed the vodka was water. They weren’t going to waste Grey Goose on a dancer. Probably not even alcohol.
“I’ve been dancing here for a year,” Emerald said, taking a sip of her drink. “But I’ve been dancing since I was eighteen.”
“They treat you well here?”
“Uh-huh. Where’re you from, Rick?”
“New York. She doesn’t own the place, that woman?” he asked, pointing with his chin at the black-haired woman.
“No, she’s the manager.”
The music segued bizarrely from Lil Wayne to Nickelback doing “Photograph.” The dancer left the stage and another one, white with bleached blond hair, took her place. She had a spray bottle in one hand and a white rag in the other, and she was cleaning the pole while undulating to the rhythm.
“Is the boss around, or does he come in later?”
Emerald smiled uncomfortably. “There’s a couple of bosses. Why you asking all that?”
Rick shrugged. “Just making conversation.” He’d come on too hard with the questions. He was out of practice; his investigative skills were rusty. But that was okay; he didn’t seriously expect to learn much if anything from her. She might know the name of the owner or owners, sure, but he hadn’t been counting on it. He mostly wanted to get the lay of the land. When the right moment presented itself, he’d be ready to ask questions of the manager or the owner, under the guise of being an undercover city inspector. “Maybe I’m looking to buy the place.”
She laughed, not sure whether to take him seriously.
Rick looked around. The sour Asian man was taking glasses out of a dishwasher built into the end of the stage. The black-haired Russian woman was talking with a man in a black fleece at the far side of the bar. He didn’t look like a patron. They were speaking with an easy, joking familiarity. Maybe he was an owner or one of the owners. The man nodded at someone in back. Rick turned to see who he was nodding at. It was another man, tall and wide, with a blond buzz cut, emerging from the dimly lit recesses at the back of the bar. He looked like a bouncer type.
At the back of the bar he saw a restroom sign. Maybe the bouncer was coming from the restroom, or maybe that’s where the employees’ entrance was.
“I’ll be back,” he told Emerald, getting up from the stool. He went toward the back. He passed the women’s restroom, then the men’s. He glanced down the narrow hallway and saw a couple more doors. One was painted steel with a push bar on it and looked as if it led outside. Another was ajar. Light from the room flooded out into the hall. Probably an office of some kind.
He looked around, didn’t see anyone coming, then shouldered the door open. It was indeed an office, a metal desk piled with papers and mail, a framed poster of a stripper, signed with a Sharpie in flowery script. The I was dotted with a heart. On top of a dented black steel file cabinet was an old Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and a few reams of printer paper.
No one here. He scanned the heap on top of the desk, saw a Comcast bill in a window envelope. So maybe he’d get lucky, find a letter or a magazine addressed to the owner, by name. He took the Comcast bill and saw it was addressed to “Jugs DBA Citadel LaGrange Entertainment.” That wasn’t a name, but it was something. He shoved it into his back pocket.
Something or someone slammed him up against the wall. He turned just in time to see the crew cut bouncer, his right hand pincered on Rick’s throat, choking him. With his other hand the bouncer pinioned Rick’s right hand against the door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.
Rick gagged. He looked down at the bouncer’s left hand, saw a green blob on the inside of his wrist. It was familiar. Then he remembered: He’d seen a similar tattoo on the wrist of one of his abductors in the Charles Hotel parking garage. It was actually a clover leaf, not a blob. A three-leaved shamrock. On each leaf was the number 6, making it 666. The number of the antichrist.
Rick kneed the man in the groin, thrusting hard. The man groaned and doubled up and Rick was able to break free of his grip. He lunged into the hallway, spun around, then slammed a hip against the push bar on the steel door. The door made a bleeping sound, and Rick could feel a rush of cold air. He stumbled, scraping a knee against the asphalt ground. The bouncer lurched through the door after him, shouting something, but Rick was already out of the alley and down the street and racing as fast as he’d ever run in his life.
19
He arrived at the offices of Back Bay magazine with scuffed jeans and a big rip at the knee. He’d torn his jeans in the alley and didn’t feel like going back to the B &B to change. He didn’t particularly care. He wasn’t going for a job interview.
Rick was still officially on the staff of Back Bay. Shortly after Mort Ostrow had fired Rick, after the shock had worn off, he’d swallowed his considerable pride and accepted Ostrow’s offhanded offer: If Rick agreed to post at least one piece a week, he’d get to keep access to the usual databases and receive a salary of sorts. A pittance. Next to nothing, but not nothing. It was useful to have access to the databases and be able to say he was calling from Back Bay magazine. That might come in handy now, too. He didn’t have to come in to the office to post things, so he’d stayed away. In fact, only once since Mort Ostrow had delivered the bad news had he been in to the office, and that was to pack up his desk.
His stomach tightened as he approached the glass door to the office suite. He dreaded meeting up with his colleagues. Ostrow had let go all the editors over the age of thirty except Darren Overby, the new editor in chief, and Karen, the managing editor, but she’d been part-time since the birth of her son, four years ago. They might still be here, though, slaving away on freelance pieces, taking advantage of the free office space to work until the magazine, which was really just a website now, downsized to whatever minuscule closet it was moving to and then disappeared altogether, like a wisp of smoke. Rick didn’t look forward to making small talk (The job search is going great, thanks! Updating my LinkedIn page as we speak!).
Then he remembered the pile of cash in his storage unit and he immediately felt better about everything. The money was like a suit of armor. It protected him against insults and indignities. Yes, he didn’t have a real job, but no longer did he have to worry about money. Except, he reminded himself, for worrying about protecting it. Keeping it safe from whoever knew he had it. Keeping himself safe, too.
Nine people were seated around the big cherrywood conference table. Rick recognized only two of them, the remaining two editors, Karen and Darren-so perfect a team they even rhymed! The other seven were a fresh-faced assortment, all in their early to mid twenties, hipster lumberjacks dressed so similarly they might have been wearing uniforms: bulky cable-knit sweaters or checked flannel shirts, a few of them wearing big chunky eyeglasses. They had to be freelance writers, here for a story meeting. All of them looked hopeful and optimistic. They weren’t yet cynics. They weren’t writers, really, either. They were contributors. They repurposed content from blogs and websites, and they were paid by the click.