“I need you to tell him that I have to cancel lunch, okay?” Archie said. “Tell him that exactly. Archie needs to cancel lunch.”
“He has a phone,” Susan said. “Call him and tell him yourself.”
“Susan,” Archie said. “Please.”
He needed Susan to do this for him, and he needed her not to ask questions.
Susan groaned. “Fine,” she said.
“Thank you,” Archie said, trying not to let her hear the relief in his voice. He ended the call and started the car.
Henry had found the piece of birthday cake on the dash and had unwrapped the tinfoil and was eating it with his fingers. “Tell me that’s code,” Henry said, his mouth full, “and that you really didn’t just call to cancel lunch.”
Archie wiped some condensation off the windshield with his forearm. “We need to go celebrate my birthday,” he said.
“Your birthday isn’t until tomorrow,” Henry said.
“Do you have cash?” Archie asked, eyes on the rearview mirror as he put the car in reverse. “Small bills?”
“For what?”
Archie allowed himself a smile as he pulled away from the curb. “The strippers,” he said.
CHAPTER
3
Why Leo suddenly wanted to go to the Dancin’ Bare, Susan didn’t know, but she wasn’t happy about it.
She was dressed for the opera.
They weren’t going to the opera. They were supposed to be going to a musical stage adaptation of the Patrick Swayze eighties movie Road House, but she had just bought an embroidered silk cape at a thrift store and she was determined to wear it. It was silver, with a red lining and a rhinestone clip at the neck, and it grazed the back of her knees when she walked. She had paired it with a black sleeveless shift, hot pink tights, and her silver twenty-eight-eye Doc Martens. She had recently dyed her hair black with a white skunk stripe down the middle, and the whole look was very Cruella De Vil meets Daphne Guinness. It was perfect for a fringe theater performance. It was not ideal for a strip club.
Leo breezed past the doorman, while Susan stalked sullenly behind him, through the wood-paneled entryway into the dark bar. Posters on the way in advertised the chance to meet girls “up close.”
She did not like to go to strip clubs with Leo. It wasn’t that she had anything against strip clubs per se. She just didn’t like the way that everyone at the strip clubs seemed to know her boyfriend. Leo’s father owned some of those clubs. Leo did business at some of them. But there was more to it than that. Leo liked these clubs. He liked them in a way that Susan knew she could never fully understand.
It certainly had nothing to do with the decor.
You couldn’t smoke in bars in Portland anymore, but the club still reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and no one had bothered to collect the black plastic ashtrays that were still stationed on every surface. Candles flickered, Italia