Once outside of the last of the Vegas suburbs, the world changes and you get a quick reminder of just how much empty space there still is out here. I sped along the highway toward Pahrump. Endless low hills and scrubby brush made me feel like I was making no headway despite rolling at eighty miles per hour. Eventually, the signs for the town’s various attractions – casinos, a winery, and the brothels.

The voice of my navigation cut in over the music, letting me know my turn was coming up. I took a few more turns off the main highway and pulled into the parking lot at Kerri’s. Even though it was mid-afternoon, there were quite a few cars parked. I parked as close to the front entrance as I could get. Even though I wasn’t expecting trouble, I figured it was better to be safe than sorry, and I wanted to be able to get back on the road quickly if something happened.

I stepped into the building and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust from the searing desert sunlight to the darkness inside. A bell rang somewhere in the back and an elegantly dressed woman in her mid-fifties walked toward me with a smile.

“Welcome to Kerri’s. Ooh, look at you. They are going to be fighting over you.” She offered me a long piece of paper, like a menu. “The ladies will be out in just a moment. Why don’t you take a look at some of our options?”

I took the paper absently and was about to say my code phrase, but the madam had already turned away and had begun positioning the women who had filed into the room. They had all shown up so quickly, I hadn’t even noticed them coming in. There were eight of them, all different, all scantily-clad, all fairly attractive. The madam stood to the side, smiling broadly at me. I held up my hand to stop the first woman from introducing herself and crossed over to the madam. Her smile tightened, somewhat, though she did well to hide her unease.

“This place is like herring in a barrel,” I said softly. I felt foolish saying it, but the older woman’s face immediately settled into a serious, businesslike manner. She snapped her fingers at the line-up and ushered me back to the office as the other women went back down the hallway to wait for the next man through the door. I followed her into the office.

It struck me as funny that the business office of a brothel should look so ordinary. Aside from a few pictures of smiling, half-naked women – past employees or contractors, I guessed – it was a perfectly normal office with stacks of paper, binders, and clutter overflowing. I glanced at the computer monitor, which showed a complex, multicolored schedule. Off to the side was a bank of monitors with live video feeds of the girls’ rooms. They weren’t out in the open, but these places had some rough characters they kept on call in case a customer decided he wanted to get a little more than he paid for. If you saw one, you were in serious trouble. A girl could hit a button in the room or management could make a call from the scene on the monitor and send in the muscle. I knew a few of them, you meet all sorts in this line of work, and they took their jobs seriously. Not that they didn’t have a good time at it. Nothing was funnier to them than throwing some asshole John out into the parking lot with his erection still swinging.

“Ok, here you are,” the madam said as she pushed a large, black duffel bag toward me. “Now, I have nothing more to do with it. You accept full responsibility from here on out, right?”

“Right,” I said, not entirely unsurprised by her caution.

“There are cameras on the way in and the way out, so you can’t say I didn’t give it to you.”

“Don’t worry, you’re off the hook.” I took the bag from her and walked out of the office.

I used my unladen hand to shield my eyes from the late afternoon sunlight. Even so, the ache of my irises squeezing my pupils made me squint hard. I got to my car almost by feel. I hadn’t realized how dark it was in the brothel. The bag landed in the footwell of the passenger seat with a heavy, muffled thunk. I had never thought about how heavy three quarters of a million dollars would be, but it was impressive.

As my eyes finally adjusted to the brightness, I scanned the parking lot and the surrounding streets. A couple of cars were missing from when I arrived. The place must have a back exit to spare the spent customers from those still seeking their release, and vice versa. Nothing suspicious. I doubted that there was any real danger. It was possible that the courier had told someone where he’d left the money, but even if he had, and they believed him, were they going to stake out the location for this whole time? No sense being careless, though.

Maybe it was SEAL training, maybe it was my more recent education in the underworld, but I had a constant need to look over my shoulder, to examine every situation for potential threats. Every room I entered, I automatically assessed every person in it, took note of the entrances and exits, sight lines, and potential weapons. Most of the time I was barely conscious of it. But with this much money at my side, I wasn’t taking any chances.

The westering sun filled my rearview mirror with orange and cast the pale sand and rock ahead of me in the same luminous color. I could see little of what was behind me. That bothered me, so I kept my speed up. A text popped up on my phone. I flicked the button on the car’s touchscreen and the electronic voice read me the address I had been waiting for. I tapped another button and the navigation started, letting me know that I would be staying on the highway for another thirty miles.

The sun sank further behind me and the landscape darkened from orange to pinkish-red to purple and then finally to utter darkness. My headlights illuminated a little ways in front of me, but that was it. There were no streetlights here. My car was a little island of halogen light in a deep, velvety darkness.

My mouth stretched open as I could no longer suppress a yawn. I couldn’t wait to drop this package off and be done with this. I didn’t have anything planned for the next couple of days and was planning to take advantage by getting some sleep. I spent a lot of nights out late and I wasn’t the best at sleeping during the day. Even those blackout curtains didn’t seem to help. Some of my buddies in the SEALs had been able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I envied them. I could function a long time on minimal sleep, but at some point, I needed to recharge the batteries. This lonely drive through the pitch-black desert was soporific.

My tired mind started wandering. As it often did, it ended up wandering to her. That girl in the top corner apartment. Kovalev’s girl. Maybe it was because she was a blank slate to me, just a pretty girl I had never spoken to, but I couldn’t help myself from making up stories about her. Who she was, how she got there. She was like some princess in a tower, locked away by an evil king. Except I was one of the guards. Not such a great story, I guess.