Blessed silence. Now she could think.
Nadine bit her lip. This room couldn’t be totally bleak. Stagehands hid out here. Without amenities? No way.
She got up from her couch and explored.
In front of the couch was a cigarette-burned and scarred coffee table, and a brimming ashtray. On the wall stood a tottery assembly that had once been a U-build-it sheet metal storage unit, now crammed with a dozen big cardboard drawers, all of them the worse for wear. Names had been written on the fronts of the drawers and then scratched out, many times. She opened one.
It was full of condoms. Unopened condoms.
She shut the drawer fast.
She licked her lips and breathed carefully while her heart calmed down. Okay, they’re probably not all full of condoms.
She opened the next. Sneakers, deodorant, aftershave, electric razor, a couple of pairs of socks and BVDs—clean, thank goodness. Somebody who cared about his appearance. Good. Such men were susceptible to moral suasion. She hoped.
The third drawer was heavy and hard to open and contained nothing but six packs of beer in twenty-four-ounce cans. Norsky’s box, she’d be willing to bet.
The fourth and fifth held a combination of the last two drawers—one had more beer than underwear, the other, more underwear than beer, plus a dirty magazine.
“You guys need a life,” she muttered, and shut the drawers.
The next drawer held a big bag of Doritos which she stole without remorse. Chewing Doritos, she probed further.
Good Lord, this one was full of dirty socks and uncashed Opera House paychecks. On top of the unsavory pile was a silver-framed photograph: three dark-eyed little mites, two boys and a girl, grinning out at the camera, the oldest no more than four years old. It reminded her of Davy Junior looking over Linda’s shoulder as she carried him away from his father’s dangerous influence. Daddy? Whose box was this? She didn’t recognize the name on the nearest check, which meant he never came into Liz Otter’s, so he was probably dead. Except the Opera probably didn’t pay dead guys. Or else he had a nickname and she’d never heard his real name. Without prying, she sort of peeked at the date on the nearest check; it was five months old. Wow, this guy never left the building. And had a mystery nickname.
She read the name again. Edward H. Canaday. Could this be Fuckdaluck Eddie’s drawer?
She looked at the photograph of the children again. The youngest, a hairless baby, had the round head and airplane ears of the Opera House’s elusive prop man.
She shut the drawer and went to sit on the couch again, crunching stolen Doritos and thinking about stagehands.
This was King Dave’s world. Dark buildings full of dirt and occasional bright, hot lights and—she lifted her head to glare at the silenced speaker on the wall above her—a variety of cultural noises. Restaurant meals and Doritos and beer. Waitresses if you were lonely, dirty magazines if you weren’t. Piles of income you didn’t have time to spend. Children who couldn’t believe their eyes when you showed up at the door with a check. Daddy?
What’sa matter, kid, don’t you wanna woik?
She stood restlessly and took a walk around the big room. The columns—pistons, King Dave had called them—went in a long straight line. She realized she must be right under the front of the stage. There was junk stored in the back corners, of course: some chipped gold-painted plaster pillars, tall candlesticks, and fake dinosaur bones. And, hey! A potty! Thank goodness.
Washing her hands, she realized there was a lock on the potty door. That got her to thinking. The potty was way in the back of this long dim room, its door hidden by pillars. The main light switch was up front, by the door.
And the condoms were right there next to the couch.
A fiendish plot came to her.
Could she pull it off? Did she dare?
Never mind dare. Did she have the self-control? King Dave had pretty much got her where he wanted her this afternoon. Only a few minutes ago, she realized, checking her watch. The opera had been running for fifteen minutes. He might be back any time.
Or not.
It really depended if anyone else came in here before he did.
If they did, she would hide behind a pillar and then run out as soon as they were away from the door. She breathed deeply to calm her panicking heart. They might see her back, but they might not recognize her. Long as she didn’t meet anyone in the hall right outside the door, no one would know she was the one who had been locked in this room.
She had self-control. What she needed was a plan.
This called for a couple of tricks. She would have to move some of these big old cardboard drawers around. And she’d have to find a hammer and a nail, or a heavy piece of junk off one of the junk piles in the corner by the potty, to delay him.
She continued her search.
In the tenth cardboard drawer she found a tool bag. Hammer and nails right there. How convenient.
Because it wouldn’t be enough to hide behind a pillar and wait until King Dave stepped away from the door.
She had to make him suffer.
Chapter Eleven
An hour into the show, King Dave escaped the follow-spot booth. He’d tried to switch with somebody on the deck, but the bums all stuck to their positions. So much for his famous pull. Apparently the soprano came out in her birthday suit for part of this act and nobody wanted to give up his job. Bunch of perverts. She’d be wearing a body stocking anyway. The bums were fucking desperate. It was pathetic.
Meanwhile he had a hot waitress in the piston room.
Unless somebody had let her out by now.
That thought lent wings to his feet. He leaped downstairs two at a time, getting hard, remembering her strong hands pulling him into her lap.
Of course, after an hour of being locked in, she might be pretty pissed with him.
He stumbled and nearly took the last thirty-foot flight at a roll.
Of course she’d be pissed. Nadine Fisher did not take direction. It made him tired, having to think up ways to control her. This led to a catalog of all the great bribes and threats she had thrown in his face. Didn’t even consider his feelings.
The piston room seemed a long way away.
He could take an elevator, but a guy didn’t exactly advertise the fact that he was taking off the second act for a smoke, even if everybody did it. Wasn’t like they needed him until the end of the third act. Still, he took the stairs.
He hoped she wouldn’t be too mad.
At the first basement he had to stop, hands on his knees, and puff. Cripes, he’d have to go slow with her’til he got his breath back. Might be a good idea to go slow anyway. Drive her a little crazy. She responded pretty well to that before.
Good idea. Go slow, invest some time eating dirt for locking her in, turn up the heat gradually. Yeah. She’d be clawing his clothes off by the time he was through.
He sauntered down the last four flights.
Always make ’em want it more than you want them, the old man said. Best advice he ever got from his Dad.
At the piston room door, he paused and cocked an ear, still panting from the stairs. No sound came through the door.
The monitor should be on, shouldn’t it? He tried to remember if voices carried through the door. He was pretty sure they didn’t. Good thing, if Nadine turned out to be a screamer.
Of course if there was someone in there with her now—if one of the guys had skipped the privilege of looking at the soprano’s body stocking in favor of a mid-show beer—
Blood thumped unpleasantly into his head. His hand shook, sticking his key in the door. He opened it carefully. If she was gonna rush him, he would as soon let her go. The woman was built like a Valkyrie. He didn’t want his nose busted.
“H’lo?” he said.
The room was dark. Oh shit.
He peered around the door. “Nadine?”
It wasn’t totally dark. There were candles burning over there, by the couch. Candles?
Something white moved on the couch.
“King Dave,” she said in a throaty voice he’d never heard before. “Finally.”
He stepped into the room and shut the door.
Three tall, fat, white candles burned in tall, black, wrought-iron candlesticks that stood four and five feet high on the floor, ranged around the couch.
In glimmering candlelight, Nadine was sort of lying on the couch, looking like a babe in a barroom painting, only she was wearing that white waitress dress. His breath caught.
She smiled at him. “You took your sweet time,” she said in that low, lazy voice.
King Dave smiled down at her. “I thought you’d be pissed.”
“I was a mite cross,” she said. “But you know what they say.” She lifted her hand to her head and did something to her hair and it fell in slo-mo, a cascade of shimmering gold spreading down over her shoulders.
He licked his dry lips. “No, what do they say?”
She reached out to him. He put a knee on the couch and kissed her hand. She pulled. Relieved, horny, and a little unnerved because no woman had ever bothered to vamp him before, he let her draw him closer. He sniffed her hair. It smelled like roses. “What do they say, your highness?”
“Living well is the best revenge,” she whispered.
Wow! thought King Dave, trying to go slow as planned, though for the life of him he couldn’t remember why. He eased himself onto the very edge of the couch and let her cup his face for a kiss. At first all she did was peck with her lips sort of pooched out. Cute, almost prissy, if her hands hadn’t been so hot. He teased her with his tongue, trying to get her to open her lips, and slowly, one peck at a time, she did.
Things got hazy after that. He remembered the thrill when she opened her mouth to him at last and the feeling of descending endlessly into warm wetness and the strength of her tongue and before he knew it they were locked together on the couch, writhing and rubbing each other with all their clothes still on.
She pulled away from him to say, “Is that door locked?”
“Yeah,” he said, diving for her mouth again.
She ducked. “Are you sure? Show me the key.”
He unsnapped his keys from his belt loop and trailed them over her ankle, up her leg, heading for the top of her pantyhose.
At that, her hand came down and stopped him.
Okay, so she’s still got some brakes.
He let her take the keys from him. He pulled away from her in time to see her smile again—and tuck the keys down the top of her dress. Their eyes met.
“You know what you have to do,” she said.
Hot damn!
Go slow, go slow, he reminded himself. His blood pounded in his brain and his hips felt ready to swivel clean off his body. He put his hand on the top of the couch, not on her, and leaned into her and nibbled her neck with his lips.
She moaned. It was the first sound he’d heard out of her besides heavy breathing. He backed off to look at her.
What a good-looking woman. He guessed she was pretty—honestly, he never noticed about cheekbones or the shape of the nose or whatever. What he saw was the flush in her cheeks, how bright her blue eyes were, the endless flow of her golden hair all over the couch and his hands. The way she smiled at him. As if she knew all about him, but somehow it was good.
And she was big. Those legs went down forever.
The top of her dress was unbuttoned. When had that happened?
He could see a major architectural bra underneath. His breath quickened. Her breasts looked like ice cream, what he could see of them, but what riveted his gaze was the bra. He couldn’t remember when he’d got this hard, looking at underwear.
His keys gleamed through the lace.
Without thinking he reached for her tit and she laughed.
“Let’s see some skin first,” she said. She went for his fly.
At that point his brain shut down again. While she pushed his jeans down, they kissed, and somehow they got his sneakers off, and his blood pounded in the big head and the little head like jungle drums.
She said, “Do you have a condom?” He was trying to bite the back of her neck. She wriggled away.
“Of course I have a condom,” he said, trying not to slobber on her ear. He’d lost track of what his hands were doing. Oh, yeah, they were kneading those amazing tits. His mind was so lust-clouded that he hadn’t even got around to taking off that inflammatory bra.
Her hands were rubbing his belly.
“Lower,” he groaned.
Her hands stopped moving. “Let me see the condom.”
He took a long, long breath and held still. “Jeez Louise. You’re gonna give me heart failure, know that?”
He felt around under the couch for his jeans but they seemed to have wandered off. “For crying out loud,” he muttered. The lust that clouded his brain cleared partially and he remembered what room they were in.
“Don’t you have one?” she said in a forlorn voice.
“Boxes. Thousands,” he said, reaching for her breast again.
She pushed his hand away. “Please. Show me. Before we get too, uh, busy to think.” Her eyes glittered and her face glowed with heat.
Sighing, he rolled to the other end of the couch and reached into the first drawer. The damned thing wouldn’t even open. “What th—?” He stood up on the cold concrete in his boxers and stocking feet and yanked the drawer open.
It was full of beer.
“Somebody’s been cleaning house again,” he growled. “Scuse me a minute, Nadine. Won’t be a sec.”
“That’s okay, I have to go potty,” she said, and scampered away into the darkness.
He opened drawers at random, swore, threw socks and Hustlers on the floor, swore, and restarted systematically top left to bottom right. Those condoms had become the last obstacle between himself and paradise, the stop sign, the cap on the beer bottle, the bra on the girl. By the time he found the condoms in the last drawer, all the way at the end of the shelf, farthest from their accustomed place, his temper was close to snapping.
And Nadine was still in the bathroom.
What was it with women?
He heard the toilet flush. About time. Way in the back of the piston room, the bathroom door creaked open and shut again.
He heard a sharp bang.
His blood froze.
Then a bang with a secondary crack.
Heart in mouth, he sprinted in his socks for the bathroom.
“Nadine?”
The bathroom door was shut. Shit, what happened? That sounded almost like a gunshot.
“Are you okay?” He jiggled the doorknob. Wouldn’t budge.
Damn, it was dark back here. All the light switches were by the outer door.
There was no sound inside the bathroom. He put his lips to the crack. “You okay in there? Nadine?” Had she hit her head?
He grabbed the knob and yanked, putting his back into it. The door gave with a scream of nails.
Nails?
King Dave reached inside and flipped on the light switch.
The bathroom was totally free of waitresses.
“What th—?!”
He swung the door in his hand, examining it. Up about eye level, two shiny nails stuck through the very edge of the door. A long splinter testified to the source of that cracking noise he’d heard. He stepped back and stepped on something lumpy. “Ow!”
It was a hammer.
She’d nailed the bathroom shut?
This was a majorly kinky waitress.
Totally befuddled, he wandered back to the candlelit couch, an island of glowing color in the blackness of the piston room.
No waitress.
“Nadine?”
Two minutes later he had all the lights on, and his shoes on, and he had searched the piston room several times.
No waitress.
No jeans, either.
He had a bad feeling about this. King Dave tried the doorknob of the piston room.
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It was locked.
His self-control snapped. He gave the door a kick that nearly broke all his toes.
Swearing, he limped back to the couch and sat in his boxers on the now-cold naugahyde, adding it up. No pants. No keys. No phone. He was due in the second balcony in about an hour. And long before that, he feared, one of the guys would come down here for a smoke or a beer and find him like this.
King Dave buried his head in his hands.
She got me again.
After a despair break, he lifted his head. The monitor ought to be going. He climbed up on the back of the sofa, found the connector dangling out of the speaker, and rammed it home. A second later he heard a roar of applause.
End of the first act. Which meant he’d have company down here real soon now.
Feverishly he blew out the candles and lugged the iron candlesticks back into their corner. Then he searched around the couch for signs of Nadine’s presence. Ah. Hairpins. Hairpins for chrissake. He’d been done in by a cowtown girl who didn’t swear and who used hairpins. He removed the evidence carefully.
And why the nails? It stumped him. Then he realized she must have known he would bang on the bathroom door. Then he’d try the knob and find it locked. Then, finally, he would pull it open.
Delay tactic. Double damn her.
He was digging under the sofa cushions for a stray hairpin when he heard his cell phone go off. His heart leapt.
It rang and rang. Frantically he searched all the drawers. Beedle-eedle-eedle-oop-a-deedle. Underwear, condoms, paychecks, Hustlers, beer, jeez, these guys needed to get a life. No phone.
Boop-a-deedle. Damn it, the ringing was coming from right here, by the couch. Sounded like it was in the couch. He stood over the couch, glaring shrewdly.
The phone stopped ringing.
Use the big head, King Dave. Last time he’d held the phone, Corky had called him. Right here in this room. And Nadine was about to leave and he tossed the phone on the couch. So he could grab her and kiss her.
Forget how she moaned and melted. Forget it.
The phone rang again. “Ah-hah!” He dove down between the couch cushions and soon had it in his hand.
“Where are you, man?” the voice of Bobbyjay said. “You blew a cue. I go up to your follow-spot and you’re not there.”
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