Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [47]
“For whom I play,” Boone says, correcting her. “Dangling … uh …”
“Preposition,” she says.
Otherwise, she doesn’t talk to him the whole way to the strip club.
Which makes him wish he’d thought up the lesbian thing a lot sooner.
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