Chapter 15 #2
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.”
I had been in church. I’d heard Glitch say it — my woman paid her way through college on a pole — watched the words drop on the table and just sit there, and then I’d filed the whole thing somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it again.
Because the Wren I knew was shy. Sweet little Wren with the cute little wave, who went pink ordering a coffee and kept her eyes on the floor in any room with people in it — unless Glitch was in that room, and then her eyes were on Glitch, and pretty much never came off him.
Put that woman on a stage in front of a room full of men?
“I still can’t get there,” I said.
“Nobody can.” He went back to the tablet.
“She knows what those girls are going to want from a manager, because she was one of those girls. You want, I’ll bring her down to walk it with you.
She’d come.” He looked up. “She wasn’t surprised you put your hand up for this.
Neither was the rest of the club — but not for the same reason.
They figure you’re going to live up to your roadname.
She figures you’ve actually got it in you to make the place better. ”
“Wren,” I said again, helplessly.
“You’re going to keep doing that a while,” Glitch said. “It passes.”
We sat in the office after and built it properly — his numbers, my list, the base pay carried off the club through the dark week, the camera plan. By the end of it we had the whole thing costed, line by line. A real report.
“Run it past me as many times as you need before you take it to Dutch and Indira,” Glitch said, packing up. “I’ll ask you everything they’ll ask. A couple things they won’t.”
“How many times is that going to take?”
“Depends how bad you are.” He shouldered the bag. “Get Wren down here, Handful. I mean it. She’ll see things you and I won’t.”
After Glitch left, I did what he’d told me to. Spent the rest of the night on my feet in the office, the report in my hand, running the pitch to the empty room — the numbers, the dark week, the base pay, all of it — until I quit struggling for the words.
One of the girls leaned in my office doorway near the end of her shift, still catching her breath off a set.
“Long night, boss.” She tipped her head back toward the floor. “I could stick around after we close. Keep you company a while. On me.”
I figured in her head it made sense — keep the new man in charge happy, buy yourself a little cover, get out ahead of whatever he was going to want anyway. Not so long ago I’d have jumped at the offer.
“No,” I said. “Thank you.”
The smile dropped off her face and her shoulders pulled in, and I watched her start to brace.
She thought she’d read me wrong — offered the boss the wrong thing, and now it was going to cost her.
A shift. Her spot on the schedule. Maybe the whole job.
I knew that flinch. It’s what you do when you’ve learned the man in charge can end you for less than nothing.
“Hey. You didn’t do anything.” I kept it easy. “Nothing about your shift or your schedule or where you stand in this place moves an inch — not for asking, not for me saying no. Asking costs you nothing. Saying no costs you nothing. We good?”
She looked at me like she was waiting for the catch — likely far as she’d ever known, there was always a catch. “Okay,” she said, slow, and I watched her go. Not the way I would’ve a year ago. Just long enough to know she got out the door all right.
The only body I wanted was a copper-haired one across town — the one who’d stood on a sidewalk outside Velvet and told me my hands couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t wrong. But I’d told her that same night she was my last, and I’d meant it down to the bone.
After the girls had gone to their cars, I did what I’d done every night that week — went out the back to check on the dog.