Brian Freeman - Stripped

“Does Boni have a connection to MJ?”

Amanda shrugged. “Not that I know of. Why?”

Stride gestured at the magazine and newspaper. “It looks like MJ was very interested in the new resort.”

“Well, his balcony looks right out on the implosion site. He was going to watch the Orient rise from the ashes for the next couple of years if someone hadn’t ventilated his skull.”

Stride nodded. He knew Amanda was right. It was nothing significant. Even so, something niggled at him. Little things did that to him-colorless pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit. MJ had too many fish to fry in this city. Drugs. Parties. Women. Why keep a months-old magazine by his bed?

What was it about the Orient project that was so important to him? A two-billion-dollar development, underwritten by a man whom everyone suspected of mob ties. That was certainly worth killing over, if someone got in your way-but Stride didn’t see how a playboy like MJ could be a threat to a man like Boni Fisso.

Stride wandered across the bedroom to the double-width glass doors that led to the balcony. He unlocked them and stepped outside. A breeze made the vertical blinds slap and twist. There was no furniture outside, just a long stretch of iron railing and a view toward the north end of the Strip. He grabbed the railing. His heart fluttered a little in his chest at the height. He imagined MJ standing here, high on cocaine, wondering if he could sprout wings and fly. The young are stupid , Stride thought. He realized that MJ probably never came out here, probably never even opened the door. He had Karyn Westermark naked in his bed, and probably countless other women, and that was a better view than all the lights of the Strip combined.

Stride stayed outside anyway. He wondered, just for the briefest moment, if he could fly. It was cool and beautiful up here, late September weather, when the worst of the heat was over and the nights had a taste of fall. To the east, there was a ruddy glow where the sun inched up to dawn above the mountains, but the valley was still wrapped in night.

Although night never really had a firm grip here. It was the land of the neon sun.

He stared down at Boni’s old casino, across the street, its roof about ten stories below him. The building itself was black, stripped of life. On street level, a hurricane fence and a makeshift plywood wall gated off the property; no more hotel guests, no more high rollers. In the weeks since the property closed, the demolition teams had already moved inside, ripped out the guts, drilled holes in the walls to plant cylinders of dynamite. In another couple of weeks, with a push of a button, a simple electrical charge, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.

Stride thought of the photo in the newspaper. Girls onstage. Men in tuxedos. Martinis. Money. All ghosts now.

He let his eyes travel across floor after floor, all of them quiet and dark.

Except for the roof. The roof was aglow.

It was such a Vegas thing to do, Stride thought, to leave the light on after the party was over.

He could see scalloped Middle Eastern icons stretching across the parapet like tiny onion domes. Where the roof notched downward in the very center of the hotel, he saw faintly the tiles and trees of what must have once been the garden of the casino’s penthouse suite. All of it was reflected in the glow of the casino’s sign, which still blazed out of the darkness in flashes of red and green neon that gave the ghosts inside a reason to believe they were still flesh and blood. No one had told them it was time to go.

Every few seconds, the sign would fade to black, and then each letter would illuminate again, one by one, as if nothing had changed, as if the floors below still pulsed with life.

One by one, letter by letter, until the entire name blinked on top of the roof.

Sheherezade.

Serena could see that Cordy was down. When she picked him up at his apartment in North Las Vegas, he wore a hangdog expression, like a kid who had been forced to stand in the corner. As they drove back south through the city streets, he stared sourly out the window without saying a word. Even his hair was having a bad day. Normally, it was greased back on his skull like a jet-black lion’s mane, but this morning there were tufts sprouting out in odd places like grass growing through the sidewalk. Not like Cordy at all.

“What’s up with you?” Serena asked, while they waited at a red light. There was almost no traffic at Cheyenne and Jones. They were in the short stretch of dead hours when the midnight crowd was finally in bed, and everyone else was drowsily starting to come awake.

Cordy gave a long, dramatic sigh. “Me and Lav,” he said. “We’re history.”

Lavender was a gorgeous black stripper who towered over Cordy by at least six inches. During the time Serena and Cordy had been partners, he had used up girlfriends like tissues, going from one to the next, each one tiny, blond, and young. Lavender was different, and when they had started dating, Serena thought Cordy might finally have met his match.

“What happened?” Serena said.

Cordy rolled down the window of Serena’s Mustang and spit. He cursed in Spanish, “What do you think, mama? I fucked up. I screwed one of her friends. Lav found out.”

“Shit, you are a stupid man.”

“I blame it on this goddamned city,” Cordy told her irritably. “All this fucking flesh. I mean, put a guy like me in a room full of sweet chilies, sooner or later I’m going to take a bite.”

“Only this time, the bite came out of your ass.”

She let Cordy stew silently as she turned onto Jones. She wanted to tell him that the real problem was that Cordy listened to his cock, not his brain. He wasn’t entirely wrong about Las Vegas, though. She knew that. You couldn’t put so much sin in one place and not tempt people across the line.

Serena had spent more than two decades in Las Vegas, including ten years on the job as part of Metro. There were plenty of ex-showgirls on the force, and most people assumed Serena was one of them because of her tall, lean physique. But Serena had lived through a much less glamorous side of the city in her early days, arriving in the dead of night from Phoenix with her girlfriend Deidre when she was sixteen.

There were about a thousand roads to ruin for young girls coming to Vegas. Stripping, hooking, gambling, drinking, stealing, fighting, doing drugs, filming porno, or just winding up in the wrong man’s bed. All of them led to the same end, turning pretty young flowers into garbage floating amid the green algae of a swamp.

Like Deidre. Her best friend, her savior, the girl she owed her life to, the girl who said she needed Serena more than anything in the world. Dead.

Sometimes it amazed Serena that she hadn’t died, too. She had chosen a back-office job in one of the casinos when she could have made ten times that in the strip clubs, looking the way she did. She had stayed in school, first studying to get her GED, then working nights and weekends to get a degree in criminal justice at UNLV. It took her ten years to make it that far. When Deidre died, the guilt sent Serena spinning into an alcoholic stupor that cost her two years of her life and almost everything she had worked for.

Eventually, she climbed back, dried out, and went back to college.

She wasn’t sure where the determination came from. Maybe it was because, when she escaped from Phoenix with Deidre, she had made a promise to herself that what she had gone through at home would not destroy the rest of her life.

But Cordy was right. Las Vegas didn’t make it easy.

“I can make you laugh,” Serena told him.

“No way. I’m in mourning. I’m wearing black.”