Now he’s closer, she can see his pupils are just teensy little pinpricks. “Oookay, my extremely stoned friend ... Listen, I need you to stay focused for me. Can you do that?”
“I’mveryfocused. And there are no female bartenders here.”
“Fine. Then let’s do a circuit.”
She gathers her bottled water and the rest of her champagne, tugs on Noone’s sleeve to encourage him to follow—they have to pushthrough the dancers in front of the DJ decks and mixing boards to go farther in. Noone seems fine, but he touches her occasionally to steady himself, his large hand an ember burning between her bare shoulder blades, or over the silk at her lower back.
Eventually, they reach a point where the crowd thins out enough for Nomi to draw breath. There are some video arcade games along the wall: A few folks are playing Pac-Man and Moon Cresta. Farther ahead, a wall of banquette seats and tables, a handful of freestanding bar tables. People are sitting or leaning, doing their best to flirt, or doing a bit more than that in the corners. Other folks smoke and chat, oblivious. Laughter shrieks nearby.
Nomi spots a face she recognizes at a bar table. “Geri! Good to see you. Where’s Shannon and Rob?”
It’s not ideal for talking, but it’s not much worse than the Riverview. She chats to Geri as Noone lights a cigarette and peruses the scene. Hard to tell where his head is at. He seems alert, engaged, but his attention is floating all over the place, and his skin is gleaming with sweat, although that could be the humidity in the club.
Maybe a half dozen staff members in club tees wind through the throng, collecting glasses, cleaning up spills, doing minor crowd control. Janice could be on the floor, but Nomi needs to get closer.
She finishes her champagne and sets down the glass, pulls on Noone’s lapel to bring his ear to her mouth. “I’m going for a dance, to check out staff on the floor.”
“Have fun.”
She assesses his grin. “Look at me—donotleave this table, or I’ll never find you again. Stay here.”
She spends most of her dance time examining staff or casting back to ensure Noone hasn’t wandered off. At least the music is good: “Fascinated” by Company B bleeds into Touch’s “Without You,” and the heavy bass creates a sensual thump that resonates through the floor and spirals up her legs.
When the track is over, she leaves Geri and returns to Noone at the bar table, takes a long draft of water from her bottle. “It’s mad out there. I didn’t see Janice.”
“I don’t think she’s on floor detail,” he notes.
Nomi caps her water, faces the horde. “Jesus, look at it. I can’t believe you’ve gone from Guatemala to this.”
He seems more amused than appalled. “It’s like Día de Muertos. Fire and lunacy and lust all mixed together.”
“But Día de Muertos is only once a year—this party runs three nights per week. And this is just one club. The Vault and the Hellfire Club are on other floors. There are, like, five or six clubs within a block and a half of where we are now.”
“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” he quotes.
“Never took you for a Shakespeare fan, Noone.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He huffs a laugh. “There’s a lotIdon’t know about me ...” Then his gaze skims over the top of her head, and his energy changes. “Come this way.”
“Why?”
Instead of replying, he closes his hands over her shoulders and walks her to another bar table farther right, angles her slightly toward the back of the room—when she sees it, her breath catches.
At a round table circled by a padded leather bench seat, four men sit reclined. Eric Lamonte, fifty years old, smoking a cigar, his cream shirt gleaming with a thin shiny stripe, gold rings on his fingers. With his hair combed back, he looks like a lizard: chin up, affluent, cold, predatory, as he surveys his domain. At his right is the guy who’s the reason Nomi currently has three stitches in her eyebrow: Claude Ameche is smoking cigarettes, not cigars, frowning at something in a small notebook; a serious, forty-something man on serious business. He hardly looks at the club—jaded, just focused on work.
Two other men sit either side of Lamonte and Ameche: a guy in his late twenties who looks no-nonsense, practical, in jeans and a T-shirt like an electrician or a carpenter, and another mid-thirties guydressed like a pimp—loud-print shirt and pale trousers, a girl on his lap. The carpenter guy is drinking a beer. On the pimp’s knee, the girl wiggles in a dress that’s short and tight enough so you can see where his hand is moving under the fabric. He’s laughing, looking back at the others like “Can you believe this chick?”—not a man of sustained intelligent thought.
Nomi feels a sudden hornet buzz on her skin, so intense it’s almost painful. For a brief, awful second, she wants to cut more than anything. She clutches her bottled water and sinks back against Noone’s chest, keeping her face as hidden as she can, and the feeling passes. “There’s the whole gang—wow. Fucking Lamonte and Ameche. The guy getting a lap dance, I’ve seen him in photos of Lamonte’s known associates, but I don’t know his name. The guy drinking beer is new to me.”
“He’ll be the one with the bolt cutters.” Noone is staring at the group. “He looks like a tradesman.”
“Well, now we know what we’re up against.”
“What about Galetti?”
It’s a sign that Noone’s brain is still switched on, which is good. “Galetti wouldn’t be caught here in a million years. He’s, like, seventy years old, rich as God, house in the Hamptons, boat off Long Island, the whole bit. Being on-site at the club is not his scene.”
“The invisible puppeteer.”
