The Ranger - Ace Atkins [55]
About a mile down the road, you could see the lights and neon of a club. DIXIE BELLES advertised hundreds of the SOUTH’S FINEST WOMEN, AMATEUR CONTESTS, and HALF-PRICE LAP DANCES. Daddy Gowrie turned into a busted-up parking lot, and Quinn drove right on past, getting a glimpse of the grizzled little man as he crawled out of the cab and started to comb his thin, greasy hair with a pocket comb in the flickering light.
Brother Davis followed, grinning up at the neon sign with his gold teeth. He borrowed Daddy Gowrie’s comb and went to work on his ducktail.
“Daddy know you?”
“Is this a face you’d forget?” Shackelford lit another cigarette and nodded. “You bet. Even before I became so unforgettable. I whipped his ass one night after he stole a pint of whiskey from me.”
Quinn nodded back.
“I know,” Shackelford said, waving the smoke from his face. “Stay here. Will you at least describe to me all them titties?”
Quinn waited five minutes before following the men inside, paying the five-dollar cover and paying ten for his first drink out of a two-drink minimum. The girls were cute but hard at the cash register, commenting on his buzzed hair, and they told him he could get a free lap dance with a military ID.
Quinn grabbed a Budweiser and walked into the club, scanning the big open space for Daddy Gowrie and the preacher.
Most strip clubs were the same, but he could tell right away this one beat the crap out of the ones lining Victory Drive in Columbus, Georgia. He’d dropped so much money in those places when he’d been a young man, maybe eight, nine years ago, he couldn’t even imagine. There was always a Ranger who’d get stupid and drunk, falling in love with one of those girls. Quinn actually knew two that married girls they’d called dancers, and when Quinn met one of the dancer wives, he had already seen her naked a half-dozen times.
All the same shit, stage lights, bad music, and some goofball DJ trying to be funny, making sure all the fellas knew to tip their waitresses.
He hadn’t been inside five minutes and had been hustled twice and asked to buy another drink three times.
Daddy Gowrie and Brother Davis had found a table close to the stage, where a girl worked a pole to some electronic shit music. At Daddy Gowrie’s feet sat a small bag, maybe a little larger than a grocery sack, that he’d touch every few minutes, feeling for it and then returning his hands to the table.
Brother Davis moved up to the stage and put a dollar bill in his gold teeth. A woman pressed her titties together and snatched it from him. Ole Daddy Gowrie watched and clapped, smiling a big shit-eating grin and slapping his knee while he reached for a couple shots from the waitress and handed her back some cash.
He threw back both of ’em, motioning to her that he wanted a couple more.
The room was dark. They couldn’t see him. If they’d turned the houselights on, they wouldn’t have noticed anyway, as the girl threw her bikini top down on the stage and hugged the pole.
Two more girls followed.
Daddy drank four more shots. Brother Davis drank three beers within five minutes.
A few songs later, Daddy Gowrie reached into his pocket for a cell phone and nodded to what he heard. He got to his feet, grabbed the bag, and walked back behind the bar, where he knocked on a metal door.
The door opened, and he was gone.
Quinn ordered another Budweiser but didn’t drink it.
It was oh-one-hundred.
He wondered if Shackelford had bailed.
Quinn didn’t care. He’d gotten what he needed, now had to figure out what to do with the information.
The music changed, and a tall blonde in boots made of fur high-stepped it down the center of the runway to Led Zeppelin. Quinn watched for a bit till his eye caught another couple girls, sitting down at a table with a couple college boys. One of the girls reached out and grabbed one of the boys by the hand and led him back to a VIP room, where he’d get a lap dance for forty bucks. The other girl, dressed as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, made small talk with