Page 54 of Handful

He opened his mouth and I cut him off.

“The operation. I’m watching the operation. The dancers —” I stopped. Not strippers. They were doing a job, same as anyone. “The dancers do their thing. I’m not here for that. I want to see the floor, the staff, where the money moves, where the gaps are. Can’t fix what I don’t understand yet.”

Dutch fixed his cold stare on me and I couldn’t tell if I’d just said something smart or something that was going to blow up in my face. “We’ve owned it five minutes.”

“Exactly.”

“All right.” He looked around the room once — the same sweep he gives any new territory — and headed for the door. Stopped with his hand on it. “Just know one mistake’s one mistake whether you make it moving too fast or sitting too still.”

Then he was gone, and it was just me and the place.

I pulled up a stool at the end of the bar and started with the bouncers.

There were four bouncers on the clock. Two on the door doing door stuff — cover charge, faces, the bored once-over. The other two parked at the end of the bar with their backs to the room, watching the front entrance from the inside, like trouble was going to come in the front and announce itself. Which left both stages, the booths, and the whole hallway of private rooms with nobody on them. You could walk up to any girl in the place and help yourself.

I sat at the end of the bar with a soda water and watched a guy at the back of the room put his hand where he hadn’t been invited to. The dancer’s face went flat. The two inside men were close enough to hear it happen, and neither of them turned his head — because in their book the floor wasn’t the job. Bodies in, cash counted, trouble stopped at the door. The girls were scenery. Nobody seemed to watch out for them.

I’d spent a lot of years in places like this from the other side — drinking beer, eyeing up the women, tucking cash in their outfits, playing the room. From that chair you never look around. You see her, and the next one, and the bottom of your own glass. This was an eye opener for me.

Around midnight I traded the stool for the back office, which was where the real glamour of my new life lived — a patched Venom brother in a cut, ink down both arms, hunched over a desk trying to figure out why the old owner’s books had a line that just said MISC and ran to eleven grand a year. If Colt could’ve seen me he’d have died laughing.

It didn’t take long to figure out the start of the money problems. The gate fee was a dollar. The old owner’s logic, near as I could reconstruct it: real money lives in the bar, so you keep the door cheap and get the men in fast and drunk. Might’ve been true, too. Except the bar here wasn’t great. The girls paid the house to work. Every one of them clocked in already in the red and clawed back to zero on tips before a dollar was hers. So a dead Tuesday after a long weekend was entirely her problem. The house got paid either way, and she could drive home having made less than nothing for six hours of being looked at.

A dollar at the door was a joke. The gate fee was going to mean something — ten dollars a head, maybe a membership for the regulars so they weren’t paying over the odds every visit.

❧

Tuesday afternoon I came in to fight the spreadsheet in daylight, and that was a mistake, because this place at two in the afternoon with the work lights up was one of the worst rooms I’d ever stood in. And I’ve stood in some rooms. It ran neck and neck with downstairs at the clubhouse — not a comparison I ever expected to make about somewhere that sells lap dances.

At night the place did its job — dark, red, loud, the disco ball throwing enough moving light that your eye never settled anywhere long enough to judge it. And nobody was trying to. Every man who walked in had his eyes on the stage; the walls could’ve been on fire and he’d have finished his drink first. The room was never what any of them came to look at.

The stage was fine. The poles, the mirrors, the lights that came up on the dancers — all of it kept up, because that was the part the men were paying for. Everything around it had been let go. The booth seats were worn through and split at the corners. The tables were scarred and ringed white from ten years of glasses. And the floor was sticky under my boots — not just a decade of grime but also last night’s spilled beer.

Nobody had put a dollar into the place in years, and it showed everywhere I looked.

Then there was the bar, which was its own disaster, and the one part of the whole mess I had no idea how to fix myself.

The place didn’t need managing — it needed shutting and gutting. Which meant going to Dutch and Indira and asking to spend a fortune on a business we’d owned for less than twenty-four hours. I didn’t love my odds.

❧

Lex caught me Wednesday at the bar.

She set a rocks glass upside down on the bar between us like she was placing a chess piece, and looked at me with eyes that had counted every exit in the building before she’d said good morning on my first day. She was a seasoned pro, older than the others.

“You walked the two inside men out last night,” she said. Not a question. “On the floor, lights up, where every girl in the room could watch you do it.”

“I did.”

“Big man.” She picked a thread off the sleeve of her robe, in no hurry about it. “So you’re two short going into our busy nights. What’s the fix — put your biker friends on the job? Let them stand around gawking at us for free, and call that taking care of us?”

“No. Not my brothers standing around for free, getting an eyeful. Might be Venom on that floor, might not — but whoever it is, they’re on the clock, getting paid, doing a job, and they know what the job is. The job’s the women. Not the door, not the register. Somebody puts a hand where it doesn’t go, I’ve got a man on him before she has to make a sound.” Half of that I hadn’t worked out till she made me say it out loud. “The two I cut weren’t security. They were muscle pointed the wrong way. I’d run two short before I’d keep four who were useless.”

She took that in without a flicker, the way she took in everything.

“And the bar,” she said. “You’re going to fix this bar?”

“I’m going to get somebody who knows bars to fix this bar. I know people. I don’t know bottles.”