Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

Midnight Choirboy

I cruise by the Secrets parking lot, but not much seems to be happening.

Much as I would like to settle down at the edge of the parking lot and watch two ace trackers from different hunting parties stake out the same watering hole, I find that when I have a chance to sit still, I get antsy instead.

It has been just too long since I last heard head or tail of Miss Midnight Louise.

I know for a fact that my Miss Temple is safely deployed at the one place the dude in question is not likely to show, Baby Doll’s.

I do not know anything about the disposition of Miss Midnight Louise other than that she is not at the Crystal Phoenix, or the Circle Ritz, or here or anywhere she should be breaking a nail to get to with a report, at least.

While I sit there chewing my nails I find my noggin cogitating. I am not sanguine about finding Miss Louise in that cavernous place, and I do not like contemplating the many unseen, if not unsniffed, signs of major muscle of a feline nature about the place.

It is quiet here, except for intermittent slices of unholy midnight howls that emanate from Secrets every time the single wide front door opens and shuts to let merrymakers in or out.

I am a bit perturbed that all is normal here. I am even more disturbed to see a stripper leave the premises for the night escorted by a dude with major workout issues. Apparently Secrets has installed a killer security system: see the ladies to and from their cars. With everyone but me carrying cell phones these days, it makes sense.

I had better swing by Baby Doll’s on the way to Los Muertos, just in case. It is only a mile or two out of my way.

Oh, my aching pads! When they slapped the tag “gumshoe” on Pls, they must have meant we pound so much pavement pursuing leads that our shuffling feet get so weary they end up sticking to the street.

I am not sorry to leave the dimly heard hell-raising chorus within behind as I plod through the black-and-neon checkerboard of a Las Vegas night, wishing I had at least one of my two little dolls in my sights.

No Dice

Max circled the room like a wolf marking his territory. Secrets was doing business as usual, crowded with pleasure-seekers lost in their own vice of choice: booze, babes, or maybe just mind-shattering sound.

The crowd was large and self-absorbed. Even the strippers seemed oddly isolated as they writhed onstage to the music they had chosen. Stripping had always struck Max as a solitary vice on both sides of the spotlights.

He hadn’t bothered to disguise himself, not even with attitude. Still, his striking appearance barely registered on Secrets’s many employees and clients. Everything was expected, including boredom. Damn it, if Temple had tracked a killer here, he wanted the bastard to be aware of him, his presence. His threat.

Even Temple didn’t seem to be here.

Max sighed. He’d have to check the stripper dressing rooms to make sure she wasn’t backstage. That would draw out whatever testosterone troops guarded this place. At Secrets they would be fairly discreet.

Rafi Nadir’s stint here must have been an aberration. This place’s pretensions to business class over coach wouldn’t support obvious muscle like him.

Besides, Nadir had never worked here after the night Max had taken Cher away from him in the parking lot. Max had checked. He could have decamped out of shame at being outsmarted and outmuscled by someone as apparently easy as Max.

Max wasn’t about to bet on shame being a big part of Rafi Nadir’s psychological makeup. Aggression, yes.

Max scanned the entire scene like a panoramic camera, identifying the cast of dozens: the familiar bare figures of girls onstage or lap dancing at the tables, the lapdog circle of guys transfixed like risen mummies before the footlights. Instead of craving revivifying tanna leaves these zombies were shedding leaves of green bills into the teeny-weeny bikini bottoms of various strippers. Down the snatch.

There was even the hard-boiled dame at the bar…a retired stripper, or maybe a club photographer. No camera, so she was some other hanger-on in the whole elegantly sleazy scene.

The illusion he required: the instant perception by one and all that he belonged here, that he could go where he wanted with no one objecting.

Max scanned the room again, 360 degrees, and found his course of action.

He walked through the tables, past the obscenely boogying couples, behind the dazed wannabe studs playing hang-dog at the stage lip.

Ducked into the glass-enclosed sound booth at the side of the stage.

“Hey, DJ!” he addressed the slack-jawed youth at the console. “Bitchin’ job, man.” He flashed a hundred-dollar bill, dropped it onto the feedback dial. “I could use a sharp sound-meister like you at my new club down the Strip, X-treme Dreams. Meanwhile, play ‘Misty’ for me, huh? Double speed.” Max winked. “I gotta see a babe about a takeover bid.”

Max was out of the noise-free zone and back on pulse-pounding time. He strode toward the door leading backstage as if he owned the place. His presence in the sound booth would have registered on the edge of everyone’s eyes. Once he visibly left a zone normally not intruded on, he could climb every mountain, plow through any door.

Through the door. He held it shut with his body, listened, felt the pounding bass vibrate the wood, his metabolism.

After an unchallenged minute, he moved down the dark hall and through a heavy velvet curtain that shivered to the heavy metal music.

Another door.

Here he knocked.

And waited. Like a gentleman.

This was where the women’s world began. Brass knuckles might get you through the hard-knock barriers of sheer muscle. Golden rings would get you through the silken curtains of sheer willpower.

“Yeah?” A distracted feminine voice. Well, mostly feminine.

“Sorry. I need to speak to someone. Can anyone step out?”

He had unconsciously lapsed into an English expression. It called to the women inside like a vodka martini to James Bond.

“Yeah?”

The woman opened the dressing room door a crack only as wide as the seam on a nylon stocking from a ’40s film noir. She was tall, rangy, tough. A trans?

“Name’s Maximilian. I’m opening a new high-end place, X-treme Dreams, in a couple of months. Looking for talent.”

“You’ve got nerve, coming here.” She eyed him up and down.

He nodded. “X-treme Dreams will be a nervy club. I’m looking for ladies who don’t hold back.”

Hoots and whistles erupted behind the gatekeeper.

“Because then I don’t have to hold back on the perks.”

More whistles.

“You got a little redhead in there? Visitor?”

“You looking for ET, Maximilian?”

“Only if it stands for ‘Extreme Tensions’. I am looking for that little redhead, though, even if she’s passing as a blond. I have an emergency message from her mother, Molina.”

He had to hope that if Temple was inside, she would hear and get his message.

“We don’t have any little women in here,” door-babe said. “If your needs are that specialized —”

“X-treme Dreams will encompass every fantasy, every female. But I want the full range. So if a little redhead happens to show, tell her to see Maximilian out front.”

Max passed another hundred through the crack in the door that was neither too large or too small, but just right for the bill to be snapped up by a long pair of fingernails.

He ambled out through the hallway, pausing in the door from the dressing room, in no hurry to join the crowd nodding and swaying to the music and the bumps and grinds.

The lone woman at the bar looked about ready to slide off her barstool. She was obviously straight. Straight women found strip clubs boring. So did mature men, not that there were any on the premises.