(no subject)
The only parking space I could find was at the bottom of the hill, a block and a half down. I beat an old lady to it and found the parking kiosk around the corner. I paid for a half hour, stuck the sticker in my window and then tackled the hill. Seraglio is at the top of a vicious hill that hates the out-of-shape, bicyclists and owners of weak-hearted cars. The club was a squat brick building that hugged jealously to the very top, an outpost against the condos, the mayor, and those who would gentrify people like me and my kind out of existence.
Vato waved at me with something that looked like a joint from the top. He was propped up against the building with a dubious canvas messenger back supporting from behind and was armed with a scrappy looking knit cap with a pompom and a winter jacket that had seen war. "Hey, vato!" he yelled triumphantly.
I waved back. "Hey, Vato." I didn't know his real name, and he probably couldn't remember mine. He called me friend, so I returned the favor. He was homeless, stout, Mexican, and he smoked, snorted, inhaled, injected and imbibed just about anything he could get his hands on. He was also a hundred years old, approximately. His wrinkles dripped off of him. "What's the occasion?"
"Big day, vato," Vato said. He grinned. His teeth were murky yellow nubs. "I'm giving up drugs. I'm cleanin' up."
Every once and a while, Vato will swear off the pharmaceuticals and start speaking nearly perfect English. Then he'll go off a metaphorical cliff and sink into the depths again. I decided not to comment on that. Instead, I looked critically at the joint and raised an eyebrow. Vato shrugged.
"It's just pot," he said. "Everyone knows pot don't really count."
I thought about this for a minute. He was right. I expressed my acquiesence with a short, knowing head-bob.
"Good for you," I said.
"Hell yeah," Vato said emphatically. "I got a fund going for my betterment."
He held out a battered tophat. I looked inside. Some charitable soul had bequeathed upon him a five dollar bill and some loose change. I shoved a hand in my pocket to see what I had in the way of loose change and found Felton's wad of one-dollar bill stripper money, stolen from the kitchen counter. Score. I tossed the roll into Vato's tophat.
"Your first big money donation, courtesy of the Felton Foundation for the Unclothed," I said with a flourish. Vato threw back his head and cackled. I was feeling pretty good until I turned my head and saw something pink fluttering against the club doors. I broke into a cold, clammy sweat.
Vato grimaced. "Fuckin' shame."
I swallowed. Hard. "Amy in there?"
Amy was Seraglio's manager and patron saint. Vato pointed to a shiny black Passat parked right at the corner in front of the doors. "Her car's there."
I nodded. My stomach was churning so violently I figured I had one of those instant ulcers that my mother gets so often. I always thought she was making those up. I promised inwardly to call her and apologize. Well. Maybe not call her. Maybe a text. Or an e-mail. Or an anonymous note taped to a brick through the window.
I walked slowly to the doors and unlocked them. I tapped the security code into the machine and bit my lip. The inside of the club was cool and dark. It smelled like booze, sweat, and cigarettes despite the law. The floor was still sticky from last night's working hours. The colors were mostly black and maroon. Cheap prints hung from the walls, mostly depicting classy looking naked women. I could hear Amy's voice, indistinct but firm, floating from her office. The door was open. I poked my head in.
Amy looked like Tinkerbell but talked like James Bond. She had platinum blonde hair cut short and chic, with little baby pigtails tied with designer hair-ties. She dressed out of Vogue and pulled it off. She did not actually break five feet and a lot of people thought she was fourteen until she pulled out her driver's license. I did not believe for a second that she weighed more than ninety pounds, but it was ninety solid pounds of pure capability, competence and razor intellect. I was a little afraid of her.
"No," she said to the phone. Someone unfortunate was on the other end. "I do intend to fight this."
Amy noticed me lingering in the door. She didn't look happy to see me. I smiled weakly and waved a tiny little bitch wave. Something about her turned me into a marshmallow. I suspected it had to do with the fact that she was secretly a Jedi.
"I will see you in court. Good bye, Mr. Osten," Amy said. She set the phone in the hook. She didn't slam it down, but there was something final and emasculating about the controlled click of the phone in the cradle. Amy turned that cool, controlled gaze on me. "What do you need?"
"Uh," I said. Thesis to brilliance. "Uncle Jay wanted to know--uh--um--if you guys are going to need that sub. I guess not, uh, now that the, um. The thing, uh, is--"
"Now that they've revoked my liquor license?" Amy said. She stared at me with burning intensity. It was very uncomfortable.
Amy wasn't the owner, just the manager, so it would seem odd normally for her to speak that way, but Seraglio was hers in everything but paperwork. Rahim would cut off his arm before firing her and he would consult her for everything. Uncle Jay liked to say that if Amy told Rahim to jump, he would jump. And he wouldn't need to ask how high, because he already knew.
"Um." I squirmed.
"Give us the sub anyway," Amy said, waving her hand around. She swiveled in her chair to the computer. She had her e-mail open, no doubt firing off e-mails to her lawyer and the liquor board and Mr. Osten. "Jay's been good to us in the past. Tell him that."
"Sure," I mumbled. "Uh, what happened?"
Amy reached over and plucked a newspaper from off of Rahim's cluttered desk. Amy's desk was neat and clinical. She used her paperweights. It was the local section of the P-I. Across the top it read Local woman caught in gunfire. Below that, Neighborhood nightclub brings violence into city.
"Some dumbass was ejected from the club two nights ago, after assaulting another patron over a girl," Amy said. She rubbed her bottom lip with her thumb. "The dumbass came back, waited until closing and pulled a gun on them. He fired three times, twice hitting the concrete and one ricocheting and planting itself in Luciana Ferrera's left leg."
"Sucks," I said. Very eloquent. "Who was the dumbass?"
"Nobody," Amy said in exasperation. "Thank everything good in this world that no one was killed. The guy was former National Guard. His name, I think, is Ian Carver or Carter."
"Ian Carter? Tall?" I said. "Brown hair, looks like the Geico caveman?"
Amy looked up in surprise. "Yes."
"That dumb asshole," I said. I gritted my teeth. "I went to highschool with that loser. We were locker buddies."
He had been a horrible locker buddy. I was not heartened to see that my former classmate had not changed a whit since he had been seventeen and a total, unmitigated dick.