Superhero Detective Series (Book 4): Hunted Page 10

  The club was housed in a two-story building with a white brick facade. There was a single door granting admittance to the building. It was set in the middle of the building’s front, directly under the flashing neon signs. Two bouncers who looked like they could be football defensive linemen checked the IDs of the people—mostly men, but a handful of women—who wanted to go inside. As it was Saturday night, there was a steady stream of people. There were no windows. Peeping Toms had to go elsewhere. If you wanted a glimpse of the naked women in Spread Legs, you were going to pay for the privilege. There was a parking lot for patrons in the back of the sprawling building. Shadow and I were instead parked across the street so we could watch the front door. We had been doing so for a little while now, scoping things out. Shadow had parked in a spot that was shrouded in the shadows so we could watch the Spread Legs without someone over there being able to readily see us.

  Shadow’s car smelled of newness, expensive leather, perfume, and badassery. I had been in cars driven by Shadow before, but not this one.

  “Is this car actually yours, or did you borrow it from someone?” I asked. “And by borrow, I mean steal.” Shadow had done a lot of illegal things in her time. She certainly would not balk at stealing a car.

  “Of course this is my car,” Shadow said. “This car is dark, sleek, and expensive. Just like me. We go together like a pea goes with a pod.” Though it sounded like she was bragging, she was not; she was simply being descriptive. Shadow was a beautiful, dark-skinned black woman with an angular face, prominent cheekbones, and symmetrical features. Her jet black hair which was so closely cropped, she was almost bald. She was shaped like a vase, with big breasts and flared hips, but moved like a panther. And, she made more money in a month than I did all year. Whoever said crime does not pay had never met Shadow.

  “How come every time I see you, you’re driving a different car?” I asked.

  Shadow shrugged.

  “Some women collect shoes, I collect cars. I was going to make it scalps, but I’ve been hanging around you too much lately and your do-goodery is rubbing off on me.”

  I thought about Avatar. I had been having a hard time thinking about much else. If someone like Avatar could get killed, what chance did the rest of us have? Especially someone who often operated on the wrong side of the law like Shadow did.

  “You ever think about going straight?” I asked her. “I know it would be a cut in income, but at least you wouldn’t have to worry about some Hero hurting or killing you one day. You could sell insurance or something.” Shadow snorted.

  “I’m the reason people take out insurance. I don’t sell it.” She looked at me intently. The whites of her eyes were startlingly so in contrast with her face and her dark retinas. “Why the sudden concern about my well-being? You think of adopting the alias Captain Save-A-Ho? I don’t need to be rescued. Remember, I’m here tonight to help you, not vice versa.”

  “No reason. I just have been thinking about the fragility of life lately, is all.” I wanted to tell her about Avatar’s death. Though I did not much believe in therapy—I had yet to meet a therapist who was not himself as crazy as a loon—I thought it would make me feel better about Avatar’s murder to at least talk about it even if I could not do anything to solve it. But, I had promised the Sentinels I would not tell anyone about Avatar’s death. Though they were not my clients, that did not change the fact I had given my word to them.

  “A lot of cows died making the interior of this car,” I said, changing the subject. The leather seat I was in was baby-soft. It felt like hovering in a cloud. Almost everything inside the car was coated with the same supple leather. “Though my butt is hardly complaining, it begs the question of what you have against cows.”

  “No cows were killed in the making of this car. They all committed suicide when they heard they had the chance to cradle my bottom. They died happy.” Shadow kidded around almost as much as I, though I suspected for a different reason. Whereas I joked around because I was in a serious business that humor helped me cope with, Shadow seemed incapable of taking anything completely seriously. She seemed simultaneously both faintly amused and contemptuous of everything in the world, as if it all was a badly written joke.

  Shadow looked past me to look more intently at the facade of the Spread Legs. “I thought you said this guy ran whores. What’s he doing owning a strip club?”

  I shrugged.

  “Brass has got to wash his dirty money somehow. Remember that, despite all his crimes, the one the government eventually got Al Capone on was tax evasion. The smart criminals know to launder their money somehow and pay taxes on it. Well, at least pay enough to not draw attention to themselves. Hardly anyone pays everything they should in taxes, including people who don’t think of themselves as criminals.” I jerked my head towards the strip club. “This place is how Brass launders his hooker money. It’s a legitimate strip club, though it sounds weird to put ‘legitimate’ and ‘strip club’ together in the same sentence. By legitimate I mean Brass is careful to scrupulously follow the law in the running of it. He funnels a lot of his hooker money through it so he can explain on his taxes where all his money is coming from. Plus, Brass uses this place to recruit a lot of his hookers. Picture a fresh-faced, tight-bodied, corn-fed girl fresh off the bus from Nowheresville, Iowa. She’s got little more in her purse than some change, lint, and a dream of making it in the big city. Since she was raised on apple pie and church on Sundays, the men who recruit new talent for Brass will have a hard time talking her into hooking for a living. They’ll have a much easier time of convincing her to take her clothes off at a reputable establishment like Spread Legs. ‘Stripping will be easy,’ she’ll think, ‘and it beats the heck out of slinging hash for slave’s wages as a waitress somewhere. Once I’ve got enough money saved up, I’ll quit.’ Plus, the naughtiness of it will appeal to the side of her that was taught to kiss only after the second date and to let a man see her boobs with the lights on sometime after the third year of marriage. Before you know it, she’s taking off her clothes and having her attractiveness validated, all while getting paid more money than she’s ever seen before in her life. She’s playing the game of life on easy mode, and crushing it. Or, so she thinks at first.

  “Then, she starts experimenting with drugs. Marijuana maybe, or coke. Perhaps a fellow dancer introduces her to them, or maybe one of Brass’ men. It’s recreational at first. Fun. After a little while, she starts to lean on drugs a little, maybe to start her engines in the morning or to come down at night after the high of being ogled for the past several hours. Before she knows it, drugs are not just fun, they’re medicinal. She needs them. Her life revolves on getting that next hit. Most of her money goes toward it, until she doesn’t have any left. That’s when Brass has her. He’ll start supplying her with drugs as long as she does what he tells her. And what he tells her is to whore herself out, with the bulk of the money she makes going to him. He’ll get everything he can out of her. He’ll squeeze the life out of her like squeezing the juice of an orange. When he’s done with her, he’ll throw her away like an empty beer can without a second thought. It won’t matter. There are plenty more girls fresh off the bus to take her place.” I stopped. I realized I had been talking for a while. The car was a quiet for a bit.

  “Jesus, Truman,” Shadow finally said, “now I want to commit suicide. Brother do you know how to depress a girl. You should record that speech, call it ‘The Sex Industry Circle of Life’ and show it to every woman who’s thinking about dabbling in stripping.” She shook her head. “Can’t say you’re wrong, though. The sex industry is the wrong one to go into if you’re looking for something with longevity. Ever met an old hooker?”

  “No. You?”

  Shadow shook her head. “I haven’t met too many old people who do what we do, either. The ones who start to get old and miss a step or two are the ones who tend to get their numbers punched,” she said. That made me think of Avatar again. If a Hero like him could be
murdered, what chance did I have? Maybe I should have hung up my metaphorical cape and gone into stripping. It was not an occupation with a bright future but, unlike Heroes, not too many strippers got shot at.

  “So I take it you’re against prostitution,” Shadow said. I shook my head.

  “Actually I’m not. Well, I’m against it to the degree it is illegal and as a licensed Hero I’m sworn to uphold the law. But as far as being against it on the basis of morality—” I shrugged. “What two consenting adults do is no business of mine. No one else’s either. You and I could have sex, and no one would care. Not their concern.”

  “I’d care. It would mean I’d gone insane. Or that you had developed mind-control powers.”

  “Save the insults until I’m done pontificating. As I was saying, if you and I had sex, no one would care. No one would say what we were doing was wrong or immoral. Why, then, is it suddenly different if I pay you? How many dates have women been on where they slept with a man simply because he spent a lot of money on dinner and a show? Yet that’s not illegal. Why has a legal line suddenly been crossed when the man pays the woman directly? If I were emperor of the world, I would legalize prostitution and regulate the heck out of it. Protect against the spread of disease, stop hookers from being abused, tax it, that sort of thing.

  “So no, I don’t have a problem with prostitution itself. What I do have a problem with is how Brass Knuckle exploits the women who work for him. He and his men get women hooked on drugs and essentially enslave them. Then, Brass and his men take the lion’s share of the money the woman have earned the hard way.”

  “The hard way? If I have to spare you my insults, you have to spare me your puns.” Shadow pulled her key out of the car’s ignition.

  “Well, you’ll have to clean up prostitution and solve the rest of the world’s problems some other time. Let’s stop loafing and get this thing done before you get me so depressed about the plight of the hooker that I’m immobilized with sorrow,” she said.

  “We’re not loafing. We’re reconnoitering.”

  Shadow shook her head.

  “It’s a constant source of amazement to me that a guy with a neck as thick as yours uses words like ‘reconnoitering.’” She opened the driver’s side door. “No wonder you people needed slaves. Left to your own devices, you’d reconnoiter all day and never get a damned thing done.”

  “How come you can make racial jokes, but if I do it, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the NAACP show up in front of my office with picket signs?”

  “Affirmative action,” Shadow said. She got out of the car. Before I opened my own door, I leaned forward and shoved a holstered gun down the back of my pants, so it was in the small of my back, held up by my belt. My brown long-sleeved dress shirt was untucked. When I stood, the bulge of the gun was concealed. I had made sure of that by examining myself in my full-length bedroom mirror before Shadow had picked me up. Weapons were not permitted inside of Spread Legs. I hoped to smuggle my gun in past the security at the club’s door. I was not about to go into the lion’s den and face Brass Knuckle unarmed. Besides, I was stylishly dressed in fitted dark blue jeans, dark brown shoes, and the athletic fit brown shirt that hugged my musculature. Strip club chic. I might need the gun to shoo away strippers when they tried to ravish me.

  I got out of the car. Shadow came around to my side of the car. She was tall for a woman, and just a couple of inches shorter than I.

  “Will you protect me if the strippers try to ravish me?” I asked.

  “That’s like asking me if I will protect you if you’re about to get eaten by a dinosaur. The answer is yes, but it’s not likely to happen.”

  “You’re just salty because you’ve got nowhere to conceal a weapon.” That was an understatement. We were near a street light, and I could see her entire outfit clearly for the first time since she had picked me up at my condominium earlier that evening. It was black of course, as I had never seen Shadow wear anything but black. It was shiny and skin-tight, as if it had been painted on. It was so tight that not only was there no way Shadow could conceal a weapon, I was pretty sure I would be able to tell if Shadow had underwear on under it if I looked hard. I did not look hard, though. Shadow did not suffer being ogled gladly.

  “That’s quite an outfit you have on. Or are you naked and just wearing body-paint?”

  “You like it?” Shadow said, ignoring the crack about body-paint. Her face dimpling into a smile. She looked down, looking at herself as gleefully as a little girl with a brand new tea party dress on. “It’s new. I had it custom-made. It’s blade-resistant, bullet-resistant, chemical-resistant—”

  “Modesty-resistant,” I interjected.

  Shadow kept talking as if I had not spoken. “And yet supple and as light as a feather. It feels like I’m wearing nothing at all. Perfect for the Metahuman badass on the go.”

  “Impressive.” I wanted to say it also looked like she was wearing nothing at all, but I knew better than to keep harping on the point in light of how pleased Shadow was with the outfit. I was still trying to avoid figuring out if she had underwear on. It was hard to suppress one’s long-cultivated investigative instincts. “What’s it made out of?”

  “Fairy wings and dragon scales, maybe.” Shadow shrugged. Parts of her torso jiggled interestingly. Yeah, definitely no underwear. “How should I know? I’m neither an engineer nor a seamstress. It works. That’s all I care about.”

  “Don’t you think that outfit it a little on the provocative side, though? You look more like the mistress of a BDSM dungeon than a Metahuman mercenary.”

  Shadow looked at me with pity in her eyes, like I was a child with a severe learning disability.

  “Of course it’s on the provocative side. There are older and often more effective weapons than guns and superpowers.”

  I glanced down at Shadow’s shoes. Though they were black like her outfit, in no other way did they go with the rest of her dungeon-mistress outfit.

  “Combat boots?” I said. “Really? Shouldn’t you be wearing stilettos?” The contrast was jarring. It would be like the strippers inside Spread Legs wearing diapers instead of G-strings. On second thought, some guys were into such things.

  “You’ve read too many comic books written by men with shoe fetishes. You can’t run, much less kick ass, in high heels.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ll take your word for it.”

  Shadow started to turn away towards the club. I reached out to stop her, but stopped before touching her. Shadow did not like being touched. I cleared my throat instead. Shadow looked at me.

  “And remember, no killing,” I said. “I’m looking for information, not a bloodbath.”

  “No killings, no bloodbaths, and no fun. Got it.”

  We crossed the street. As we got closer to the bouncers stationed on either side of the door, I saw a yellow sign mounted on the door. In red lettering, it listed things patrons were not allowed to bring inside, which included minors, weapons, alcohol, illegal drugs, cameras, and recording devices. The sign did not say anything about superheroes with guns stuffed down their pants, so I thought it was okay for me to go in. I was a well-known stickler for following the rules. I felt the gun pressing into the small of my back. I hoped I had the safety on. If I accidentally shot myself in the ass, Shadow would laugh at me.

  Two men were being patted down for illicit items by the bouncers. Both bouncers were black. The larger one, the one on the right of the door, was not doing a thorough job patting the man in front of him down. From the time Shadow and I had been watching from the car, I had noticed he tended to do sloppier pat-downs than the smaller bouncer. So, I went to stand near the larger bouncer to make sure he was the one who patted me down. He was more likely to miss the gun I was hiding in my waistband. Shadow waited next to me as the larger bouncer finished patting down the man in front of him. He and the other bouncer were dressed identically: black trousers, black shoes, and long-sleeved black tee shirts.

  “They�
��re wearing black just like you. Do you three go shopping together?” I murmured to Shadow. “And you didn’t even ask if I wanted to go.” She ignored me. Perhaps it was a race thing. Maybe that was why I had not been invited. A clear case of discrimination. I would have to write a sharply worded letter to the Urban League and the NAACP later. No justice, no peace.

  The men being patted down were cleared to go inside by the bouncers. The larger one we were in front of looked at Shadow. He had dark skin, though not as dark as Shadow’s. He was overweight, but it looked like he had a lot of muscle underneath that fat. He was around my height. His eyes caressed her curves.

  “Do you mind turning around?” he said to her, his deep voice catching a bit on the last word. Shadow spun in place. The bouncer unconsciously licked his lips a little as he drank her in.

  “You clearly aren’t carrying anything you shouldn’t be,” the bouncer said once Shadow was facing him again. Anything bigger than a matchbook would have stood out like a mountain in Shadow’s tight outfit. “I can still pat you down if you’d like, though,” he added flirtatiously.

  “No thanks,” Shadow said. Her voice no doubt sounded neutral to the man. But I knew her well enough to know that there was an undercurrent of “I can punch you in the throat if you’d like, though,” lying underneath her simple “no thanks.” I should have opened a Shadow-to-English translation school. God only knew who my students would be, though. People who wanted to avoid getting punched in the throat by Shadow, I supposed.