Strip Page 19

“But I didn’t think you would be that way.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought … I don’t know. I was afraid that you might be like, I had already invited you, given you permission.”

  “You haven’t done that.”

  “No, but I thought maybe just making it personal and not business might make you think in a different way. You know, about me.”

  “Do you wish it had?”

  “No. Not then. Maybe I do a little bit now, though. Just a little.”

  He kissed her again, and this time the atmosphere had changed. At first the change was so slight and gradual she might have thought she had imagined it, but this time there was no pulling back to talk, no pause or hesitation. In a short time he was removing her blouse and then unzipping and pulling off the black uniform shorts, then peeling off the shiny pantyhose, and then she was naked. The kissing and touching went on for a long time, and as it went on, at some point he finished removing his clothes too.

  After a few minutes he could tell she knew there was a problem. She waited and appeared to be expecting nothing more to happen, as though the problem would solve itself, but Kapak could feel that he was doomed. He said, “I’m sorry.”

  She sat up straight. “Just a second.” She got off the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. She returned with a glass of water and a blue pill.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s medicine. Take it and it will make things nicer. You won’t be sorry”

  “It’s Viagra, isn’t it? What if I have an erection that lasts four hours?”

  “I don’t think you have much to worry about.” She smiled.

  He took it and squinted at it suspiciously. “Where did you get it?”

  “Someone I know bought it online. I can tell you it’s real, and I know it works.”

  “On who?”

  “None of your business.”

  He put the pill on his tongue and washed it down with the water, looking at her as he drank it. She took the glass, turned, and walked off. He followed her to the bathroom, where he found her running water into an oversized tub. She got in while it was filling, poured a little bubble bath in, and beckoned to him. “Get in with me.”

  He stepped into it, facing her. “This is a really big tub.”

  “It’s one of the reasons I chose this apartment. I always thought I would bring a man in here. It never happened until now.”

  He sat in the water, and they found that they could both fit if he kept his legs straight, and she put hers over his. After a few minutes she straddled his thighs and leaned forward to kiss him. They stayed that way for a time, and then she said, “I think it’s time to get out, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” He looked down and cleared some of the suds from the surface of the water. “How long will this last?”

  “Long enough. Don’t talk now.”

  They dried off and went into the bedroom. In concentrating on Sherri, Kapak almost immediately forgot that it was the medicine that had changed everything, and not some return of his youth. Then he forgot everything but her. She seemed to him tonight to be a composite and holder of the best qualities of all the women he had slept with when he was young: his wife, Marija; Ava the thirty-year-old whore he had paid with stolen money when he was fifteen and visited on the way home from school every day; the college girls in Budapest. She seemed to him to be a gift—maybe the final gift—the universe letting him remember why its creatures fought so hard to be alive.

  Afterward, Sherri lay with her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and slept. He lay there staring at the ceiling of the unfamiliar little bedroom. He didn’t want to move because if he did, she might not come back to his shoulder. He lay still for a long time, and while he thought, he began to feel the sensation. It wasn’t exactly pain, just an uneasy awareness that something inside his chest wasn’t right. It was almost a sadness. This was happening too late, after he had gotten old.

  It didn’t go away. He started to feel short of breath. It was as though each breath he took was more difficult, and when he exhaled, a belt tightened on his chest so the next breath would be shallower. Then there was a feeling as though weights were being piled on his chest. “Sherri.” He had to take two breaths before he could say it again, so he touched her foot with his and said it louder. “Sherri!”

  “What?” She lifted her head and brought her face closer.

  “Something’s wrong. It’s in my chest. I’ve got to go to a hospital.”

  She got up quickly. She found his clothes and tossed them on the bed beside him. “All right. I’m going to drive you to Valley Presbyterian. It’s the closest, and it’s big enough to have a lot of doctors on duty.” She drew back the covers and crawled onto the bed beside him. “I’ll help you put on your clothes. If something hurts, just tell me.”

  “It’s like a tightness. Hard to breathe.”

  She dressed him efficiently, and then threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. They walked out into the living room. As he passed the couch where they had been sitting, everything looked different. The clear sides of the half-empty bottle of Armagnac had a film that looked sticky and nauseating. The uniform he had taken off Sherri was still lying crumpled on the floor. She snatched up her purse, led him to the top of the exterior staircase, and said, “Wait here.”

  He gripped the railing and stood still, watching her lock the door, then run down the stairs to pull her Volvo out of the garage, then run back up to him. “Feel any different?”

  “No.” But he did. Besides the tightness in his chest, or maybe because the tightness had gone on for a time and made his muscles tense, it hurt. And time was part of the discomfort. Everything seemed to take an eternity. He let her help him down the stairs and into the passenger seat of her Volvo. She ran around the car and drove.

  She drove with care all the way to the emergency room of Valley Presbyterian Hospital. He sat in tense immobility on the end chair of four that were connected, while she talked to the receptionist, then the triage nurse, and then some kind of clerk who handled insurance matters. As soon as she had her back turned, people came and sat down beside him on the row of chairs. Every one of them sat by simply releasing the tension in their knees and letting their buttocks drop a foot or so onto the chair. Each time it happened, Kapak would be jolted suddenly, his muscles would contract, and the pain would increase.

  Finally, to nobody in particular, he announced loudly, “I’m having a fucking heart attack.” All conversation in the room stopped while everyone looked at him. It was still a wait before the nurse called him into an examining room off the hallway, let him lie on a gurney, took his vital signs, gave him two aspirin, and disappeared. By then he had lost his sense of time. Sometime later another nurse took blood for a test, and he fell asleep. A young woman doctor in a long white lab coat appeared after that and spoke to him.

  “Well, Claudiu, how do you feel now?”

  “Like a crap sandwich.”

  She hesitated. “Crab?”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t seem to hurt as much, but I feel this weird pressure on my chest. Did I have a heart attack?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “We looked at the test, and it’s inconclusive. There’s an enzyme we test for. If you haven’t had a heart attack, there’s no enzyme in your blood. If you did, there is. You had a tiny amount, so we can’t really be sure. A cramp in the esophagus feels exactly like a heart attack. If you had one it was small. It was like a warning.”

  “A warning?”

  “Your age is a risk factor for heart disease. So is your weight, and the fact that you get no exercise, and probably the cholesterol, fat, and sodium in your diet.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “I’m releasing you and recommending that you see your family doctor tomorrow. He may order more tests and help you work out a plan for a healthier lifestyle.”

  Sherri drove him back to her house and helped him go back to bed. He fell asleep immediately. He woke up af
ter two hours and saw her lying beside him. He touched her bleached hair, her sleep-closed eyelids and soft cheek, her smooth shoulder and thin waist and the swell of her hip. He had so much to regret.

  18

  IT WAS AFTER 2:00 A.M. Jeff and Carrie sat in her white car down the street from Siren and watched the building from a distance. A dozen people walked out the side door in a small gaggle, talking to each other, and stepped onto the darkened parking lot. A couple of them waved, and all of them got into cars. In the headlights from one of the cars, Jeff picked out Lila from the corn-silk blond hair and her tall, thin silhouette. She got into the little red Honda and started it. Jeff watched her as she drove off the lot and disappeared down the road.

  “I don’t see any lights on,” Carrie said.

  “There aren’t any windows. It’s a strip club.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I suppose they don’t want to give it away for free.”

  “They’re closed for the night, so the neon light on the roof is off, and the floodlights for the parking lot.”

  “How did you think of this place?”

  “It’s the club where the money came from last night. Those three guys who were outside the bank last night work for Manco Kapak, and the money was his profit. They were depositing it for him.”

  “I could see what they were doing with it. But don’t we have all their money now?”

  “No. That was just last night’s take—l ast night’s money. We want tonight’s money.” He looked at her closely. “Unless we don’t. You were the one who said you wanted to do a robbery tonight.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to rob a strip joint.”

  “Fine. Let’s go home.”

  “Not so fast. I’m thinking. Have you cased this place—gone inside so you know your way around in the dark?”

  “I have. I know the layout fairly well.”

  “You’re so pathetic. Coming out here and sitting in a dark bar with a couple hundred of your fellow losers to see one girl dance naked. Couldn’t any of you get a date?”

  “In the first place, it isn’t one girl, it’s like four or five at a time. Over an evening, it’s a lot of them.”

  “Oh. Only fifty to one, then. No wonder you’re an expert.”

  “I was checking the place out so I could rob it.”

  “Were all those tits and asses better than mine?”

  “The ones I saw weren’t. But I may have missed some, because I was looking to see where the doors are and the windows aren’t, and so on. So far, you’re the best-looking woman I’ve seen.”

  “I wish it were lighter in here so I could see your face.”

  “I’m not lying to you. It’s true.”

  “What’s your plan for this place?”

  “It’s almost the time when they show up at the bank every night. We can’t go back to the bank. They’ll be expecting us. They’ll have armed guys hiding all over the neighborhood waiting. So I’m thinking we might be able to stop the bagman before he gets there—maybe force him off the road and rob him. He’s probably going to be alone tonight, because they’ll want everybody else out of sight.”

  She smiled. “That’s such a good idea, baby. I love it that you’re not as stupid as I thought. Let’s do it.”

  “Okay. The regular employees are gone. We can just wait until the bagman goes out to his car and heads for the bank.”

  They sat quietly, now and then shifting in their seats to get a better view of the Siren parking lot. Jeff was glad that all the waitresses’ cars were gone. The idea of meeting Lila in the middle of a robbery seemed to be the biggest worry, and it was gone. After a time Carrie said, “It’s been an hour, and nobody’s come out that door. What do you suppose is going on?”

  “Nothing that I can see.”

  “So why isn’t it? Did they take the money to the bank already?”

  “I doubt it. We were here at, like, eight minutes after two. They couldn’t have counted all the money and bagged it and filled out deposit slips in eight minutes. Could they?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the bandito.”

  “Exactly. I can tell you this is not normal.”

  “Maybe they’re sick of getting robbed, so they’re doing things differently.”

  “That’s got to be it,” he said. “You have a talent for this.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. Maybe what they’re doing is having an armored car come and pick it up, the way supermarkets do. But no armored car came after closing, so the pickup must be tomorrow morning.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “I’ve got to think. I can’t see waiting and trying to shoot it out with an armored car crew.”

  “Nothing to argue with there.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I think I’ve got it. They’ve always deposited the money at closing time. They didn’t deposit the money tonight, and the armored car didn’t come, so it must be coming in the morning. I’m sure of that much. Meanwhile, there will be somebody in there watching the money. Does that sound right?”

  “Yes. It does. It would explain why there are two cars still parked by the building.”

  He craned his neck to see the cars, then nodded. “It probably takes two guys to watch money, because they’re mostly watching each other. It has to be the dullest thing there is to do.”

  “Sounds true.”

  “Those doors are going to be locked and probably deadbolted, so we aren’t going to get through them. The two guys have to come out and let us in.”

  “Okay.” She waited.

  “We have two choices, I think. One is to go to the side of the building, find the phone junction box, and cut it. That will get rid of the alarm. Then we find the main circuit-breaker panel and flip the switch to kill the power. One of them will come outside to see what’s wrong. I hold my gun on him and tape him up with duct tape. When he doesn’t come back inside or anything, the other one will come at least as far as the door. He’ll call out to his friend—’Where are you? What’s going on?’ At that moment you put your gun to his head. We tape him up too.”

  “Then what?”

  “If there’s a safe, we make them open it. If they can’t, we put tape over their eyes and make them carry the safe to our car. It won’t be a big safe, or they could just leave the money in it and go home.”

  “What if they’re asleep? If they’re asleep, they won’t even know the power and the phone are turned off”’

  “Well, that’s true, but these are guys who work for a nightclub company. They have to be used to staying up late. If they don’t come out after ten or fifteen minutes, we can knock on the door and pretend to be cops who saw their cars and want to know who’s in there at this hour.”

  Carrie sat absolutely still for a few seconds, then said, “All right. I’m in. Let’s get at it. Should I park at the back of the place, behind the Dumpster?”

  “Yes. That way when they look out they won’t see it.”

  She drove her car up the street, turned into the parking lot, turned off her headlights, and circled the building from a distance. She saw the spot she wanted and coasted up to it, then got out.

  Carrie took her big .45 pistol out of her purse, pulled back the slide to bring a round into the chamber, and put the purse back into the car under the seat. She hid the gun in the back of her pants against her spine and covered it with her sweater.

  She moved to the brick wall and walked along it to the door. She stood with her back to the wall at the hinge side and nodded to Jeff.

  He moved off around the building to find the phone junction box and the circuit-breaker panel.

  A man’s voice, disembodied and electronic, seemed to come from the sky above her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. But we’re closed for the night.”

  “What?”

  “I said we’re closed now. The bar can’t serve anybody after two.”

  She located the speaker, a little square gray metal box with holes on the front in a circular pattern. But wh
at was above it worried her much more. It was a video camera mounted under the eaves of the building. Its single shiny black lens was staring right at her.

  She pushed off to move out from the wall, wavering a bit as though she had been standing with her back to the bricks to steady herself, and put on a drunk voice. “I don’t want a drink, thankyou-verymuch. I had some drinks already, and I’ve got all I want in the car. I’m not here for that.”

  “Then what are you here for, miss?”

  “I’m here to audition.”

  “Audition for what?”

  “A job. Isn’t this a strip place?” She began to dance to unheard music.

  “That’s what you want—to audition for a job as a dancer?”

  She shouted, both to let Jeff know that she was talking to someone, and to keep the man’s attention on her monitor rather than spotting Jeff on another one. “Not dancing, silly! I don’t want to dance. I want to strip!”

  “Look, miss?”

  “What?”

  “The manager already went home, and the talent coordinator is only in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from noon to eight. We don’t do auditions in the middle of the night. Please go home, sober up, and give the club a call around noon tomorrow. The manager and the talent coordinator will make an appointment for you. Okay?”

  “Fuck, no! I’m not going to leave work to drive all the way over here to take my clothes off at noon. I’m not going to be in the mood then. I’m in the mood now.” She did a wriggling, suggestive dance, lifted the front of her sweater, and undulated her hips, careful not to turn her body to let the gun at the back of her waistband show.

  The man in the speaker chuckled. “Please. I can’t deny you’re hot. I’m sure you can get a job here any time you want. But hiring people—that’s not my job. On nights like tonight, I sometimes wish it was. But it isn’t.”

  “But you can help me get a job. I’ll show you my act, and you tell me honestly what you think, so I can fix it.”

  “I can tell you without seeing the best parts of your act that you’re qualified. Isn’t she qualified?” There was some muffled speech. “My friend says you’re more than qualified.”