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  EVEN MONEY

  by

  STEPHANIE CAFFREY

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  Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Caffrey

  Cover design by Janet Holmes

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  FREE BOOK OFFER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY STEPHANIE CAFFREY

  SNEAK PEEK

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  CHAPTER ONE

  It had been about a week since I’d first seen it, by which I mean the beige Chanel handbag, a symphony of lush fabric, leather, and chrome. To say it was beautiful would be like saying Niagara Falls was kind of okay. Did I mention it was Chanel? And now it was gone, an afterthought, replaced by something equally jaw-dropping or—was it even possible?—better. Orange was not exactly my color, usually, but it wasn’t hard to picture this handsome handbag perched on my left arm while I perused comically expensive shoes with a private shopper cooing lisped praise in my ear. These were the kinds of bags that angels toted around in Heaven. But—how?

  How was it that Miranda, young Miranda, could afford such lust-inducing accoutrements? She was early twenties, reedy, and tall with impossibly perfect you-know-whats, a light brown brunette with a soft jaw and a perfect, tiny nose. In short, she was a nine-point-five. Not a ten, mind you, a nine-point-five, and I was an honest judge of women’s looks, not some Eastern Bloc commie judge who fudged the scores to make my own inadequacies look better by comparison. Miranda had what it took to attract attention. Once in a while one of us exotic dancers would draw the interest of a gentleman admirer, which is to say a loaded dude who thought pampering us with expensive gifts would lead to the sex of his dreams. Often it did. But she didn’t quite seem the type. So how could she afford a bag like that?

  There was so much drool on the floor underneath my mouth that I began looking around for a slop bucket and a fresh mop to clean it up with. Miranda had placed her bag in perfectly conspicuous view—the way anyone with a bag like that would—almost begging me, or anyone within the same time zone, to praise it while she preened in her mirror under a glow of soft lights.

  “Is that real?” I blurted out, ever the diplomat.

  She blushed with pleasure. Strangely, being asked if something was real was a compliment, a signal that the questioner knew how expensive the genuine article must have been.

  “Of course it is,” she retorted, feigning mild offense.

  “You have a friend?” I asked. “A sugar daddy? A money honey?”

  She cocked her head sideways and then spun around to face me. I was turned towards her, squatting unattractively on my stool, probably seeming a little too interested in her handbag—like a bird dog fixing on a grouse.

  “I used to have a few friends like that,” she said vaguely. “This one—I bought it myself. In fact”—here she brought her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper—“it’s not even out yet.” She held it out to me. “Special order,” she announced proudly.

  I whistled, duly impressed, as I turned it over in my hands, fearing that my mortal fingers might somehow mar the impossibly soft Creamsicle-colored leather. This was no last-season Chanel. Hell, according to her, it wasn’t even a this-season Chanel. I was guessing six, seven grand. Which led me to the next question, the question I was dying to ask but couldn’t.

  “You have some awesome bags, too, Raven,” she said, her voice betraying the fact that she obviously felt the opposite, that she downright pitied my eclectic collection of last-season’s clearance bags mostly bought at workaday stores like Macy’s and, sometimes, even Target. She was right to pity me.

  “So how did you get a prerelease Chanel bag?” I asked, trying to revive the topic. I placed the emphasis on the how, but I really meant to emphasize the you—as in how did you, you little nobody, get your grubby hands on a bag like this? It was killing me, wanting to know how she’d afforded it. Don’t get me wrong. At Cougar’s, where I’d danced for the last decade or so, a nine-point-five like her could earn six or seven hundred bucks in a good night. But that wasn’t exactly Chanel purse money, especially for someone so young.

  “I kind of made friends with the assistant manager of the store over at Wynn,” she explained, referring to the megacasino’s esplanade of ultraluxe shops.

  “Ahh,” I said, the light bulb going off. “Company discount, huh?”

  She flashed me a thin smile. “I wish,” she said. “No, she just got me the bag a week before anyone else.”

  She was going to make me beat it out of her, apparently. But that proved unnecessary.

  “Hi Miranda,” said a lilting voice to my right. I turned to see another of the younger dancers arrive. She was gaudily displaying her recent conquest, a yellow alligator number from what looked like Prada. She almost purred as she stroked it.

  I couldn’t help myself now. “What the hell is going on around here? Was there a heist nobody told me about? Did you guys win the lottery? How come everyone is walking around with ten grand on their arms?”

  I had never spoken to Kayla before, the girl with the yellow reptilian bag, and she seemed a little taken aback by my unexpectedly hostile outburst. I didn’t feel the need to apologize. It was one in the morning, and my pre-arthritic knees were beginning to tighten up like some crusty, old rubber bands.

  Kayla and Miranda exchanged a knowing look, the kind of look that said we know something you don’t know.

  Miranda coughed. “One of our customers has been investing our money for us,” she said, a little hesitantly. “And he’s doing really well, so we’ve been joking about how we can spend more on ourselves now. It’s kind of a contest, actually.”

  So that was it. “What kind of investment is he doing?” I asked, more than a little
intrigued. I was never one to say no to a good investment. My eyes were dancing back and forth between the Chanel and Prada handbags.

  “It has to do with oil,” Kayla piped in. “Something about a pipeline in… Where is it, Miranda? Russia or something like it.”

  Miranda frowned. “I thought it was like, you know, something-a-stan. Not Pakistan, but one of those.”

  I chuckled. “You’re a regular Vasco da Gama,” I muttered.

  “Huh?” Miranda asked, frowning.

  “Never mind,” I said. “He was a famous explorer. That cat knew his geography. I believe he was the first European to reach India by sea, actually.”

  “You should be on Jeopardy!” Kayla murmured.

  I smiled. “I do have a little thing for Alex Trebek, even though he’s Canadian.”

  “I’m from Canada,” Kayla protested, her arms folding in front of her.

  I shrugged it off. “Well, nobody’s perfect. Anyway, so this thing has to do with oil, and we’ve established it’s somewhere very far away from here, possibly in a place ending with –stan.” I was trying to disguise the intensity of my interest but was failing miserably.

  Kayla was nodding. “That’s about all I know, except for the fact that my account’s gone up twenty percent!”

  “Impressive,” I said. “I’d kill for twenty percent. Especially with the stock market being such a roller coaster.”

  Miranda chuckled. “That’s twenty percent per month, Raven.”

  My eyes got big, and I think I felt a little more drool dripping out of the corner of my mouth. I was seeing dollar signs now—an apartment stuffed to the gills with designer shoes, an upgrade to my Porsche, mani-pedi appointments at the spa every week—as far as the eye could see. But most of all what I saw was invisible, an intangible concept that was almost foreign to me. It was freedom. If I invested a bunch of money and got twenty percent a month, I’d never have to spend another night in a strip club, never have to laugh at a guy’s sloppy-drunk jokes and fend off his unwelcome and gross advances. It was my ticket out of this life.

  “So,” I began, letting the word hang in the air. “How do I get in? Do you have any paperwork I can look at?”

  The two of them looked at each other. “Um, not exactly,” Kayla said. “It’s more of a word-of-mouth kind of thing. If you want in, I can ask the guy and see if there’s still room for a new person. But when I got in, he made it seem like he was doing me a favor because he sort of had a thing for me. Really, he had a thing for these,” she added, grabbing her breasts and smiling.

  “But I’m sure he’d like you, too, Raven,” Miranda mused. “He’s an older guy.”

  I cringed. Ouch. The fact that she said it so matter-of-factly, so politely, made it even harder to swallow. After all, I was only thirty-five, even if that made me a dinosaur in my business. I felt like lecturing them about how many “younger” men still liked me, liked me enough to pay fifty bucks for five minutes, half of which was a tip, and how only a few years earlier my nearly naked body had been plastered all over town on dozens of billboards. I’d be able to last a few more years at Cougar’s, maybe, but then it was a downhill slide to lower-end places well off the Strip, the kinds of places that are beneath the visiting business executives and doctors and lawyers who give the best tips.

  I decided to save the lecture for another day, figuring that if I seemed offended I’d look even more pathetic in their youthful eyes. “Yeah,” I said casually, “let me know.”

  I checked the clock and saw that I was late, overdue to get back out there to shake it some more, before it started to sag too much. Time to go wriggle around on some half-drunk guys’ laps and palm a few more twenties, and hopefully a Benjamin or two.

  The rest of the evening was uneventful, if you don’t count the fistfight that broke out around two thirty. I couldn’t tell what the brouhaha was all about, but it made me nostalgic for the days when men got into fistfights over me. If there was one thing I was good at, and I mean real world-class talent here, it was my ability to turn completely random events into the beginnings of a downward spiral of emotions, a real negative feedback loop. Talking with Kayla and Miranda earlier had got me down—they were so young—and being surrounded by the hottest young bodies Las Vegas had to offer didn’t help the old ego much either.

  These were the thoughts percolating in my brain as I went to work on a three thirty a.m. bowl of butter pecan ice cream, only half paying attention to my DVR’d rerun of The Big Bang Theory. I had relayed the story to myself over and over again, usually dwelling on the part about how I’d gotten serious about stripping for a living only after it became clear that my niece needed expensive chemotherapy. In some ways it was an act of charity, I rationalized—a selfless debasement of my own body to cure the body of another. But that was years ago, and here I was, scarfing ice cream in a lonely apartment in the middle of the night, feeling like a triceratops looking up at the asteroid that was barreling towards the earth. Yup, this thirty-something stripper was about to become extinct. Maybe not this year, or even next year, but soon.

  And that’s why I’d gone to school to get my private investigator’s license, opening up a way out of this job, this lifestyle. As careers go, a PI isn’t much higher up the ladder than stripper, but it’s a step in the right direction, and it was about the only way I could think of to make a living. My resume, after all, was literally “bare.”

  I’d had a few initial successes, more a result of luck than any great sleuthing skill, and because they were high-profile cases, they’d been in the news. The publicity had led to more work and even a few cyberstalkers, folks who’d emailed me their “stats”—height, weight, bench press totals, and measurements of other body parts I didn’t particularly care to know about. Needless to say, I hadn’t felt tempted by any of them. But recently the action had been slower. Thanks to a well designed website, I’d developed a little specialty in following married men around when they visited Vegas alone. It was the one ray of hope I’d seen in mankind: of the dozen or more husbands I’d snooped on, not a single one had done anything even remotely naughty while they were here visiting. Unless you counted strip clubs, which I didn’t.

  If only there was a better way, I mused as I tried to fall asleep. A better, easier—and then it hit me. Kayla and Miranda had struck gold, and I wanted in. I dozed off with visions of designer handbags floating through my mind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I felt better in the morning after my workout, which was not the way things normally went. Normally I felt like a 1979 Oldsmobile about to overheat, with fluids dripping everywhere, weird huffing sounds emanating from my mouth, and creaking noises coming from parts I hadn’t properly maintained and which were no longer under warranty. It helped that a younger guy was clearly ogling me in the gym and trying to get my attention. A typical gym rat, though I’d never seen him before, he was the kind of guy who assumed women would swoon in his presence merely because he had some nice biceps. I didn’t swoon, but I had to admit it was nice that he was showing off for me.

  I spent the bulk of the day waiting for a guy I was tailing to wake up and start doing something interesting. I was sorely disappointed. He was here with some other forty-something guys, apparently reliving a bachelor party kind of experience from decades past, but for the most part all the guys were pretty well behaved. Except, of course, for the guy who got so drunk that the mall security guards gave him the boot for trying to make a baby with one of the mannequins inside Ann Taylor. But no one was paying me to watch him, so I’d leave that little tidbit out of my report.

  Thursday night meant it was back to the grind—literally—at Cougar’s. I rolled in just before nine, and while I was primping in the mirror, I saw a flash of yellow in the reflection. It could only be one thing.

  “Hi Raven,” Kayla said, still clutching her iridescent Prada handbag. “He’ll be here tonight,” she added, carefully storing the bag in a small locker next to the vanity. For as much as that bag was
worth, she should have hired a full-time security guard to watch it.

  “Who’ll be here tonight?” I asked.

  She turned to face me and placed her hands on her hips. “My contact. His name’s Aaron. I’ll ask him if there’s room for you, okay?”

  I nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  This Thursday night crowd was hopping, stoked into a frenzy by a new DJ the club had recently hired, a guy, it was rumored, who made twenty-five grand a night. He was probably worth it because the place was packed, the joint was jumping, and the energy he brewed up was translating into more lap dances and bigger tips. And more women.

  I’d noticed the trend right away. As the club had become more of an “it” place to go, it became more of a scene for couples, for groups of guys and women, and even a few ladies’ groups who came because it was a great place to meet guys, if you didn’t mind the fact that they were the kind of guys who frequented strip clubs. Women’s standards being as low as they were, it didn’t seem to bother them very much.

  Around eleven I saw Kayla weaving through the throng of people towards me. I had just hit up a guy for a lap dance, but I backed away and told him I’d catch him later.

  “He wants to meet you,” Kayla yelled, trying to be heard over the din.

  I mouthed “OK” and followed her into the back area where there were a number of cushy booths, some dim fake candles flickering realistically on the tables, and waitresses offering bottle service for those who didn’t mind plopping down four hundred bucks for a bottle of vodka. It was also about thirty decibels quieter back there. Kayla led me to a booth in the corner where a middle-aged bald man had his arms around a couple of dancers, one on each side of him. Both were redheads, and both were topless.