“Money.”
Charlene starts the engine. “How much?”
“As much as I need to.”
Fred cruised behind the Ford Focus as it left the parking garage. As he was pulling onto the street, the man who was blackmailing him called.
“I’m following Wray now,” Fred told him. “I’ll find out what you want to know. I just need to get him alone first.”
“I’ve given you enough time. I told you who he was, where he would be—”
“No, listen, just give me another hour. I’ll get the files. Trust me.”
The line was silent, and Fred began to wonder if the man was still there.
“One hour,” the voice said. “And then I’m posting the pictures online. You know what’s going to happen if those photos are made public.”
Fred felt his temperature rising. “Yes, I know. I’ll get the information you want. I’ll talk to you in an hour.”
“One hour.”
The call ended.
Fred was motivated. He was not going to let those photos go public. He would do whatever it took to find out the information from Wray.
Whatever.
It.
Took.
Calista Hendrix sipped at her drink and gazed around the Chimera Club, the swankiest club on the Strip, but she didn’t see Dr. Jeremy Turnisen anywhere.
She checked the time again.
Yes. 10:20. He was a very punctual man and was not in the habit of being late, but he had mentioned on the phone that he wouldn’t be able to meet her earlier, so maybe he’d had a hard time slipping away from whatever he was doing.
Techno music pumped through the air and the dance floor thrummed with people losing themselves in the beat. Sweaty bodies sliding against each other in ways that would have been considered inappropriate twenty years ago but that were the norm today. Especially in Vegas.
A melee of madness, she thought. A phrase from some book they’d studied in her lit class back in college.
Man, it was weird how she remembered stuff from that class at the strangest times.
Jeremy wasn’t the kind of man to dance in a club like this, more the kind to play blackjack at the tables on the next level up, but nevertheless she searched the crowd carefully.
Typically, they met here by the bar, but perhaps he’d gone to the blackjack tables to look for her.
After paying off her tab, she navigated through the crowd toward the escalator.
Driving down the Strip is easier emotionally on me than walking it because when you do that, you’re faced with the people on the street corners handing out full-color business cards of escorts and strippers.
The folks hawking the cards have stacks of hundreds of them and snap them with their hands — a sound you get to know all too well when you live here in Vegas — then offer them to you as you pass.
All along the Strip, you’ll find newspaper boxes with flyers promoting strippers, exotic dancers, and other “entertainers” with the promise that they’ll make it to your hotel room within twenty minutes.
When you’ve worked in Vegas as long as I have, you can’t help but end up meeting some strippers. One of Charlene’s best friends is an exotic dancer. She doesn’t do full service calls, but according to the ad she takes out in the circulars that are distributed so freely on the Strip, she will “shower in your room or watch you shower! Can’t sleep? Let’s get together! Independent girl, no agency!”
I once asked Charlene about her friendship with her and some of the other prostitutes we know. Considering Charlene’s faith, her reply both surprised me and didn’t surprise me: “Jesus was a lot more willing to attend a party with prostitutes than to shun them.”
“But how do you think Jesus feels about those girls?”
“I think he loves them so much he was willing to die for them. The least I can do is love them enough not to judge them.”
Full service means just what it says.
On the cards and flyers, there are photos of the girls without their clothes on, with small boxes, stars, or flowers covering their nipples and carefully positioned between their legs.
The circulars are split into categories: exotic dancers, massage, college coeds, naughty nurses, Asians… and some categories that are best not to mention.
You can close your eyes and pretend this isn’t our world, but it is. You can look away, but the flyers and business cards are everywhere, and whenever I catch a glimpse of one of those pictures of a young woman who should be at the mall hanging out with her friends or making plans for college, baring her breasts and advertising her services, it’s heartbreaking.
But it’s all part of Vegas, and you can’t understand our city unless you accept that it’s part of our everyday reality.
Here, you can become an “exotic entertainer” when you turn eighteen. One of the saddest ads I’ve seen was in a flyer that someone discarded on the sidewalk in front of me recently. It contained the photo of a young girl in pigtails and the words: “Just outta high school! Barely legal! Anxious to meet you!”
I never had a daughter, so I can only imagine what it would be like to be that girl’s father. Especially if I happened to stumble across that flyer.
She’s someone’s daughter.
That’s what I think of whenever the people at the street corners try to hand me another card with a photo of a topless girl — she’s someone’s daughter. In Vegas she isn’t old enough to have a beer or slide a bill into a slot machine, but she is old enough to get a job dancing nude in front of strangers.
She’s someone’s daughter.
I love my city, but it’s one of the things I would change if I had the chance.
So now we leave the Strip and all that it is — the good and the bad — and head for Industrial Boulevard.
Dr. Jeremy Turnisen did not work for the United States Air Force. If you asked him what he did, he would say that he has a job in research and development.
Every day except Wednesday, when he takes his day off, he leaves his home on the outskirts of Las Vegas, drives to the airport, boards a small private jet, and is flown to an undisclosed location. At the end of his workday he returns, drives to his home in the suburbs, and either lifts weights in his garage or watches reruns of NCIS on television.
If you see him, he’ll be dressed as a civilian.
Research and development.
That’s what he’d tell you he does for a living.
And he would be telling you the truth. He does work in research and development.
His name does not appear on any official USAF personnel rosters. If he were ever to be interrogated, he would only be able to give his name because he has no rank and serial number.
His specialty is strong AI and autonomous weaponry algorithms.
After his pioneering work at MIT and twenty-two patents in robotics, the military recruited him.
Well, not officially.
Because he doesn’t officially work for them.
But if things were official, he would have been recognized as one of the world’s experts on unmanned aerial vehicles and would have pioneered the research into the next generation of autonomous drones that could also be controlled, when necessary, by the thoughts of pilots on the ground.
But since that program didn’t technically exist, none of those things did either.
Tonight he was scheduled to meet Calista at the Chimera Club. Traffic had slowed him down, but now he pulled into the parking garage, entered the Arête’s lobby, and found his way through the gaming area to the club.
I’d Like You to Meet Betty