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It’s a crazy night.But then, this club, every night is crazy.
Harrison Eldridge makes an appearance in Hel—Harrison is an actor, and an asshole. He’s known for his dimpled smile and platinum blond hair, for his chops as a dramatic actor and as an action hero. Too bad he’s a raging sex addict with a vicious temper. He’s got a regular girl down in Hel, and she has a way of taming the beast that is Harrison Eldridge. Meaning, she lets him get off via whatever sick kink he’s got going on without getting herself hurt. I don’t know what goes on in that room when he’s in there with Sindie—yes, that’s her working name, yes, she chose that spelling, and no, I doubt that’s anything close to her real name—and I donotwant to know.
Once Harrison has been safely escorted through the throngs of Sin and down into Hel, where he eagerly heads off with Sindie to her room, I prowl the edges of Hel, watching a bachelor party with one-time passes blow thousands of dollars on lap dances and oral. Here, in Hel, the lap dances are not your average strip joint charade, seeing as here, in Hel, there are no rules. The ladies are fully naked, and you get what you pay for. You want that lap dance to end the way you always fantasized it would every time you go to the strip joint? Pony up the Benjamins and your fantasy becomes reality. Right there, on the couch in front of the bar, if you want. That’s Hel.
The women are subcontractors. They work for themselves, contracting through the club. They pay a flat monthly fee to lease the room, and then pay a five percent fee off their nightly gross, the rest is theirs. In return, they set their own rules, their own fees, and they’re protected. A client is acting up? Each room is equipped with a panic button by the bed, within easy reach, just like a bank teller would have. That panic button lights up the command center and one of us from security will be in there to handle the situation—and if we have to handle a situation, we do not do so gently. You’re dumped, broken bones and all, on the Strip.
Not all the women who work in Hel are prostitutes—some are strippers, some are merely topless servers and bartenders. But no matter what, they’re paid top dollar and they’re protected from unwanted attention—from men who don’t know that No Means No.
That’s my primary role—securing the women of Hel. I’m technically the security coordinator—nominally the head of security. Inez’s orders go through me, and now that we have Anjalee in the command center, her dispatches will go through me as well. But most of the night, the guys can coordinate themselves. Door guys work the doors—these being the brothers, Silas, Saxon, and Solomon, as well as Kane and Lash; Rev is the roamer, the one responsible for wandering through the club as a whole, assessing the crowd, handling minor incidents as they arise, and being first responder to a major incident; I’m part-roamer as well. We’ve also got three part-time security guys: Toro, Fonz, and Taj. They work the VIP rooms up on the second level and the gates between Fisticuffs, the stairs, and Hel. They’re not Broken Arrows, they don’t live in the lower-level compound, and they don’t fraternize with us—they’re just security, paid to come, do the job, and go home.
But really, my job is Hel—my job is the women. My job is to be there, look scary, and intimidate the horny fuck-dogs that comprise Hel pass-holders. Keep the rabble from going out of control. Keep the women safe.
Tonight, my big issue is this goddamn bachelor party. The fuckers are awful. Entitled, rich, spoiled douchebags who’ve been given everything, never been told no, and think the sun shines off their bleached assholes. They throw hundreds around like normal dudes do ones, but in return they treat the women like pieces of meat. So far, they haven’t crossed any boundaries, so I can’t lay into them, but I fucking hate them. I know the ladies do, too, but they’re paying, and the one time Shelly told one of them no, he listened. So I’m stuck sitting on my thumb, hoping they fuck up so I can crack some goddamn skulls.
Probably best they stay in line, though, because I’m in a shit mood. One wrong step, and they’re liable to end up fucking vegetables.
My earpiece hisses. “Chance, please?” This is Anjalee, up in the command center.
“Talk to me,” I say. “Whaddya got, Anj?”
“There is a situation which I am not liking, in the VIP section of bar Two-Red-B. A couple which does not seem to be a real couple. He is very badly mistreating her. They are arriving together, but…I do not know. It is simply something which makes me uneasy. He is very unkind, and she is not happy.”
“Details?” I snap, already heading for the stairs. “Rev, come down to Hel and watch these fuckin’ bachelor party shit-sticks.”
“Copy that,” Rev says. “Moving.”
“The man is very small,” Anjalee says. “Quite shorter than me, I believe. And he is…how may I say it? It is unkind to say, but he is very ugly. She is the most tall woman I have ever seen, with red hair, in very curly ringlets. He is pushing her around, yanking on her arm, like this. Making her do what he wishes, whether she likes to or no.”
I growl—that shit pisses me off something fierce. “On it. Thanks, Anj. Out.”
“Yes, okay.”
I laugh to myself. Except Silas and Saxon, all of us are ex-military, so we maintain military standards on the radios, and keep cross-chatter to a minimum. Anjalee doesn’t have that training, so she tends to be informal and chatty, which for some reason just cracks the rest of us up.
I move through Hel to the transition between Hel and Fisticuffs—Toro and Taj are manning the gate, which is an actual cemetery-style wrought iron gate through which the crowd in Fisticuffs can see the goings-on in Hel but cannot get to it.
Toro is a brute. He’s six feet at most and likely less, but nearly as broad as he is tall. His chest is almost improbably thick and broad, tapering to a narrow waist, cartoon-like caricature proportions. He’s Spanish, with an expensive haircut and a neat Van Dyke goatee. Taj is Indian, tall, lean, clean-cut, and very quiet. I don’t know much else about either one, except that they’re good at their jobs, which is all I care about.
They see me coming, open the gate with nods at me, close it after me, and return their attention to the crowd and to the fight in process up in the cage. It’s a good fight, near the end. Both fighters are bloody, tiring, and seeking the opening to get the match-ending shot in. I pay only cursory attention to it, scanning the crowd out of habit.
Fisticuffs is a cage-match venue for underground, off-circuit MMA fights. No refs, no rules. Two fighters, one cage, one winner, by any means necessary. Most fighters adhere to a general, unspoken code of conduct—no nut shots, no eye gouging, no biting. That shit happens, but rarely, because when you do that shit, the other guy tends to not like it, and the offender generally tends to get beat to hospitalization.
The cage itself is cage-fight standard, but it’s suspended six feet off the floor by waist-thick aircraft carrier anchor chains at each corner. There’s a good thirty feet of dead space around the cage itself, and a rolling stairway for access to the cage. Beyond the ropes, the crowd, always four and five deep, churning, cheering, jeering, screaming, whistling, heckling, encouraging, booing. Here in Fisticuffs, we also employ temporary security for the fight itself. They’re different guys each night, and they never work anywhere but the cage match; they’re purely crowd control, keeping the crowd on the other side of the thick black ropes, and tamp down unrest, which is inevitable when a drunk asshole loses a couple grand on a fight and goes bananas. There are four giant Jumbotron screens in each of the four corners of the ceiling, showing the fight when one is in progress, and in between fights they show replays of previous fights, stats of the fighters featured that evening, and the odds on a given match. There’s a bar in Fisticuffs, in the corner near the stairs that lead up to Sin.
I jog up the stairs, wide, shallow, and lit by blacklights. Here, in the club proper, the noise is like a close, thick fog, leavened by sweat and threaded through by the thudding, throbbing rhythm of electronic dance music. I pause, let my eyes adjust to the darkness—laser lights strobe and flash, flicker and twist, shifting through the spectrum of visible color. Those lasers are just about the only ambient light.
The club is two levels, a two-story open center with a second-level balcony running the perimeter; dead in the middle of the open area, suspended in space, is a plexiglass DJ platform. A full circle of giant speakers with only a sliver cutout for the DJ to enter and exit through, the spin equipment inside the circle of speakers. The DJ is a permanent fixture, a residency of sorts. He performs in all white, lit by blacklights so he glows bright, with LED strips outlining his arms and legs and torso shifting colors in synch with the lasers. The bars are a maze, running the perimeter of the club in a winding, serpentine U, a constant flow of counter space along the walls; there are roped-off VIP seating sections in the curves and hollows of the bar, between actual alcohol serving stations and the no-man’s-land areas where people congregate and conversate and just get away from the crush of the dance floor. On the other side of the bar is a path for bar staff to make their way unimpeded by the crowd, and every few dozen feet, a section of the bar is hinged so it can be lifted up and out of the way for access from behind the bar to dance floor. The second level mirrors the first, accessible by stairs in the four corners.
I push through the crowd, up the nearest stairwell, and to the indicated bar. I find the issue immediately.
It’s obvious.
