Nightlife Read online

  Justin looked at Erik, found a more knowing grin than his own. As if it had gotten the joke minutes before.

  “Boudoir photography,” Erik said, somewhat sheepishly.

  “Boudoir. Meaning?”

  “Meaning I shoot tasteful cheesecake and make good money doing it.” Erik shrugged, easygoing.

  Justin pulled a hangered black lace thing from the rack, held it before his own torso. They both shook their heads, and he put it back.

  “It’s the latest thing. One of them, anyway.” Erik motioned him to follow, led him past a jumble of studio gear. Lights, tripods, backdrops, ornate brass-rail bed with frilly coverlet. They left it behind for a side cubbyhole crammed with a desk and file cabinet. Erik flipped on the light. “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like the office.”

  “So what does this involve, if I may be so bold?”

  Erik spoke while digging through a file drawer. “In a nutshell, women come in to have erotic pictures taken of themselves. No hard-core nudes, no couples, no guys, transvestites or otherwise. Very classy. The management is pretty strict on that.” He plucked out a folder with a satisfied nod. “Yah. Here we go.”

  He handed a few proof sheets to Justin, who scanned the miniature images with wide eyes and a longing heart. Three different women, looked to be from mid-twenties to late thirties. One per proof sheet. Obviously, they knew how to pose and Erik knew how to capture the moment.

  “We’re supposed to destroy the proofs after they place their orders.” Erik made doubly sure they were alone. “But sometimes I fudge and tuck them away. The really good ones. An artiste’s life has so few rewards, you know.”

  Justin handed them back, and away they went. “I hate you. I bet you make out like Don Juan in this job.”

  “Huh. Dream on. There was only once that the client-photographer relationship got a little heated.” Erik sighed, settled in his desk chair. “I’d say at least ninety-nine percent of the women who come in are having them shot for someone else. They give them to husbands, boyfriends. So it’s a lost cause. Or they’re giving them to a girlfriend, in which case it’s really a lost cause. You kind of have to be a real philosopher to not go crazy in this job.”

  Justin slid down to the floor, back to the wall. The vodka buzz was waning. Have to remedy that soon. Hung over by early afternoon was not the most ideal proposition.

  “So why the switch from shooting news? I thought you loved that job.”

  “I did.” Erik’s eyes grew cloudy. He laced his fingers while gazing at the ceiling for inspiration. “But with some of the stuff! was shooting — man, it really takes a certain mindset to not get to you. The drug wars, especially. I mean, this isn’t Miami, but we’re not immune here by any means. I was shooting pictures of these people — men, women, kids, everybody gets caught in the crossfire sooner or later — and I was seeing some really hideous stuff. Shootings, knifings, beatings. Murder by automobile. One guy they found … one of his arms wasn’t anything but bone from the elbow down. Coroner said somebody had stuck his arm in with a bunch of piranha, if you can believe that. So I’m seeing all this through my viewfinder, and I find that it’s not making much of a dent in my head anymore.”

  Justin nodded. “But you’re supposed to bring a certain amount of objectivity with you.”

  “Objectivity is one thing. Not giving a damn anymore is another. I was burning out big-time. And I just didn’t want to end up one of these grizzled old guys trading their worst murder stories over coffee and doughnuts every morning.” Erik pulled up from his slump, rested his elbows on his knees. Smiled and upturned his palms. “So now … all this is mine.”

  “Lord of the thighs.”

  Erik wrinkled his nose. “Crass.” He dug through the center desk drawer. He pulled out another sheet of photographic paper. Withheld the image for a moment. “I’ve got all kinds of stuff lined up for us to do the next few days, get you out and introduced to a few people.”

  Justin grinned. “So you’re not stuck with me the whole time, right?”

  “All for your own good, dear boy. We’ve got to get you circulating among single women again. You’re probably out of practice.” He handed the picture over. “Here’s someone you’ll be meeting tomorrow night. And don’t drool on the picture.”

  This was no proof sheet, best served by a magnifying glass, but a full eight-by-ten glossy. The woman was in her mid- or late twenties. It wasn’t a standard lace teddy shot and was therefore all the more provocative. Faded ancient jeans, unsnapped and halfway unzipped. Blue denim shirt, completely unbuttoned as well, with only the inner swell of each breast showing. Bare feet, luxurious dark hair bunched messily around her shoulders. Her face looked vaguely exotic, as if she carried within a few drops of Asian blood.

  Yes, it could be love.

  “That’s April. April Kingston. She used to work at the paper too. In advertising. See, you already have something in common. I took that shot of her, oh, seven, eight months ago.

  Justin pulled his eyes away, an effort. He looked at Erik with a sudden plummeting of his heart. “This is too good to be true. So what’s the catch, what is she? Married, engaged, or a lesbian?”

  A wide smile from Erik. “None of the above. Formerly engaged, if you must know. It broke off around Christmas. I don’t know why, she never talked much about it. Best thing that could’ve happened, though. Her fiancé’s name was Brad, but I used to call him Dickless. That should clue you in. He was about as exciting as a bowl of oat bran.”

  Justin perused the photo again. “He was probably too safe for her. A womanchild like this needs the kind of thrills that my roller-coaster life can provide.”

  “That’s the spirit. Turn that checkered past to an advantage.” Erik wiggled his fingers, and Justin reluctantly parted with the print. Back it went into the drawer. “Come on. Let’s go start on those brain cells and play catch-up on the past few months.”

  They rose to leave, Erik killing the light. Justin threw one last longing glance at the desk drawer:

  “Can’t we bring her along?”

  “You’re smitten already, aren’t you? I recognize that look. She stays put. Your first day in town, I get all your attention. I’m selfish that way.”

  They were halfway across the boudoir set before Erik spoke again.

  “Besides, I’ve got another print like that at home.”

  Erik Webber lived in a section of Tampa called Davis Island. The “island” label made it sound more exotic than it really was. It was simply a bulbous little annex that barely missed extending to the southern edge of the city proper. You hardly knew you were forsaking the mainland when the highway bridged over a channel leading into the bay. Near the edge of the island, round timbers jutted a few feet above the water, and brown pelicans often perched there, a respite from scooping up fish that were probably contaminated by now anyway.

  They made the island their final stop, ducking into the last of three bars on Erik’s agenda. Knocked back a few more beers, played a few video games, and retired to Erik’s Davis Boulevard apartment to whittle on his refrigerator stock and tune in to the VCR. Evening was well underway by now.

  They watched a mutual favorite, Barfly. Generally heralded by critics but little known. See Mickey Rourke swagger about, full-time derelict and part-time literary genius. See Faye Dunaway match him drink for drink, understandably proud of her legs. See them revel in lowlife, for here is their life’s true niche, and they know it.

  “Why is it every time I watch this, I feel like I’m just that much closer to living it?” Justin asked. The credits were rolling beneath sleazy jazz organ by Booker T.

  Erik shrugged. Legs dangling over one arm of the apartment’s love seat, he aimed the VCR remote and zapped it into rewind mode. MTV came on as the video image disappeared.

  Justin looked toward the row of windows. The apartment was third-floor, a corner unit. The first two windows were nearly filled with an extreme close-up of the top of a palm tree. Wonderful
view. Beyond lay the buildings of Davis Boulevard, a low skyline of apartments and commercial property. Darkening clouds beyond them.

  He had always found dusk the most supremely dismal time of day. Never sure why, only knowing that the advent of night felt like a painful transition. The sun bleeding into the horizon. Nature’s subtle reminder that death is inevitable, that the law of the jungle prevails even on asphalt.

  He knew what was coming next. The moment was ripe for it.

  “Story time now, I think,” Erik said. He remoted the TV volume to a whisper. “Okay?”

  “I suppose there’s no way around it.”

  Erik nodded. “I think I’ve showed enormous patience today. But hey, I do deserve a little more explanation about what went down in St. Louis. I get a phone call and my friend’s telling me that the entire U.S. system of justice is coming down on his head, I tend to wonder why.”

  Justin pulled thoughtfully at his beer bottle. How to begin, how to begin. Erik knew the setup.

  College graduate Justin Gray, armed with his degree, a B.S. in advertising — never was there a more appropriately named degree. Returns home from the University of Illinois to St. Louis, lands an entry-level position with the agency Hamilton, Darren, and Stevens, annual billings in excess of twenty-four million. The creative department is good, allows business world success without necessarily becoming a corporate clone. Wide-eyed Justin hopes he’ll become the wunderkind of the midwestern advertising scene, perhaps use St. Louis, then Chicago, as stepping-stones to New York. He does okay, nothing spectacular. Respectable. Solid. He sows his wild oats, then marries well, a blond-haired, blue-eyed fashion merchandiser named Paula. The archetypical upwardly mobile couple. This, Erik knew.

  “Well,” said Justin, “you know we’ve always been into better living through chemistry.”

  “Sure.” Even now, Erik had a couple of joints rolling around on the coffee table. He hadn’t offered any nasal powder, so Justin assumed there was none around.

  “So. Couple years ago, I started dealing. I mean, it was a nice secondary income. I wanted things, Paula wanted things. This was just a quicker way to do it. I kept it strictly small time, though. Friends, acquaintances, people at the office … that sort of thing. I figure don’t get greedy, keep it downscale, I won’t get caught. No hassles with anybody, no rough stuff. A kinder, gentler drug dealer.”

  Erik had a hearty chuckle at that.

  “And that’s the way it was, too. Paula felt a little weird about it. It wasn’t exactly approval, but it wasn’t disapproval, either. It was like, ‘This makes me nervous, but I sure do like these new toys we have to play with.’ A boat, couple new cars.

  “Then in November we went to this party, and a guy turns some friend of his on to me that wants to score some heroin. So I made a few calls, made a couple stops, and came back with it. No problem, right?

  “Wrong.” Justin felt the tears creep up to the backs of his eyes. He had reached the point where the threshold of memory and the threshold of pain were one and the same. “Some guy, some idiot, with an IQ about like his shoe size … he’d laced the junk with strychnine. Just to see what would happen, he said later. So I got to watch this eighteen-year-old nail up right in front of me and go into convulsions and die. All because I thought we had to have a better stereo system.”

  He gauged Erik for reactions, for the loathing he had become accustomed to feeling directed his way from endless sources. Thankfully, it wasn’t there.

  “So I got pinched that night. No way around that. A nice grueling four-hour interrogation. But. I was a little fish. They wanted big fish, and I was the bait. Cut a deal, and I could walk. So I turned state’s evidence and led them to some guys they really had a hard-on for. It was either that or manslaughter charges, on top of the dealing and possession and all that. So I rolled over and squealed like a pig from Deliverance.”

  They both smiled. Sometimes it seemed their lives were one constant string of cinematic references.

  “Everything else — job, home life, everything — it went down like a row of dominos. Pretty soon I didn’t need a lawyer just for the bust, I needed him for divorce proceedings too.” Justin ran his hands through his hair, left it sticking up from his head. Shock therapy. “I’ve got to get my proverbial shit together, Erik. The trials, the testimony, it was all over three days ago. My first stop after I left the courthouse was the travel agency.”

  Erik abandoned the love seat and wandered over to the couch. Sank in beside him, looped a brotherly arm around his shoulders.

  “Tell you what. Stay here as long as you need, to get your head back together. When it feels right, we’ll find you a new job. There’s loads, this place is booming. And then I’ll fly back up with you, and we can both load up your stuff and road-trip it down here. Sound good?”

  Justin shook his head. “No need for that, man.”

  “I insist. It’s the least I can do.”

  “When I say there’s no need, there’s no need.” He hitched his thumb toward the corner, where the suitcases sat patiently. Still full. “That’s it. That’s my sum total of worldly possessions.”

  It could have been the evening’s low point. The pit of despair. But for some reason, the thought of the quintessential yuppie reduced to traveling around like a gypsy caravan of one struck Justin as funny. He surrendered to laughter, and Erik quickly followed. It was like spitting into the eye of Fate. Gallows humor.

  And Justin hoped, prayed, that he would be smart enough to keep lightning from striking twice in the same place.

  Chapter 3

  PARTY ANIMALS

  The name of the club was Apocalips, and the name said it all. Too many lights, too much glitz, too many speakers with too much wattage. An exercise in sensual overkill.

  Justin loved it.

  Given the turn of events in St. Louis, it had been a long time since he had tasted any sort of nightlife. He’d not realized how much he missed it, like someone whose hunger doesn’t surface until the first crucial bite of food.

  True to his word, Erik had managed a sizable turnout of friends to welcome Justin to Tampa. Most of them didn’t seem to have needed much coaxing. There were nine or ten in all. Hard to keep track, though, with everybody on the move. Drinks, dancing, some of them taking trips to the johns to powder their noses from the inside.

  They’d pulled a few tables together inside a chrome corral elevated above the dance floor, creating a home base of sorts. A core group of four or five stayed at the tables at any one time.

  Names, faces — too many to pair together. He’d have Erik quiz him tomorrow until he had them down. A few stuck in mind, though. Angel, a blond tigress on the dance floor. She showed him her signature, a halo above the A and a devil’s tail tipping the cursive l. Trent, perpetually wired and hyper and suffering from a self-induced runny nose, rarely still for three seconds at a time.

  And then there was April, at once cool and animated, drinking margaritas at a pace of two per hour. She seemed much less the exotic goddess she’d appeared in the photo, and for this Justin was grateful. Exotic goddesses lean toward the unapproachable.

  “Ask her to dance, you weenie.” Erik had to hover close to his ear to be heard over the music. “We’ve been here nearly three hours. You’re disappointing me.”

  Justin, sucking from a Killian’s Red bottle, nodded. “I’ll get around to it.”

  “Not later. Now.”

  Justin set his bottle on the mauve table. “Answer a question first.”

  “Sure.”

  Justin glanced sidelong at April. Her attention was elsewhere. Good. He hated discussing someone when he thought they knew it.

  “She hardly seems like someone you wouldn’t go for. Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between the two of you?”

  Erik bit a knuckle, frowning. “You perceptive little cuss, you. Well, yeah, sort of. For a couple weeks after she broke up with Dickless. But it just didn’t feel right. We were friends first. By the t
ime we tried lovers, we thought it made more sense not to risk killing the friendship.” Erik played priest, made the sign of the cross. “You have my blessings, my son. Now move your ass.”

  So much for pep talks. April sat on the other side of the tables, three chairs down. Shouting across the distance seemed less than suave, so he stood. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

  The floor thumped with basslines, swirling lights glinted off chrome and glass. Across the packed dance floor stood a wall of video monitors, thirty in all, each playing the same image. Like a fragmented worldview through multifaceted insect eyes in B-grade movies. INXS blared from the speakers; good dance music.

  Distance crossed. Nerves steeled. Justin smiled down at her.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  She smiled back, nose crinkling a bit. “No thanks.”

  It shotgunned the smile right off his face. His eyes darted to Erik, who was talking with Angel. This was Erik’s fault. He’s a dead man, I will kill him. He started to grope for a graceful way out, knowing such dignity was hopeless.

  “I’ve watched you out on the floor tonight,” April said. She seemed friendly enough — what gave? “You don’t really like to dance. Do you?”

  “Sure I do. I wouldn’t have asked if…”

  She grinned, hazel eyes sparkling. She was enjoying this torture! After Erik was dead, perhaps he’d turn on her.

  “Don’t lie,” she gleefully warned. “Liars go to Hell.”

  He let his arms hang limp, palms out in surrender. Here stands a complete and utter fool. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t, really.”

  “Neither do I.”

  He was starting to catch on to her game. Perhaps this could be salvaged after all. “So would you like,” he ventured, “to sit one out with me?”

  “I’d love to.” April motioned to the empty seat at her right, and he took it before they could slip back into retrograde progress. The conversation was anyone’s ball game. He punted.

  “So why the aversion to dancing?” he asked. “You look like you’d be good at it.”