Chapter 19
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— Handful —
Renner came in every Friday in an expensive suit and tipped like he was leaving a deposit on something.
Front booth, bottle of the good champagne, called every girl who came near him sweetheart.
The kind of customer the old owner would’ve named a beer after.
The kind I’d been told, more than once, kept the lights on.
Fewin had rung him through for eleven hundred dollars the week before and Renner had told him to keep two hundred of it, loud enough for the room to hear.
That was in addition to the money he was handing out to the girls.
Tonight, he had his hand on Lex before I got to him.
I’ve got bouncers for the floor and a man on the door, and I still walk the room myself a hundred times a night — so I was already moving when it happened, already halfway across.
Lex was at his table doing what Lex does, working him for the bottle and the tip, running the whole thing the way she runs everything.
And his hand came up off the table and went where it had no business going, fingers spread, like he’d bought the right along with the champagne.
Lex’s face didn’t change. That was the worst of it.
She’d been here six years and a hand on her wasn’t news.
She just reached down and lifted his wrist off her like she was moving a coat off a chair, polite, professional, and that — the practice in it, the way she’d done it ten thousand times — was what damn near killed me.
“Renner.” I was at the booth. “On your feet. We’re done.”
He looked up at me, easy, the face of a man who’s never been told no anywhere he’s picking up the check. “We’re having a conversation, friend.”
“You’re leaving. There’s two ways it goes. You walk, or I walk you. Either way you’re in the lot in about a minute.”
“Do you have any idea,” he said, and I watched him reach for the number, “how much I spend in this place?”
“Yeah. To the dollar. Doesn’t matter.” I stepped back and gave him room to stand on his own, because a man with an audience will sometimes do the smart thing if you don’t make him lose face doing it.
“You put a hand on her. In here, that’s the one thing you cannot do.
I don’t care if you’re spending a hundred grand a year, you don’t get to buy that.
You’re done. Permanent. Don’t come back. ”
The room had gone quiet around us. He looked around, realized the audience wasn’t on his side, and stood up, straightening the suit like that put him back on top.
“I want my tab refunded.”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea who I am?” He buttoned the jacket, getting his feet back under him the only way men like him know how. “I can make a lot of trouble for a place like this. You can’t afford to lose me. I’m friends with the man who owns this place.”
I smiled at him. “I guess you haven’t heard. Place is under new management.”
That landed somewhere behind his eyes. “Then I’ll have a word with whoever owns this dump.”
“Venom Riders owns it.” I let him have a second with that. “And you just had your word. Out.”
I walked him to the door myself, a half step back and to the side.
Never put a hand on him. You learn that running door.
The guy you throw out clean stays thrown out.
The guy you grab has a bruise to show people, a story where he’s the one it happened to, and a reason to come back and even it up.
Renner got nothing off me but a walk to the parking lot.
Out in the lot he stopped at a black Maserati and turned around. “You just cost yourself a customer,” he said.
“Drive safe.”
“A real customer. You don’t throw out money like that and stay open.”
“Drive safe, Mr. Renner.”
He got in. I waited until the taillights were out of the lot before I went back inside.
Biggest tab in the building, gone on a Friday with payroll due Monday. I waited for that to bother me. It didn’t.
Lex was gone when I got back in.
?
We closed at two. The prospects broke the floor down and stacked the chairs and cleared out, the girls went to their cars in a group out the back, and I watched the cameras till the lot was down to my bike and one other car.
When I came back through, Lex was still there, sitting at the end of the bar in her coat with a rocks glass turned upside down in front of her.
“You’re still here.”
“I’m having a drink. You’re going to have one with me, and then I’m going to go home.” She righted the glass. “Sit down, Handful.”
I poured her a whiskey. Poured myself a soda water, because I don’t drink much anymore. She looked at the glass, then at me, and let it go.
“You barred Renner,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She drank some of the whiskey and looked at the empty room for a while, the stages dark, the chairs up on the tables where the prospects had stacked them.
“You know what the worst ones are?” she said.
“Everybody thinks it’s the Renners. The grabbers.
It’s not. A grabber I can handle, I’ve been handling grabbers since I was nineteen, you see the hand coming a mile off.
” She let that sit. “It’s the mouths. The ones who never touch you, never break a single rule.
They talk about me like I can’t hear them.
They look at my tits, they talk to my tits, they’re still looking at my tits when I answer their questions. ”
She turned her head a little, like she was watching it happen on the far side of the room.
“I can respect a man who comes in to look. Admires the view, tips well, goes home to his wife. That’s the deal, that’s what the chair’s for, I’ve got no problem with him.
It’s the one who comes in every Friday and spends the whole night telling his buddy how he’d love to bend the whore with the big tits over the stage and then finish on her face.
Loud enough that I hear it. Smiling at me while he says it, like I’m in on it.
” She looked at me. “I take my clothes off to pay rent. That’s all I do. ”
I sat there with my soda water and didn’t say anything.
What she was describing — a man narrating what he’d do to her while she stood there and smiled through it — that I’d never done.
But I wasn’t going to sit there and play clean.
I’d rated a woman to a brother across a bar and not much cared if she heard me.
Made a server at Austen’s place so uncomfortable she went and got the boss — back before I knew the boss was going to turn out to be the woman of my dreams. My mouth had been careless plenty but I’d never been that.
“Say what you want about me,” I said finally.
“Most of it’ll be fair. I’ve been free with my hands — never where they weren’t wanted, but free, I’ll cop to that.
And I’ve run my mouth about a woman to a brother when I should’ve kept it shut.
” I held her eyes. “But not the way you just said. I never once set out to make a woman feel the way those men set out to make you feel.”
Lex made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No. I don’t expect you have.”
She looked me over like she was pricing me out.
“I’ll bet women throw themselves at you.
I’ll bet that cut does half the work before you open your mouth.
And maybe you take a little advantage of that — course you do, the edge it buys you, why wouldn’t you.
But every one of them walked in knowing exactly what you were.
They came looking for a night of something they weren’t getting elsewhere, hoping you’d give them a taste of it, and I’d put money you gave them plenty.
They went home satisfied and got on with their lives.
” She lifted a shoulder. “That ain’t the same thing, honey.
A grown woman who wanted you and got what she came for isn’t some stranger up on a stage while you tell your buddy what you’d do to her and how much she’d thank you for it. ”
“You don’t know the half of how I —”
“I know the kind, honey. I know every kind there is.” She wasn’t unkind about it.
“But I’ll say this for you. You sit in an empty bar at two in the morning weighing your own moves, putting yourself on trial for them.
That takes something up top most men haven’t got.
So quit drowning in it. You did right tonight. Leave it there.”
She held my eyes a moment longer than she had to, and what was in them was respect — plain, and for me, not for the boss who’d barred Renner.
“Tomorrow,” she said, standing, pulling her coat straight, “you treat me exactly the same as today. You don’t get gentle with me because Renner got handsy and we had a nice talk.
You go soft on me now and I’ll know tonight was about you.
” She finished the whiskey. “Same as always. That’s how I’ll know it’s real. ”
“Same as always.”
“Good.” She set the glass down. “Lock up.” She was at the door. She didn’t turn around. “Renner’s been touching girls in here for six years. Four owners. You’re the first one who walked him out the door instead of walking me off the schedule for making a fuss.” Then she was gone.
Before I locked up, I went out back to check on Jacks - the girls had started calling him that. Same spot under the loading dock, same wary distance he always kept. I crouched down in the cold and watched him eat, no closer to touching him than I’d been the first night.
Afterwards, I Wasn’t ready to go home so I rode to the cemetery instead.
Three in the morning, the gate open the way it always is, because who robs a graveyard? I walked in past Snake’s stone and the two older brothers’ and down to the end of the row, to the one that still looked newer than the rest. Anchor. Danny. Nineteen forever.
I don’t come here. We toast him every Saturday, now Sunday. His cut hangs in church. I say see you out there, Anchor with the rest of them, but I’ve never been out here to the actual stone, because there’s nothing on it worth looking at.
But I’d been up too long and I wanted to talk to someone. So I put it down on him.
“Barred a whale tonight,” I said. To granite.
“Cost us a few grand on a Friday. Year ago I’d have sent the guy a bottle and told the girl to lighten up.
” I had my hands shoved in my jacket. “I’m trying to do this right, Danny.
I don’t know if I’ve got it in me. Some nights I think I’m getting there, and then I lie down and the only thing I want is the one I threw away myself. ”
I huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh into the cold.
“And I’ll be straight with you, since it’s just us — it’s not only her laugh I’m missing.
Me and that woman are unfinished business, brother.
I’ve got a whole lifetime of making her squirm in that bed, wrecking her slow till she forgets everything except that she belongs to me.
A man gets a taste of that, he doesn’t just hand it back.
” I shook my head. “You’d have liked her, Danny. ”
The stone didn’t say anything back.
I put two fingers on the top of it and left. Rode home to the clubhouse, to the room with a lock on the door I still wasn’t used to, and went up to bed.