weren’t his stories, because they had created the impression that he knew this form of vice den inside and out. He was not unaware of that as he told the tales. Vanity! Vanity! ::::::A real cop who doesn’t know the strip club scene? I mean, come on!:::::: Maybe if worse came to worst, he could bluff his way through… After all, John Smith had admitted from the git-go that he had never been in a dirty den like this or any other.
So the two of them stood outside the Honey Pot, discussing strategy. “We’re not here to look at all the shit that goes on there,” said Nestor. Mr. All Business. The leader. “We’re here to find a Russian with a big mustache named Igor Drukovich.” He did a quick air sculpture, putting his forefingers and the tips of his thumbs under his nose and swooping them way out as far as his ears. “Searching the place for Igor Drukovich is all we’re doing. No distractions allowed. You get the picture?”
John Smith nodded yes, and then said, “You’re sure you won’t get in trouble over this? Doesn’t ‘relieved of duty’ mean that you can’t do any police work?”
At first, Nestor thought John Smith was getting squirrelly, now that he was actually here before the door to a strip club… in this disorienting orangeade gloom… If he, Nestor, pulled out at the last minute, it would save him, John Smith, from the ignominy of doing so himself.
“But I’m not here doing police work,” said Nestor. “I’m not gonna flash a badge. As a matter of fact, they took my badge away from me.”
“But aren’t you under a form of… house arrest, I suppose it is?”
“I’m supposed to be at home from eight a.m. to six p.m. After six, I can do anything I want.”
“And this is what you want?”
“I told you I’d try to help you with Korolyov, and here we are. At least we’ve got this much to go on.” From a side pocket he withdrew a laminated copy of the picture of Igor in a car with Korolyov he had obtained from the Miami-Dade Police via the brothernet. “At least we know what the guy looks like, and we know that they know each other. That’s not a bad start.”
The entrance to the Honey Pot was a plain workmanlike sliding door, easily fifteen feet wide, that looked as if it had been there since long before the warehouse was converted into the Honey Pot. Immediately inside was a glass wall with a pair of glass doors leading into what resembled a movie theater vestibule.
The moment the leader and his orangeade-faced follower entered, BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung began BEATING and thunging into their central nervous systems. It wasn’t a fast beat and not terribly loud, but it was relentless. It never changed and never stopped going BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung. There must have been a musical score generating it, but you couldn’t hear it in this small walled-in space that served as a box office… a curved counter… behind it, a paunchy, forty-whatever white man clad in a white polo shirt with an orange Honey Pot logo embroidered on the chest pocket. He was the cashier. John Smith gave him forty dollars for the two of them. The man tried his best to be jovial. He smiled and said, “Have a good time, fellas!” The smile looked like a mean streak turned up at the corners. Nestor led the way through the door into the club itself… BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung and sure enough, there was music behind the beat, recorded music. At the moment a girl with a teenage voice was singing, “I’m takin’ you to school, fool, an’ if you don’ get it, I don’ give it, an’ if I don’ give it, you don’ get it. Get it, fool? You cool with that?” But after a few moments, the song didn’t matter. It was sucked up by the BEAT-unngh thung BEAT-unngh thung.
Swivel—Nestor’s and John Smith’s heads turned simultaneously. Many eyes watching them! Off to the side, near the door they just went through, was a bar with a seven-to-eight-foot partition separating it from the rest of the club. Packed with women it was, young women with jacked-up white legs, pushed-up white cleavages, three-hundred-watt white eyeballs—white girls and only white girls, their white faces decorated with the tarty black arts of the eyeliner, eye shadow, eyelash paint, black-laden eyelids… white girls with