Wednesday, November 23
The deal was that Carl Tanner, after three weeks in Mexico’s Sonoran desert taking down narcomonsters, would get his injuries tended to and then kick back for four weeks before getting his first Omega Team assignment. That deal had so far held for seven days.
Tanner sat at his favorite beach bar, savoring his second draft and gazing across the pale sand to the Gulf of Mexico. Any minute he’d get his longed-for desert fantasy: a blackened grouper sandwich with a double order of fries. And a side of slaw. And sriracha. Running for his life while surviving on cactus paddles and grubs had increased his appreciation for life’s little luxuries.
Nobody else shared the palm-shaded table. These days he appreciated shade a lot more, too. He wore cutoffs and a worn, baggy tee shirt, the better for his back to heal. He’d left his flip flops in the car. The livid gouges on his legs didn’t show much. And he didn’t give a shit if they did, so long as no idiot asked how he’d got them.
The breeze off the water was balmy, low 70’s, about right for this time of year around Tampa Bay. Better than the Sonoran desert, for damn sure. More food and more beer, and the ladies were light years more friendly. He blanked the rest of it, forced himself to appreciate the barely-moving gulf, and the stupefyingly boring sports babble on the bar TV.
Life, at this moment, was good: unexciting. Now if only the grouper would arrive and—
His cell phone rang, a distinctive tone, and he groaned. The bartender, who’d been eyeing him, looked up from quartering limes and he tossed her a wink. She grinned and went back to the limes. He swiped open the connection.
“You’re three weeks early, boss,” he said. “Omega doesn’t get to see me until after Christmas.”
Athena Madero, co-owner of Omega and one one of his new bosses, chuckled. He loved her chuckle. He’d do almost anything for that chuckle. Except agree to what could be his first assignment with Omega. Way too early.
“How are you doing, Carl?”
“Fine,” he clipped out. He knew schmooze when he heard it.
Senior management at Omega knew exactly how he was doing. Athena and her partner Grey Holden had seen him when he’d been carted off their plane at Tampa Executive Airport. Doctors, hired by a distant and despised colleague and Tanner’s then-boss, had surely copied Omega on his injuries, treatment and prognosis. All but the shrink; she’d promised to stay quiet. But Athena was nothing if not intuitive.
“Really?”
Human kindness as well as business need-to-know prompted her question. But how he was doing was complicated, and it was his job to sort it out.
“Yeah. Scabs are coming off.”
“What are your Thanksgiving plans?”
His what? Oh. “So that’s why they asked me if I wanted a turkey burger with cranberry sauce.”
“Jeez, come on over tomorrow. Plenty of room.”
The bloodbaths that had passed for Tanner family holidays made him shudder at the thought of anything presented as convivial gatherings. “I’ve had enough Thanksgivings, thanks. So...?”
“I know this is early,” Athena said, “but Omega has a little job that could be right down your alley. Fun, even. It’s in your back yard. And it’s finite, I figure one week. How’d you like to be paid double time to be a bouncer in a women’s strip club?”
“When?”
“Soonest. There’s some interesting circumstances.”
“Sorry. Get someone else.” There’d been a time when females taking off their clothes to the pound of raunchy music had been intensely interesting to him. Now, he didn’t give a rat’s ass. “Wait one. Are the women the strippers or the strippees?”
“They’re called guests. The club’s called Crave, the strippers are male, and on average close to a hundred women pay the cover each night to gasp and scream. There’s a minor problem at Crave that the owner needs corrected.”
“If it’s minor, why doesn’t the owner correct it himself? Or herself.”
“Himself. He wants anonymity. I accept his reasons, they’re valid, although I have no respect for his situation. Hypocrisy,” her voice sharpened, “turns me off. Grey thinks you’d be ideal.”
One of Grey’s maxims: if you fall off the horse, get right back on.
“Quick and dirty?”
She tsk-tsk’d. “Fast and clean. I’m sending you the file. Should be there shortly. Take a look and let me know. By three.”
“It’s almost one now,” he said. “Why the rush?”
“You’ll see when you check the envelope. At least take a look?”
“I’m at Chevy’s on the beach. Send it here?”
“I don’t want you reading this in a public place. Go home. It’s what, a quarter of a mile?”
Busted. He lived – and currently drank – on Sunset Beach, a still-funky finger of land south of Treasure Island. His one bedroom apartment, tucked discretely behind a McMansion owned by people apparently allergic to Florida, backed onto the Intracoastal Waterway and sported a dock he spent a lot of time on. To date, the main building had never been occupied.
Privacy was important, but convenience was the kicker. He could’ve jogged to the bar in five easy minutes but he’d gone to the firing range first. The waitress slid his lunch on the table. He mimed a request for the check, and waited until she left.
“My grouper sandwich was just set in front of me. It is a work of culinary art. I just spent forever starving in the desert. I don’t want to go to a strip club, especially one with naked men. I’ve seen way too many naked men. Find someone else, okay?”
“Package just left the office. It’ll be forty minutes. Doesn’t take you that long to scarf down a sandwich. I’ve watched you eat, bud.” She laughed but there was steel under the humor. “Chow down and go home. Just consider it, that’s all I ask.”
“Why does it have to be me?” Was he repeating himself? And whining? He must be more wiped than he’d figured.
“You’re new to Omega, no connection yet. You’ll have a bullet-proof legend. Besides, it’s perfect casting. You’re big and tough, the perfect bouncer. And,” she said again, “it could be a lot of fun. All those eager ladies...”
All those eager ladies wound up by someone else. He liked to do his own winding up, thanks. Or he had before Sonora. “I’ll take a look. No promises.”
“All I ask, Carl. One week, double pay, then your break recalibrates: thirty days off.”
She sure knew how to sweeten the pot. He scarfed down the sandwich, settled the bill and drove home.
***
The package arrived four minutes after he and Cat had gone through his front door.
He got a seltzer from the fridge, gave Cat a bowl of dry food garnished with a splotch of sour cream, settled at the kitchen counter and slit the flap. A half-dozen photos spilled out as he pulled a thin sheaf of papers free. He set the photos aside and read.
The present owner was a total sleaze, and not because he owned the club. Part of the file read like a piece of fiction. The back story had elements of the ridiculous.
Five years ago, Alfred Hatcher, a player even in his seventies, had owned a gentlemen’s club on a busy boulevard in the unincorporated land north of St. Petersburg. On his 77th birthday, he’d fired all the female strippers, closed for a month, and converted into the only women’s strip club in the county. He’d hired local Chippendales. The new club was an overnight hit.
One Saturday night two happy years into his brilliant venture, Alfred did a couple of lines, drank a bottle of champagne while smoking a Cohiba Behike, and – while counting the night’s considerable take – had a massive coronary. The cleaning staff discovered him as they made their final rounds. DOA.
He left the club to a nephew, Donald D. Denton. A name which, in the Tampa Bay area, had instant recognition. The bequest could be looked at as a loving gesture by a fond uncle, or a posthumous payback by a pissed-off relative. Given Denton’s personality, probably the latter.
Cat jumped up on the counter, a forbidden act, but he was no more trainable than Tanner was. The tabby looked at Denton’s photograph, hissed, and clawed the face. Purring violently, Cat butted Tanner’s hand, arched his back and waited for a scratch. Gently, Tanner elbowed him off the table.
He stared at Denton’s photo. Tall, slope-shouldered, pot-bellied. His bio was as unattractive. After decades of slip-and-fall shystering, he’d decided to feed more directly at the public trough. He ran a campaign for State Representative based on a return to biblical standards in all walks of life. He was especially hot on the nuclear family, the sanctity of marriage even unto repeated runs to the ER, and aw-shucks-boys-will-be-boys.
Sadly, Denton possessed the only qualities essential to a successful American politician: good teeth, a head of thick, silvering hair, and a talent for speaking in inflammatory raw-meat generalities that blew fact-checks into the red zone. Enough voters went for him.
It was the apathetic who got Denton elected: they never showed up and he squeaked past his opponent under one hundred votes. Like toenail fungus, once established, he wasn’t going away. His was a tottery throne, but rumors had it he was eyeing Washington like Cat might eye a baby bunny.
But there was a problem. If Denton’s constituency found out he was hauling in six figures a year from a strip club catering to (horrors!) women, his political plans would be cindered. Any furor at Crave, other than the usual five-nights-a-week disrobing, might bring attention to its ownership, and Denton couldn’t risk it.
When rumors reached his hypersensitive ears of funny stuff going on at Crave, his cutout called Omega. It was a small job for the company, but the cutout had promised a generous bonus if the matter was cleared up, quickly, quietly and permanently.
What kind of funny stuff? Denton’s guy was vague, although profits were down. First thought: skimming. The club was under the erratic management of another well-known local figure, ex-pro football quarterback Richie Agostino, who had managed, despite an arm that could fire a pigskin from Miami almost to Bimini, to get his multi-million dollar contract voided. Serial sexual misconduct.
Tanner imagined scenarios, none of them attractive. The boy must’ve been really bad, considering what pro football would tolerate.
Tanner found Agostino’s photo. Clad only in a black spandex pouch and draped crotch-out across the wheel of an offshore racer, the picture captured a feral quality that raised Tanner’s hackles. He wondered what Cat would make of this photo, but he was now snoring in a patch of sunshine. The dude was a GQ cover, hot, like Satan was hot. If a woman went for bad boys, Agostino would be like offering a chocoholic a triple hot fudge sundae.
Back to the report.
Agostino, long a wild child, was also reckless, careless, mendacious, mercurial, financially unstable (how’d he managed that?), a womanizer of epic proportions, and a brawler who threw himself into frays with fervor but usually managed to emerge unmarked. Nice trick, Tanner thought, examining some of his own scars. How’d Agostino come out of pro football with that movie star nose intact? To top it off, his management style would’ve been admired by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Turnover at Crave was high.
Tanner muttered the natural first question. “Why hasn’t the asshole been fired?”
Athena’s take: Agostino knew who owned the joint, and had vowed to blab everything to the tabloids if he was fired. The disgraced but wily quarterback had one hand wrapped firmly around Denton’s balls. If he went down, he’d take those balls, and Denton’s irrational dreams of the White House, with him.
Photos showed Crave housed in a long, low cement block building. Charcoal black with pink accents, topped by an elaborate neon sign, it crouched far off a busy boulevard. Its sole claim to class was a huge pink and black striped marquee. The three other sides were windowless and lapped by the parking lot’s crushed oyster shell. There were three other doors: kitchen and employee entrance on the west, fire exit on the east. Couldn’t get more basic.
Professional interior shots showed a mirrored bar in a red and black room. The showroom was silver and sparkle, black chairs and tables, and what looked like high-backed banquettes along one silver-draped rear wall. The mirrored stage angled like a half-erect phallus into the room, with three poles spaced along its length. A smaller photo was of a full house, women cheering a man wearing only a cowboy hat and boots, and a three foot long, strap-on plastic penis.
Denton’s photo – American flag in background, bible under one hand, sincerity oozing from every polished pore – showed a man whose beady eyes were fixed only on himself. He was a true swamp creature. But the bespoke teeth and that gorgeous hair made him a vote-magnet.
A staff photo: Stanley Green and Bud Cobb. Bouncers, the longest-employed. They projected don’t-mess-with-me, from their folded arms to their all-black attire. Green, plough horse big with an ex-cop’s direct stare, appeared to be leader. Cobb, blond and meaty with the mean mouth of a bully, looked mildly retarded. Or totally stoned.
Omega’s comments: Green left the force ahead of serious charges. Cobb’s his nephew. Your legend’s solid: you’re a distant relative from Southern California a step ahead of the law, and can’t be fired. See what you can find.
Athena had scribbled at the bottom: Assignment starts tonight. Report five PM. Bouncers wear all black. Agostino knows you may be coming. I don’t like this guy, he’s a predator. But Denton’s all about following the money. Start with that.
Tanner sat back, stared out at a line of brown pelicans gliding by. He was tired, his injuries extensive and all inflicted by women. To go into another all-female situation with the memories still causing flashbacks...
Cat meowed and bumped his ankle, then leaped onto the counter and stared in his face.
Tanner butted foreheads and talked feline for a moment, trying to shake the darkness. He looked ahead: three-plus weeks of eating grouper sandwiches and chatting up beach bunnies. Decided being a bouncer in a women’s strip club might be more interesting. Wouldn’t be lethal, at any rate. And, as Athena had suggested, it could be fun.
But not, he also decided, for Richie Agostino
***
When Tanner stepped inside Crave’s vestibule at ten before five, Richie Agostino blocked the way. The manager was maybe five-ten, narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered. He obviously worked out with single-minded purpose: to be mistaken for Iron Man. Or just to impress and intimidate. The pointlessly aggressive presentation made Tanner dislike the douche even more.
Agostino’s thick, dark hair was styled long, the gleaming waves framing his too-handsome face. His clothes were expertly tailored to show off the muscle. And the attitude was tailored to show how much he didn’t give a shit. He swept Tanner with a dismissive up-and-down.
“All black? Who the fuck are you?” .
Tanner fluffed his over-gelled hair and smirked. “Your new bouncer, dude. Don’t get your knickers in a knot, ‘kay? So bad for your blood pressure.”
A pulse throbbed in Agostino’s temple. “I don’t need any fucking medical advice. And I don’t need a third bouncer.”
“Oooh. Too bad, cause Uncle Don says I got a job until I, like, get my feet back on the ground.” He stepped up to the manager, smiled. Fury stared back at him. “We can do this, like, one of two ways, as the saying goes. Uncle Don’s way or no way. I’m here to stay, boss, so calm down. I can’t be fired and I have to be paid.”
“Maybe you should just show up once a week and get your fuckin’ paycheck.”
Tanner grinned. “Uncle Don would so not love that. But it’s, like, way cool with me.” He shrugged, did another hair fluff. “So, dude, your call.”
“Stanley,” Agostino bellowed.