Black Lotus Kiss by Jason Ridler

Author:Jason Ridler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2018-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

18

“STRIP.”

I dropped Jack Lumber’s gym bag and did as I was told.

“Well,” Wendell said with a roll of his eyes as he focused a standing lamp to bathe me in jaundiced yellow wattage. “Someone fell off the fitness tree and hit every branch on the way down. Who’s your father, Jack LaLanne?”

I unbuttoned my shirt. “No. A dock worker from Oakland.”

Wendell’s attitude was playful, but not happy. He had to respect Shirley’s old friend until there was no need to keep up pretenses. Once I was gone, he could shit-talk me to the cadre of teens who called him ‘God.’ “What do you need? Formal? Elegant? Timeless?”

“I need to look like I fit in at the Hilton in Venice.”

Shirley took a half-empty pack of Kools from a worktable with a Frankenstein’s monster head tilted to one side. “Hilton? You finally become the gentleman escort I always thought you were born to be?”

I hung my shirt over the head of a faceless mannequin. “I’m a private eye now.”

Shirley clapped her hands, smoke perched on the edge of lips that sparkled in the weak glow of the lamp. “Oh, my! Bravo! In what movie?”

Wendell drew his tape across my shoulders. “No. Not an actor. A real private investigator.”

Her mirth sank into gloom and she cut the applause. “What? That’s the dumbest thing you could ever goddamn do.”

Wendell’s breath was heavy on my neck. A clear sign of approval of the drop in the temperature of the room.

I grinned. “We can’t all be entrepreneurs of gags and magic.”

She pointed the tip of the ciggy at me. It shook with her stream of words. “Don’t try and make this about me, handsome; I’m good at what I do. I live my life the way I want to live it, and I don’t give a damn about other people’s dirty laundry. But you? You’re sniffing around people’s garbage, poking your nose in their bedrooms, collecting the dirt we forget we leave behind.” She tapped her ash with enough force to make the flecks fly like windborne glitter. “Wendell, stop.”

Flummoxed, my arms dropped and Wendell whistled the William Tell Overture.

This was bad. I’d tried the truth and it had sunk me like a freshly dug grave after a monsoon. Fiction would have to do.

“Shirley.”

“Get out, panty sniffer.” “You got it all wrong.”

“What part of you being a bloodhound of misery makes me off beam?”

“Look.” I dropped to my knees, opened Jack’s bag, and ripped out the mask.

That shut up further discussion of my heinous character flaws.

Wendell gazed at Shirley, but her dance hall lashes were flapping only for me. “What the hell is this?”

“The truth. I’m a wrestler. A pro wrestler.”

Wendell gripped his tape around his neck like a country lawyer’s suspenders. “You mean a fake, phony, a conman.”

Shirley turned, then tapped more ash. “A wrestler? Like at the Olympic?”

“That’s where I’m headed tonight, but I have to meet the promoter. He wants to meet at the Hilton and they have a dress code and my dress code has been S-L-O-B since I was a kid.

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