Nate endured an overly personal manual search from one of the bouncers, whose hands moved slowly and squeezed harder than necessary. The guy stank of body odor and cigarette smoke, and was about as sexy as a pickup truck on cinder blocks. It was an effort of will not to shrink away from his touch.
“Want me to turn my head and cough?” Nate asked when the bouncer’s hands lingered where they shouldn’t.
The bouncer gave him a scowl to let him know he wasn’t amused, then gave his family jewels a little extra squeeze. Nate reminded himself that he could hide signs of weakness without resorting to his own special brand of humor, which he doubted would be much appreciated by his current audience.
Finally satisfied that Nate wasn’t carrying anything into the club that he shouldn’t, the bouncer let him go. Yet another hurdle overcome, but the greatest challenge still awaited him.
Someone with a keen understanding of architecture and structural engineering must have helped Angel renovate her club, because although it was located in a building identical to those around it, it was completely different on the inside. The apartment buildings had eight four-room units per floor. They were supposedly designed to house families of four, but they would be tight and cramped even for two. Certainly they weren’t designed to house a nightclub, which was why Angel had had all the apartments on the first two floors of her building ripped out.
What she’d done was technically illegal—the high-rises were meant to be free housing for the poor. When the city planners had first designed the Basement, they’d made sure that there was enough housing for everyone who needed it. What they hadn’t planned for—or, more accurately, what they’d willfully ignored—was the human desire to lay claim to territory. Housing units were claimed by whoever had the strength to hold them, and if a powerful Basement-dweller like Angel of Mercy wanted to take over whole floors of an apartment building, rip out all the apartments, and turn them into a club, no one was going to stop her. And the fact that she’d managed to rip out all the apartments except for a few support pillars here and there without bringing the entire tower down around her suggested she’d had high-level help doing it.
Angel was most likely the richest person in all of Debasement, and with her money she could no doubt have decorated her club as elegantly as any legitimate Executive club in the city. However, she was also one of the savviest people Nate had ever met, and she knew exactly what her customers wanted. They didn’t come to Debasement in search of an elegant club they could find in their own neighborhoods; they came to see how the “other half” lived—without actually having to see anything more than a prettied-up fantasy.
The club was decorated in what Nate liked to think of as jailhouse chic. The pillars and floor were naked concrete, complete with chips and pockmarks to make them look like they came from a war zone. The ceiling was exposed beams and wiring, and lighting was provided by bare bulbs on wires. The walls were concrete, too, only you could barely see any of the concrete gray behind all the spray-painted graffiti that decorated them. Most of it was gang tags—for “artistic” effect, not because Angel’s was part of any gang’s territory—and suggestions to do things that were anatomically unlikely. There were also some pornographic cartoons, and one whole wall displayed a spray-painted portrait of Angel herself, holding a wicked, serrated blade to her chest and testing the edge with her finger as she looked out over her club with all-seeing eyes.
Nate fought his way through the crowd toward the bar. If you were looking for someone in a bar, the best place to start was generally with the bartender, and Kurt had always seemed to be at least mildly friendly with one of the ones who worked here. Nate darted through an opening to grab one of the rickety barstools. To his disappointment, the bar was being tended by Viper, a foul-tempered asshole Nate would have just as soon avoided. There was an off chance that Kurt’s friend, Random, was also on duty today, but Nate would just have to wait and see, because he didn’t want to ask questions of Viper if he didn’t have to.
A petite blonde in heels so high they should have given her a nosebleed climbed onto the other end of the bar. The girl was an obvious Basement-dweller, her hair dyed jet black with neon blue and green streaks, tattoos peeking out from the edges of her clothes, her face dotted with holes where she was pierced but not wearing her jewelry. But she was dressed in Executive finery, wearing a clingy red skirt suit that fit her like it was made for her, a white button-down blouse, and a conservative string of pearls. The stilt-like red pumps that looked like they were made out of plastic definitely did not go with the outfit.
As the patrons hooted and hollered out encouragement, the girl began to dance on the bar, stepping around bottles, jars, and glasses. Dollar bills and scrip appeared like magic in people’s hands, and as the girl slithered out of her clothes, she revealed convenient places for patrons to tuck the money. Viper worked around her, taking money and giving out drinks as if she weren’t even there.
Nate would have preferred to just buy a drink and sip quietly as he kept his eyes out for Random. But he knew from experience that if he ignored the stripper, she might make it her personal goal to gain his attention, and he was not in the mood for a lap dance. He held out bills like the men around him and tried to enjoy the show.
Technically, strippers weren’t supposed to remove their G-strings, and patrons weren’t allowed to touch, but those rules were ignored in Debasement with the same negligence as most laws. The strippers at Angel’s never seemed to mind, always encouraging the patrons to sample their wares—as long as there was money involved, naturally. Maybe it was because Nate was in a somewhat altered state of mind, or maybe this particular girl was new and not as practiced as the pros he’d seen before, but he couldn’t help noticing how frozen her eyes and smile were as she pranced across the bar, naked except for her shoes and her money-stuffed garters, letting the patrons, men and women both, touch her whenever and wherever they wanted.
Nate stuck a bill in her garter when she invited him to, but he did it almost gingerly, trying not to touch her any more than necessary. There were some girls he found attractive, but this chick wasn’t one of them. Her movements were almost mechanical, her expression behind the fake smile one of bored indifference. Based on the number of bills in her garters, Nate was the only one who gave a crap.
When Nate came to Debasement with Kurt, he always had a blast, and time had a way of getting away from him. It was always Kurt who had to gently break it to him that it was time to go. Together, they had sampled the various exotic drinks offered at the bar, danced openly as a couple because in Debasement, no one cared—and none of the tourists could see through Nate’s disguise—and rented the rooms upstairs when they wanted … privacy. They had enjoyed Angel’s male strippers, had bargained for contraband with the club’s favored black marketeers, and had even dabbled in some of the tamer drugs, though Kurt had advised Nate to caution on that front. When Kurt championed caution, Nate listened.
Angel’s without Kurt was nowhere near as much fun as he remembered. Drinking alone held little appeal, especially when he was drinking the watered-down crap that was served to customers paying in scrip. And without Kurt to distract him, he found himself really looking at the strippers and sex workers for the first time. There was nothing wrong with sex for hire, as far as he was concerned. Two consenting adults and all that. It certainly seemed a less unsavory “career” for a Basement-dweller than the drug dealing and violence that were the most obvious alternatives. Sex was fun, after all. But with nothing to do but sit back and observe, he was seeing things that before he’d always ignored, like the way the prostitutes’ hungry smiles tended to wilt when their customers weren’t looking.