"Only a couple places they could be going," Carlos said. "This is the middle of the friggin' desert."
"Pahrump, here we come," I muttered. Pahrump was a town about an hour outside of Vegas that I knew primarily from the local TV weather reports. It was about the only town in the desert west of Vegas, and for some reason meteorologists felt the need to tell us what the temperature was out there during every weather report. But it was much more famous for offering the closest legal brothels to Vegas.
"You ever been out here?"
"Nope. No need." He smiled at me.
"Remember Andi? Brunette, great smile?"
Carlos nodded somberly. "Yep."
"She came to work out here. I guess the tips started drying up, so she had to start working on her back to pay the bills."
"And she had some expensive habits."
I nodded. That was the way things went.
We were a few miles outside of Pahrump when the BMW's brake lights began glowing softly.
Carlos stomped on the brakes. "Fuck," he whispered. The BMW had pulled over to the right and then swung around to do a one-eighty. Carlos had to veer off the highway to get out of its way. I watched Ethan's taillights get smaller in my mirror as he sped back to the city.
"What the hell was that?" he asked.
"The guy's pretty trashed, you said, so who knows."
"You think he saw us? I was hanging back pretty far."
"I doubt it. It's so dark out here, all he saw were headlights. Maybe he just got spooked by something. Or maybe he thought Mayfield saw him."
We were stopped by the side of the road. There was no hope of catching up to Mayfield now, but we'd come this far, and I didn't feel like giving up without a fight.
"Let's keep going," I said. "There can't be that many brothels in this town, assuming that's where he's going. And he's wearing an orange shirt and driving a yellow Porsche. How hard can it be to find him?"
"You're the boss."
Normally Carlos would have protested by now or tried to milk some more money out of me, but I suspected he might be intrigued by the idea of visiting a bunch of brothels. We headed into town and slowed down as we neared the first stoplight.
Although it was dark and impossible to see much, Pahrump seemed like a regular small town, not the kind of place that was famous for its X-rated entertainment. There were no billboards or street signs pointing us in the direction of the nearest brothel, so I whipped out my phone and ran a quick Google search. My phone produced a map with little arrows pointing at five different brothels scattered around town. We were closest to one called Helen's Horse Ranch, so I pointed Carlos in that direction. It turned out to be only a few blocks from the highway. I wondered briefly what a horny man in a hurry would have done before smartphones and Google.
"This place is scary," Carlos said. Even at night, Helen's Horse Ranch looked like it might just topple over in a stiff wind. There were about eight cars in the parking lot, along with a beat-up van that said Helen's Love Shuttle on the side. The shuttle driver was smoking a cigarette under a light next to a creaky porch. We did a slow drive-by and got out of there. No Porsche.
Carlos shook his head. "What kind of people are desperate enough to come way out here to a dump like that?"
"You have no idea how bad some men are, my friend. Look at all those nasty, drugged-out hookers you see downtown. Those women actually make a living. Think about that for a minute. My guess is that this is a step up from that."
He shuddered. "Whatever. Where do we go next?"
I studied my tiny phone map and pointed to the right. We weaved through a few streets on the outskirts of town abutting the mountain range that separated Pahrump from Vegas and the rest of civilization. Tucked away on its own street was the Valley Palace Resort. I assumed it was a brothel because it had shown up on my Google search, but from what we could tell, it looked like a fairly upscale resort. The entrance driveway was lined with palm trees, and the shuttle sitting out front looked brand new. There were more than a hundred cars in the lot, but we didn't have to search long. Mayfield's yellow Porsche was idling in front of the main entrance as a valet was writing something down on a pad of paper.
"What a country," I murmured.
"What?"
"Here we are in the middle of the desert. It's three a.m. And they have valet parking at a whorehouse."
"I call that progress."
I elbowed Carlos. "Only for a few. Look around here. This is like Lifestyles of the Rich and Horny."
He parked the car, and we made our way into the hotel. Suffice it to say that Carlos was a little more eager to go inside than I was.
The lobby was large, dimly lit, and tastefully done up with a kind of Mediterranean theme heavy on deep reds and rich tans. Columns and everything. I grabbed a brochure from a stand, and we sat down on a bench near the entrance. There was no sign of Mayfield.
"Let me see that," Carlos said, grabbing at the brochure.
"Get your own," I hissed.
He got up and returned with a hotel brochure and something called a "menu."
"Oh god," I said.
Carlos flashed me a big grin. He sat down and leaned back to peruse the menu while I tried to concentrate on figuring out what kind of place this really was. It was my first time visiting a brothel, so I figured I better take things slowly.
"They have something called a fifty-fifty," he announced.
"And that is…"
"First, the woman—"
I cut him off. "You know what— I don't want to know."
He sighed. "Ooh, and they do massages. The good kind of massages."
I shrugged. "Somebody's gonna drive sixty miles just to get a hand job?"
"Maybe these people are experts."
I rolled my eyes. "Men are unbelievable," I mumbled.
I went back to studying the hotel brochure. The brothel offered standard and deluxe rooms as well as a few suites and private bungalows that offered "extra privacy." Not that you had to book a room, of course. If you wanted a briefer "visit" with one of the working girls, you just headed on over to the sports bar. Apparently if you smiled just right at the girl bringing you chicken wings, she'd take you into a back room. Prices for such princely treatment weren't listed. I imagined that the girls were independent contractors just like I was, so they probably negotiated their own deals.
"So where do you think he went?" Carlos asked.
"How in the hell would I know that?"
He shrugged. "No one here is going to tell you—that's for sure. A place like this is probably super-secret about its clientele."
"Good point. Nobody's going to come here if they think it's going to get around." A big smile began forming on my face. I nudged Carlos, who was still reading through all the options on the menu. I wondered if they had combo platters, too.
"Why are you smiling like that?" he asked.
"No reason. Well, okay, it's just that I think you're going to like my plan. A lot."
CHAPTER NINE
Carlos seemed suspicious. "Your plan? You came up with this when?"
"I said you were going to like it, so shut up and listen. I need you to pretend you're a customer here. Go hang out in the sports bar and talk to the girls. See if you can get some information about Mayfield. Who he's with right now, for example."
"Why am I going to like that?"
"Because you're talking to women who are dying for you to ask them to sleep with you."
"But they're prostitutes." He made a face.
"I thought you were into this stuff. The massages, the fifty-fifty, whatever that is—"
"It's where the girl—"
"Carlos!"
"Okay, okay. For a stripper, you're kind of a prude."
"Yeah, what about it?"
He ignored the question. "So I'm into it, as you say, but only in theory. I don't want to talk to them. I doubt I could even look them in the eye."
"Now who's the prude?" I asked.
&nbs
p; "Don't matter. What's Plan B?"
I sighed. "I suppose I could try talking to them. I'm sure they do girl-on-girl stuff. Hell, they probably prefer that." If I were in their shoes, I think I would prefer girl on girl by about a million to one, especially considering the kind of male creeps that hung around in here.
"Or you could apply for a job," Carlos said.
"Let me guess—you'd be my first customer?"
"No way, I'd ruin you. After five minutes with me, you'd be madly in love and would retire from the business forever."
I raised an eyebrow but decided to let it pass without comment. "Let's go to the bar. They do couples' things, right?"
"We're a couple?"
"For the next hour we are."
"In that case, they had a whole section on the menu to choose from."
"We'll improvise."
A sign hanging from the ceiling directed us through a wide hallway into a surprisingly nice-looking bar. My first reaction was that it seemed like an upscale Hooters, and although it was not exactly crowded, I couldn't help wondering why there were so many people there in the middle of the night. We took a table at a barstool and I flagged down a waitress. There seemed to be a couple of actual waitresses, who were dressed in glittery silver, tight shorts and low-cut stretchy tops. About a half-dozen other women flitted around the room socializing with the other customers, most of whom were men sitting either alone or in pairs.
It would be fair to say that Carlos and I were the least creepy patrons in the bar, and we soon attracted not one but four of the roaming ladies. Two blondes (one fake, one real), and two brunettes. Their name tags were a Who's Who of phony names. The women weren't hideous, I had to give them that. But they weren't going to be getting offers to pose on the cover of Glamour either.
The fake blonde spoke up first. "You guys make sooch a coote couple!" Her name tag said her name was Night, but her accent told me it was probably closer to Natasha.
Carlos was about to say something, but I elbowed him. I had already decided to make him pay for turning down my Plan A.
"Thank you," I said to Natasha. "We are interested in a couples' experience. A very specific one, actually."
"We have lots of things you might be interested in," said Brandi, one of the brunettes. She was the best looking of the bunch. Early twenties and a killer body, blue eyes, and a So Cal accent.
I went for it. "Well, you see, my boyfriend here has been bad. Very naughty. He needs to be punished by someone who knows what she's doing. And I want to watch."
None of the girls even batted an eyelash. I supposed they heard strange requests every day, because all four of them were nodding at us and smiling.
"Would you need more than one of us?" asked the real blonde hopefully. Her name tag said her name was Misty.
I looked them over appraisingly, as though evaluating each one of them for her ability to inflict pain on Carlos. "Do you guys have a group rate?"
The four of them huddled together, with the Russian girl taking charge. Carlos glared at me with a what the hell look.
"Just play along, and I'll make it up to you," I whispered.
"Five hundred dollars for one hour," said Natasha.
"Three-fifty," I blurted out.
The group huddled again.
"Four hundred, you got a deal."
"Let's go," I said. I dragged Carlos up from the table, and we followed the foursome through the bar and down a long hallway.
"What are we going to accomplish with this?" Carlos whispered, his face betraying a touch of panic.
"We're building their trust."
"Oh."
The ladies led us past a large pool where more than a few couples had found private spots to make out. Some groups were in one of the four or five hot tubs, while others were swimming together in the nude. I cringed at the thought of how much chlorine would be required to make that pool sanitary.
"I thought Vegas was weird," Carlos said, "but here you have all these people swimming with naked strangers in the middle of the night."
"Lots of lonely guys out there, I guess."
We followed the ladies up a flight of carpeted steps and stopped outside the first door on the right. One of the brunettes excused herself. The hallway looked no different than your typical Holiday Inn. On the inside, though, the room was a world apart.
"This is one of our couples' rooms," Brandi explained. She was talking exclusively to me as though Carlos didn't exist. "Over there are the dual massage tables, and here is our famous king-size bed. It's bolted into the floor and the wall so you don't get a lot of movement. And you will see we have a couple of steel bars on the headboard for convenience."
She didn't explain what "convenience" the steel bars were intended for, and I didn't want to seem like a dimwit, so I didn't ask. "So what do we do first?" I asked.
Natasha piped in. "You're the boss. What kind of trouble did your boyfriend get into? That will dictate the proper punishment." She squinted her eyes in a contemptuous glare at Carlos.
"He looked at another woman," I said.
The three women focused on Carlos for the first time. They weren't Oscar-caliber actresses, but they all managed to look properly disgusted by his presence. Carlos gulped. I almost felt sorry for him.
The other brunette returned with a box of scary looking things. On top of the box were two leather whips. I smiled approvingly. This was going to be fun.
CHAPTER TEN
Tempting though it was to let Carlos experience the full brunt of the girls' "punishment," it turned out that neither of us were really into that kind of thing. We played along for about twenty minutes until it started to get a little uncomfortable. Carlos was being a good sport, but enough was enough. When I caved in and told the girls that he'd had enough and that I'd forgiven him, they happily backed off. We still had a half hour with them, so I hit the minibar and shared generously.
Having established their trust, I delicately asked whether any celebrities or big shots hung out here. Brandi was the first to spill the beans.
"I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there's a few little houses out back that some of the guys like to go to. They come from out of state a lot of the time."
Misty shot her a nervous look and then looked at the floor, fidgeting with her chartreuse fingernails. That was enough for me. It seemed pretty likely that Mayfield had gone in back to the high-roller houses, or whatever they were. We said our good-byes, and I slipped them a fifty-dollar tip as they left. They told me the room was ours for another fifteen minutes and that we'd have to settle up the bar bill on the way out.
Carlos pulled up his shorts. Luckily, we hadn't gotten far along enough to get past his boxer shorts, so he wasn't too humiliated. In fact, judging by the expression on his face, he wasn't humiliated at all.
He smirked at me when the door closed. "First time for everything," he snickered.
My eyebrows shot up. "So you're getting into this stuff, huh?"
He shrugged. "It wasn't that bad, really. I liked that Russian chick."
"Well, I think we just went through the beginner course, so don't get any ideas. I'm guessing that little spanking was nothing compared to what they're used to doing."
He nodded and grinned sheepishly. "Still."
I shook my head. "All right, freak. Calm down. We've got work to do."
We made our way out of the room and paid our bar bill at the checkout counter. Forty-four bucks for eight mini-bottles of gin and vodka. All things considered, it wasn't as outrageous as I'd feared.
There was a small, well-lit parking lot behind the hotel. The lighting made it hard to make out anything beyond the parking lot, so we headed outside to investigate. When we turned around the corner of the hotel structure, a set of smaller, unlit buildings came into dim view. As we approached, it became clear that they were tiny little bungalow structures, no bigger than a single-wide trailer home.
The first one we passed seemed lifeless, but the windows of the sec
ond bungalow were glowing with a soft light. Carlos and I ensured that the coast was clear and eased our way alongside the little house, where we receded into the shadows. There was no discernible noise emanating from within.
"You want to look, or should I?" I whispered. We were crouched below the only window on that side of the house.
"You do it," he said. I was afraid he was going to say that.
I stood up very slowly. The window was cracked about three inches, probably to allow the now-cool desert air inside, but a thin curtain blocked the view entirely. As I stood there for a few seconds trying to figure out our next move, a gentle breeze blew in and moved the curtain a couple inches to the right. For a brief moment I had a sliver of an opening.
I didn't see anything during the first opening, but on the next gust I saw more than I ever wanted. "Oh my god," I whispered.
"What?"
"It's him. He's got his clothes off, and—" I shuddered. "There are two girls in there. One of them has to be fifteen, sixteen, tops. It looks like he just finished."
Carlos cringed.
"I have to try to get this on video, unfortunately," I said. I turned on my iPhone video recorder and waited for another opening. The wind had other ideas, however, and wasn't going to play nicely. The curtain remained closed. I sighed. Spying on perverts at brothels was not my idea of fun.
I reached in the window and tried to grab the curtain ever so softly. The curtain proved to be slippery, but I was able to latch on to a small section with my fingernail and pull it open very gradually. With a tiny little corner pried open, I snuck the iPhone into the gap with my left hand. The problem was pushing the record button. I really needed a third hand, but I managed to hit it with my index finger as the phone balanced precariously on the window sill. That's when a gust of wind finally hit. When the curtain blew wide open, all hell broke loose.
Vegas Stripped (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 2) Page 5