The sergeant and the maid exchanged conspiratorial glances before Daniels spoke. “One of her friends heard about someone blowing up.”
Key and Gonzales’s faces jerked toward Chona as if they were robots.
“No, no,” she said quickly. “Not blowing up, but—” She stopped, embarrassed.
“But what?” Gonzales pressed. “This is important, baby, so don’t hold anything back, no matter how silly it might sound.”
“Okay, okay,” Chona said, clearly relieved. “Some of my friends work at Club Blue.”
“That’s in Qurum, the next town over,” Daniels explained. “Upper-scale burb…mostly.”
“That’s right,” Chona continued. “They’re waitresses and hostesses and—”
Daniels took over. “There are whore houses in Muscat, but they’re always being shut down by the cops, so they often relocate in suburban hotels owned by Westerners, where they can skirt the laws.”
“Not whore houses,” Chona insisted. “Just, you know, flirting, like in Hong Kong bars.”
“Where all the girls are also Filipino,” Daniels said, “and they have private lounges with seventy-five dollar sodas and two-hundred-dollar muscatels.”
“They say,” Chona stammered. “They say that the girls are ‘available for any services.’”
“And you know what that means.” Daniels winked at Key.
“Enough, Morty,” Key grumbled impatiently. “Someone tell me about the blowing up stuff.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Chona started, but, after a look from Gonzales, continued more evenly. “A friend of mine said a friend of hers got real sick. She said the poor girl couldn’t take any light, and even began to cry blood.”
“Dark blood,” Daniels added.
Key couldn’t help but glance at Gonzales, who only stared at Chona. “Go on,” he urged her.
“She said the poor girl then started to have a seizure,” Chona elaborated. “They were afraid she was going to collapse until they hustled her into the back room.”
Key waited, but that was all Chona said.
“I was going to check it out,” Daniels said, “but waited for you. So, let’s have a look?”
Key looked to his associate. “Can’t yet.”
“What, are you kidding?” Daniels complained. “You’re the one who said we can’t waste time!”
“We got someone coming,” Gonzales informed him.
“Then you wait for them!” Daniels barked. He turned to the other. “Come on, Joe, let’s go.”
“Morty,” Key said evenly. “Got to wait. This is more important.”
“Oh, yeah?” Daniels retorted. “You get a whisper of something and suddenly it’s more important! I get a lead, and it’s all ‘Morty just wants to hang with hookers’, right?”
Chona laughed unconvincingly to try to lighten the suddenly contentious mood. “It’s just a story from another pinoy,” she said. “Who knows if it’s true?”
“Only one way to find out,” Daniels stated as he got up. “I’m going. You coming or not, Joe?”
Key looked up, directly into Daniels’s eyes. “Morty, I trust you with my life, you know that. If you can’t wait for me, then fine. You go and check it out. If you’re not back by the time we’re done here, we’ll come looking for you. Right?”
Daniels stared back for a few seconds, his expression going from offensive to defensive, but finally softening to appreciation. “Right,” he said.
He started to turn toward the door when Gonzales threw the Yaris keys to him. “Chona has her own car,” he said.
Daniels nodded in appreciation, then left the room. Assistant Professor Esherida Rahal showed up a few minutes later, seemingly coming directly from her meeting with the student, since she was wearing the same outfit.
Given his mood, Key stood on no ceremony. He quickly closed the door behind her, ushered her into the room, and motioned at the refreshments as he spoke.
“A single young woman going out at night to a remote street in a neighboring village means you think this is important. You weren’t in the least bit surprised when I told you the problem, so you already knew about that too. And your superior, Professor Davi, is not absent, he’s missing.”
Rahal seemed startled for a moment. She recovered quickly. “How did you know?”
Key curtly shook his head and said, “Stay on topic. I’d love to have the time to feel each other out and build a bond of trust, but we don’t. I’ll tell you flatly now that I am not a spy or double agent or government official. I am a soldier who is trying to find out what happened to his squad and prevent a disaster that could, if it spreads, kill thousands—”
“Millions,” she whispered, stopping Key in his verbal tracks.
“Ms. Rahal?” Malik, the very same student who had interrupted them before, stood in the open doorway, wearing the very same outfit, only now with a backpack. “I am so sorry,” he said sheepishly, “but I heard the address they gave you, and I forgot to—”
Gonzales clamped the student’s right hand in both of his as Key grabbed a pillow off the floor while pulling his Sig Sauer from beneath his light jacket.
Jamming the 9mm automatic’s barrel deep into the pillow, he shot Malik right between the eyes.
Chapter 11
At first, Morty Daniels was disappointed by Club Blue.
As he drove there, passing the ocean sparkling in the moonlight on one side and quaint mosques with lush gardens on the other, he had started toying with the idea that Club Blue might be an Omani’s idea of a seedy Hong Kong bar, so the actual place, in his mind, would be well appointed and filled with beautiful women—as would befit the clean elegance of the upmarket Muscat suburb. He knew seedy; he’d grown up in it, in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. The only thing that kept the crumbling burlesque houses and gay movie theaters from dragging the twenty-three-block area into complete slumdom was its proximity to the glittering theater district on and off Broadway. He had grumped about hookers, but Key had been right. He knew them in both senses of the word, and he loved them. In the same way every good soldier was ready to fight 24/7, a streetwalker was always sexually available, always on the make, always willing. On his way to school each morning, it used to thrill Daniels to walk by the two hookers on Forty-Fifth Street and Eighth Avenue. They would stand outside the corner coffee shop holding paper bags as if they’d just gotten takeout. That way, the police couldn’t charge them with loitering or soliciting. They’d accost men with, “You look hot today, honey,” or the even less subtle, “I’d like sausage with my muffin.” Over the days and weeks, the girls came to recognize him and greet him and stir youthful urges under the worn leather belt that was held together with staples. His printshop owner parents didn’t have much money, but they did have stationary supplies. When Daniels was old enough to work at the store on Ninth Avenue, he spent his first wages on one of the girls. She wasn’t young and maybe she had a habit and there were cockroaches everywhere in the furnished hotel room that had cost him an extra ten bucks over the sixty he’d paid the black girl who called herself Gigi. Even then he knew the moans and audibles were fake. But he didn’t give a shit about any of that. His world and senses had been entirely bound by five foot five of artfully alive flesh and fingers and smell and what his school yard friends called lumpy-bumps.
Daniels smiled as he remembered the phrase. So many expressions from his childhood—nancy-boys, retardo, even fatty—would probably be grounds for suspension these days. But like lumpy-bumps the things they said didn’t have a truly disparaging or hateful thought behind them. Not like today, when deeper hate was transmitted in a look or a gesture. Anybody who didn’t believe that should spend some time out here.
A pressure cooker like this, he thought, you could learn to hate your friends as totally as your enemies.
Back in New York, he had no hate. To the
contrary. From that heaven-in-Hell’s-Kitchen point forward, Daniels was addicted to love, as the Robert Palmer song went. Low end sex and dives were already in his blood. Everywhere he went in the big, perverse world he hoped for a transfusion.
Once he’d parked on cracked asphalt outside the cramped, tacky place wedged into a copse of Mangrove trees, that dream died, replaced with a sense of “been there, done that, got something that needed shots.” Unlike the rest of the country, Club Blue gave him a sense of comfortable familiarity. Once he stepped into the dark bar, decorated in a cheap set designer’s idea of the Arabian Knights, he actually felt at ease. Especially since a mirthlessly smiling, slit-eyed, square-faced, surprisingly tall Filipino girl was leaning on his shoulder within seconds.
“You speak English?” he asked above the generic thumping music apparently shared by every rundown girlie bar in the world. “You want a drink?” He said it slowly, as if emphasizing the words would somehow make them seem more comprehensible.
Those beautifully formed eyes winced a little. “Come on, man,” the girl answered. “Are you kidding me?” She slapped him on the chest with a fine, cool, flat hand. “Yes-ee, mister man. I speakee English and I want drinkee. Only now me wantee most expensive drinkee.”
Daniels laughed with honest approval, bought her the faux champagne, and was off to the races. Key might not have agreed with his tactics, but that was why Daniels was a sergeant and Key still a corporal. This was far from Daniels’s first rodeo, so he jumped through the now familiar hoops, guiding them as much as they guided him.
Three drinks, transfer to private room, bottle planted upside down in the ice bucket, then, right on schedule, an older, squatter, wider, mama-san was at his other shoulder, wondering if he might like to rent a room for a while. And, if he so desired, his companion, whose name was unconvincingly Lailani, was available for any services.
It was “yes” and “yes” from Daniels, who pretended to be drunker than he was, so Lailani “helped” him up narrow stairs and into a small white room with ill-fitting, piss-yellow curtains and a severe, plain, thinly covered bed that looked like it had been bought at a hospital bankruptcy auction.
Daniels was severely certain Key would not have signed off on the next portion of his plan, but it wouldn’t do to have Lailani raising a ruckus at any portion of the evening, so Daniels felt his options were limited. The way he figured it, he had only two. Plan B, he could punch her lights out. Seeing Lailani crawl onto the bed made him decide to go with Plan A, screw her clever little brains out. It wasn’t her position—flat on her back—that decided him. It certainly wasn’t her get-up—a faded lime-colored T-shirt with a gold logo that read Goochi over an elastic, blue, polyester tube miniskirt. It wasn’t even her body—long and lean, with slightly more pronounced curves than he was used to seeing on Filipino whores. It was her expression.
Clouds seem to dissipate in her flinty black eyes as they wandered the room like it was an old friend. He imagined her replaying many a visit in her mind, but just as that began to annoy him, her eyes returned to him, and her lips widened into an actual, believable, honest smile. Daniels was confused for a second. What did this well-practiced and well-used woman have to smile about? He looked away as he tried to process it, as he mentally scanned all the smiles from all the women he had known.
Not finding a match, his own eyes settled on a small card tacked to the plain, faded, white wall over a tiny metal end table on which sat a pile of condoms and a box of tissues. It was written in both Arabic and Filipino. He met her eyes before nodding to the card.
“What does that say? Check out time is 1:00 a.m.?”
She didn’t even look at it. “Mama puts that in all the rooms. She has carried it to every house she goes to. It says, ‘Life is too short to make anyone’s hour unpleasant.’”
She smiled at him again, and that did it. He recognized the look now. It was a smile of pride, triumph, and possession. He remembered all the other men in the bar—small, sad, furtive, and even ashamed. They couldn’t afford the prime Asian and Eastern European prostitutes in the big Western-owned hotel bars. They had to come crawling to Club Blue, and acted like it. Then Morty Daniels had walked in. He may have been many things, but sad, small, furtive, and ashamed were not four of them.
Obviously, every available girl in the place had a momentary, silent wrestling match to see who would claim him. Maybe even the mama-san had decided the match with a nearly imperceptible move of her head. Lailani had gotten the nod, meaning that Lailani was the top cat in the joint.
That made Daniels smile back—hard. Okay, baby, he thought as he all but ejected his dishdasha robe-length shirt from his body. Top cat, get ready to meet top dog.
Her eyes widened as he leaned over the bed, reaching for her. Her gaze was focused below his waist line where another big, fat finger was poking up his wazer and pointing directly between her eyes. He gripped the hem of the tube skirt and yanked it off her sleek loins like a magician yanking a table cloth away without disturbing the crockery and silverware. He was delighted with the glorious sight of a plush tuft the likes of which he hadn’t seen since stealing some of his grandfather’s Playboy magazines out of the old man’s sock drawer way back when.
“Holy cream-pie.” He crawled across her. “You hairy little muff-cake you.”
She beamed with approval, her spider-leg fingers, with their orange-painted fake nails, crawled and skittered across his shoulders and neck, sending chills down his spine. He could feel her grip change as she molded his muscles with her hands and arms. He saw or felt no fear as she all but clenched him to her. Her entire being all but yelled, “I’ll show you. Think you’re so tough and strong? I’ll show you what we pinay are made of.”
As far as Daniels was concerned, what she was made of, above the waist, was a little brown sugar, and much more spice. A buddy of his stationed in Japan once bragged about the creaminess of his girl’s skin, so Daniels couldn’t wait to text him that she had nothing on Leilani. It was like feeling melted caramel.
But now, he thought, time to see how the bottom half lives.
He pried and then popped his penis out of his wazar while maintaining a one-handed push-up off her. It flopped on her hip before she took a glance toward it—a glance that turned into a stare.
Her eyes snapped back up to his, and in them he saw excitement, anticipation, and even challenge. She looked like a little birthday girl who was given a real bakery cake after years of store-bought brands.
Daniels thought of his brown belt Marine Corps Martial Arts Program training, the one with the advanced bayonet techniques, as he plunged all the way into her. Her flesh was weak but her muscles were strong. And she knew it, immediately compensating for her “used car upholstery” by showing him how durable her engine still was. Her hands shot down to his buttocks, clamping and pushing, all but demanding he go as deep and as hard as he wanted, or could.
Daniels gave her a big fuckaduck-eating grin, with all his teeth on display, as a sign of approval. It was like dipping his wick into a tub of softened margarine. Not butter, margarine, but still. He would have given her a thumbs-up, but his hands were busy seeing if her breasts were of any use. They were sunny-side-up eggs on her chest, decently shaped, with small, oblong aureoles, and even smaller button nipples. Not much to hold on to, but soft and fun to rest on. So Daniels concentrated on his relentless, unflagging, and consistent counterattack.
He watched and waited for any sign of her eyes unfocusing, but they were as clear and sharp as onyx. She stared up at him with a combination of thanks and “is that all you got?” That made Daniels smile all the wider, because he knew exactly what was going on here. Key might have been able to run rings around him on the track or at crossword puzzles, but in here he was king. He knew, but Lailani didn’t know he knew, that she was doing everything she could for him—except suggesting he grab a rubber.
There was som
ething she could give him, and there was something he could give her, and, apparently, Lailani was fine with either of them. Daniels, however, was not fine with an STD or an illegitimate kid, so he waited until the girl finally turned her head and closed her eyes before grabbing a condom from the end table, and doing his one-handed trick. He’d seen lots of bar girls tie a knot in a cherry stem with their tongues. His variation was opening the package and sheathing his word with one hand in seconds, like an expert chef cracking eggs.
He did it twice, just in case either prophylactic was defective, and so expertly she hardly knew he had accomplished it between three thrusts. Finally she realized that something was now covering his lance, but, as she started to react, he silently notified her that, perhaps despite her possible presumption, he had not yet truly begun to screw.
She knew now. His approach went from waves-crashing-to-the-shore to tsunami level. He was no longer steady. He was hydraulic, and he pounded into her until her pupils grew soft and her eyelids closed like cherubs were sitting on them.
* * * *
Daniels pocketed both the empty chloral hydrate vial as well as the not-empty condom as he pleasurably glanced over Lailani’s long, lean back as she snored, drooling on the thin pillow.
Oh, the things I do for my country, he thought, quelling the urge to write B+ on her spine in lipstick. Instead he pulled up his wazar pants and smoothed down his dishdasha. He didn’t even have to put on his sandals since he hadn’t taken them off.
So much for the prologue. Now to the main show.
Unlike the grittier portions of the Middle East and Asia, there was no hulking guard making sure no one caused trouble at the end of each dimly lit hallway. Club Blue was filled with well-mannered, quiet, even respectful natives and tourists who knew better than to risk a good thing in the otherwise strictly principled country. The entitled wealthy hung out at places with registered copyrights after their brand names. Club Blue was for under-the-radar mischief-makers.
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