Wanna Get Lucky? (10 page)

Outside the building, the hookers were again leaning against the wall. “That boy’s got a bite,” one of them hissed at me as I passed.

“You scared the locals,” I said to Dane as I nodded toward the hookers.

“I was in the Navy. Hookers, I can handle.”

I dropped my bag with XXX in big red lettering on the side in Paxton Dane’s lap as I got into the car.

He took a peek inside then shut the bag and looked at me with a thinly disguised leer. “You
are
a surprise.”

“Those aren’t for me.” I started the car, gunned the engine and piloted us out of the parking lot. “Those are for my mother.”

Y
our
mother
?” Paxton Dane shouted to be heard above the wind.

“Contrary to popular opinion, I was not hatched from an egg,” I said.

“Did you spring fully formed from The Big Boss’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus?”

“No, although I like that analogy. Unfortunately, I do indeed have a mother.” Driving a bit too fast, I darted in and out of traffic on the 15. I noticed Dane’s white-knuckled grip on the armrest, but I didn’t slow down.

“Miracles never cease,” Dane remarked. “But I wasn’t really commenting on whether you have a mother or not but on the fact that you buy porno movies for her. Most people I know spend half their lives hiding smut from their mothers, not buying it for them.”

“My mother is unique.” And a good thing, too—the world would never survive more than one Mona.

I slowed, but not much, took the off-ramp for the Blue Diamond highway, then hung a right, heading west out of town.

The Blue Diamond highway is another Las Vegas exaggeration. A four-lane with traffic signals every few hundred yards, at the edge of town it shrinks into a two-lane blacktop that bears little resemblance to a highway and has nothing to do with blue diamonds. Stretching across the Mojave Desert, it snakes through the Spring Mountains (another bit of wishful thinking) before dropping into the desert again.

We said nothing as we inched through traffic and around seemingly endless road construction. The heat of the beating sun radiated off every surface, smothering, suffocating, turning the convertible into an oven of stagnant, superheated air almost impossible to breathe. Thirst, a mere discomfort anywhere else, triggered a survival instinct impossible to ignore in the desert. I pulled the two bottles of water out of my bag, handing one of them to Dane. We both drank deeply.

Finally we reached the edge of town. The transition from city to abject desert startled me each time I ventured out of civilization. Without water, the desert quickly reclaimed all that man abandoned, and the land reverted to uncovered sand, dotted with patches of low grasses and prickly cacti. Everything about the desert was inhospitable, if not downright dangerous, including some of the flora and most of the fauna—a lesson I learned at an early age when I decided to run away from home.

Most of the traffic had filtered away when the highway narrowed, and I found myself faced with an open stretch of blacktop. A slight pressure on the accelerator and, like a horse ready to run, the car surged forward. The speed climbed. The dry desert air raced past, bringing tears to my eyes.

The fast car was my sin, Mother, my penance.

“You going to tell me where we’re going?”

I glanced at Dane. He still gripped the armrest, but his knuckles weren’t as white as before.

At first blush, I’d pegged him as a fast-car, fast-woman kind of guy. The look in his eye told me I was right about the fast-car part. “Pahrump. It’s a small town just across the county line. Mother is expecting us for lunch.”

“I hope she’s not going to make us watch videos.”

“First lunch, then a movie? You never know with Mother. She does like to shake things up.”

“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree then,” Dane said through clenched teeth as we reached the mountains and I threw the car into the curves.

Too soon we dropped down to the desert floor again and, thinking of the looming meeting with my mother, I eased up on the throttle.

“Tell me about this mother of yours.”

“She can’t be described. She has to be experienced.”

Dane released his grip on the handles, then, like a kid, stretched his arms up into the flow of air. “Okay, she likes porn, and she defies description. Does she work?”

“She’s owns a business called Mona’s Place.”

His head whipped around, his eyes big as saucers. “You’re shittin’ me.
The
Mona’s Place?”

“Guess you’ve heard of it.” I refused to ask him if he’d been there—I didn’t want to know.

“Heard of it, who hasn’t? It’s the best whorehouse in Nevada.” Incredulousness crept into his voice as the light dawned. “Your mother is
Mona
? I’ll be damned.”

“You and me both.” I eased off the accelerator as we approached the outskirts of Pahrump. “And, if you value your manhood, I wouldn’t refer to her place as a whorehouse.”

Dane made a rude noise. “What does she prefer? Bordello? Pleasure Palace? Fuck for a Fee? The Bang Barn?”

My fingers worked the paddle shifters dropping the car through the gears until I hit second, holding the twenty-five-mile-an-hour
speed limit. “You know, you’ve got a real bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.”

“Sorry, it’s a gift,” Dane said, not looking the least bit sorry.

“That’s not exactly what I would call it. She is my mother—remember that. And bordello will do.”

“While I extract my foot from my mouth, why don’t you tell me a bit about Mona?”

“She’s a businesswoman running a legitimate, legal business and she expects to be treated as such.”

“You make running a bordello sound like owning a Jiffy Lube.”

“It’s closer than you think. The bordellos pay licensing fees and purchase business permits. The girls all must be registered with the sheriff’s office, and they too buy business licenses. In fact, the survival of many of the rural counties in Nevada depends on revenue from the bordellos.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Dane squirming in his seat. An often uncomfortable topic, prostitution polarized everyone.

“Mona’s Place is the most successful house in Nevada, and she’s proud of that,” I said.

“If you believe the papers, the bordellos are all jails where the girls are trapped and forced to do things they don’t want to do.”

“I’ve never seen one like that, and Mother would rather walk stark naked down the Strip than have people thinking that’s the kind of place she runs. In fact, she believes she’s running a halfway house for hookers. She takes in girls off the streets, cleans them up, gives them a safe place to live and work. In addition, she makes them go to school, so those who want out can get out and not end up back on the streets.”

“They have a school for hookers?”

I shot him a warning look.

He held up his hands. “Sorry.”

“The girls who are in school work at night to pay for their room and board. Believe it or not, most of them earn their GEDs, then enroll in either a trade school or job program. Some have even made it through college.”

“A madam who helps her ladies get out of the trade—that’s an interesting business model.”

“She keeps the ones who want to stay, and she feels good about the ones who leave.”

“And it works?”

“More or less.” Lyda Sue had me feeling a little less confident about Mother’s exit strategy.

“A halfway house for hookers?” Dane shook his head. “Is everyone in this town one bead out of true?”

“Just a bunch of square pegs. Mother’s latest project is to become classified as a charity. Income taxes really cut into her bottom line.”

“I can’t tell if you’re feeding me a line or not.”

“Ask her yourself. She got this whole charity idea after reading a story about a guy who personally ‘donated’ his sperm to interested females. Apparently the guy felt his services were of a charitable nature—I guess he screwed only women who couldn’t get any anywhere else, I don’t know. Anyway, I have no idea how all of that turned out, but it got Mother started and once she gets the bit in her teeth, she can’t be stopped.”

Dane stared at me. “Do you ever feel like you have been transported to a parallel universe?”

“All the time.”

Pahrump had been a small town when I lived here. Now, fueled by the recent double-digit annual price escalation in Vegas, houses were sprouting like weeds on the outskirts of town and extending across the desert. Like a new Detroit, Vegas real estate had outpriced its workforce. Pahrump, and a few other outlying towns, gratefully absorbed the overflow. The town had certainly changed, with new schools, a championship golf course, brand-name fast-food joints—the streets had even been paved. The locals were all atwitter over the arrival of a Walmart Supercenter. A long time coming, civilization had found my hometown, and I’m not sure that was a good thing.

Despite all of the changes, Mona’s Place was still hard to miss. A rambling, three-story, bright purple Victorian, it sported hot pink
trim, a wraparound porch and a neon sign announcing the daily special. Today apparently was “two for one” day. I didn’t even want to know exactly what that referred to. I prayed Mother wouldn’t tell me and that Dane was smart enough not to ask.

As I pulled into the half-full parking lot, angled the Ferrari across three spaces and cut the engine, Mona burst through the bright yellow front door. Dressed in a tailored gray business suit that had “designer” written all over it, no blouse, a lacy black bra, and purple high heels—this season’s Ferragamos—she stopped at the edge of the porch and waved. Her long brown hair was tastefully pulled back, her makeup understated and impeccable. Huge square-cut diamonds twinkled at her earlobes and a single strand of peach-colored South Sea pearls ringed her neck and dropped strategically between her breasts. Not a trace of yesterday’s tears remained.

Next to her I felt invisible.

Mona was only fifteen when I was conceived. It had taken her years to figure out how to be a mother, and by then I’d left. We had made our peace, but some of the old scars remained

I waved back. I’d inherited her height but not her figure; her brains but not her discernment—especially when it came to men; her high cheekbones, but not her smoky gray eyes; her long legs, but not her tiny ass. I have never met my father, but if that ever happens, he has some explaining to do.

“
That’s
Mona?” Dane hissed.

“My mother, the poster child for plastic surgery. I hear she’s in a neck-and-neck race with a woman from Brazil to see who can have the most procedures before they die. The Brazilian had a head start, but Mother’s pulling abreast.”

Dane opened his door and levered himself out of the car, then leaned in so I was eye to eye with his emerald greens. God, he even smelled good. “You weren’t by chance the inspiration for the slogan ‘Sarcasm, just another service I provide’?”

“If not, I should have been.” I felt the heat rise in my cheeks under his penetrating stare.

“They say sarcasm is a defense mechanism.”

I stepped out of the car, grabbing the sack from Smokin’ Joe’s. “I prefer to think of it as the armor I wear. Makes me sound more well-adjusted.”

We both tossed our ball caps into the car. I fluffed my hair—Mother would not tolerate hat hair, and I didn’t want to hear about it.

He took my arm, leading me across the parking lot toward the porch steps. “Or it’s the wall you hide behind.”

So, he was smarter than he looked. Men are pigs; smart men are dangerous pigs. Perhaps The Big Boss knew more than I did. However, I let Dane hold my arm. It felt good.

“Lucky! Sweetheart! Miss Patterson told me you were bringing a guest, but she neglected to mention he was such a dish.” Mother gave me a squeeze, one that lasted just a fraction longer than necessary.

I squeezed her back. “Mother, this is Paxton Dane. He works in Security at the hotel.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she leveled her gaze on him, then she shook his hand.

Mother could size up a man in a millisecond. If she could bottle that, we’d all be rich. “Mr. Dane.”