Episode 2

He hated the allure of Debbie’s wavy, honey-blond hair cascading over her naked shoulders.

She said, “You look sexy tonight, Peaches.”

His smile was automatic. Don had been trained to radiate smiles from an early age and to never frown around beautiful women, but he hated his nickname. Why couldn’t she just call him Don like almost everyone else did?

The loud music vibrated through the walls and the floor and up into his legs, torso and brain, giving him a headache that distracted him from enjoying the eye candy in front of him.

Dancing was another way to escape. Ignoring Debbie, he walked around the front desk to the closed glass door that separated the restaurant lobby from the nightclub. Through the glass, he watched a thousand worshiping pagans writhe around a giant, stained-glass dildo protruding from the ceiling above the dance floor. From the dildo, twirling, swirling, multicolored lights sent off hot, flashing beams of psychedelic sperm that splashed off the dancers’ faces.

A dozen bartenders sweated behind three cheery wood bars. The club was packed, and, to cross the room, Don would have to walk across people’s shoulders and heads. He’d done it before to break up a fight in the middle of the dance floor.

Don decided the crowd wasn’t for him, so there would be no dancing tonight. He hated crowds like this, anyway. Always had, ever since the war.

Returning behind the front desk, he finished examining a dinner receipt and carefully set it on the finished stack. He sensed Debbie still watching him before he glanced up past her bare navel and feasted briefly on her ample breasts to watch her nipples harden and push against the elastic fabric of her almost-transparent halter top. His eyes moved higher to study the freckles spread across her chiseled Nordic features. He managed to keep his expression innocent and naïve while suppressing his lust.

He’d had Debbie before—more than once. Sex with her was a great experience. Better than any roller coaster. But not tonight. Maybe never again.

“I’ll buy you breakfast when you get off,” she said.

“I’m going jogging.”

There was a brief pause in the loud music from the club before she replied, “Yeah, sure, jogging after midnight in the cold and dark.” Her lips puckered in disappointment, and she tossed her hair in a misty neon cloud around her shoulders.

“I’ll talk to you next time I’m in town,” she said, and spun on her high heels to walk briskly back to the glass doors to the club, where she stopped to flash the back of her right hand so the bouncer could see the stamp.

Satisfied, the bouncer opened the door to let Debbie through, the roaring music escaping momentarily into the lobby with the harsh scent of male and female sweat and pheromones.

Don had to admit, as she slipped through the narrow opening and into the packed humanity, that Debbie’s legs were worth lusting after. They were long and muscular—the legs of a professional dancer. She worked in a chorus line at the Rio in Las Vegas and visited her older, overweight sister in Manhattan Beach often.

He’d dated Debbie several times, and, by the second date, he knew he could’ve seduced her on the floor behind the front desk of the lobby if he’d wanted to.

He was tempted to go after her, because he knew exactly how good her body felt under his hands, but he forced his lust back into the fireproof safe he’d built for it. To give in to the candy that Debbie offered would turn to guilt and remorse later.

The glass door closed, sending the tidal wave of lusty music back toward the dancers. With regret, Don returned to auditing the waitresses’ receipts from the three dining rooms. When he finished, he walked from behind the cherry wood of the front desk of the Aphrodisiac Academe, and down the hot-waxed brick ramp, past his great-grandmother Amanda’s clock and into the first of three dimly lit dining rooms. Most of the tables in this room still had customers. A lone light glowed from the nearest busboy station.

“You free?” Veronica asked. She was the best waitress in the club and could serve a dozen tables without missing a beat. Her people skills were so sharp that she easily earned more in tips every shift than all the others combined.

“Of course,” he said.

“Good!” She sounded relieved, and Don felt alarmed. Something must be wrong, and, as the maître d', he was the fixer.

Across the dining room and through busboy station was the kitchen, with men and women from south of the border mopping floors, scrubbing pots and washing dishes. Veronica was older than Don, but not by much, and she had a stocky, Eastern European figure—or, at least, what he thought was one. Her Honduran husband Javier was one of the cooks, and they had three kids, who were watched over at night by a grandmother from Poland.

Years ago, before her marriage and after he’d returned from his third tour in Vietnam, Don had taken Veronica to breakfast, and they’d kissed between bites of pancake and fried potatoes. The fling that followed lasted for three months before she woke up to the fact that he wasn’t the marrying kind.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Norman,” she said.

“Shit! Where?”

“Off the lobby.”

“Tell Ben to join me there.” Don retraced his route through the dining room to the bathroom off the lobby where he found Norman.

Normal was tall and thin as a pole. He was young, but looked as if he were on his way to becoming petrified. He was sitting on top of the counter with his long legs sprawled across all three sinks, staring at the mirror in deep concentration, as if he was willing the Wicked Witch of the North to appear from the mirror and weave a spell to make him handsome instead of butt-ugly.

“Norman, what have I told you about this?”

A stubborn defiance swept across Norman’s toasted, leathery face like a filthy mop. He leaned closer to the mirror to pop one of his host of zits, and a white gob of pus with a spot of blood in its center splattered on the mirror.

Don counted at least a dozen more spots as he struggled against the angry pressure building inside his head. He couldn’t let the anger out. It was its own breed of tiger—something he’d carried home from ’Nam.

In a forced, calm, paced voice, Don said, “What did I say?”

Norman rolled his eyes and picked up a sweaty bottle of Coors from the counter. The avocado seed in his pencil-thin neck bobbed up and down as he chugged.

“Do you need help in here, Don?” Benedict Wallace asked. Ben, the head bouncer for the club, was a lean man who Don knew well. They’d been a two-man Marine sniper team in Vietnam for three tours, and Ben stayed for two more after Don returned to the states. After Ben came home, he worked as a male stripper. He bragged that he was half Chinese and half Viking, and he had the face to match. He looked like an Asian demon, with wide flaring nostrils and a thin-lipped mouth that ran like an evil, wicked slash across his face. The right side of his face, behind the eye and mouth, was scarred and deformed from a burn he’d received in combat on his last tour. He also had dark, curly hair and piercing, almond-shaped, icy blue eyes that he claimed came from his Viking half. He loved to travel and had visited China soon after it opened in the early 1980s. He was married to one of Don’s cousins who didn’t like to travel, so Ben traveled alone.

Ben knew Don well, and the look in Don’s eyes said it all.

“I understand,” Ben said. He turned to Norman. “You won’t be back.”

“That’s not fair, you faggots,” Norman said. “You two are bastards.”

Don felt the tiger stirring in his gut.

“Get out of here,” Ben said to Don. “I’ll handle this snot.” Ben didn’t need help to deal with the likes of Norman. In fact, Ben didn’t need help to deal with anyone.

As Don left the bathroom, he remembered Ben in Vietnam calmly filing his upper and lower front teeth razor sharp—he said they were the one weapon he could always rely on in close combat. He also had a fourth-degree black belt in Korean Karate, having worked closely with elements of the South Korean 2nd Marine Brigade known as the Blue Dragon on their first tour. South Korea sent more than 300,000 troops to fight in Vietnam.

The first 20% of this murder mystery is offered free every Sunday, one episode at a time for 15 episodes, starting September 27 and ending January 3, 2015. The e-book of the novel will go on sale December 5 to 7, 2015, and be offered for three days at $0.99 (75% less than the original price).