Page 58 of Bound Bride
"Take a breath," I instruct quietly as we walk up toward the door. "Talk me through what is wrong."
"Well, at the first count of the profits, we noticed we were thirty thousand over what we usually make. Now, you know we pull in a crowd, and we make a lot, but thirty thousand extra is abnormal. We're typically ten thousand over at most. So I ordered everyone to stop, I pulled all the CCTV and the ID's of everyone who visited and I stored all the cash in the office. So you can like…" He pants slightly as he holds the door open and then ushers Ethan and I inside. "You can do that thing you do."
"The thing?" I follow him down the red carpet, past the reception, and into the main club, where several poles stand absent their dancers. The women are all clustered near the bar where they drink and sit, but among all the curious glances are a few very pissed off ones.
"Yeah!" Teigan grins at me. "Can't you run the ID's and see who runs in the counterfeiter circles? Because then you'd know who is trying to screw you over."
"Hey!" calls one of the women from the bar. "When the fuck are we getting paid?!"
"In a minute!" Teigan yells back, then he turns to me with an exasperated sigh. "You can run that kind of check, right?"
I stop walking and glance back at the bar. "Teigan, have you checked the money?"
He adjusts the stack of papers in his arms. "Huh? What do you mean?"
"Did you check your takings to see if any of it was even counterfeit?"
By the owlish look on his face, this never even crossed his mind, and he stutters slightly as he speaks. "I-I mean, we're thirty thousand over, boss. That's alarming as it is!"
"I see new faces." At the bar, only a few recognizable ones stare back at me. "You have new girls?"
"Oh yeah, a handful."
"New faces bring in new customers." My attention slides to Ethan. "Check the takings first."
Ethan nods and immediately strides away toward the back office. After some bumbling hesitation, Teigan takes off after him, and the women return to their drinks at the bar.
Places like this remain the backbone of my business but not because of the money these women pull in.
It's the perfect place to ship and split my product, and no one dares to look because strip clubs make even criminals nervous.
Taking a seat at the nearest booth, I keep one eye on the women and the other on my phone to deal with a few other urgent calls that come my way.
After an hour, Ethan returns and sags into the seat across from me.
"All of it was legit," he groans. "What a wasted trip. Teigan is fucking stupid."
"Might not be wasted," I reply quietly. "Take a look at the bar and tell me what you see."
Ethan twists in his seat and rests his arm on the back of the booth, gazing across the dance floor to the bar. "A lot of strippers. A lot I haven't seen before. What am I looking for?" As he speaks, he suddenly stiffens and glances back at me. "I count… three?"
"Three," I agree. "Three do not look over twenty-one."
"Shit."
"I want this place closed and audited immediately, staff included. Everything needs to be legal and aboveboard before this place sees a lick of business again."
"Already on it," Ethan replies, buried in his phone.
"And find out where the new girls came from." Something about this stinks. It's painfully common that one or two underage girls can slip through a net, but not with the security protocols I have in place.
My cover businesses keep everything aboveboard, but now first the extra cash and then dancers who look far too young to be here.
By the time Ethan sends out word, Teigan has several furious, unpaid dancers on his hands and we leave him to it while my other team takes over.
Back outside, the sun's high in the sky once more and I groan.
"This heat will kill me."
