Shadow Dance by Martin Ott

Author:Martin Ott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

Shadow Boss

One day you’re here…and the next? Tarzana’s disappearance wasn’t so strange in a revolving door of life off the grid. Club Paradise and its clientele thrived on anonymity. The women were constantly coming and going. The dance of fake names and tall tales at the strip club reminded me of the shadows of myself. We each had our uniform and role to play at Club Paradise, not unlike my old army platoon where the prisoners donned blue overalls, the guards sported camouflage, and occasional visitors strutted around in civies, each form of dress carrying a different status.

I wondered what the OGA (an acronym for Other Government Agencies like the CIA) had felt like strolling through Bagram Air Base, dressed as though they were camping or in a back-slapping beer commercial, with the power to pop open men like piñatas or stash them away like popsicles in GTMO. Being a prison guard had given me endless time to let my imagination run wild as I accompanied the prisoners to and from their interrogations. I was never trusted to watch the OGA practice their trade, however. That honor went to Staff Sergeant Lasicky. He gladly stayed for these marathon sessions. All I ever saw was the wreckage of the men afterward, the worry lines on their skin reminiscent of the faded Cyrillic on the walls of the airbase from Russian soldiers who behind unheeded warnings.

The helplessness I felt in that haunted place in the mountains filled me with so much rage that I released it in one punch. I’d left Lasicky bloodied on the airstrip at Barksdale just minutes after landing back home in Louisiana and that was the end of the man formerly known as Buddy Rivet. All I’d done was punished myself for the terror, real and imagined, going on behind closed doors. I was now pinned against the ocean with my fake name while Lasicky was probably getting pinned with another medal even as the war in Afghanistan ended. For the time being.

It’s strange how those in power and those without power intersect in a world of false intentions. In that way the military and the strip club were alike. I’d never discovered Tarzana’s real name, just as she’d never know mine. She told us at the bar one night that she chose her stripper name because she grew up in Tarzana and because her dead father had loved Tarzan films. When the erotic dancer vanished without a trace, who did I imagine would be looking for her? Hell, who was looking for me? Tarzana simply disappeared one night before her shift. Poof. It was as though she’d tumbled through the slats in Solomon’s futon into some other dimension like the kids in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Women revolved quickly through the club and through Solomon’s bedroom, as if there was a trap door.

Tarzana was replaced quickly enough on stage and at a Solomon’s pad by a dancer who wore seven different outfits matching the color of the rainbow.

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