Dawn Patrol

34

Petra's quiet for the whole drive.

Which is a relatively long one, because the club, TNG, is all the way up in Mira Mesa, in North County.

Boone takes the 8 east, then turns north on the 163, through the broad flatland of strip malls, fast-food joints, and wholesale outlets. He turns onto Aero Drive, just south of the Marine Corps air-training base, and pulls into the parking lot of TNG.

TNG is the name of the club, and the stripper cognoscenti know that the initials stand for “Totally nude girls”-as opposed, Boone thinks as he parks the van, to partially nude girls, or sort-of nude girls. No, the owners of TNG wanted to make sure that prospective customers knew that the girls were completely, absolutely, totally nude.

“It's not too late for you to wait in the van,” he tells Petra.

“And potentially miss meeting my Alice B. Toklas?” she asks as she gets out. “No way.”

“Is she a friend of Tammy's or something?” Boone asks.

“Never mind.”

They go in.

All strip clubs are the same.

You can dress them up all you want, create any dumb gimmick you can think of, go for the down-low sleazy or the “gentlemen's club” faux sophistication, but at the end of the day it all amounts to a girl on a stage with a pole.

Or, in this case, one totally nude girl on a pole and another totally nude girl unenthusiastically writhing on the stage without the benefit of a pole.

TNG has no pretense at sophistication. TNG is a bare-bones, stripped-down (as it were) stroke joint (same) where guys come to look at naked women, maybe get a lap dance, or, if they're feeling fat, go with a dancer behind a beaded curtain into the VIP Room to get a “deluxe lap dance.”

The club is pretty empty at this time of the day. This is a working guy's hang, and most of the working guys are working. Two marines, judging by their haircuts, sit on stools at the stage-side bar. A depressed-looking salesman type, playing hooky from his calls, sits alone, one hand on a dollar bill, the other on his lap. Other than that, it's just the bartender, the bouncer, and a totally nude waitress serving her apprenticeship on the floor before she can make the giant leap to the stage.

The bouncer makes Boone right away.

Boone sees the flicker of recognition, and then he sees the guy move away a little bit and make a cell phone call. So we're working on a clock, Boone thinks as he steers Petra away from the stage-side stool and into a booth along the back wall.

The waitress comes over and stands expectantly.

“What would you like?” Boone asks Petra.

“A wet wipe?” she asks.

“I meant like a drink.”

“Yes, hemlock with an arsenic twist, please.”

“The lady will have a ginger ale,” Boone says, “and I'll have a Coke.”

The waitress nods and walks away.

Petra looks at the stage.

“I thought you said this was a strip club,” she says.

“I did. It is.”

“But don't you have to have some clothing on,” she asks, “in order to strip it off?”

“I guess so.”

“But they're already nude.”

“Totally.”

“So they just stand there,” Petra says, “and sort of dance, and that's all they do?”

No, that's not all they do, Boone thinks. But he really doesn't want to get into that, and he's relieved when the waitress comes with their drinks. Petra reaches into her bag, comes out with a linen handkerchief, with which she carefully wipes the rim of her glass, then uses the handkerchief to hold the glass.

Well, we all have our own brand of paranoia, Boone thinks. Hers is catching a venereal disease from a glass; mine is getting knocked into tomorrow by a date-rape drug that the bouncer told the bartender to slip into my drink. Except the purpose wouldn't be to take sexual advantage of me; it would be to drag me out in the alley and beat me half to death.

Because clearly the bouncer got a “Be on the lookout for Boone Daniels” notice and he's called Dan Silver to get his instructions.

That's the bad news.

The good news is, if they're protecting something here, it means that there's something to protect.

He thinks about sharing that gem with Petra, then thinks better of it.

Anyway, she's staring at the girls on the stage.

“Either of them do anything for you?” Boone asks.

“It's fascinating,” Petra says. “Sort of the car crash phenomenon-you don't want to look, but you can't look away.”

Yeah, you can, Boone thinks, feeling his thirty-second curiosity clock running down.

The girl twisted on the pole is your stereotypical blond knockout with big hair and bigger boobs. She's too attractive for the day shift and she knows it. But she must have done something to piss the manager off- shorted him on his kickback, refused to give him a blow job, or maybe she was just getting uppity and talking about moving to a better club downtown-and now she's being punished by having to slog it out for the low-money losers in the afternoons. Now she's working the salesman hard, hoping that he's drunk enough to spring a hundred for a trip to the VIP Room so she can start earning her way back to nights.

The other girl is strictly day shift. She's petite, her face really isn't pretty, and she's small-chested. Her best feature is her long brown hair, and she's working it hard to make up for her other deficiencies. She has that look of a girl who's been told by everyone everywhere that she just isn't good enough, so she works her ass off making up for it. She works harder at being a better lay; she gets up early to make her latest boyfriend his breakfast; she bails him out of jail after he's beaten her up. She's the kind of girl who'll end up doing bottom-of-the-barrel porn videos because some producer tells her she's pretty.

She's looking down at the stage, in her own world, grinding her hips to the music-but in reality, she's moving to a private sound track of her own. She glances up and sees Boone, then looks right back down again as she turns, flinging her long hair across her back like a flogger, then looks over her shoulder at him again.

Sure enough, when the song ends and a new one begins, she dances off the stage, down onto the floor, and over to his booth.

“I'm Amber,” she says. “Would you like a lap dance?”

“Would you like a lap dance?” Boone asks Petra, aware that she probably thinks a lap dance is something they do in Lapland.

Amber turns her attention to Petra. “I find girls so sensual,” she says. It's a rehearsed line and comes off that way.

“No, thank you,” Petra says, and Boone can tell she's actually trying not to hurt the girl's feelings.

Which is nice, Boone thinks.

“How about you?” Amber asks Boone. “Would you like a lap dance?

Or, for a hundred, we can go into the VIP Room. Wouldn't you like to have some private time with me?”

“Yeah, I would,” Boone says.

“You what?” says Petra.

“I'll make you happy,” Amber says.

“Give me two hundred,” Boone says to Petra.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Give me two hundred dollars,” Boone repeats. “I want to go into the VIP Room.”

“Twice?”

“Just shut up and give me the money.”

Amber doesn't react to any of this. She totally gets digging into her purse and giving her boyfriend money.

“It's going on your expense account,” Petra says, slapping two bills into Boone's outstretched palm. “ Youcan explain to Alan Burke why you-”

“No worries.”

He takes the two hundred and follows Amber through the beaded curtain into the VIP Room.