Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (37 page)

Up to that moment the women had been lagging behind. Now, with the prospect of going back to the ship and getting out of the drizzling rain, they set off at a much faster pace. Lars looked after them, shaking his head.

“Women,” he muttered in disgust. “Probably want to stop off and do some shopping.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Yust more yunk to carry home,” he said.

We went down to the dock then, just Lars and I. It had been years since he had been in Sitka. Nevertheless, he recognized many of the boats moored there, calling out their names and giving me a rundown of their various former skippers and crews. Listening to him talk, I had a sense of living history. Here was someone who knew firsthand the history of Alaska's fishing fleet for over half of the twentieth century. When Lars Jenssen died, much of that history would die with him.

“You should write all this down,” I told him. “Or at least record it on tape.”

“Naw,” he said. “Nobody'd be interested in hearing what I have to say.”

We had walked as far as the last set of docks. It was when we turned around to come back that I saw it. Painted on a shed far from where even the most daring tourists would venture was a billboard featuring a scrawny knight seated on an equally scrawny horse. The picture was a reasonably good plagiarism of the one by Picasso.
QUIXOTE CLUB
, the sign said. Below the club name was a toll-free number, and below that were the words, “Call for free shuttle service.”

“What's that?” I asked.

Lars shrugged. “The Quicksaudy Club,” he returned. Lars' mangled pronunciation, an authentically Ballardese version of Quixote, was a long way from Naomi Pepper's perfectly enunciated Spanish
kee-hoy-tay
from earlier that morning.

“But what is it?”

“Whaddya t'ink?” Lars returned. “It's full of women strippers. You got no business going there.”

“You know about it then?” I asked. “You've been there?”

“Everybody in the fleet's been there,” he said defensively.

“What do you know about it?”

Lars sighed. “It's a long story,” he said. “There used to be this place out of town a couple of miles. It was called the Kiksadi Club named after one of the Tlingit clans. In the old days when they used to allow after-hours drinking outside the city limits, it was a real booming place. Every summer they used to import lady strippers. They came up and worked the place for a month or two at a time. One of the girls told me once that she made enough money dancing in Alaska each summer that she could pay her tuition and go to school the next year without having to work a part-time job. Sort of like fishing,” Lars added. “Used to be real good pay for what was seasonal work.”

“I take it you knew some of these girls personally?” I asked. By then we had left the dock area and were walking back to the ship—strolling, really, rather than walking.

“I was drinking then,” Lars said. “Anyways, one of the girls who came up one year got friendly with the guy who was the manager of the Kiksadi Club. Real friendly. So friendly, in fact, that she thought he was going to divorce his wife and marry her, but he didn't. He dumped her instead. So she got herself some financial backers, went down the road half a mile or so, and opened her own place—the one you saw on the sign back there, the Quicksaudy Club. It's spelled different, but it sounds a lot like the other one. It was easy to get them confused, and I think she counted on that. It worked in her favor.”

It was only easy to confuse the two if you were a Norwegian fisherman from Ballard who was half lit most of the time. But Lars Jenssen had been sober for years. From the newness of the sign, it looked as though the Quixote Club, no matter how you pronounced it, was still a going concern.

“Ya, sure,” Lars said after a thoughtful silence. “That Dulcie always was one smart cookie.”

I stopped short. “Who?”

“Dulcie—the woman who runs the Quicksaudy. She was a real looker back then, but she also had something upstairs.”

“Dulcie?” I asked. “That's her name?”

“Not her whole name,” Lars said. “That's just what the guys in the fleet called her. I can't remember her real name.”

“Dulcinea maybe?” I asked.

Lars looked at me and frowned. “You know, that may be it. How did you know that?”

So Dulcinea wasn't going to contact me; I was supposed to contact her. Desperately, I looked around, searching for a cab. Naturally I didn't see one anywhere. “How do we get there?” I asked. “How long will it take? Can we walk?”

“You want to go to the Quicksaudy Club?” Lars demanded suspiciously. “How come? Looks to me like you've got a perfectly good woman waiting for you back on the ship. Matter of fact, I've got one, too. There's no need . . . And hell, no, you can't walk. It's a good five miles out of town.”

“Where's the nearest pay phone then? I'll call a cab.”

“There's one back at the dock, but the shuttle's cheaper. It's free.”

I turned and headed back in that direction, with Lars dogging my heels and protesting my every step. At the docks, I went far enough to be able to see the club's sign and make a note of how to contact the shuttle service. I've never dialed one of those telephone sex lines, but the voice that answered the shuttle number was sexy enough to be worthy of a 1-900 designation.

“Welcome to Quixote Club, where your pleasure is our only business,” she said breathlessly while a pair of castanets clattered evocatively in the background. “If you are in need of our shuttle service, please press one now. Your call will be transferred to an operator for assistance.”

I turned back to Lars. “What is this, a whorehouse?”

He glowered at me. “Not as far as I know,” he said.

When the dispatcher came on the phone, her voice was pleasant enough if not quite as sultry. “What's your location?”

“I'm down by the docks,” I said. “The docks with the fishing boats.”

“Very good. Our next shuttle will reach your location in approximately ten minutes,” she said. “Our next show starts on the hour. How many people will be in your party?”

“One,” I said.

“Two,” Lars growled behind me. “There'll be two.”

“No way,” I said to him.

He shook his head. “Two,” he insisted. “Either I go, too, or you don't.”

I gave up. “Two,” I grumbled into the phone.

“Very well, sir,” the operator said. “You'll have no trouble recognizing our vehicles. They're all painted pink. You'll need to come up to the road and wait there. The shuttle will stop by and pick you up. And we'll need your name, sir, so the driver can verify that she's picked up the correct passenger.”

“Beau,” I barked back at her. “The name's Beau.”

“Very well, Mr. Bow. Someone will be right there.”

I put down the phone. Lars was standing behind me, shaking his head. “I t'ink this is a bad idea,” he said. “If Naomi and Beverly hear about this, there'll be hell to pay. You can count on that.”

“So it is a whorehouse then?”

“It may have started out that way,” Lars admitted. “Yust at first. But I mostly went there to watch the girls and to drink single-malt Scotch. Dulcie always made it a point to have one of the best bars going. I'll bet she still does.”

“Right,” I said. “I'm sure she does. Now go on back to the ship, Lars. I'm a big boy. I don't need you along to hold my hand.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “If you went there by yourself and got into some kind of scrape, Beverly would never forgive me.” And that was the end of that.

The shuttle arrived in less than ten minutes. Most of that time Lars and I stood side by side without saying a word. When the shuttle showed up, it was a sturdy Suburban painted that distinctive shade of pale pink favored by successful Mary Kay ladies the world over. Stenciled in black on both front doors was the same silhouette image we had seen on the sign back at the docks—Don Quixote on his knobby-kneed horse.

The driver rolled down her window. “Mr. Bow?” she asked.

“Right,” I said without bothering to correct her. Lars and I clambered in.

The driver was a young woman in her early twenties. She was dressed in what looked like high-class waitress gear—a tuxedo shirt, black bow tie, and black slacks. Like the girls in the cruise-ship gift shop, she reminded me of my daughter.

“Rosinante,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Rosinante,” she repeated. “That's the name of Don Quixote's horse. People always want to know the horse's name. I've started telling people that first thing, just to get it out of the way.”

Carefully she threaded her way through narrow streets clogged with cruise passengers determined to do their last bit of Alaska-based shopping. I peered through the crowd looking for familiar faces. Riding in the back of the pink Suburban, I wasn't eager to be recognized. It made me grateful for the dark-tinted glass in all the back windows.

“Look's like the weather's clearing up some,” our driver announced. “I wouldn't be surprised if it turned sunny late in the day.”

That's right,
I thought grimly.
Talk about the weather
.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Seattle,” she said. “Lynnwood, actually. I have one more quarter to go at the U Dub before I get my degree in counseling. The season's winding down here. I'm headed home in a few weeks.”

A hooker with a degree in counseling
, I thought.
That's rich
.

“How long have you worked here?”

“This is my last year,” she said.

“The girls can only work four years,” Lars put in. “That's as long as Dulcie will let them stay. It's like an athletic scholarship. You get four years of eligibility.”

The driver glanced at Lars in the mirror. “I haven't seen you before, but I'll bet you're one of Dulcie's old-timers, aren't you!”

“Ya.” Lars nodded. “Ya, sure.”

Just as Lars had said, Dulcie sounded like quite a businesswoman. She cycled her girls through her system in four-year shifts.
That way she get's 'em when they're young and healthy, and sends them on their way before they get too old
.

We were out of town now—I wasn't sure in which direction—and driving through a hazy suburban landscape interspersed with patches of forest. We might have been in one of Seattle's eastern suburbs—North Bend or Snoqualmie. We passed a sign on the right-hand side of the road that said
ROOKIES
. A gravel driveway wound up a rise and gave way to an uneven gravel-and-mud parking lot dotted with pickup trucks and SUVs. The building situated in the middle of the lot looked like any other nondescript commercial building—one that could just as easily be either a bar or a warehouse.

“There used to be a lot more trees around here,” Lars said. “And why does that sign say ‘Rookies'? What happened to the Kiksadi?”

“Changed hands,” our driver informed us helpfully. “The new owners decided not to try to compete with Dulcie, so they turned it into a sports bar. They have male strippers in occasionally, but only on special occasions. The girls are all down the road—with Dulcie.”

“That's it!” Lars exclaimed with a grin. “She told the guy that she was gonna get even and put him out of business. Looks like she did yust that.”

Half a mile farther down the road we came to a second clearing. Even in the middle of the day, there must have been thirty cars parked in the smoothly paved lot, not counting the five matching pink Suburbans lined up in reserved spots near the front door. The Quixote Club wasn't just a single building, either. Behind the main building—a two-story rambling affair that showed clear signs of regular painting and maintenance—stood a series of small, sturdily built cabins. I had a pretty good idea about what those were used for but made no comment. In the contest between the old Kiksadi Club and the Quixote Club, no matter how you pronounced the name, there could be no question that the Quixote was the hands-down winner.

Our driver pulled up to the door. “You buy your tickets from the booth just inside,” she directed. “The show starts in about ten minutes. When it's over, come outside and we'll shuttle you back downtown. It'll take a few minutes to change. When things slow down like this, we have to double as dancers and drivers both.”

Inside the door was a vestibule complete with a glass-enclosed ticket booth. Beyond that was another room that reeked of cigarette smoke and was filled with the talk and laughter of guys having a good time. The ticket booth was staffed by a woman who was almost as wide as the booth itself. “May I help you?” she asked.

As soon as the woman opened her mouth, I recognized the sultry voice from the answering machine. She may have once been beautiful. It was difficult to see her former beauty wrapped in the fleshy, sagging-jowled body imprisoned behind the glass, but the woman's voice alone was enough to bring Lars to attention.

He squared his shoulders, stepped up to the window, pulled out his billfold, and handed over a crisp hundred-dollar bill. For a change there was no grumbling about how much things cost. “Hi, there, Dulcie,” he said. “Two, please.”

The woman handed him two tickets and his change, then there was a momentary pause while she studied him. At last her eyes lit up with recognition. “Why, Lars Jenssen, you old devil! What on earth are you doing here? So you finally decided to come check up on me, did you? Why didn't you call ahead and let me know?”

I couldn't quibble with Dulcie's genuine pleasure at seeing Lars again. If he had come to what he called the Quicksaudy Club for just the dancing and drinking, as he claimed, then I was a monkey's uncle. But then again, anything that may have transpired between Lars and Dulcie was years in the past. It was no more my business than what was happening between Naomi Pepper and me was his.