Page 55 of Handful

She nodded at that. “Honest. That’s new from management.” She leaned a hip against the bar. “I hear you want to close down for a remodel.”

The MC gossips worse than a hair salon. Apparently strip clubs are no different. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I hear everything.” She turned the glass right side up. “Go on. Sell it to me. New owner shuts down for a month. None of us can make rent while he shampoos a carpet. Tell me how that’s for our benefit?”

“A month?” I said. “No. A week, tops. We don’t do slow — we close, we move in, we work, we reopen. I don’t have the full plan yet; I’ve got a brother coming Thursday to run the numbers with me.”

Then I gave her the highlights. Gut it, scrub ten years out of the place and open it back up. A gate fee that meant something. A better bar. And — this part I knew Indira would back me on — nobody losing a paycheck for the week we were dark. Base pay off the club’s money till the doors opened again.

She let me get all the way to the end. Didn’t nod once. Didn’t give me an inch.

“That’s a real nice speech,” she said.

“It’s not a—”

“It’s a speech, honey.” She held my eyes. “I’ve heard it four times now. Same owner the whole stretch, four floor managers under him, and every one of them gave me some version of your pretty little speech. Things’ll be different. I take care of my girls. The shortest lasted two weeks. One of them I damn near believed — right up until a man with a fat wallet put his hand where it didn’t belong, and got away with it. Fat wallets always override our feelings.” She slapped the bar, once. “So I won’t thank you for the cameras, and I won’t thank you for the gate fee, and I won’t believe a word of any of it. Not till I’ve watched you hold the line on a bad night. A real one. When doing right costs you money, and the man trying to cross the line is the one keeping the lights on, and payroll’s due Friday. That’s the night I’ll know what you are.”

“That’s fair.”

“Fair,” she scoffed. “I don’t need fair. I need true.” She came off the bar and smoothed her robe. “Most of you mean it in the daylight, Handful. It’s the dark I’m waiting on.”

Then she went off to get ready, and I watched her go. Respect. Everyone else in that place had kept their distance since Venom took over — stared, whispered, sized me up from across the room, the way people do when they’ve just found out an MC signs their checks now. Lex was the only one with the guts to walk up and say it to my face.

❧

“It’s worse in daylight,” Glitch said, after that slow scan he does — the one where you can practically hear him indexing.

He’d cased the place more than once before the club made an offer, in the dark with a beer like any other customer, Wren beside him. Much to my surprise, she’d worked rooms like this and knew what to look for. Indira never came. A strip club was the last place the club’s First Lady wanted to be seen, so she’d made her call from the seller’s books, the photos, and Glitch’s word.

“The dark’s kind to it,” I agreed. “Come on. I’ll give you the tour.”

I walked him across the carpet so it pulled at his boots the way it pulled at mine. “This goes — all of it. I don’t want it cleaned, I want it in a dumpster.” Down the length of the bar. “This comes out. Rebuilt by somebody who knows bars.” Past the booths and the stages and the back hall. “The whole place stripped and scrubbed to the boards, not mopped. Ten years of beer out of the floor, not pushed around with a bucket. Paint. And those lights — half dead, forty years old. In the dark nobody clocks it, but I want light you could run a safe room under. Not this.”

Glitch took the whole circuit without a word. When I finished, he turned the tablet around and showed me the screen. He’d had half of it already. Carpet, HVAC, the bar, the lighting, a rough number with a contingency line under it. He’d had most of it costed before Dutch ever hit the gavel. That’s Glitch.

“You beat me to most of it,” he said. “Wasn’t sure you’d see past the girls. Last three guys who ran a retrofit for the club, I’d have had to staple the list to their face.”

“Speaking of.” He scrolled. “You talked to the girls about cameras yet?”

I shook my head.

“Then I’m not putting an eye up anywhere till I have. Where they want coverage, where they don’t.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Figure you know better than most what it’s like to find out the hard way there’s a camera on you.”

“Real funny.”

“Little bit.”

“They get a say,” I said. “Not the last one. A blind spot’s going to get somebody hurt, that’s your call — you know the difference, I don’t. Safety wins.”

“Agreed. I’ll overrule a no if it comes to it.” He thumbed the tablet. “But there won’t be a camera in this place they can’t point to. Every eye marked, every girl knowing where it is and where it isn’t. Nobody in here gets surprised.” He paused. “Unless it’s some handsy creep.”

“How do you even know what to ask them?” I said.

He didn’t look up. “Wren walked me through it.”

“Wren—”

“Wren.” Now he looked up, and the bastard was enjoying himself. “You were in church when I said it.”