by Shirl Henke
“There’s got to be an exit. What the hell about the fire codes?” she muttered midstage seeing no illuminated exit sign in the darkness opposite.
“You’re gonna get naked!” Louie shrieked, adding an inventive series of oaths.
Sam knew she was in trouble when the cheap velvet drapes separating the howling audience from the stage began to open. Louie was hopping toward her but abruptly stopped with a big grin when he saw the curtain guy doing his job. The music grew deafeningly loud. So did the roar of male anticipation out front. She could kick off the shoes—if they weren’t glued to her feet—and take Louie, but that still left the problem of the locked door behind her.
Decision time, Sam.
She would have to brazen it out and make her way to what she could now see as the only side exit, its dim light flickering from the left side of the room. A horrific vision flashed through her mind as she started to twirl the boa—her Grandma Mary Elizabeth O’Malley looking down from on High and watching her favorite granddaughter bump and grind in front of a bunch of drunks! She quickly suppressed it. Gram would understand I didn’t intend for this to happen.
At least that’s what she told herself as she deftly dodged one big lug trying to grab hold of her ankle. She swatted him playfully with the boa and moved back from the edge of the stage. She had to work her way nearer to the exit before she could make a break for it. The weight of the beaded bag filled with quarters felt reassuring as she twirled it.
Figuring out her strategy, Louie limped to the stairs leading down into the audience, positioning himself beside the exit. If he wanted to play it that way, she’d have to oblige. Sam rolled her hips and flipped the boa again.
“C’mon, baby, take it off!” a guy yelled from the back of the room.
“Yeah, Jinx, you can jinx me any day of the week,” another customer seated at the bar cried.
Many of the other yells of encouragement were more explicit, but Sam had heard worse on assignment with vice. She ignored the “cheers” and concentrated on how she could get from point A to point B as fast as possible. The boa could work. So would the caftan. After that, well…
She continued dancing, ignoring the pole at stage center, to the dismay of several males. “In your dreams,” she muttered beneath her breath, then realized the pole might be a help in getting rid of the shoes. No way could she make a dash for it in spike strap sandals. And no way could she just kick them off thanks to Shel, who’d glued them to her feet! Her toes felt as if glass shavings scraped between them as she wriggled her way back to the pole.
Sam wrapped herself around it, raising one leg high enough to grab the sandal by its heel and tug it off. The loud music smothered her oath as hunks of skin and what felt like toes came with it. The audience became more appreciative now, seeing her bare leg all the way up to her mini-thong! A few pubes get the men horny. Just what she needed! She used one hand to strategically rearrange the green feathers.
Jeez, I feel like a parrot in molting season. She tossed the shoe to the right side of the crowd and a bunch of guys grabbed for it. Mark McGuire’s sixty-second home run ball hadn’t created a bigger hubbub. She twirled around the pole and raised the other leg, this time being more coy about the feathers as she removed the second shoe. Ouch, again! Now or never, she tossed it near where a bunch of the losers were cheering.
“Hope I don’t slip on the blood gushing from my feet,” she muttered to herself, vowing that Louie would bleed even more once she got near him.
When they dived after the glittery spike, she made her dash for the left steps off the stage. She could see the owner motioning for the surly big bartender to come to his assistance. Beautiful. She had to get the hell out of the building before Max got around the bar and made his way through the crowd. When she hit the steps, several men grabbed for her.
She flung the caftan over her head and tented the three nearest ones, then flung the boa around the neck of one particularly persistent fan, pulling him toward her. As he stepped up with a loopy grin, she reached down and yanked his right leg up, jerking on his pants cuff. Almost simultaneously she clipped his left leg out from under him in a version of Kuchiki-Taoshi, or “the dead tree drop.” He toppled like a redwood, knocking a bunch of other guys down as he fell. She tossed several feathers, one at a time into the crowd, letting the men fight over them as she neared the exit.
Which left Louie.
He didn’t look in the mood for a rational discussion. When he reared back to slug her, Sam asked, “Why doncha break these quarters into nickels for me?” She swung the bag low and connected directly between his legs in a judo technique that has no name. Louie’s eyes bulged. His mouth worked like a guppy, then his face turned green as the feathers. He had a short trip to the floor. She had a couple more feathers and the boa. The door was a couple of yards away and she could see it was partially cracked open.
I’m golden!
Sam tossed more feathers and used the boa to snap several guys in the face, backing them off. The last feather went. Then the boa. Her hand closed around the door handle and she started to shove it open when Max’s big paw grabbed a hunk of her hair and pulled her back.
“You hurt Ralph, bitch. He paid you to strip. You fuckin’ strip!”
“How about you strip?” she yelled, breaking free of his hold by applying pressure on the nerves at the base of his flabby bicep just above his elbow. He yelped in pain and released her. She whirled around to face him, then grabbed the collar of his shirt and ripped it apart. Buttons went flying, revealing a big hairy beer gut as she yanked it down his right arm, immobilizing his uninjured arm.
Sam waited for him to raise his left, ready to lever it for an Ippon-Seoi-Nage, the over-the-shoulder throw. But before she could act, a loaded longneck connected with the back of his skull and he collapsed.
“Hey, she’s trying to get away!” an angry voice cried out.
“Look what that guy did to Max,” from another.
“Hit him from behind. Stinkin’ yellow bastard,” a third chimed in.
Sam looked up at Matt’s furious face, seeing his eyes sweep over her almost naked body. “What the hell are you doing here? I told you I’d shave—”
He cut her off, yelling, “Argue later. Get the hell out now,” as he drove the bottom of the longneck into the nose of a dissatisfied customer preparing to launch a roundhouse punch at his kisser.
Suddenly the whole room erupted like a volcano. Every drunken man—and that included most of the patrons—started taking swings at the guy nearest him. Sam had been close to the exit, but during the dustup with Max, she’d been forced away from it. Matt’s untimely interference put them squarely in the middle of the melee. She used what she could of her judo training, applying her strong fingers to sensitive pressure points and foot-sweeping the feet out from under guys to drop them onto their butts. Matt applied his loaded beer bottle to good advantage.
Someone killed the music. All Matt could hear was the grunting and swearing of a roomful of drunks. And he and his wife—his naked wife—were right in the thick of the fight. How the hell did the woman manage to get herself into this kind of trouble?
They stood back-to-back, both using every dirty trick they knew, his from Army MP training, hers from police academy martial arts and her judo workouts. Because she was the only woman in the room, she drew every eye in spite of the general brawl. He had to get her out of there, but how?
Then the whining sound of police sirens echoed from down the street. Moments later the cops burst through the front door, yelling for order. The lights came up and batons came down. Hard and often. Finally the crowd subsided into a milling mass. The cops started to herd those still standing to paddy wagons.
“Who appointed you my guardian, Granger?” Sam said as two of Miami Beach’s finest escorted them toward the front door.
“If I hadn’t been here, that big jack-off would’ve broken your neck,” he growled.
“If you hadn’t been here, I would�
�ve sent him flying and slipped out the side door. You started a friggin’ riot!” she shrieked like a fishwife when a red-faced rookie handed her what looked like a tablecloth.
“If you’ll just, er, wrap this around yourself, miss,” he said, trying his best not to look at the glittering pasties on her breasts.
“She’s not a Miss, she’s a Mrs. My wife,” Matt said, glaring at the kid.
“Oh, and you think that makes it okay for you to start beaning the customers?” a grizzled sergeant asked, removing the longneck from Matt’s hand.
“That guy I hit was assaulting her,” he said.
“I could’ve handled him,” Sam interjected. “Look, Sergeant, I’m a P.I. on a job—”
“I can see what kind of ‘job’ you got, lady,” the cop replied, shaking his head. “Show biz. Your limo awaits,” he said sarcastically, shoving her into the line of patrons headed toward the bright red flashing lights outside.
“You have the brains of a squirrel, Matthew Granger! No, that’s not giving squirrels nearly enough credit. You—”
“Listen, you mouthy little idiot. I kept that pretty little ass of yours from getting turned into pork rinds and gobbled up by those bar stool jockeys,” he growled, holding an ice compress to the swelling on the side of his face.
“You know what Vinny Lorussa’s gonna charge for getting us out of lockup?” she asked, ignoring his remarks entirely while she paced furiously across their living room floor. “And that’s not to mention possible lawsuits! God only knows how many bones you crushed with that longneck!”
Matt snorted. “My compassionate little paramedic, what about your employer, Louie? After the job you did on him with that bag of quarters, he’ll never wade in the gene pool again.”
“Now there’s a real plus for future generations,” she snapped. But then the implications of actual lawsuits hit her. “Oh, my God, we’ll end up selling Tupperware on the side to pay our legal fees—for the rest of our lives!”
“Money, money, money. That’s all you can ever think about. You could’ve gotten us both killed!” He lay stretched out on the long sectional sofa nursing his injuries.
“Well, since you won’t use your trust fund or let Aunt Claudia give us the money she promised me when we got married, somebody’s gotta worry about paying the bills.”
“Sam,” he said with a resigned sigh, “we always pay our bills, every month…that is, when you remember to write the checks and deposit our paychecks in the bank. Now, I’d be happy to take over—”
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m not trusting you to handle money. You spread it around like parmesan on pizza to every mooch who ever darkened the Herald’s doors.”
“A reporter has to grease his sources.”
“You don’t just grease ’em, Matt, you give them enough to glide from here to Key Largo. And most of the dough doesn’t go to sources. It goes to pay off Bennie Lanski’s bookie and Chuck Durmont’s alimony. You give handouts to every deadbeat at the paper.”
“Okay,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I couldn’t let Bennie’s bookie sic leg breakers on him. He’s on the wagon. Joined Gamblers Anonymous. I’m a soft touch now and then. You knew that when you married me.”
She stopped pacing and looked down at his battered face. Dammit, he looked like he’d been in a three-day board fight and he was the only one without a board. She sat down beside him and took his hand. “I think there were a lot of things I didn’t know about you…we did get married kind of suddenly….”
His fingers tightened around her much smaller hand. “Yeah, we did. At first…aw, shit, this is gonna sound dumb.”
“Did you think I married you for your money?” she asked, withdrawing her hand. The idea stung. “I know I seem mercenary sometimes—okay, most of the time,” she confessed, clenching her hands together now.
A small hint of a smile touched his cut lip, reminding both of them of the fiasco at the strip club. “You know me, Sammie. I admit I worried about the money—even though I knew it wasn’t true, but what really scares me is the way you keep on risking your life. Being shot at, nearly run over, beaten up. That’s why I couldn’t stay away tonight,” he confessed.
She studied his face as if seeing him for the first time. “You’ll always be there to back me up—whether I want you to or not.” She bent down and kissed him, careful of his split lip. “I kinda have a hang-up or two of my own. You’re a prep school kid with all kinds of fancy connections—”
“I took a hike, didn’t I? Sam, I hated that life. That’s why I don’t want us to accept my aunt’s money. We’d end up back there in her web.”
“That life is pretty scary for a south Boston girl from the wrong side of the tracks. I wouldn’t fit in. What if you found someone—here or there—who does? Some woman who went to finishing school and knows how to hold a teacup and doesn’t curse and—”
He stopped her by sitting up and cupping her face between his hands so he could kiss her quite soundly. “We may have gotten married without a formal engagement, but I’ve been through enough with you to know you’ll always be there for me…and I’ll always be there for you. I’ll never want anyone else but you.”
Sam drew back when the kiss ended, considering what he’d just said, knowing it was true. “Okay, here’s the deal. I promise I’ll try not to bring up Aunt Claudia’s offer if you try to trust me to do my job. I really am good at it, you know.”
Matt grinned. “Damn straight you are. I can’t promise I won’t come bashing my way in to the rescue, but I’ll try not to hover. Good enough?”
“Good enough. And I won’t even dope you and shave your head—as a sign of my good faith.”
Matt threw back his head and laughed until his split lip cracked open and started bleeding again. Sam reached for the discarded ice bag and placed it carefully over his mouth. “That’ll teach you to laugh at me.” She stood up and resumed pacing, saying, “I have to get cracking on Farley Winchester’s case.”
He removed the ice bag and said casually, “Oh, yeah, about the Winchester family…”
She stopped and turned to him expectantly. “What do you know?”
“Guess what I turned up on daddy-o?”
“Roman Numeral?” she asked, excited now.
Matt could practically hear the wheels turning in her mind when he explained the terms of Susan Winchester’s will and the nature of their marriage and her death. “So, you can see that the old man definitely has to keep the kid alive, but not necessarily well.”
“Especially once Farley turns twenty-one. But keeping him nutty and committing him to some rest home leaves the bastard in control of his dead wife’s fortune. All he needs is a shrink unscrupulous enough to do that,” Sam said, thrilled by this new twist. “Enter Reicht, who we know isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, IRS not withstanding.”
“He has to be involved in Leila Satterwaite’s death, but why?” Matt asked, musing. “Did your stroll—you should excuse the pun—at the Pink Pussycat shed any light on that?” he asked.
Sam made a face at his rotten joke. “As a matter of fact, Sir Galahad, it did. According to her stripper friends, Leila was seeing a shrink in the Seascape Building.”
“That’s a big high-rise. There must be quite a few.”
“Six. While you were in the shower, I checked the yellow pages. Pretty long odds that Farley’d see her with Reicht in that elevator if she wasn’t his patient.”
“What’s your next move?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
Sam gave him an arch look. “Your head remains unshaven…only because I gave my word,” she said with a smirk.
“You just better hope that Louie doesn’t have a litigious wife.”
Sam smiled beatifically. “Hell, she wouldn’t sue me, she’d thank me.” Now that she had time to consider the possibilities, she realized there was no way the club owner would dare come after her. “I’ll have one of my pals on the Beach PD tell him that I used to be a Miami-Dade cop.”
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nbsp; “That ought to work,” he conceded. As in the newsroom, there was a camaraderie among police officers. Running a strip club made Ralph Unicker vulnerable to endless hassles if the local authorities decided to go after him.
“While I work some other angles, I could use some help. There’s a story in this once I nail Reicht. But you have to stick to my script.”
“What’s the script?” he asked with a worried frown he couldn’t quite conceal.
“I want you to keep digging dirt on Winchester. Find out if there’s any connection between him and Reicht. Charm the ever-lovely Ida Kleb and see what you can shake loose on the IRS investigation.”
“We still have Elvis Scruggs on the loose. He could be dangerous, Sammie. You won’t go after him, will you?”
“Not yet. But I’m gonna give Patowski another grilling,” she said, wincing. Bandages encircled seven of her ten toes, thanks to that glitter glue.
“You only use me when you need information,” he groused, getting up from the sofa slowly.
“Poor baby, you don’t have an unblack-and-blue place on your whole bod, do you?” she said, wrapping her arms around him.
“You could kiss it and make it all well,” he suggested.
“It’s three in the morning, Granger, and I doubt you’re in any shape for more action,” she replied, leading him down the hall to their bedroom.
“Wanna bet?”
“I think you oughta join your pal Bennie for his next Gamblers Anonymous meeting.”
He started nibbling kisses on the back of her neck, then reached around her and placed one large hand over each of her breasts, caressing them until she sighed and turned to face him.
“Okay, you win,” she murmured between kisses.
“Just promise you’ll be gentle with me,” he said, wincing when his nose bumped her cheek.
“I’ll be gentle if you promise not to kiss my toes.”