Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [28]
I was overdressed in my navy t-shirt and black jeans and running shoes, but nobody seemed to notice. I took one of the open stools at the bar and ordered whatever was on tap, and asked a few questions of the bartender, a guy in a blue-striped white shirt with rolled-up sleeves over a black t-shirt; he had black wavy hair and a thick black mustache, and looked a little like Tom Selleck’s dumber, not-so-good-looking brother.
“So where’s all this famous action I keep hearing about?” I asked pleasantly.
“What kind you looking for?”
“I keep an open mind.”
He leaned an elbow against the bar. “The girls over at those tables have trailers either side of the parking lot.”
Four girls in lots of makeup and with a plentitude of high feathered hair and a modicum of spandex dress were at a table smoking and staring at nothing, unless maybe they were playing invisible cards. They had drinks in tumblers that might have been whiskey but probably were tea. They looked like prom queens, if this were prom night in Hades, which it kind of was.
“Trailers out back, huh? What does twenty-five bucks get you?”
“Their attention. Now, if you’re interested in a game of chance, you’ll want to head that-a-way.”
The bartender gestured to a doorless doorway to the right of where the pool table level rose, presumably providing passage to the adjacent storefront. A brawny black guy in a black polo with a red cursive Lucky Devil on the breast and black jeans was seated on a wooden chair on a boxy platform, like a low-riding life-guard station. Or maybe he was just waiting for the right white guy to come along to give him a shoeshine. In any case, he was keeping watch on the bar and standing guard on that door, his arms folded like a genie; somehow I didn’t think he was granting wishes.
I finished my beer and wandered over there. I paused in front of the big black lifeguard and looked up at him, and asked, “Okay I go on in?”
“You free, white and twenty-one, ain’t you?”
I decided this was a rhetorical question, and went on through. I expected to find the casino, but did not—this was another bar, but with a big hardwood dance floor, lightly sawdusted, with a stage that butted up where the front window was blacked out. Under hot colored lights, four guys in cowboy hats and tattered t-shirts and jeans and boots were getting ready to play. The tables were only maybe a third full. It was so early the males and females were still in their own little enclaves.
This seemed a different clientele than next door, and was not that different from the dance crowd at the Paddlewheel Lounge. The age was twenties and early thirties, the male attire running from denim jackets to Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants to designer jeans, the female attire from leopard print tops to vests over tube tops, miniskirts to short shorts. A girl of maybe twenty-five in a black-and-yellow backless minidress, with high heels and a yard-in-all-directions of frizzy blonde hair twitched her taut tail as she headed from the ladies’ room back to her hive of half a dozen honeys.
I bought another beer and sat at the bar and watched as the band began to play Southern Rock at ear-bleed level, and waitresses in low-cut spandex minidresses took orders and not very discreetly dealt drugs. This section of the Lucky Devil had the same shitty wall paneling, but framed Patrick Nagel beauties and movie posters (Flashdance, For Your Eyes Only) indicated a vague sense of purpose if not style.
At the rear another bouncer perched on a lifeguard